ABSTRACT
This chapter examines image–text relations in comics and how drawing the world by hand creates an aesthetic of exaggeration and distortion that helps us understand what borders are and do. Borders are inherently spaces of contradictions. They are spaces of encounters and divisions that separate and unite. They are visible yet invisible, fixed yet mobile, rigid yet porous, and remote yet so central to politics. Comics are a form that exploits contradictions between, among others, image and text, interiority and exteriority, visibility and invisibility, and movement and action stopped in motion. The border first appears in the story when Gangto decides to cross it and go to the North to help build a new revolutionary society. The 38th parallel importantly shapes Gangto's life. Following Gangto and later his son in their role as soldiers gives us the perspectives of those who create and maintain borders.
