The Cartoon Mode Provides a Stage: Understanding Comics through Performance

This article examines the phenomenon of cartoon theatre, an approach to performance that emerged in the alternative theatre movement of the mid-1960s to early 1990s which drew on cartooning as a visual mode and the structure and iconography of comics, as part of a wider subversion of theatre practice. Analysing the case study of socialist theatre group CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre), it asks what looking at the adoption of cartooning by experimental theatre groups tells us about it as a mode, its aesthetics, and particularly its political affordances. Grounded in archival research, I use the form of collage comics to visualise the process of engaging with and synthesising archival sources, the materiality of archival records, and the acts of imagining involved, particularly when trying to conjure theatrical performances from fragmented documentary traces. As illustrator Esther McManus attests, comics can foreground the complexity, multiplicity, and ellipses of archives, and animate them in a way that enables the past to reach into the future. Reading CAST’s work against Joseph Witek’s breakdown of ‘the cartoon mode’ in comics, I argue that cartooning, in its carnivalesque anti-naturalism and with its roots in popular performance traditions, is inherently argumentative, lending itself to agonism.