Harnessing comics as minoritarian interventions in the representation of conflicts and their everyday: the case of Vanni and Welcome to the New World

This essay studies the representation of the everyday of geopolitical conflicts in Vanni and Welcome to the New World. The graphic novels are situated in war-torn Sri Lanka and Syria, respectively, and document the everyday of their characters. The apparent ordinariness of everyday, especially in states of tension and conflict, has been a prominent trope in comics. The paper examines the properties of comics vis-à-vis their grammar, spatiotopia, and visual-verbal registers to decode a particular medium-specific import in the representation of everyday. Living in zones of conflict requires careful materialize a similar aesthetic of intentional navigation in their reading by creating palimpsestic cartographies, spatiotopic interventions, and image-text tensions of the comics form. These properties make a case for the medium in creating horizontal and non-hegemonic writings of geopolitical conflict. It finds that comics, as a medium, is able to function as a minoritarian intervention in majoritarian representation.