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Antisettler Comics? Sophie McCall, ‘Framing, Reframing, and Deframing: Disclosure in Indigenous Comics’, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 8, 3, 2024 pp. 337-357

22Dec24

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Indigenous comic creators disrupt or reclaim the conventions of comics in four works: The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill (Kwakwaka’wakw), 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga by David Alexander Robertson (Cree), Deer Woman: A Vignette by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe, Métis), and Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls (Tahltan). These comics use innovative paneling to expose silence and denial in settler-colonial societies, to disrupt linear concepts of time, and to assert Indigenous presence expansively across settler-colonial borders. American comic book theorist Scott McCloud, author of several celebrated books on the “vocabulary of comics,” argues that comics create a “dance of the visible and invisible” in the production of “closure” across panels (McCloud 92). In the context of reading comics, McCloud defines closure as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole,” which he further glosses as the reader’s act of silently filling in the gaps between panels, allowing that reader to comprehend the action even between two seemingly unrelated panels. However, without critical self-awareness, a reader risks imposing closure in ways that maintain settler-colonial norms. The comic books that I discuss mobilize strategies of disclosure to contest a reader’s assumptions about the production of meaning across panels. I argue that disclosure interrupts readers’ unconscious mobilization of established narratives that invisibly guide interpretation, and turns the mirror back on the readers themselves. These comic books’ insurgent acts of disclosure challenge settler-colonial impositions of closure and powerfully activate narratives of Indigenous resistance, cultural continuance, empowerment, and resurgence.


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