The articles in this edition of European Comic Art cover a range of themes, including adaptation, whether from an Ibsen play or a range of classic novels, and a corresponding scrutiny of the affordances of the comics medium, along with a reflection on the differential apportioning of artistic prestige from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. An in-depth interview with an award-winning translator brings in further angles on comics as a transnational medium, and an essay by an eminent semiologist revisits the linear/tabular distinction that has been the basis of much formal analysis of comics. The issue of pedagogy recurs both as subject matter of primary texts and in the form of a constructive proposal for enlightened curriculum development. Politics pervades all the articles: the environmental crisis and media collusion in obfuscation, the process of achieving change in education, the responsibility of a satirist to adhere or refuse adherence to one camp or another, the negotiations and frictions that arise out of relocation into new contexts of reception, and an exploration of the borderline regions of the social unconscious.

Per Esben Svelstad discusses Javi Rey's graphic novel adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's nineteenth-century play An Enemy of the People. Inevitably, the failure to act on warnings about polluted water in Ibsen's play acquires much resonance in the twenty-first-century context of a lack of urgency in response to the climate emergency. Svelstad insists that such a reading does not have to be retrospective: the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century produced its own forms of knowledge, and repression of that knowledge, about the depredations of the Anthropocene and Ibsen's hypotext offers a clear allegorical vision of the inextricability of capitalist expansion and the defilement of natural resources. However, Rey's graphic novel renders explicit the political lesson that was implicit in the more psychologically oriented play, effecting a certain simplification through adjustments to character and plot. Rey's Thomas is not as compromised by ambition as Ibsen's Tomas, and his faith in science as a potential cure-all is transferred to his denialist brother, for whom financial concerns are paramount. At the same time, Svelstad argues that the graphic novel form allows for increased complexity in the exploration of certain themes, including the role of the media in facilitating the triumph of obscurity over clarity. The play of visual perspective conveys varying states of partial knowledge, and the comics page can frustrate the reader by concealing as well as revealing. The environmentalist message is amplified as metaphors such as the ‘swamp’ of corruption gain force through visual iteration, and repeated symbols such as a water globe condense meanings related to capitalism, consumerism and waste. The page layout juxtaposes disparate temporal and spatial frames, enforcing upon the reader both historical consciousness and a sense of the shocks and clashes between the local and the global. In the final section of the article, Svelstad points to a key change of emphasis from hypotext to hypertext, in relation to the question of pedagogy: where in the former, Tomas, having lost his fight, settles for school teaching with the somewhat contradictory aim of transmitting critical thought, in the latter, it is Thomas's daughter, Petra, who imagines a democratic mode of learning that grows from questioning and prioritises the collective interest. Svelstad concludes that Rey's graphic novel suggests a way forward for challenging the unsustainable and seemingly unassailable status quo.

Pedagogy is the focus of Robert Rozema's article: specifically, the teaching of graphic adaptations of canonical books. Rozema points to the widespread use in American schools in the twemtieth century of the Classics Illustrated series, a practice that incurred the wrath of Frederick Wertham. His assumption that these texts represented a downgrading of their literary sources went generally unchallenged, even by teachers, who tended to regard them as a stepping stone towards their more august originals and judged them solely on the basis of fidelity. Rozema cites evidence that the students themselves were untroubled by any such considerations and would seek out Classics Illustrated titles that, far from being in the shadow of a Great Work, offered vivid excitement in their own right. However, he also cites evidence that many English teachers still consign graphic adaptations to the bottom of an implicit cultural hierarchy, even with the advent in recent years of some highly accomplished examples. In some cases, educators acknowledge the visual quality and impact of the graphic hypertext but fail to break out of a comparative mode: the adaptation may no longer be treated as a poor substitute for the real prize, the literary hypotext, but is still valued chiefly for its capacity to enhance understanding of its illustrious forebear, not for its intrinsic qualities. Rozema turns to Linda Hutcheon's distinction between knowing and unknowing readers. The latter category encompasses students who will approach a graphic adaptation as a stand-alone text, often bringing familiarity with the semiotic systems of comics, an acquaintanceship that their teachers may lack. Conscious of the difficulty that educators can encounter in working with these texts, Rozema offers readings of selected graphic adaptations, attending to influences other than the source text; to the complex grammar of visual/verbal narratives in terms of sequence and relations across the surface of the page, including the repetition of motifs; to the establishment and disruption of temporal and spatial continuity; and to the interaction between words and images. Rozema's article is accompanied by a framework for the study of graphic adaptations that tabulates the methodology he has applied to the analysis of meaning-making in his chosen works. We are very happy to publish this meticulously designed support for educators in European Comic Art and believe that it will prove an invaluable resource.

