TY - JOUR
AU - Shim,, David
AB - Abstract Recent scholarship in international relations (IR) and international political sociology (IPS) has made significant contributions to the study of images. Chief among such studies on visual politics has been the focus on popular visual media including cartoons, film, photography, and video games. This article takes a look at another prominent medium: the comic. Comics provide ample potential starting points for IR scholars and political sociologists; the comic’s aesthetic qualities—the way in which it narrates geopolitical events to public audiences through condensed image-word relations—reveals a distinct politics of representation. Thus, the study of comics contributes to a better understanding of visuality—theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. This article complements existing work by engaging an example outside of familiar European-language contexts. It discusses a comic booklet that was published by the South Korean Ministry of National Defense in the aftermath of the sinking of the Cheonan, a navy vessel that was allegedly sunk by a North Korean torpedo in 2010. Recognizing comics as narrative sites of (geo)politics, the article explores the booklet’s own way of seeing by discussing its dramatic structure and rhetorical devices. In this way, the article provides an exemplary reading of comics, which can serve as a conceptual basis for future studies in the field. On March 26, 2010, a corvette of the Republic of Korea (hereafter South Korea) navy, the Cheonan, sank near Baengnyeong Island in the Yellow Sea. Of the 104 personnel onboard, fifty-eight survived. It was not immediately clear what caused the vessel, which was on a routine patrol mission close to the disputed maritime border with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (hereafter North Korea), to sink. In response to the incident, then South Korean President, Lee Myung-bak, convened emergency security meetings and ordered an investigation. Almost two months later, a team of military and civilian investigators, the so-called Joint Investigation Group (JIG), from Australia, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, concluded that the Cheonan had been sunk by a North Korean torpedo. These findings led to widespread fears about the escalation of tensions between the two Koreas, which currently remain in an official state of war. Another military incident—the shelling of the South Korean island Yeonpyeong by North Korean artillery in November 2010—exposed the tense geopolitical situation in the region, which is in the sphere of influence of the four nuclear powers: China, North Korea, Russia, and the United States. In an immediate response to the publication of the JIG’s findings, North Korea strongly denied any involvement in the sinking and accused the South Korean–led investigation of manipulation and fabrication. While the reactions of North Korea might not have been surprising (although, in an unusual move, it did offer to send its own inspection team), skepticism about the conclusions of the JIG’s investigation grew both in South Korea and abroad. A domestic survey, for instance, found that less than one-third of South Koreans believed the findings of the investigation (Chosunilbo 2010). In order to dispel doubts both at home and abroad, the South Korean Ministry of National Defense (MND) published, in September 2010, a Korean- and English-language report in order to make the findings of the JIG available to a broader domestic and international audience (MND 2010a). Earlier in June, the South Korean government had already presented the results of the official investigation in a letter to the United Nations Security Council (Park 2010); the letter contained photographic images of the ship wreckage in an attempt to provide visual evidence of its claim. As the United Nations (UN) body issued a presidential statement on the sinking—without naming an aggressor, but accepting that it was caused by an attack and not, for instance, by an accident—these initiatives came to be part of a broader approach on the part of the Seoul administration both to tell its version of the story and establish international consensus on its geopolitical narrative. Embedded in these efforts to produce particular knowledge of the event was the commissioning of a comic booklet—this article’s central object of analysis—which the MND distributed to public institutions including schools, libraries, and government offices (MND 2010b). The comic, The Truth about the Cheonan Attack,1 features a story about a young journalist who is investigating the sinking and, eventually, convinces his fiancée of North Korea’s responsibility. Leaving no doubt about the nature of the incident—it was an attack and nothing else—the comic has been published in Korean in both a print and online version. While the MND had published cartoons and comics before, they were mainly aimed at members of the armed forces. Commissioning storytelling about geopolitics to society at large through the MND—instead of other cabinet-level bodies such as the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Public Administration—not only signals the booklet’s extraordinary rhetoric of national security, but also provides insights into the international political sociology of The Truth about the Cheonan Attack. The linking of a “serious” matter of “high politics” (i.e., the sinking of the Cheonan) with an “unserious” item of popular culture (i.e., the medium of comics) reveals that comics affect political practice because they are deemed fit by governments to represent matters related to national security. In the present case, the comic is a central part of a state’s reasoning on geopolitical affairs and a crucial site to relate to a public audience. In fact, many state and nonstate actors resort and, no less important, react to comic images in ways suggesting their significance in setting the conditions for meaningful social practices in domestic and global politics. The use of comics—understood here as deliberate sequential arrangements of multiple, sketched image-text panels to convey information (cf. McCloud 1993; Groensteen 2007)—therefore requires a thorough discussion of their politics of representation: the main goal of this article. Making sense of geopolitics through comics has posed the question, for critical scholarship in IR and IPS, of how geopolitical storytelling is put to work through such images (for example, Thorsten 2012; Rech 2014; Hansen 2016). This article’s specific contributions thereto consist of conceptual reflections about the peculiarity of the medium of comics. While this implies we lay bare the connections of sketched art to the broader analysis of global politics, it means also that we develop an awareness regarding the complicity of comics—and in a wider sense of modes of representation—in performing the political (section 2). Arguing for the need to work with a specific understanding of the political—a central term (not only) for critical scholarship (cf. Guillaume and Bilgin 2017)—this section aims at rethinking the term propaganda, which is often—also implicitly—associated with official comic imagery in current research.2 Furthermore, by contrasting comics with other forms of visual media, this section will show what comics can “do” that other media cannot. In short, this means that we approach comics as a form of visual storytelling—different to the cartoon, which makes a visual statement—that has a dual function (in contrast to photorealistic media): that is, reducing the complexity of the real world and enhancing narrative capability. Thus, comics not only convey geopolitical storytelling but also facilitate its subsequent understanding. Important to note is that this dual function is achieved specifically by virtue of comics’ peculiar aesthetic qualities. Thus, narrative authority is reliant on comics’ artificial and artistic representation of reality at large. Another key contribution of the article is to complement ongoing debates in IPS on visual methodologies (for example, Bleiker 2017; Lisle 2017). While Bleiker and Lisle have outlined important sets of methodological questions so as to better account for visuality—Bleiker explores multiple methodologies and sites of analysis, whereas Lisle engages with the operation of power in embodied relations of seeing—this article goes a step further and offers a concrete method for the study of comics (section 3). Emphasis is put on the rhetorical strategies of The Truth about the Cheonan Attack in order to show how meaning is created—as well as a particular reading of the ship’s sinking, normalized via image-text relations (Rose 2016). In this vein, visual discourse analysis provides an interpretive reading of the comic’s dramatic structure and its rhetorical devices. While the emphasis on the narrative structure is meant to demonstrate how the comic tells its story, a familiar approach in analyzing various forms of narration (for example, Chatman 1980; Armes 1994;), this section engages in particular with the booklet’s distinct politics of representation. Specifically, it focuses on the plot’s reliance on the figure of the journalist as well as the continuous juxtaposition of gendered (state/society), media (comics/photography), and spatial (private/public) binaries—crucial facets for critical scholarship to scrutinize in order to gain further insight into the meaning-making process of visuality (cf. Huysmans and Nogueira 2012). This analysis will also help diversify current research in IR/IPS as many studies on popular media are located in European-language contexts, usually English, possibly impairing a broader understanding of how visual imagery is put to work in different cultural and political spaces (see also, Acharya 2014). The conclusion will place the findings of the article into the broader IR/IPS context. The Sketched Image and the Political Proclaiming that sketched images have significance for global politics is nothing new. There have been numerous recent examples illustrating the geopolitical importance and implications of illustrated visual art. For instance, in 2007 the International Criminal Court (ICC) accepted child drawings depicting the conflict in Darfur as evidence against Sudanese officials during their trials for war crimes (see also, Aradau and Hill 2013). Graphic illustrations of the torture practiced in North Korean prison camps figured prominently in the 2014 UN Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (OHCHR 2014). Based on this report, the commission recommended the prosecution by the ICC of the country’s leadership, including North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un, for crimes against humanity. And arguably the most well-known incidents illustrating the serious implications of drawn images for world politics are the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in European media outlets such as the Danish Jyllands-Posten and, more recently, the French publication Charlie Hebdo. In this vein, image-based studies in the broader field of IR/IPS—mostly associated with what is often called aesthetic IR (for example, Bleiker 2009; Case and Hamilton 2016; Moore and Shepherd 2010), popular culture and world politics (for example, Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009; Kiersey and Neumann 2013), and popular/critical geopolitics (for example, Dittmer and Dodds 2008; MacDonald, Dodds, and Hughes 2010)—have focused on the cartoon as a particular object of study. Dodds’ (2007) engagement with the artwork of British cartoonist, Steve Bell, on the US “war on terror” and Hansen’s (2011) discussion of the so-called Muhammed Cartoon Crisis serve as the most prominent examples in the field (see also, Berg 2003; Ridanpää 2009; Hammett 2010; Manzo 2012). In fact, cartoons, a form of visual art mostly illustrated with a single or a limited number of panels, seem to be predestined for visual political analysis given their instant connection to the political; they are often sketched and published in newspapers, mostly in the politics section, as a way to question or criticize the powerful. With cartoonists in many countries regularly being arrested for their artwork, cartoons speak truth to power by means of caricature, irony, and mockery. Cartoons, hence, emerge as visual sites of contestation; they are sites of resistance. Comics, however, might not disclose themselves immediately to the political. Rather, they are often viewed as innocent pieces of “low art,” requiring additional explanation for serious engagement with them. This “lack of legitimacy,” as one well-known comics scholar put it (Groensteen 2009, 3), is also due to the fact that reading comics is often made sense of in terms of (children’s) education and entertainment. The allegedly juvenile character of comics arguably aided the emergence of what is widely called the graphic novel, which by its very name suggests a more serious and mature outlook, but is not necessarily a different form of comic-based storytelling. Yet, scholars of the above-mentioned backgrounds have addressed the comic as a distinct, political medium of meaning making, with Hansen’s (2016) study of Bosnian War comics being a recent example (others include, Holland 2012; Thorsten 2012; Rech 2014). Holland (2012), for instance, explores the potential of a graphic novel by comic journalist, Joe Sacco, as a counterhegemonic reading of the everyday experience of internally displaced people during the wars in Chechnya. By drawing on Gerard Toal’s concept of the antigeopolitical eye, Holland conceives the graphic narrative as a form of disrupting the dominant perspective of states on geopolitical events. By contrast, Rech (2014), in his analysis of a military recruitment campaign by the British Royal Air Force, shows how state-centric narratives of geopolitics are reproduced through aesthetic conventions prevalent in the genre of war comics. Most academic engagements with comics, however, explore how national identity and nationalism are enacted in, and