Stephan Packard - Transnational Imagination and the Ideology of Fiction: Picturing Cultural Others in Intercultural Comic Publications

Mainstream comics strive towards images of transnationality in various ways: by addressing international markets and audiences, by including transnationally diverse creators, and by depicting transnational settings and dramatis personae on their pages. As the latter are typically fictional, this practice usually includes the necessary invention of the transnational other – a freedom of imagination that might, however, similarly apply to the projected images of producers and audiences. As contradictions between different conceptions and material practices of transnationality arise, an ideological element of fiction may be traced that is situated beyond the naïve questions of confusing the fictional and the real, and that instead operates by confounding the social imaginary with possibilities of political agency. The talk will trace some examples of these contradictions through their aesthetic and stylistic consequences on the page and back to a reflection of the imagined transnational comic book marketplace.