Humanimals and Transculturalism in Contemporary North American Graphic Fiction

This thesis is situated at the intersection of animal, comics, and cultural studies, a wide area of investigation in which graphic fiction has rarely interacted with the different theoretical and cultural paradigms that inform animal-human relationships of both the present and the past. Comics and graphic novels are probably as popular as they have ever been, and are being put to distinctive uses in our increasingly visual age. The funny animal and the beast fable are often cited as historical precursors to the “humanimal” hybrids we find in contemporary print and web-based versions of the sequential arts. However, animal genres and practices are not consistent or universal. Talking animals still tend, as they have always done, to draw the charge of anthropomorphism. But they continue to function as effective metaphors for cultural pluralism and treatments of otherness, increasingly in a broader ecological (multispecies) context. This thesis focuses on eight contemporary North American graphic fictions that present readers with linked representations of humanimals and transculturalism. These texts—mostly from Canada, but also the US—use graphic forms to encourage a rethinking of asymmetrical discourses of humanity and animality in the increasingly transcultural context of North America today.