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James Scorer, "Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame" (U Texas Press, 2024)
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James Skora
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6 each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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Podcast Interviewer
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to James Skora about Latin American comics and the 21st century transgressing the frame. So welcome to the podcast.
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James Skora
Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Podcast Interviewer
It's great to have you and it's great to be talking about a book that's about comics, but comics that I basically wasn't really aware of and hadn't kind of encountered. And I'm interested to start really with the inspiration to write a book about, about an art form that is, you know, huge globally and huge in Latin America. But maybe English speaking readers might, might not have encountered what, what sort of inspired you to write a book about Latin American comics?
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James Skora
Well, in part, that's in part my answer comes from the fact that I'm, you know, a Latin Americanist. I would define myself as a Latin Americanist. So I've worked always with Latin American material since I started my career as an academic. But I didn't start with comics. In fact, I worked more on urban imaginaries. So I did touch a bit on comics in my PhD, but I was looking at literature, film arts, art installations and interventions as well as sort of urban politics and all kinds of different things. A bit of music. And then I kind of on the side had written something about Tintin's adventures in Latin America. It was kind of early article I wrote a long time ago and had always been interested in comics as an art form, but that was my first sort of intervention in terms of actually trying to write something about comics in relation to Latin America. And then I some years later wrote an article on graphic biographies of Che Guevara and I noticed that there was a small corpus of graphic biographies. And I had been interested in the kind of iconicity surrounding his figure and the politics of that era. And I wrote again a sort of standalone piece, but I think it was on the back of that that I was invited to kind of collaborate with a guy called Paolo Drino at UCL and Jorge Catalacaraco at Newcastle University. And we put on an event that eventually became an edited book called Comics and Memory in Latin America. And we were kind of looking at different ways in which artists, Comics artists had addressed issues of the past in Latin America. You know, everything from sort of elements of colonial history through to kind of, you know, sort of politics of the 1970s and the whole kind of issue around disappearance and things like that. So that was probably for me, the sort of biggest moment of sort of thinking, well, actually I could do more with Latin American comics and work on them in a more kind of sustained way. And I subsequently obtained a grant from the Lever Hume to run an international network on Latin American comics and the city. And I guess aspects and elements of things that I was looking at during that period feed into this book, particularly in the final chapter, which is about. About urban landscapes. But all this kind of period of looking at these different kinds of comics, I suppose, were forming a kind of a groundwork of a corpus in some way. And I then kind of started looking at that more systematically. I done some research trips as part of that grant and kind of realized that there was this really vibrant comics landscape that had emerged in the region, particularly kind of post 2005, which was the moment of the first sort of transnational comics blog in the region. And, you know, so I kind of worked that was. That was, I suppose, in some ways, the sort of inspiration for that. And then on a kind of more obvious level, I suppose I just like the material. I mean, the material is great. There's loads of really cool, you know, graphic novels, magazines, blogs, zines, all kinds of stuff that I was really excited about looking about it. So on a kind of very simple level, I guess I was just kind of keen to get into that.
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Podcast Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, that comes through really well in the book. The kind of sense of enthusiasm and for particular creators dealing with particular issues, the sense of kind of real sort of importance of the work alongside, you know, kind of digging into things like fan communities and the industry as well. You mentioned a couple of times the region. And one of the things that the book does, and you've mentioned kind of building a corporate as well, is make a bit of an intervention to say there is a thing called Latin American comics. And I'm sort of intrigued as to what this means, partially the category of, like, Latin America. What you actually talking about? What region do you mean? Because from my kind of reading of the book. It's not every country in Latin America. There are sort of particular countries that are prominent, but also some that you're quite clear that, you know, are kind of outside the scope of the study. But also, I guess, that kind of sense of building a Latin American consciousness around the comics industry. So what I suppose is this category.
