Graphic Homelessness: Representations of Home Deprivation in Comic Form

Resumen

This article discusses the potential of the comic to represent marginal realities, and homelessness in particular. The corpus consists of an array of recently published English, American and Spanish comic books that show real-life attempts of desperate home-making in the streets’ negligible and invisible spaces. The focus is on how the combinations of image and text disclose the physical and psychological barriers that separate the destitute from the affluent and also display the kind of identities that have historically been foisted on homeless people. The arrangement of figures and objects on the page serves as a spatial parallel to customary habits of passers-by in creating non-empathic fields of vision when walking in the city. On the other hand, the written narratives accompanying the drawings show how the meaning-making processes of the traditional narrative with a moral lesson may not easily apply to experiences of home deprivation. The very existence of homeless people breaks the boundaries between public and private space and exposes the shortcomings of overbearing explanations of humanity ruled by ideas of progress, family integration and material success.