The Hug: Children in Comics Rewritings of History

This article focuses on specific instances of hugs between an adult and a child appearing in graphic historical fiction and memoir. These moments of bodily contact capture an affective stickiness (Sara Ahmed) associated with the figure of the child. In focusing on secondary child characters in two recent French albums revisiting the First World War, Les Folies Berg & egrave;re (2012) and La Ligne de Front (2004), this article shows how hugs also appear as chronotopes (Mikhail Bakhtin), collapsing space and time. Situated in imagined episodes of history, these children do not grow, remaining frozen within the frame of childhood, which is used to intercept and question history. This frame reveals itself as comics-specific, resisting reproduction in other media through the complex positioning of the comics child and the ease with which the fantastic mixes with the remnants of history in the comics form.