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Traumatic loss and productive impasse in comics: visual metaphors of depression and melancholia in Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore how Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, in This One Summer, employ a variety of images and visual metaphors to address the emotional situations of traumatic loss. In this graphic novel, we encounter a character named Alice, who is often distracted and withdrawn, and appears to suffer from a prolonged, inescapable period of depression and sadness. By the graphic novel’s end, however, she begins to learn how to live with the effects of a loss that won’t let her go, as her depressive period becomes reframed as a state of productive impasse. In my discussion, I move through three major types of images that help to illuminate the inner transformations of Alice’s psychic condition: Shattering, Shifting Temporalities, and Diving. Throughout this paper, I use the conceptual touchstones of psychoanalytic theory to describe the interrelation of mourning and melancholia, and suggest that focusing closely on the visual elements of emotional events in comics might allow for an interpretation of those ephemeral aspects of human experience – including moods and feelings – whose expression inevitably requires more than words alone.