through, them. Dunnett (2009), for instance, provides an analysis of (Belgian) identity representations in the comic series The Adventures of Tin Tin by comic artist Georges Remi. Dunnett identifies specific geopolitical discourses—colonialism, European preeminence, and anti-Americanism—which resonate throughout the comic series and promote Eurocentric values and views on the world. Jason Dittmer, turning to superheroes stories such as Watchmen and Captain America from DC Comics and Marvel Comics, theorizes comic books as a specific medium through which US geopolitical worldviews and notions of US national identity are conveyed (Dittmer 2005, 2007, 2013). While the figure of the superhero provides a popular script for academic inquiries to reimagine current affairs in global politics (see the symposium on “The Politics of the Superhero” in Political Science & Politics, Costello and Worchester 2014, but also Costello 2009; DiPaolo 2011; Smith and Goodrum 2011; Scott 2015), other studies have outlined how comics have been used to convey particular political messages to audiences. For instance, Madison (2013) and Scott (2014) show how US governments and publishers have employed graphic art to denigrate US enemies or to build public support for ongoing war efforts (see also, Graham 2011; Donovan 2012). Thus, rethinking the putative innocence of comics as the very condition of advancing political knowledge claims helps to discern the complicity of comics in performing the political. This complicity, however, as Strömberg (2010) has shown in depictions of war and conflict in official or commercial comic imagery, has often been labeled and, more importantly, condemned as propaganda—something that is implicated as ideology in comics in the above-mentioned scholarship (see also, Scott 2007; DiPaolo 2011; Cortsen etal. 2014). One of the implications of such a designation is that comics are not recognized as crucial sites of politics. Put simply, since these aesthetic texts only constitute instances of deception and brainwashing, they are meaningless for the study of the political. This line of argumentation, however, is problematic in two interrelated ways: First, it could be asked whether people and society at large are really passive subjects who are exposed to, and at the mercy of, ideological indoctrination. Second, and more importantly, an understanding of propaganda as distortion implies that an authentic or original path to politics is attainable, as if we only need to liberate politics from propaganda for its pure form to become discernable. Such an understanding of propaganda fails to take into account that, in essence, any attempts designed to influence opinions, advance certain knowledge claims, and/or persuade people to believe in particular ideas can be called propaganda—or, for that matter, brainwashing. This includes matters as diverse as, for instance, everyday advertising in modern societies, educational practices in schools and universities, as well as democracy promotion in foreign countries. In all these instances, people’s “hearts and minds” are targeted by particular means designed to persuade them to believe in certain concepts, knowledges, and values. As such, the question could in fact be turned the other way round: what is politics about if not denoting the very practice of influencing people’s worldview on a local, regional, or global scale? What follows, then, is a different notion of the political—one that is not necessarily about the organization of social communities or the distribution of material values, but rather is linked to constant struggles over the prerogative of interpretation of material and social formations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). These struggles, in turn, are linked to multiple modes of representation, of which comics are a part. While this understanding implies that modes of representation are entangled with material worlds, it also points to the mutual imbrication of the political and the representational (cf. Lisle 2017). For the close affiliation between the state—or indeed any other bearer of politics—and the comic image shows that political practice cannot be separated from its visual representation. Thus, as the comic constitutes an empirical site of the visual politics of states, it becomes a necessary object of political inquiry. The juxtaposition of the comic with other visual media—in particular with its close relative, the cartoon, and the measure of reality, photography—helps to better understand comics’ own politics of representation. For what will be emphasized here, and should be taken into account by current scholarship, is the scope that the comic, in contrast to the cartoon, has to mediate a story. That is to say, comics reveal an inherent breadth of visual storytelling that relates to the development of context, characters, and plot, so as to represent narrative complexity in a condensed form. The narrative coherence of cartoons, on the other hand, is usually limited to a few sketches requiring prior contextual knowledge (for example, about politics, history, and society). While this is not about making clear-cut distinctions between, or providing precise definitions of, cartoons and comics—this has been done more fruitfully elsewhere (see, for example, Eisner 1985; McCloud 1993; Groensteen 2007; Chute 2010)—differentiating both visual media as heuristic categories clarifies their distinct articulatory objectives. Put simply, while cartoons make a statement (for example, the Muhammed cartoons), comics tell a story (for example, narrating national identity). In this way, a focus on comics can contribute to advance the field’s understanding of the drawn image. The peculiarity of the comic can also be elucidated in comparison to photorealistic media. The genres of documentary film and photojournalism, for instance, uphold a knowledge claim, after which their images function as copies of “the rational” and “the real.” This is why these images, as will be shown in the following section, work as incontrovertible evidence across distinct spatial and temporal discourses; since the popularization of photographic technologies in the nineteenth century, people have referred to these mimetic representations as self-evident facts regardless of their different cultural, historical, or geographical backgrounds. In other words, photographs (are thought to) speak for themselves. In this vein, photographic images, in aesthetic approaches to politics, come close to bridging what has been described as the gap of representation (for example, Ankersmit 1997; Bleiker 2009; Kompridis 2014). That is, photography is believed to overcome the inevitable difference between the represented (the event) and its representation (the image). While for some scholars this gap, and its attempted closure, enable the practice of politics (for example, Ankersmit 1997; Laclau 1996; Bleiker 2009), it is posited that it is precisely the comic’s lack of realism that articulates the medium’s distinct way of seeing and