WonderCon 2025

Juan Carlos Fermin (University of California, Irvine) compares Art Spiegelman's Maus and Joe Sacco's Palestine, examining their formal, narrative, and rhetorical content as commentaries on imperialism, fascism, ethnic nationalism, and how these forces rise to power. Mike Bittner (Stanford University) looks at the ways Native superheroes continue to be portrayed in mainstream comics and beyond, and how those representations can lead to harmful assumptions being made during wartime. Anuradha Dosad (Adamas University) uses the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and the Lacanian framework of symbolic, real, and imaginary stages of the personality structure to offer insight into the mechanics of sequential narratives featuring the Joker. Daniel Ambord presents a feminist reading of Peter Milligan's Sub-Mariner: The Depths with an eye to what it has to teach us about Western attitudes towards chaos.