Introduction

The articles in this edition of European Comic Art cover a range of themes, including adaptation, whether from an Ibsen play or a range of classic novels, and a corresponding scrutiny of the affordances of the comics medium, along with a reflection on the differential apportioning of artistic prestige from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. An in-depth interview with an award-winning translator brings in further angles on comics as a transnational medium, and an essay by an eminent semiologist revisits the linear/tabular distinction that has been the basis of much formal analysis of comics. The issue of pedagogy recurs both as subject matter of primary texts and in the form of a constructive proposal for enlightened curriculum development. Politics pervades all the articles: the environmental crisis and media collusion in obfuscation, the process of achieving change in education, the responsibility of a satirist to adhere or refuse adherence to one camp or another, the negotiations and frictions that arise out of relocation into new contexts of reception, and an exploration of the borderline regions of the social unconscious.