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James Skora
For Latin America, I mean, in many ways it's an unstable and problematic and questionable concept in and of itself. In a way, the very idea of Latin America is something that occasionally in Latin American history has been mobilized for sort of what we might call some sort of progressive anti, particularly US sentiment, if you like, a way of trying to sort of mobilize a kind of transnational sense of solidarity that pushes back against imperial and neo imperial structures. But then for other people, it's also a term that has tended to kind of collapse difference between different parts of the region. And obviously in a region as diverse as it is, there are some players who tend to dominate, I suppose, in terms of prevailing tropes and prevailing kind of identities and economics and all the rest of it. So it's a sort of a, as I say, an unstable and sometimes problematic term. And it's also true, as you say, that the book doesn't, you know, doesn't look at a. It doesn't look at the comics from some countries. Partly that's because there isn't a great deal of material from those countries. And partly it doesn't look so much at some countries that I felt in the period that I was looking at, and as I say, that was sort of post 2005, weren't necessarily as integrated into this sort of transnational networked nature of production that I saw kind of emerging. So the obvious examples there in Mexico and Brazil, which are two major kind of players in terms of comics production in the region. But in terms of what I was looking at, they were almost like more peripheral figures on that. And I think that's certainly a kind of a questionable aspect of many books in the field, including this one, is to call something Latin American comics, when you're not looking at X, Y, Z. But I'm not kind of. I never set out to be encyclopedic. What I was trying to do was say that here's a trend, a series of trends and processes and ideas that are cutting across different national contexts in such a way that, you know, even with all those problems and limitations, you can still start, you can still see emerging a kind of a field, a Latin American field where, you know, traditionally in the Region comics have been read in relation to national identity. I mean, that's the traditional way of doing it. And many comics engaged with national traditions and ideas of national politics. And that was the way that many scholars read comics. You know, the kind of appearance of comics. And a lot of studies of the region appear in studies of popular culture. You know, the idea that comics were, you know, this kind of bottom up voice of, of the people, if you like. And I don't think that that entirely kind of disappears necessarily in the 21st century. But I also felt that that was less of a concern that that there was this kind of body of work that was interested in expressing or engaging with ideas that were less concerned with the national on the one hand, but then also that there was a kind of strand of big transnational solidarity networks and themes that were kind of cutting across these national boundaries. And that was kind of manifest in festivals, in online blogs, in magazines. Magazines is what I focus on in the first chapter of the book where I try and unpack some of these things, but, but also in festivals and blogs as well. And I think that was definitely helped by the kind of digital turn and the way that, that enabled people to create these kind of connections. You know, I should say that I don't think the national disappears as a question of concern. It's definitely there. And also it's true that some of the so called pink tide governments that came to power at the start of the new millennium in Latin America, the kind of left wing governments that came in, in the wake of the kind of crisis in the neoliberal era, a lot of them actually were interested in incorporating comics and comics histories and traditions into their kind of revamped notion of national identity. So I don't think that those then, they're not necessarily kind of mutually exclusive. They can kind of run parallel to. But I was interested in this new body of work and group of creators who were definitely interested in exploring these kinds of transnational connections at the level of production, circulation, form themes, et cetera, et cetera.
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Podcast Interviewer
I mean the really obvious way to kind of bring that to life and those both trends and kind of tensions. And you mentioned this already with, with the reference to the first chapter is how this plays out in a particular place. And obviously Argentina is really kind of in importance to that analysis in the first chapter. I wonder if you just give a couple of examples that kind of show that rise of Latin Americanist comics, but also I guess how some of Argentina's comics and kind of magazines production were still Argentinian in a sense.