showing. Put simply, instead of bridging the gap of representation, comics—due to their aesthetic qualities—widen it. For as comic images already appear treated, processed, and adapted, they are instantly recognizable as artificial or artistic representations of reality and not as its corresponding equivalent. Important to note is that these imaginary renderings work both ways; comic images convey the complexity of reality (and of storytelling), that is, issues and processes of the “real world,” in a simplified as well as a focused manner. That is to say, the comic not only reduces the concept of reality to sketched shades of grey (or color for that matter), but simultaneously condenses narrative structure too.3 Thus, the comic not only takes something away—that is, (photo)realism—it also adds something by foregrounding the essentials of storytelling such as plot and character development. What follows is comics’ peculiar politics of representation: they are not only deployed to mediate geopolitical discourse, but also to facilitate its understanding. For instance, in November 2013, the Australian Department for Immigration and Border Protection published a graphic novel in order to discourage potential refugees from seeking asylum in Australia (Laughland 2014). Containing no words or other textual explanations, the eighteen-page digital comic “speaks” via images alone; as a result, it transcends cultural and linguistic barriers and makes Australian border protection narratives easily understandable to particular audiences. Another example of how comics are meant to represent and aid the comprehension of political events concerns the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Providing another illustration of the juxtaposition of “serious” geopolitics and its “unserious” representation, the National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks upon the United States sanctioned an official comic version of its final report in order to help explain the processes that led to the coordinated attacks by the terrorist group, al-Qaeda. The purpose of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation is clear: to make complex developments comprehensible to a broader public (Jacobson and Colon 2006). The same rationality applies to The Truth about the Cheonan Attack (interview with Lee Jae-hwa, October 22, 2014). In order to make visible what has been invisible—that is, the event itself as well as the intricate processes related to fact-finding and official reasoning—the comic seems to have emerged as the only suitable format with which to visualize South Korea’s geopolitical narrative. What becomes evident in the uses of sketched visual art is that the medium of the comics is meant to embed itself in the message (McLuhan 1965). Thus, the content becomes intertwined with its form of presentation, so that the reading of the message is affected by its messenger. It follows that the medium or the form is never neutral in how it tells a story, as it is also itself a story. Consequently, the medium constitutes distinct knowledge and represents geopolitics in a particular way. People’s interactions with sketched art are a good example of the comic’s own epistemologies. Regardless of its content, readers relate to the medium’s aesthetic appeal and easy accessibility as well as to its reduction of complexity and its artistic freedom in the representation of reality. It is precisely the comic’s own way of seeing and showing that makes it deeply political. Thus, the comic, because it is able to speak in a way that other forms of visual media cannot—in the words of Möller (2013, 164), it transcends the limits of representation—has to be the medium used to recount the geopolitical narrative about the Cheonan. Following from this, the next sections provide a discussion of the (geo)politics of the comic booklet. Geopolitics Sketched The thirty-two-page color comic booklet, The Truth about the Cheonan Attack, is sketched in a Japanese Manga—or, what would be called in Korea, Manhwa—style iconography emphasizing childlike facial features (for example, enlarged eyes, small noses, and mouths) and expressive character designs. This particular aesthetic style functions as a form of nonverbal, purely visual communication (for example, through the visual exaggeration of emotions such as anger, joy, and pain). The pages of the comic contain two to nine panels, as individual image frames, which are separated by white blank spaces (the gutter). In the present case, the separating gutter helps the story to be read as individual images arranged in a sequential order.4 With the exception of onomatopoetic expressions such as “crash,” “boom,” “bang,” which address the text as image as well as adding an aural dimension to visual art, the text in the speech bubbles does not interact aesthetically with the drawn images (Eisner 1985). In other words, the textual and the visual are addressed as two distinct modes of meaning making.5 The major storyline is constructed around the protagonist’s search for the cause of the ship’s sinking, which is linked to the personal relationships between the main characters.6 Considering comics as a (visual) narrative medium aims to outline an interpretive method that finds application in discourse analytical approaches in particular (Rose 2016). In order to understand how meaning is created, and a particular reading of the sinking normalized through image-text relations, the following visual discourse analysis places emphasis on the rhetorical strategies of the comic. To this end, the discussion explores the dramatic structure and rhetorical devices of the booklet—thereby advancing recent research on visual methodologies (for example, Bleiker 2017; Lisle 2017). Similar to a plot structure in a film or a play, the comic entails narrative segments—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement—that together make up its story and articulate specific assumptions about the characters and the narration of the course of events (see also, Eisner 2008). Therefore, it makes sense to discuss each of the narrative segments consecutively and to relate them to the comic’s politics of representation. In this vein, the empirical discussion will pay particular attention to the juxtaposition of narrative elements pertaining to the gendered depiction of the lead characters, the interplay between comic and photographic images, the figure of the journalist, and the spatial settings of the story. This will help discern how the comic’s medium is utilized to articulate the ship’s sinking in ways that draw on wider social discourses, including ones of gender, intervisuality, class, and space. It is in this vein that these elements—as knowledge practices themselves involved in framing—become political (Lisle 2017). Thus, the analysis will discuss images in conjunction with their accompanying texts, the speech bubbles, as well as pay attention to how readers are made to see and to know through the comic’s visuality. The goal here is twofold: (1) to show how