Like Rozema, Callum Smith sets out to disrupt artistic hierarchies. He takes issue with critics who have disparaged the political caricatures of the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century artist Thomas Rowlandson, comparing them unfavourably with his own social satires and landscapes, and with the work of his contemporary James Gillray. Smith begins by emphasising the role of publishers, whose awareness of the market appeal of topical prints across a broad political spectrum evidently outweighed fear of government reprisals. Similarly, Rowlandson's targeting of the Whig-supporting Samuel House early in his career seems to be justified primarily by the saleable caricaturability of the man's features. The fact that the artist was not averse to altering a slogan to increase the relevance of a cartoon during an election campaign testifies likewise to a certain cynicism. With the coalition between former opponents, the Whig Charles James Fox and the Tory Lord North, which took power in 1783, Rowlandson sharpened his acerbic pen, and with its fall he catered to the public appetite for ridicule of the two deposed politicians. The general election of 1784 saw him produce a plethora of prints, this time in support of Fox, for a variety of publishers seemingly commercially rather than party-politically motivated. During the Regency Crisis of 1788, occasioned by George III's mental infirmity, Rowlandson produced cartoons both for and against the unpopular Prince Regent, the former likely to have been paid propaganda. Smith suggests that the striking similarity and contrast between two examples, one pro and one anti, the goddesses from the first transmuted into figures of derision in the second, may be read as a metacommentary by Rowlandson on his own status as a pen-for-hire. However, he argues that some self-published prints satirising Fox's failed diplomacy with Napoleon could, for once, indicate his own views. Smith goes on to discuss critical speculation as to whether prints that have been attributed to Rowlandson may not in fact have been partially or wholly produced by other artists. He concludes with a strong defence of Rowlandson as a highly effective satirist, with a delicate line that eschews the grotesque, unjustly castigated for his inconsistent political stance. Smith prefers to assess his work as all the more powerful for its disinterested assault on the follies and abuses of the ruling classes irrespective of party or faction.

Interviewed by Aubrey Gabel, Edward Gauvin, prolific translator of French-language comics, reflects on the advantages of conceiving translation in terms of genre, thereby inscribing the work into a transmedial, transcultural set of influences and expectations bearing on vocabulary as well as plot and character, recognisable not only in, say, sci-fi or Western but also in non-fictional texts less obviously bound by generic norms. Gauvin reveals that his contacts are rarely with authors, more often with publishing rights departments, although he cites his collaboration with the author of Quai d'Orsay over its adaptation for an American readership, and the intervention of the Chinese author of Une vie chinoise, ghost-written and published in French, anxious to present a more positive vision of China in the English version. In this and other cases of works already mediated by transnational publishing processes, the notion of an ‘original’ authorial text becomes blurred. Asked about the importance of the artwork as part of the context for the translator's decisions, Gauvin notes that this is variable. In some cases, the artwork sets the tone; in others, genre conventions or a sharply individual narratorial voice or literary (or filmic) antecedent will be more prominent. The author's verbal style may not be consistent throughout a career, a diversity often extended by the involvement of multiple translators. Questioned about the constraints built into a spatial medium, Gauvin alludes not only to the requirement for the text to fit into balloons and boxes but also to the challenge of rendering texts with high visual impact, such as onomatopoeia. He laments that prior research is minimised by the fast turnover demanded by sometimes undiscriminating publishers. Translating can nonetheless be a thrillingly immersive experience, a practice of reading that can be distinguished from the textual analysis more valorised in academe. Gauvin offers fascinating insights into the technical issues involved in relettering the translated text, including an account of the unsettling reproduction of the late Gébé’s style by another artist. Invited to recount his own career, he emphasises the pivotal period in the mid-2010s when mainstream French publishers began to commission translations on an industrial scale, supplying employment to translators, albeit with an often impersonal editorial process. Finally, Gauvin muses on the unevenness of reputations across borders and offers us some personal recommendations of less celebrated texts.

Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, who theorised the differential operations of the linear and tabular dimensions of comics in a celebrated article,¹ relates this formal duality to the capacity of the medium to redraw the boundaries of the real and the fantastic. He begins with a deceptively simple example, two panels from a Richard F. Outcault Buster Brown episode, in which, through the transformative mechanism of comics, a magical illusion is shattered although not altogether dispelled. He then introduces Wilhelm Schulz's Schutzengel Aegir, a satirical wordless four-panel vertically aligned strip, which appears to achieve closure as the sleeping heroine wakes up safe and sound upon the beach, the eponymous guardian angel having dispatched the sea monster that threatened her. Fresnault-Deruelle suggests, though, that darker forces may be at work, invoking another Schulz strip that radically confounds expectations of a happy ending, casting its already socially outcast heroine into abject despair. He then offers a rereading of Schutzengel Aegir that takes account of our ability to scan the page as a whole and to foresee the ending. Rather than simply cancelling suspense, this tabular apprehension of the four panels may imbue the final image of the wide-awake young woman with the menace that she does not know herself to have escaped. Fresnault-Deruelle considers the symbolic potency of the imagery of the water's edge, a frequent visual trope in the work of Expressionist, Symbolist and Surrealist artists that represents the uncertain boundary between the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the repressed. He uses the terms ‘posed’ and ‘transposed’ to describe a process through which the seeming solidity of the real ceases to stand in opposition to the illusory world of the dream or nightmare but is consumed by it, as familiar reality is encroached upon by fear and fantasy. And the comics medium, at this early stage of its history, with its sequential panels and tabular layout, can stand comparison with the work of masters of the uncanny such as Francisco Goya and René Magritte.

We end this editorial by paying tribute to two towering figures from the comics world who died earlier this year. David Kunzle was a comics historian of mighty erudition and, we are proud to say, a contributor to this journal. He changed our way of looking at the pre-history of comics, and his works on the nineteenth-century exponents of the form—in particular Töpffer and Cham—remain markers in the field. Trina Robbins was a brilliant cartoonist who shook up the male-dominated underground as well as a herstorian of women's (or wimmin's) comics, pursuits inseparable from her feminist activism. As wimmin artists, as wimmin scholars and as wimmin (or men), we owe her a debt of gratitude.