Harnessing comics as minoritarian interventions in the representation of conflicts and their everyday: the case of <i>Vanni</i> and <i>Welcome to the New World</i>

This essay studies the representation of the everyday of geopolitical conflicts in Vanni and Welcome to the New World. The graphic novels are situated in war-torn Sri Lanka and Syria, respectively, and document the everyday of their characters. The apparent ordinariness of everyday, especially in states of tension and conflict, has been a prominent trope in comics. The paper examines the properties of comics vis-à-vis their grammar, spatiotopia, and visual-verbal registers to decode a particular medium-specific import in the representation of everyday. Living in zones of conflict requires careful materialize a similar aesthetic of intentional navigation in their reading by creating palimpsestic cartographies, spatiotopic interventions, and image-text tensions of the comics form. These properties make a case for the medium in creating horizontal and non-hegemonic writings of geopolitical conflict. It finds that comics, as a medium, is able to function as a minoritarian intervention in majoritarian representation.