the visual storytelling of the comic functions in producing a specific account of the event and (2) to provide an exemplary analysis for subsequent research on sequential visual imagery. In addition, the discussion of the booklet is complemented by insights that have been gained through email exchanges and onsite interviews. These were conducted in autumn 2014 with the author of the comic booklet, Kang Chon, and the chief officer of the Planning Group of the Scientific Investigation Lab of the MND, Lee Jae-hwa, as well as his assistant, So Jae-hyun. Exposition The exposition of the comic introduces the main characters to the readers and explains what the story is about. We learn who the characters are, what is driving their quest, and how they relate to each other (cf. MND 2010b, 2–6). The plot is set in South Korea a couple of months after the sinking of the Cheonan and unfolds in a private spatial setting: at home. Kang Ho-ryong, the protagonist of the comic, is awoken in the morning by a phone call from his fiancée, Song Eun-hye (see Figure 1 below). The reader learns that Song is complaining about the first encounter that Kang had with her father some time earlier. She complains that instead of trying to make a good impression on her father, he spoke his mind too freely when he stated his intention to live with her in a friendship-like manner yet intending to have many children (MND 2010b, 3). This independent and outspoken character trait of Kang, which will play a role later in the discussion, is reinforced by the fact that he lives on his own. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Introductory scene taking place in private spaceNote: All images are reproduced with permission of the Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defense. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Introductory scene taking place in private spaceNote: All images are reproduced with permission of the Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defense. The introductory scenes also show how Kang, a journalist working for a Sunday newspaper, is asked by his superior to reopen the case of the Cheonan sinking—and, for that matter, determine its real cause. A renewed investigation based on facts is needed since, as his boss explains to a surprised Kang, “there are still people who have doubts about the incident” (MND 2010b, 5). Given that the investigation about the sinking is portrayed as a career opportunity for the young journalist, the reader expects the assignment to be carried out with commitment, resolve, and seriousness. Indeed, the reader finds out that Kang has already worked on the case for two months, even before he was “officially” given the task of its reinvestigation (MND 2010b, 10). In a later scene, he is shown to be so absorbed by the investigation that he forgets his date with his fiancé (MND 2010b, 9). Furthermore, since Kang is also portrayed as a character who expresses his opinion freely, we can infer his upright and authentic nature.7 Put into the wider context of the story, the sinking of the Cheonan will be investigated with determination and professionalism regardless of the interests of, and interference by, politics, the public, or other third parties. Portrayed as someone who is undeterred and unaffected by any outside influence, Kang can also pursue his investigation without interference from the domestic realm—an aspect that helps to reveal the gendered nature of the booklet’s storytelling. The articulation of gendered difference not only becomes visible through the use of colors in the comic—he wears blue and she wears pink; even her cell phone is pink—but also through the protagonists’ way of behaving. He pursues a professional undertaking, while she is primarily occupied with the personal, their imminent wedding. He has a job, she does not; while he earns the money, she only takes it. He is reasonable and rational, whereas she is emotional and hysterical. He explains “serious” affairs of “high politics,” while she is obsessed with “soft” issues of romance and marriage; she constantly brings up the wedding in her personal conversations with Kang, who is shown to be deep in his investigation. He possesses factual knowledge, while she echoes rumors about the sinking; in other words, he knows, while she is only enlightened by him. While the politics of gender—the presence and agency of men and the absence and passivity of women—resonate well within popular representations of international politics (cf. Dixit 2014), it also provides insights into the political sociology of the booklet, by linking the personal relationship to a broader political context. What becomes clear in the course of the comic is that the two characters perform the role of the government and the public in South Korea. While the male character—active and knowing—comes to represent the South Korean government, the female character embodies the South Korean public—critical but uninformed, distracted and passive. The characters’ relationship is presented in the comic in somewhat conflictual terms—she calls into question his words, actions, and intentions and appears to control him, while he has to be accountable for his actions and attempts to appease her (e.g., MND 2010b, 4, 9–12, 27–29; see also, Figure 2 below). This antagonistic depiction corresponds with the general nature of the government’s relationship with the public in the aftermath of the Cheonan sinking. The period was marked by distrust toward the official investigation, demands for greater accountability, and public pledges of transparency by the government. Thus, the comic’s juxtaposition of gendered difference functions as a reference point to the overall separation that emerged between the government and the public—a separation that will, through the narrative means of the marriage, eventually be overcome. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Gendered depiction of state/society relations Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Gendered depiction of state/society relations Rising Action The second narrative segment, which takes up the largest share of the plot structure, shows the beginning of the investigation and the research conducted by Kang (MND 2010b, 6–20). This segment serves as the narrative preparation of the story’s climax, which blames North Korea while also reaching a consensus. This is done by adhering to the technicalities of scientific discourse. Kang uses graphs, images, and numbers to argue and convince, not to assert and persuade. His impersonal and dispassionate language, which contains formal terminology and references to scientific methodology (see, for example, MND 2010b, 12–17), stands in contrast to Song’s emotional outbursts. In other words, the journalist’s knowledge claims are credible, substantial, and valid. He dismisses each of the different hypotheses that have been proposed in the aftermath of the ship’s sinking. For instance, the reader is shown Kang’s visit to the site of the sinking, where he is told that bad weather conditions made rescue attempts difficult. The visualization of the site of the sinking—depicted in dark and opaque tones—helps the reader to see, and therefore to better understand, the difficulties of the salvage operation—an argumentative clarification given the public criticism the government faced due to the perceived delay in rescuing the ship’s crew (see MND 2010b, 7). In this section, Kang explains to Song—and, by extension, to the reader—the background to, and circumstances of, the official investigation. Although Song echoes the public disbelief that accompanied the findings of the JIG, Kang, with his deduced knowledge and devotion to the case (e.g., MND 2010b, 6, 8, 9), always has a ready and convincing answer to whatever question she may have. The (visual) rhetoric of science is also enhanced by contrasting two distinct modes of visuality, which are rarely found in (studies of) graphic art: comic images and photographs (see Figure 3). Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Recontextualization of photographs presented at the UN Security Council. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Recontextualization of photographs presented at the UN Security Council. The visual politics of the comic points to a hierarchical relationship between both forms of representation, a hierarchy that is deliberately reliant on the contrasting of the “fantasy” of the comic with the “reality” of the photographs. For what becomes clear is that the comic image is used for illustrative purposes in the booklet. That is to say, the comic image is explanatory of, and therefore secondary to, actual knowledge about the incident. It is not itself (relevant) knowledge. In contrast, photographs of the wreckage serve here as self-evident arguments. The photographs function as knowledge in themselves. So while the comic images indicate fictional knowledge belonging to the imagined world, the photographs constitute factual knowledge defining the real world. The photographs are able to enhance their rhetorical force precisely by being placed in contradistinction to the comic image. As mentioned above, this is due to their different aesthetic qualities. A photograph is what Barthes (1977, 12) famously called a “message without a code” through which we can witness truth and reality as they are, and not as we wish them to be. Photographs are therefore authentic and authoritative and trump other modes of representation such as language, sound, and text (for example, eyewitness over earwitness or a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words logic). The comic, due to its style and appearance, is, however, immediately identifiable as an artistic and, crucially, artificial rendering of reality. The medium of the comics is not able to close the blank space between the represented (the event) and its representation (the image). On the contrary, it actually widens the gap. This is why the comic image always refers to the photograph, and not vice versa. Employing seeing as a way of knowing, Kang repeatedly instructs Song to “look at the photograph” (e.g., MND 2010b, 13, 14; see Figure 3 below). Climax The use of photographs as facts continues in the third segment, which forms the narrative climax of the comic (MND 2010b, 21–26). This part culminates with two key aspects: substantiating, first, that the Cheonan was sunk in an attack that, second, was caused by a North Korean torpedo. In this segment, Song, who is echoing public doubts about the investigation results, is finally convinced about the factual circumstances of the sinking. Similar to the previous section, photographs take up a central role in articulating the message of the segment (see Figure 3 below). In this regard, the booklet’s climax refers to South Korea’s geopolitical reasoning at the UN Security Council, where it maintained that Korean-language markings found on the torpedo fragments were what it called “conclusive evidence” about North Korea’s involvement in the ship’s sinking (Park 2010; see Figure 3 below). In the words of the comic’s lead character, “… the UN Security Council, too, has shown overwhelmingly support [for the findings of the JIG] and adopted a strong presidential statement … [w]hen we summarize the results, we can be certain that the attack on the Cheonan was conducted by a North Korean torpedo” (MND 2010b, 25). Since the photographs of the torpedo fragments and the wreckage have been presented as self-explanatory facts, both at the UN Security Council and in the comic, they are meant to “speak” security. In this way, and due to a comic’s inherent lack of realism, the pictures work to mend the gap of representation; the truth about the event becomes knowable via its immediate photographic depiction. However, as mentioned above, neither facts nor photographs speak for themselves. This is not to question the content or the accuracy of these pictures, but to acknowledge that, as can be seen throughout the course of the booklet, they are already embedded in an interpretive framework of signs (e.g., comic images, captions, arrows, circles) that guide their reading and, hence, facilitate understanding of South Korea’s geopolitical narrative in the first place. Falling Action The fourth narrative segment of falling action takes place in a bar and depicts a conversation between Kang and Song (MND 2010b, 27–31). In another sign of her preoccupation with their imminent wedding, Song suggests a follow-up meeting with her father so that Kang can promise he will be a good husband. As their conversation switches to the sinking of the Cheonan, she does not understand why people still say that the findings of the investigation have been manipulated. Responding that everybody can express her or his opinion freely in a democracy, it is not a coincidence that Kang—or, put differently, the journalist—refers here to the fundamental democratic principle of free speech. The figure of the journalist, another central device of the booklet’s storytelling, shows how the comic is put to work. First, the protagonist is easily recognizable by his mere visual appearance: the notepad. The notepad, and its corresponding pen, is arguably the most iconic symbol of investigative journalism. This is why it always accompanies him while he is shown to conduct field research (e.g., MND 2010b, 8, 18, 19, 31). The icon of the notebook also transcends linguistic and cultural barriers: a reader does not have to speak Korean in order to understand what the depiction of the notepad signifies. Second, and more importantly, although other male figures with an investigatory directive, such as a policeman or a private detective, could have been invoked to illustrate the practice of investigation,8 only the character of the journalist combines the attributes essential to mediating the message of the story: namely informing the general public by means of objective and independent investigation. While a private detective does not have the overall public mandate of a reporter, a policeman would arguably be too easily