Displaced at Home: An American Tale

Sophie Yanow is an artist and writer and the author of What Is a Glacier? and War of Streets and Houses. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Fusion, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nib. She has also translated Dominique Goblet’s Pretending Is Lying from French. In TheContradictions (Drawn and Quarterly) we meet Sophie. She is young and queer and into feminist theory. She decides to study abroad, choosing Paris for no firm reason beyond liking French comics. Feeling a bit lonely and out of place, she’s desperate for community and a sense of belonging. She stumbles into what/who she’s looking for when she meets Zena, an anarchist student-activist committed to veganism and shoplifting. Enamored—of Zena, of the idea of living more righteously—Sophie is swept up in a whirlwind that blows her even further from her rural California roots as they embark on a disastrous hitchhiking trip to Amsterdam and Berlin, full of couch surfing, drug tripping, and radical book fairs. The Contradictions is Yanow’s fictionalized coming-of-age story. Sophie’s attempts at ideological purity are challenged time and again, putting into question the plausibility of a life of dogma in a world filled with contradictions. Rachel Cooke, writing for The Guardian, noted that “This funny and very knowing graphic novel will still strike an exceedingly loud chord with anyone who is, or has ever been, a fresher, far from home and all at sea.” 

Joan Hilty directs comics and graphic novel publishing at Nickelodeon, and is Editor-in-Chief of the book producer Pageturner. She has been a senior editor at DC Comics/Vertigo and a syndicated cartoonist. She co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival graphics committee and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Mike Hawthorne is an American comic book artist known for his work on books such as Deadpool, G.I. JOE: Origins, Queen & Country, Conan: Road of Kings, and his own creator-owned book, Hysteria. Mike Hawthorne’s mother was left alone to raise her son in New York City, a city that tormented them both with its unforgiving nature. But when Mike fell victim to an old-world Santeria death curse, she begins a series of events that drive him away both physically and emotionally. In Happiness Will Follow (Archaia) for the first time, Hawthorne tells the true and tragic story of enduring abuse, discovering a love of art, and a passion that helped him to build the home he never had in this graphic novel memoir about family, survival, and what it means to be Puerto Rican in America. In a starred review Publishers Weekly praised it noting “Hawthorne doesn’t hold anything back in this gut punch of a graphic memoir.”

Kiku Hughes is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work has been featured in Beyond Anthology volumes 1 and 2, Short Box #6 and the Alloy Anthology. She creates stories about identity, queer romance and compassionate sci-fi. Displacement (First Second) is her first graphic novel, and it is a story she’s wanted to share for as long as she can remember. A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother’s experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps. Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II. These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself “stuck” back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive. Hughes’s tale highlights the intergenerational impact and the power of memory. John Jennings, artist of kindred: a graphic novel adaptation, called Displacement “Poignant and powerful…a work of art that is both timely and timeless.”