How might the visual grammar of comics be drawn upon to highlight the labour, theory, and practice of translation? At the intersection between the world republic of letters and the domain of images, comics necessitate techniques and physical spaces for reading that challenge assumptions of linguistic–and cultural–equivalence.
Examining Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ A Tale of Two Shamans and the trilingual Lebanese comics magazine Samandal, Prof. Kelp-Stebbins considers the comics page as a site that brings together a wide swath of encounters between peoples, cultural techniques, nomenclatures, spatial demarcations, and commodity objects. By compelling readers to reflect on differences between spaces of language, the multilingual pages of A Tale of Two Shamans and Samandal articulate relations between and among readerly practices. These works remind us that the co-presence of Xaad Kil, French, Arabic, and English texts alongside images on the space of the page does not imply parity between languages; rather, the page orients a reader to anticolonial struggles for recognition and literacy within the world system of comics.
