Please note: this is a proposed, not a guaranteed, session, sponsored by the forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives, at MLA 2025. It is contingent on approval by the MLA Program Committee. All prospective presenters must be current MLA members by April 1, 2024.

NOLA in Graphic Narratives takes the location of the 2025 Modern Language Association Annual Convention as its source of inspiration to critically examine the ways in which New Orleans, Louisiana, and the region have been visualized and made visible in comics and graphic narratives. Located on the shores of the Mississippi River and Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne, the city of New Orleans has long been a site of confluence. The intermingling of these fresh, brackish, and saline bodies of water serve as a metaphor for the many encounters, encroachments, and hybridizations that have come to define the city and larger region. 

Sites of the successive overlaying of indigenous, colonial, Creole, and contemporary histories, New Orleans and Louisiana have been characterized by recurrent narratives of (in)visibilization. These include: displacement of Indigenous peoples and resignification of the land, waters, and cityscape as sites of exploitation by successive colonial powers; development of distinct ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural identities associated with the region; and histories of migration to and from the area. Moreover, of ever-increasing importance are the intertwined economic and environmental concerns that stem from the reclamation of land and coastal erosion, the exploitation of offshore oil reserves, rising sea levels and the impact of weather events such as hurricanes, and the varying consequences of (re)construction initiatives for residents, businesses, and other interested parties.

The overwhelming majority of scholarly attention to New Orleans’ comics has gone to Josh Neufeld’s (2009) A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which visualizes the communities of New Orleans in the city’s geography, from the perspective of the real people Neufeld interviewed, along with a so-called “God’s eye” perspective. Similar in theme was Mat Johnson and Simon Gane’s (2010) Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story. As Anthony Dyer Hoefer explored in his essay on A.D., images of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina can “overwhelm the viewer” whilst giving little information about the event itself. Decades earlier, Bunny Matthews introduced his New Orleans “Yat” characters Vic and Nat’ly, characters linguistic anthropologists Katie Carmichael and Nathalie Dajko argue are falsely perceived to be authentic, “eras[ing] the realities of modern New Orleans.” More recently, comics scholarship has turned to Marvel’s Brother Voodoo (later Doctor Voodoo), a Haitian-born New Orleans resident, whose storylines feature Creole culture and Black identity, alongside DC Vertigo’s House of Whispers, focusing on the religious and marine connections between New Orleans and the wider Caribbean region.

Taking the location of the 2025 MLA as a critical occasion for re-visioning New Orleans, this panel asks what lessons comics offer about visualizing a region, its geography, the material connections to the environment, and the ways individuals and communities navigate it.

Questions we hope the panel will engage:

  • How has the diversity of New Orleans been represented (visualized) in comics? What positive and negative consequences have such imaginings had? And what lessons does the graphic medium offer for other visual media forms?
  • How do visual representations of New Orleans and the region represent it as a site of connection across racial, ethnic, national, cultural, and linguistic categories?
  • In what ways does Creole identity/Creoleness serve as a site of interrogation of national, cultural, and linguistic plurality in New Orleans and Louisiana?  
  • How do overlapping colonial legacies appear in graphic representations of the region?
  • What ways of seeing and knowing are made possible through bodies of water, such as rivers, lakes, and seas? How does water function materially and metaphorically to connect, reflect, and separate?
  • What comics produced in New Orleans and/or taking place in New Orleans have been invisible to the field of Comics and Graphic Narrative Studies?

Send 250-word abstracts and short bios (in English) by March 15, 2024 to Rachel Kunert-Graf (rkunertgraf@antioch.edu) and Paul Humphrey (phumphrey@colgate.edu).