Arts & culture, Politics & society, Literature, Visual arts

Drawing new conclusions from comics and cartoons

By Public Affairs

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This book combines eight individual comics that the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in partnership with Umlando Wezithombe, circulated to schoolchildren and others for free between 2005 and 2007. It is among those displayed in a Doe Library exhibit on comics from around the world. (Image courtesy of the UC Berkeley Library.)

This book combines eight individual comics that the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in partnership with Umlando Wezithombe, circulated to schoolchildren and others for free between 2005 and 2007. It is among those displayed in a Doe Library exhibit on comics from around the world. (Image courtesy of the UC Berkeley Library.)

Comics and graphic novels offering intriguing glimpses of visually arresting, sometimes amusing and often sobering stories of cultures, politics and economics around the world are on display in Doe Library’s Bernice Layne Brown Gallery at UC Berkeley through March 2017.

The exhibit, “Beyond Tintin and Superman: The Diversity of Global Comics,” reflects the collaborative work of a team led by Liladhar Pendse, UC Berkeley’s librarian for Slavic, East European, Armenian and Central Asian studies collections, as well as acting librarian for African Studies.

The comics and graphic novels on display come from the library’s collection, as well as some loaned from Pendse’s personal collection. The materials — with their striking imagery and layers of subtexts — come from Mexico, Egypt, Argentina, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Colombia, Poland, Israel and other nations, and include Japanese woodblock imagery and contemporary manga stories.

Pendse leads a brief tour of the exhibit in the video below.