ABSTRACT
Often combining words and pictures in sequential panels, comics represents “an art form long accustomed to rendering time as space, characters as multiplicities, and the disputed frontier between self and not-self as a permeable zone open for exploration”. Some scholars such as Tanya Kam argue that such features make comics “ideal for thanatography.” In her words, comics “describes the complicated process of aging, mental and physical atrophy, and isolation with visual immediacy and intimacy”. Indeed, the representation of debility, dying, death, loss, and mourning has figured prominently in graphic narrative since the modern emergence of the medium in the late nineteenth century. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century comic strips had no shortage of exaggerated mayhem and slapstick, which often blurred into startling violence. Similarly, one may read the absurdist goings-on against oneiric landscapes in both Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat as afterlife narratives.
