This chapter reads Las edades de la rata (2019), a comic by Peruvian, Valencia-based Martín López Lam within a genealogy of the migrant subject. It proposes that Antonio Cornejo Polar’s ideas on migration as a phenomenon which goes back in time, both aesthetically and conceptually, are useful to think about how recent literature dealing with the contemporary migrant condition can be read as a continuation of long-lasting histories and traditions of displacement. The essay traces a connection between contemporary Latinx comics and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, which Cornejo Polar identifies as one of the first manifestations of this migrant aesthetic. The qilqas of Guaman Poma are thus read alongside a form of our times, the contemporary comic, a medium that is defined by its radical formal heterogeneity and multimodal construction. Ultimately, by reading López Lam’s comic within this framework, the chapter draws a relationship between the many dimensions of the migrant subject, including its Latinx iterations, and the larger processes of coloniality which have shaped the encounter of cultures in Latin America and its diasporas.

The conclusion recaps the various chapters by considering what the backward look of contemporary graphic novelists can mean for comics studies today. This archival impulse in the graphic novel inevitably confronts us with our own practices as comics scholars and the extent to which we are also indebted to a range of vernacular archivists and historians of the form. It highlights both the possible blinkers that we repeat from that heritage and how these various gestures of transmission can make comics scholars more cognizant about the materiality of their own engagement with historical archives, possibly paving the way for different forms of academic research.

The introduction starts with a concise discussion of three capsule examples (Chris Ware’s McSweeney’s anthology, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and Seth’s design for The Complete Peanuts, all published in 2004) as different markers of the archival impulse in the graphic novel. From there, and relying on these examples, the chapter sets out the methodological problems that come with historicizing the graphic novel by analyzing the backward look of contemporary cartoonists. It tackles three core issues: definitional and media-historical questions around the graphic novel, canonization and what gets forgotten in today’s cartoonists’ limited embrace of the past, and the archival turn in comics studies. It finishes by introducing the notion of gestures of transmission as a way of approaching comics memory as a visual material culture that is variously reframed, reshaped, and redrawn into the present.