Tasting of Visual Textures: Experiencing War Comics Through Children’s Drawings in Virtual Reality

Since the late 20th century, comics has evolved into a journalistic and pedagogical medium that has used nuance to subtly translate trauma experienced by adults, related to war and conflict, for children’s consumption, case in point would be the “Schtroumpf Vert et Vert Schtroumpf” (Smurf vs Smurf) released in 1972 that underscores “real-life division in Belgium between the French-speaking Wallonia to the South, and the Dutch-speaking Flanders in the North,” despite overtly claiming to portray the language barrier between Southern and Northern Smurfs (Meier). However, when the reverse is performed, that is, children’s experience of war and conflict is communicated to adults albeit reflected through hand drawings, it tends to leave a bitter after-taste lingering in the mouth.

In our paper, we aim to refer to a chapter from our ongoing Comics Lab virtual reality (VR) project—Children of War, that uses comics as an immersive journalistic and pedagogical medium to document the experiences of children during the Spanish Civil War by borrowing scenes and motifs from archived children’s drawings present in UC San Diego’s—Spanish Civil War Children’s Drawings Digital Collection. By underscoring attributes of the VR space and visceral aesthetics derived from the children’s drawings, we argue that our project does not rely on nuancing trauma but can vividly address the abject reality of war and conflict through the experience of visual textures that effectively communicate trauma, particularly, when words fail us.