Comics give refugees a voice to tell their stories authentically

Comic books and graphic novels written by refugees counter the one-dimensional version found in most visual media. By Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind

- Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind

There are more refugees in the world today than at any other point in history. The UN estimates that there are now more than 120 million people forcibly displaced from their homes. That is one in every 69 people on Earth. Some 73% of this population is hosted in loweror middle-income countries.

From the legacies of European colonialism to global inequality, drone warfare and climate instability, politicians have failed to address the causes driving this mass displacement. Instead, far-right parties exploit the crisis by inflaming cultures of hatred and hostility towards migrants, particularly in high-income Western countries.

This is exacerbated by visual media, which makes refugees an easy target by denying them the means of telling their own stories on their own terms. Pictures of migrants on boats or climbing over border walls are everywhere in tabloid newspapers and on social media. But these images are rarely accompanied by any detailed account of the brutal experiences that force people into these situations.

In our new book, Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, we show how a growing genre of “refugee comics” is challenging this visual culture through a range of storytelling strategies and innovations in illustration. Comprised of multiple images arranged into sequences and interspersed with speech bubbles and caption boxes, refugee comics disrupt a media landscape that tends to reduce migrants to either threats or victims.

Many different kinds of visual storytelling live under the umbrella of refugee comics. They include short strips and stories, such as A Perilous Journey (2016), with testimonies from people fleeing the civil war in Syria, and Cabramatta (2019), about growing up as a Vietnamese migrant in a suburb in Sydney, Australia. They also include codex-bound graphic novels such as