identifiable as an agent of the state. That the reader is able to follow the journalist’s investigation from the perspective of an observer—we see how he works and how “the truth” about the Cheonan attack is built incrementally—only adds to rendering his activities accountable and verifiable. The politics of the journalist figure, which possesses an authoritative voice in democratic systems, becomes clear; by drawing on the nature of professional journalism—balanced reporting, impartial research, being a watchdog for governmental bodies—the comic booklet disguises its own official origins. Equally important to mention is how, after North Korea’s role in the Cheonan attack has been substantiated, the lead characters make sense of the event, as this section contains the take-home messages for the reader. As Song wonders why North Korea did what it did—even though, she notes, the South Korean government was helping the regime—Kang responds by referring to recent developments in the country: the North Korean leadership needed a distraction after public sentiment had turned against it due to the failed currency reform of 2009, a failure that hit the domestic economy hard. Furthermore, in order to strengthen the loyalty of the military, the young successor to power, Kim Jong-un, wanted to demonstrate his firm stance (MND 2010b, 30). However, the most likely reason for North Korea’s behavior is, according to Kang, because it wants to divide public opinion in South Korea (MND 2010b, 30). The rhetoric of separation—the division between the public and the government, among the general public and on the Korean peninsula—as well as its overcoming, figure prominently in this section. In a flashback scene of Kang’s research, he recalls a conversation he had with a surviving soldier. Inviting him to address the general public, the MND speaks directly to the reader of the comic via one of its agents. The soldier asserts that, despite recent provocations by the North—such as the Cheonan attack or a 2009 skirmish off Daecheong Island—South Korean citizens would seem to be too complacent. Asking for continuing trust in, and support of, the country’s military, the soldier conveys a central message to the reader: “For the sake of [national] security, it is desirable if everybody speaks with one voice” (MND 2010b, 31). In this way, he repeats a sentence that Song expressed earlier in her conversation with Kang about the freedom of speech in democracies (“Our country is the only divided nation in the world. For the sake of [national] security, it is desirable if everybody speaks with one voice” [MND 2010b, 30]). The evocation of unity and the overcoming of a separation, also discussed in earlier sections, concludes in the next segment of the booklet. Dénouement The final section shows both characters outside, after they have left the bar. While the reader is implied as a target throughout the story—noticeable, for instance, in the way Kang presents photographic evidence to the reader in Figure 3—this is the first time the characters directly, visually and verbally, address and interact with the audience. Addressing the reader through Song signals that the overall point—how the government reached its conclusion about North Korea’s guilt—is understood by the public (“Now you know everything, right?” [MND 2010b, 32]). Her raised index finger indicates a reference to educational authority, in that the reader is “in the picture,” enlightened. At the same time, it also refers to moral authority in that what has been claimed in the booklet is just and righteous. The setting of the final scene deserves particular mention as it reveals distinct spatial politics, which reinforces the message to the public. In the beginning of the comic, the lack of knowledge about the sinking is connected to private space. The protagonist, who is at home, literally and figuratively receives a wake-up call (see Figure 1). Here, the place of home suggests the lack of knowledge is an individual matter, something that is contained inside domestic space. In contrast, the comic ends outside of home, the reader seeing a vibrant scene taking place in a metropolitan setting; thus, the state of having knowledge and being enlightened is linked to public space (Figure 4 below). The public venue suggests that knowledge about the sinking has become a collective matter, something that can be expressed outside in public space. Spatializing the beginning and the ending of the comic works to frame the story of the Cheonan in binaries including private/public, state/society, inside/outside, and division/unity. While both lead characters, or state and society for that matter, were separated from, and in conflict with, each other in the beginning—they are both home alone and have an argument—at the end they have found common ground and walk harmoniously alongside each other. Furthermore, they are about to tie the knot. Reiterating unity in matters of national security, both sides have bridged their spatial and political distance and overcome difference. The comic, hence, emerges as a site where social consensus is established and a common sense understanding of geopolitical affairs is articulated. In doing so, The Truth about the Cheonan Attack is involved in setting the boundaries of legitimate geopolitical knowledge. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Concluding scene taking place in public space Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Concluding scene taking place in public space Conclusion This article’s specific contribution to current scholarship on visual politics has been its conceptual reflection on the peculiarity of the comics medium, based on the selected example of The Truth about the Cheonan Attack. This official comic booklet was published by the South Korean MND in the aftermath of the sinking of one of its navy ships, the Cheonan, in March 2010. In particular, the article has argued for the need to develop a sensitivity concerning the complicity of the medium of comics in performing the political. For, as was shown, comics are a good example of the impact that artefacts of visual culture have on politics, since many political actors rely on them to advance certain knowledge claims to public audiences. Comics are thus involved in setting the conditions for meaningful social practices in international relations—ample reason why IPS and IR scholars should study them closely. As has been argued, this means looking at comics as crucial sites of politics and not as mere instruments of propaganda—as is often the case in current research. Comics are a distinct form of visual storytelling—in contrast to the cartoon, which makes a visual statement—that operates at the level of reduction (reality) and condensation (narration). In this vein, comics are also different to photorealistic media forms, which assume political authority via mimetic representability. Comics, in contrast, claim authority due to their artificial and artistic representations of reality. Another contribution of the article has