Comics From the Global South Are Not a Variation on the Western Form - They Are Something Else

Walk into any academic course on comics history and the syllabus will likely start with Superman, move through Jack Kirby, arrive at Art Spiegelman, and treat this progression as a natural unfolding of the artform. A new book assembled by researchers at Cambridge, Leeds, and Manchester challenges that curriculum at its foundation - not by adding non-Western examples to the existing canon, but by questioning whether that canon tells us anything useful about what comics are or can be.

Comics and the Global South, published by Leuven University Press and freely available online in digital form, brings together case studies from India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Maori communities in New Zealand, Somali refugee camps, and other locations to argue that the artform has developed along multiple independent tracks simultaneously. The Western track - superhero comics, graphic novels, manga as understood through its global commercial form - is one trajectory, not the default.

What the Western frame gets wrong

"Comics have a much more varied cultural history than we tend to think, partly because we keep measuring them against a very narrow Anglo-European idea of what they are," said co-editor Dr. Joe Sutliff Sanders of Cambridge's Faculty of Education. The problem is definitional. When panels, speech bubbles, and sequential page layout constitute the definition of comics, traditions that tell sequential visual stories through scroll painting, wood carving, or mural cycles get treated as precursors rather than legitimate alternatives.

Sanders, who describes himself as an enthusiast for Western comics, frames this not as an attack on familiar forms but as a plea for the artform's survival: "If we can only imagine comics in the terms of what a handful of big publishers tell us they should be, the artform will atrophy."

Brazil: scroll painting and matrilineal memory

Each chapter in the volume takes a specific region and a specific critical method, rather than simply cataloguing what exists. Brazilian scholar Leticia Simoes uses a methodology called malunga - a term historically describing the bonds formed between people forced together on slave ships - to examine comics by women in South America. The approach traces how shared experiences of trauma, racism, and displacement generate solidarity and collective expression.

Her analysis includes the work of Marilia Marz, whose collage-like images depict Black Brazilian women assembling identity from fragments, and Chilean artist Amanda Baeza, whose comics imagine female characters escaping cycles of abuse. Simoes applies the term escrevivencia - roughly, "write-existing" - to describe storytelling that asserts women's needs and identities through a shared cultural vocabulary rather than through individual narrative voice.

Eastern India and Maori communities: ancient forms remade

In eastern India, artists are adapting Patachitra - a centuries-old scroll painting tradition - into new visual storytelling forms. The adaptation is not straightforward translation; contemporary artists use Patachitra conventions to address present-day subjects while preserving the visual grammar of the original tradition.

In New Zealand, Maori creators are reworking puraka - traditional creation narratives - into comics and picture-book hybrids. These works are not museum pieces; they engage Maori youth with contemporary concerns while keeping ancestral story structures intact.

Indo-manga and the localization of Japanese convention

One of the more unexpected developments the volume documents is "Indo-manga" - comics by Indian artists who adopt Japanese manga visual conventions and redirect them toward South Asian audiences and concerns. Yakshi by Parvaty Menon follows a bored Generation Z demoness perpetually attached to her smartphone. The Nirvana series by Abhiray and Abiresh retells ancient tales as modern action comics with embedded references to everyday Indian youth experience.

The manga framework, originally developed in Japan and then exported globally through commercial publishing, becomes a local tool rather than a foreign import. The creators use it to speak to audiences who recognize the visual language but expect stories that reflect their own social reality.

Kenya: comics as maternal health intervention

Perhaps the most direct demonstration of comics as practical tool comes from Dadaab, Kenya's vast refugee camp, home to Somali refugees since the 1990s. The camp recorded unusually high rates of maternal and neonatal death, traced in part to policies that banned traditional birthing attendants - community specialists who play culturally central roles during and after childbirth.

In a study documented in the book, women collaborated to produce comics depicting their experiences and the work of these attendants. The comics are now being developed as training resources for midwives and humanitarian workers, designed to bridge the gap between formal medical protocols and local knowledge systems. Visual storytelling made it possible to communicate across literacy levels and languages in a population that formal text-based materials had difficulty reaching.

What the editors want readers to do with this

Co-editor Dr. Andrea Aramburu of the University of Manchester notes that substantial critical scholarship on Global South comics already exists but has remained outside the mainstream academic conversation: "There is already a lot of passionate, intelligent critical engagement with these comics, but much of it has been waiting to enter the global conversation."

Sanders is direct about who he hopes reads the book: not only Western academics but students and fans in the Global South itself. "Hopefully it will deepen their enjoyment of the art, and at the same time encourage them to challenge some of the assumptions that still dominate comics culture in the West."