Beyond National Traditions: Comics, Animation, and the Global Circulation of Visual Culture
The history of comics and animation has frequently been organized around a limited number of national traditions and influential cultural industries. American comics, Japanese manga and anime, and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées have occupied prominent positions in narratives that often describe cultural globalization through the international expansion of established models. Two books published in 2026 offer opportunities to reconsider this perspective. Frederick Luis Aldama’s Global Comics: The Basics and Panpan Yang’s Animation Thinks: A Story of Media Entanglements in China approach visual culture from different geographical and methodological perspectives, raising questions about cultural circulation, artistic exchanges, and historical transformations.
Aldama’s Global Comics: The Basics presents an overview of comics as a global cultural phenomenon. Its geographical scope extends beyond the principal centers traditionally associated with comics scholarship, incorporating Latin American historietas, African and Middle Eastern productions, and developments associated with digital comics. The volume also addresses translation, adaptation, cross-cultural exchanges, and questions of identity and social justice.
The book’s comparative framework invites readers to reconsider national traditions as historically interconnected rather than entirely separate developments. Its geographical breadth also raises an important historiographical question: expanding the range of societies included in comics history does not necessarily amount to explaining the global relationships connecting them. Such an explanation also requires attention to publishing institutions, translation networks, distribution systems, and the unequal conditions under which different cultural traditions acquire international recognition.
Aldama’s approach provides a starting point for investigating these relationships, although assessing how extensively the book examines their material and institutional dimensions would require a closer reading of its complete argument.
Panpan Yang’s Animation Thinks: A Story of Media Entanglements in China approaches visual culture through a different set of questions. Covering the period from the 1920s to the present, the book examines encounters between Chinese animation and other artistic practices, including photography, painting, calligraphy, and porcelain. Rather than presenting a continuous chronological history, Yang investigates how animation has developed through interactions between different media, materials, and aesthetic traditions.
Drawing on perspectives associated with media archaeology, Yang explores the coexistence of different historical temporalities and the transformations that occur when artistic practices encounter one another. Particular attention is also devoted to the changing meanings of animated works as they move between institutional environments, including the film industry and contemporary art.
This approach offers an alternative to interpretations that primarily assess Chinese animation through comparisons with American or Japanese productions. By foregrounding relationships between artistic practices and historical experiences, Yang encourages a reconsideration of conventional narratives of influence and artistic development. Her research does not necessarily provide an explanation of global cultural hierarchies, but suggests methodological possibilities for investigating visual traditions beyond established geographical frameworks.
The two publications therefore contribute to different dimensions of a broader historiographical discussion. Aldama emphasizes geographical plurality and the circulation of comics across cultural boundaries, while Yang explores interactions between artistic media and the historical contexts in which animation develops. These approaches are complementary without being interchangeable: transnational circulation and exchanges between different media involve distinct processes, even when both challenge the representation of cultural traditions as isolated historical formations.
Read together, the books suggest that a global history of visual culture should examine not only how cultural products circulate between societies but also how artistic languages, practices, and meanings change through these encounters. A further question concerns the unequal conditions under which such transformations occur. The existence of multiple artistic traditions does not imply equal access to production resources, distribution networks, or international recognition. Nor does the circulation of cultural forms necessarily diminish established hierarchies.
The broader significance of these publications lies in the questions they encourage historians to pursue. How have comics and animation developed through encounters with different cultural practices? How have institutions influenced the recognition and international circulation of visual works? And how can the history of popular culture move beyond established geographical hierarchies without overlooking the unequal relationships that continue to shape cultural exchange?
These questions point towards a global history of comics and animation attentive to interdependence without presuming convergence. The global dimension of visual culture cannot be adequately explained by the geographical expansion of audiences or the growing visibility of different traditions. It must also be reconstructed through the historically specific relationships connecting cultural production, artistic transformation, circulation, and power.
References
Frederick Luis Aldama, Global Comics: The Basics, Routledge, 2026, 356 pp.
Panpan Yang, Animation Thinks: A Story of Media Entanglements in China, University of California Press, 2026, 280 pp.
Further Information
Frederick Luis Aldama, Global Comics: The Basics: https://www.frederickluisaldama.com/books/global-comics%3A-the-basics
Panpan Yang, Animation Thinks: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/animation-thinks/paper
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