been to offer a concrete method for analyzing comics, in contrast to recent works by critical scholars exploring diverse methodological approaches to the more general study of visuality (for example, Bleiker 2017; Lisle 2017). Stressing the rhetorical strategies of the comic, the visual discourse analysis explored how meaning is constructed and how particular knowledge about the sinking, produced in the image-text relations, is presented. It was suggested that, in the future, critical scholars need to develop an appreciation of the dramatic structure and rhetorical devices of a comic. In the case study presented here, this means being attentive to the gendered depictions of characters, the interplay between different visualities, the social roles played by the protagonists, and the spatial settings of the story. These cut across and permeate the comic’s narrative segments of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement and are all crucial aspects for scholars to consider—ultimately so as to better understand the meaning-making process of visuality. The findings of the article give rise to key questions that could be addressed in further engagements with the medium of comics. For instance, it could be asked how the interplay between different visualities affects the involvement of viewers—and in multiple ways. Whereas the juxtaposition of comic and photographic imagery in the present booklet turns the viewer into a passive witness, facilitated by an image-text that invites watching and reading but not challenging the protagonist’s line of argumentation (Kang merely presents facts to the viewer), it could also be asked how intervisuality mediates an event as immediate and immersive—with the consequence of the viewer becoming an active participant (see also, Möller 2013). Theorizing intervisuality might also help us to rethink the limits of representation, in particular with regard to the representability of events that are deemed to be too atrocious and horrific to be made visual (for example, Spiegelman’s [2003] artistic engagement with the Holocaust). Similarly, IR scholars could explore how rhetorical devices—for example, the specific roles of people and places—work in comics, which contain no words. This is pertinent, for example, in the case of the abovementioned (anti)refugee graphic novel of the Australian Department for Immigration and Border Protection, which communicates narratives of IR solely via visual imagery. While critical IR scholarship goes on to address geopolitical storytelling, it is important to note that, in fact, there are many ways to mediate—and therefore to make sense of—an event. Far from being self-evident or self-narrating, stories can be conveyed in various narrative forms (for example, prose, news, novel) and/or representational modes (for example, film, photography, video). While one of the ways, as seen, relates to the medium of comics, the principle openness of narration reveals that storytelling implies an imaginative dimension. Accounting for the narrative and imaginative dimension of international politics—most notably put forward through the methods of autoethnography, autobiography, and what is called fictional IR (for example, Brigg and Bleiker 2010; Inayatullah 2011)—does require the study of comics as geopolitical imaginaries—comics that are themselves geopolitical in that they not only tell a story about the military, national security, or international relations, but also articulate difference alongside dichotomies of high/low politics, inside/outside, private/public, man/woman, rational/emotional, and imagined/real (see also, Campbell 2007). In this vein, the role of the comic in enacting geopolitical knowledge requires the continued attention of critical scholarship. Footnotes 1 " The full comic can be accessed at http://cheonan46.tistory.com/96. 2 " As one reviewer correctly pointed out, graphic narratives stemming from popular comics artists such as Joe Sacco or Art Spiegelman are understood to be critical texts commenting on political and social issues, rather than ones serving propaganda purposes. 3 " I thank Nadine Godehardt for pointing this out to me. 4 " For a further engagement with the function of the gutter, see Dittmer and Latham (2015). 5 " In order to evoke particular emotions, comics engage the text as images. For instance, a sense of fear and horror can be aggravated by rendering the (content of) text in red, resembling flowing blood (see also, Eisner 1985, 12). In this way, the text-as-image rendering affects the reading of the comic. 6 " According to the chief officer of the Planning Group of the Scientific Investigation Lab of the Ministry of National Defense, the reason for embedding the story of the Cheonan sinking in the context of a romantic partnership and not, for instance, in friendship or kinship, was because such sensitive issues tend to be discussed more freely and sincerely (interview with Lee, October 22, 2014). Some theorists in comic studies have suggested that invoking the theme of romance works to appeal to feminine readerships (Duncan and Levitz 2015). 7 " I would like to thank Sun-kyung Choi for directing my attention to this point. 8 " With the notable exception of Agatha Christie, the emphasis on male subjectivity is important because the figure of the investigator is heavily gender-biased in popular investigation imaginaries. 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For providing background information about the comic, I would like to thank Lee Jae-hwa, chief officer of the Planning Group of the Scientific Investigation Lab of the Ministry of National Defense; his assistant, So-Jae-hyun; the author of the comic booklet, Kang Chon; and cartoonist Kim Nahm-ho. Draft versions of the article have been presented at various conference and workshop panels hosted by the International Studies Association, the European International Studies Association, the Korean Political Science Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Center for East Asian Studies Groningen. Some parts were drafted during my January 2015 stay at the Universidad de Antioquia, Medellin, which was facilitated by my host, Dr. Carolina Vasquez of the Faculty of Law and Political Science, and by an Erasmus Mundus Action 2 mobility grant. Special thanks go to Sun-kyung Choi, Nadine Godehardt, Patrick Köllner, Seon-ok Lee, Mirja Maletzki, and Tirza van Bruggen. I also would like to thank the participants of the colloquium of the Chair Group on History and Theory of International Relations and of the media studies department at the University of Groningen for helpful comments on an earlier version of the article. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Sketching Geopolitics: Comics and the Case of the Cheonan Sinking
JO - International Political Sociology
DO - 10.1093/ips/olx016
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/sketching-geopolitics-comics-and-the-case-of-the-cheonan-sinking-1z0M1dteei
SP - 398
VL - 11
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -