Drawing Disaster

It was a pleasure to speak to Oliver Thompson and Nahlah Ayed for an episode of CBC’s Ideas radio show and podcast that asked how graphic novels could be an antidote to “doom scrolling”? Other guests on the podcast include Ben Dix, Hillary Chute, and Art Spiegelman. Read more and listen to the full podcast here.

"We've got a particular penchant, I suppose, for disaster, and we're talking here about primarily people or primarily audiences in the global north who tend to ... scroll through their phones looking at news stories from all around the globe," said Dom Davies, a senior lecturer in English at City, University of London.

But Davies believes that comics — or graphic novels — can offer an antidote to what he sees as the contemporary barrage of images.

Davies studies the representation of trauma in comics and graphic novels. He argues that we need to devise new visual strategies in a digital landscape saturated with horrific imagery, and that comics might provide a new way telling traumatic stories. 

"What we have is too many pictures of our people without names: pictures of trauma that are deprived of that context, and that actually we need to devise new visual strategies for seeing differently," Davies said. 

Davies argues that comics help to resist a digital environment saturated with traumatic imagery. "Comics really do slow that down and break apart that visual system," he said. 

You can read more and listen back to the podcast here.