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James Skora
Yeah. And Argentina in some ways is in some of its publications that were being released. And here I'm thinking in particular of the most recent iteration of the magazine. Fierro is not necessarily the best example of this because, in fact, it was quite concerned with a national comics tradition. And a lot of the editorials in the magazine were pushing the idea of a very kind of strong Argentine tradition, which was seen as being quite distinct from other national contexts when it even kind of took those contexts into consideration. So I think that's quite different in terms of the way it plays out in the kind of Peruvian context or the Colombian context, which were the other two kind of national context. I focused on in that chapter where there wasn't such a strong sense of a sort of national tradition in comics. And therefore there was much more kind of self reflection, in a way, about what it meant to produce a Colombian comic or a Peruvian comic, or what that might even mean, or what the problems were with even thinking about it in those kinds of terms. And in. In Argentina, though, there were examples of publications that, you know, did kind of think about an argent. Well, maybe not even an Argentine tradition, but which were trying to engage with issues that cut across transnational boundaries. So a good example of that is. Is the magazine Clitoris, which was only had four issues because it had a kind of limited grant, but it was thinking precisely about comics more as a mode of thinking about feminist modes of expression, issues related to gender, but not only that, but driven largely by that. And in a way, it was countering the sort of narrative that was being produced in Fierro, which was very kind of male centric, had very few contributors who weren't men, and, you know, tended to almost make the. Almost claim that there weren't women. You know, the reason for that was that there weren't women who were really producing comics, which was a complete. Completely ridiculous because, in fact, there were an awful lot. And I talk about that in the following chapter, but an awful lot of women who were producing comics, and they were doing it in really, really interesting ways, but ways that possibly didn't fit with the kind of idea of a traditional comics canon that was. That was coming out of a magazine like Fiero. So I think Clitoris did a lot in terms of showcasing that kind of work and thinking about comics beyond a kind of purely national, outside of that framework, if you like, of the national. And there were, you know, other kind of interesting collaborations there. So Feminietas, which is kind of like a newspaper, but incorporates Quite a lot of comics and comics aesthetics was set up by an Argentine who was actually living in Barcelona. So that's another kind of interesting example of a different kind of transnational exchange, one that isn't necessarily just about Latin America, but also about how Latin American artists were collaborating with artists, in this case in Spain in particular. So those are a couple of examples of that kind of tendency.
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Podcast Interviewer
Yeah, you mentioned the kind of focus on magazines and you sort of alluded to the impact of feminism as well. And one of the things the book does as it goes along is it tries to represent really the kind of big range of different media that get included under that heading or banner of comics. And I'm interested in zines and I guess kind of like the story of zines in Latin America, both in terms of some, you know, kind of zine cultures, I guess, that spring up, but also almost as a kind of different mode of production to, as you've talked about with the Argentinian case, you know, kind of formal magazine production. And obviously this is something that isn't unique to Latin America. You know, the explosion of zine making and zine culture is a pretty global phenomenon. But I'm intrigued, I guess, to hear the kind of Latin American story for the impact of zines on comics.
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James Skora
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to say is that even though we might refer to the magazines as formal publications, and some of them were formal in the sense that they had ISSNs or, you know, had a price on the publication and were sold at kiosks or with, you know, national newspapers or however else they were distributed, I don't think you can talk about them in quite the same way as you might talk about a kind of formal comics market in, say, the U.S. i think there's a much greater sense of precarity around the world of comics. You can't talk about a kind of national comics industry in any sense. And so even these publications, the vast majority of them were living on a kind of sometimes a sort of month to month basis and sometimes would go kind of months without issuing or there'd be gaps and things like that. So I think that's a. An important thing. The other thing to say is that there's no kind of, or very few kind of large publishing houses that are producing just national comics. So there too there's this kind of sense of kind of cultural precarity around the world of comics production. Certainly there are kind of publishing houses and indies and that sort of something else, I think grows up alongside these comics is a growth of independent publishing houses, but they still tend to be quite small. They're not producing huge numbers of books or publications, and these aren't large print runs. So there is still that sense that even what we might call an inverted commas, the formal comics market, it retains a sense of informality anyway. So I think that's one of the reasons why I suggest that the zine scene in Latin America is not the kind of underground scene that you might think about if you were thinking about, say, zines in the US in the 1970s. Moreover, a lot of the artists who were creating zines were also publishing in magazines or were in some cases, producing kind of books. So there's much more of that kind of like, crossover and fluidity at the same time between the zine world and what I would call, in inverted commas, a sort of formal comics production. So I don't know that they were necessarily always critiquing that formal world. In a sense. I think they were more about a kind of a critique of kind of consumerism and neoliberal culture more more broadly. And. And the. I had a lot of fun actually writing that chapter on. On comics and. And particularly putting it in relation to ideas of punk as a kind of transgressive force to the market. And, yeah, I kind of look at how these. Well, a couple of zine artists in particular, Lucia Bruta being one example, you know, thinking about how they are kind of, you know, the holidays are coming.
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
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James Skora
Looking at issues of value waste, there's quite a lot of stuff around shit in the chapter, you know, the other series I look at in particular is by Inu Waters, a Colombian artist, and his series Colombian Trash. You know, so this whole idea of zines as maybe producing an alternative value system to the one that's purely driven by the kind of commercialism of the market. And I think worth noting that by this point in time, given the rise of kind of digital platforms, to produce a zine in this era is a deliberate choice. Back in the 90s in Latin America, people were producing zines because the neoliberal kind of restructuring of Latin America had really cut out the ground from underneath national comics production. I mean, if there was any, it was kind of decimated by those kinds of decisions in the 90s. So people were producing zines because they really didn't have any other way of creating comics, if you like, in a sort of informal network. So they use the photocopier and produce these things informally. But by 2000, let's say, 8, 9, 10, let's say, people could have produced the equivalent, if you like, of an alternative market networks, by putting things online. So producing a zine was also something about, I think, the kind of materiality of the zine and how that circulated and the kind of exchanges that would take place at zine fairs that would take place in different parts of these kind of cities in Latin America. And itself a kind of a sense of sort of presence of, this is mine, this is it, this is physical. You can buy it and circuit it and, you know, sometimes not even buy it. And they'd be quite fun. Sometimes they'd have sort of. Some of them would come with kind of baggies of bits and pieces that the artists had collected, made them into these kind of unique, but almost valueless but unique pieces of cultural creation, which is something that I really enjoyed looking at. And it was fun going to some of the spaces where these were being sold and circulated. And, you know, I think there are interesting issues around zines as well, with the kind of desire on the part of artists to kind of record some of that work. You know, again, so the idea of kind of zines as this informal underground, never to be catalogued kind of bits of work, which on the one hand is true, but then a lot of the artists sort of saying, well, there's all this great material we need to gather it, we need to keep examples of it. And so there are also some kind of interesting cases of almost like informal archival practices that are springing up outside the kind of mainstream archiving of Latin American comics, which in any case tends to happen if anywhere in the US rather than in Latin America itself. So that was a kind of, of another interesting reflection on the idea of kind of value and the institution in inverted commerce.
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Podcast Interviewer
I'm also interested there because you mentioned that archiving chapter which is later on in the book. But also there's I guess a kind of question of content as well. So you talk quite a lot about, I guess, kind of non fiction comics that are partially kind of addressing what you discussed earlier. You know, the kind of politics of the moment across Latin America and the kind of politics of change in the moment, but also trying to address effectively kind of forgotten missing absence archives and kind of quite controversial and forgotten histories. And I wonder if you could give a couple of examples, I guess, of those kind of non fiction contents, but also as a way of kind of saying, you know, non fiction is really kind of important to this new cross Latin American comics culture.
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James Skora
Yeah, so. So those two aspects kind of cut across sort of middle chapters of the book, I suppose. So that would be chapters four and five. And so four was. Is the one that's particularly focused on kind of extractivism and forms of extractivism and looking at how non fiction comics address this kind of really crucial aspect of contemporary life in Latin America and the sort of decimation of the land or indeed of water in some of the cases. And this kind of non fiction approach comes out of a long tradition in the region, particularly sort of after the 60s and 70s of, you know, non fiction comics functioning as, I suppose in part there's a pedagogical element to it, like sort of functioning as pedagogical tools to instruct people about everyday realities.
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
But.
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James Skora
But then also more specifically, I suppose conjoined to that in sense of a kind of a. A kind of, of social pedagogy, the idea of making a sociopolitical intervention about particular issues. And in this case I was focusing on extractivism and I think these were interesting cases. So for example, the work of Jesus Kosio, who's a guy who kind of a lot of his fame, I suppose came from producing a graphic version of the Truth Commission reports in Peru following the internal armed conflict there with Sendero, Shining Path and a kind of really important piece of nonfiction work. But I was interested in some of his drawings about Mining conflicts in Peru in particular, and how mining in the region had really affected. Had contaminated the land, affected people's lives. And I sort of thought about. And here, drawing on some theory that had been written about Joe Sacco and his work in terms of sort of non fiction comics, but the idea of sort of temporalities and the slowness of drawing comics and the kind of materiality of inscribing something on the page and how that linked to ideas of destruction, slow violence, which are kind of key themes and ideas of extractivism, you know, across the globe, but particularly not least in Latin America, let's say. So I like, you know, I looked at a web comic called La Guerra Podelagua, War Over Water and which is a sort of a. It's not really interactive, but you sort of have to click your way through it and there are sort of certain scenes and bits of sound that come into it. So it's quite an interesting bit of work. So that was kind of chapter four and then five is sort of thinking more about memory politics and how comics engage with ideas of the archive there in a more sort of formal sense. So that could be the kind of comic almost as an archive, comics as depicting archives like literally, you know, drawing images of archives, comics maybe as counter archives. So there's this kind of set of relationships that emerge around ideas of drawing, around ideas of documents, documentation, order and disorder, the kind of the aspiration to order of the archive, if you like. But then also how comics engage with ideas of disordered archives. And in some sense, and they're the kind of formal aspect of the page which is highly networked with different panels existing simultaneously in the same physical space where you can think about that kind of networked relationship of different frames that we might regard, I suppose as archival boxes in a way, and bits and pieces that are kind of cutting across that formal structure of the archive to produce different kind of alternative archival stories. And the kind of key example in that chapter, the one that I look at perhaps in most detail, is the Dora series created by Ignacio Minaverri, who also kindly gave us permission for the image on the COVID of the book. And that series, it's a great series, several books looking at how or sort of thinking about the kind of transnational implications and network nature of archives relating to particularly the Holocaust, National Socialism, Nazism, and then sort of thinking about how that also plays out in, to an extent in. In Argentina, but also in. It's kind of has echoes, I suppose, in. In some of the aspects relating to Algeria and. And the kind of Algerian independence movement in France and things like that. So it's kind of kind of a network to idea of the archive. So, yeah, that was mainly chapter five.
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Podcast Interviewer
The other kind of archiving role, the kind of act of recording something factual, is how comics dealt with and were kind of damaged isn't the right word, but kind of adapted to and worked around the Pandemic. And, you know, it's a contemporary book because, as you say, you're dealing with the last kind of 20 or so years. But at the same time, the Pandemic has a kind of historical moment now, given it's obviously still with us. But, you know, it is kind of four or five years since the kind of main focus of the public health emergency. And I'm interested, I. I guess, to kind of hear a bit about both the kind of content, if that's the term response to the pandemic, but also, as the book has done, kind of all the way through, that kind of sense of there being a political economy, a community, both of readers, writers, producers.
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James Skora
Yeah, okay, so that chapter is an interesting one because I wrote quite a lot or bits and pieces of the book during lockdown, but that was a chapter that I hadn't necessarily planned in quite the same way. I had the idea of writing something about zombies because I noticed that there were quite a lot of comics about zombies, but I hadn't really got a kind of good grasp on how I would tackle that material. And then it kind of in a almost like very kind of obvious way, but in a way that I hadn't really clicked. At some point I thought, oh, there are issues of sort of contagion and disease circulating all around me. And that's obviously what's going on here in these zombie comics. So I think. I don't know that I can remember totally this process, but I think it was probably the last chapter that I kind of conceptualized. So I wasn't necessarily that attuned to how artists and, you know, creators were dealing with the pandemic and lockdown. I think I probably learned more about that afterwards, partly as a process of starting to interview some of the artists, which was not something I planned to do at the beginning, but I did do some of that as well during kind of lockdown. Reached out to a few people and had some interviews, which I found quite productive, until I decided to incorporate some of that material. And clearly the Pandemic did have a big impact on kind of physical meeting spaces and some of those kind of festivals and fairs that I'D referred to before. I think it did have a big impact on some of the publications in terms of whether they were able to kind of survive. But clearly it also enabled a lot of kind of like fertile conversations that were taking place online and that kind.
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Podcast Interviewer
Of.
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James Skora
Whether that was directly about the pandemic or not. But certainly in some cases, there were quite a lot of comics and blogs that were blogging about the experience of being in that kind of environment, conditions and things like that. So I do refer to a few of those comics at the beginning of that chapter as a kind of way into perhaps thinking more broadly about ideas of contagion and disease in Latin America and drawing in particular on ideas like Roberto Esposito's concept of immunity and sort of positioning it a bit more broadly about how we think about social relations. And I suppose the pandemic made us all think about that. How we engage with people, how we interact with people, but also how we avoid people, how we protect ourselves from people, sometimes because we want to, sometimes gets enforced upon us. But then also, as Espositor says, sometimes that can also play out in terms of how we respond to say, immigration and issues around that. And I think the book, and I think I mentioned this in the introduction, in some ways the book, you could say, is a kind of, on a conceptual, personal level sort of response to the kind of discourses that were circulating around Brexit and the sort of the fear and the management of fear around others. And, you know, that. That were so kind of repulsive in a way. And so I kind of felt that the book, perhaps, you know, unconsciously for a long period of time, was also a way of kind of engaging with ideas of transgression, transnationalism, you know, trans feminism, et cetera, et cetera, which I think is one of the reasons why those kind of concepts are so prevalent.
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Podcast Interviewer
In the book, which is absolutely still with us now. And this is not just something that is relevant to Latin America either. You can apply this really kind of straightforwardly to the politics of most kind of contemporary European and North American countries as well. I usually kind of wrap up by talking about how there's loads more we could have talked about and the kind of the depth of the book. And I sort of want to stress that for listeners because as much as we've had quite, I guess, a kind of high level conversation about some of the big themes and ideas in the book, the book is really rich, particularly actually with material. And it's, you know, you mentioned getting permission for some of the artistic work on the COVID But it's great to have kind of documented so much of the material. And it kind of brings the material to life in a way that sometimes, you know, a bit like reading a film studies book or sometimes reading an art book, you know, the lack of kind of images can be. Be limiting. And I say that obviously, as we're discussing this on a. On a podcast. So it's definitely one that I think does need. Need reading in that kind of moment, though, you know, we picked up on some of the themes that maybe are still with us with the book. And obviously part of the dynamism of the industries, scenes, cultures you've been writing about is something that means there's kind of lots more you could be going back to. But you've also mentioned kind of, you know, your sort of broader research agenda as a Latin Americanist. And I'm intrigued, I guess, as to what do next, whether there's, you know, another comics book, which that, you know, almost certainly is, or whether you're going to be kind of focusing on something a little different.
- [39:43]
James Skora
Yeah, well, first of all, just to kind of echo, you know, what you're saying, I mean, in a way, the book is sort of driven by the work, and the work is great, and it's only a pity that there isn't more of it in translation, to be honest. But I did try and get as many images as I could in the book. And so hopefully they give a kind of flavor of the stuff that's out there. And some of the things are online. So it's definitely worth kind of, you know, tracking some of that stuff down. In terms of what I'm working on now, as I was writing this book, I was also starting a large project on comics and racialized identities in Latin America. And that project's now come to an end. But there is an edited collection that will be coming out hopefully next year on that, which actually includes more work by Latin American artists more extensively. So there we've got a kind of range of different artists, different kind of, who identify in racial terms in different ways, and their work is included in, or will be included in that book. There's also quite a lot of their work online in relation to the project's website as a kind of online exhibition which is up. So I think if you search kind of comics and race in Latin America, then that should spring up. So, you know, there are things related to that project which are not quite finalized yet. But having sort of worked on comics for quite a long time, now I'm also sort of seeking out new research pathways a bit. So certainly my next venture won't be focused on comics, but hopefully will incorporate something on comics. But my plan is to sort of look at sort of tree stories in Latin America and thinking about how artists are using trees. And I include within that kind of wood or pulp or seeds or leaves as part of a kind of a way into intervening into issues around society, politics, and the environment. So that's where I'm headed next. But it's a pretty kind of nascent thing, so I'm afraid I don't have a great deal of insight kind of share at the moment about that.