Animating the Dead via Comics

Comics are an art of animism. Since the earliest days of the art form, cartoonists have drawn talking animals, plants, buildings, and objects that come alive and speak. Often, they use the incongruity, ensuing misunderstandings or difficulties of translation, as the source of a gag—as in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts strip below. The little bird Woodstock’s speech, depicted as always via a series of simple pen strokes, gradually lengthens and tilts downward as Woodstock’s facial expression starts to look glum. But we must rely on Snoopy—ironically, another creature who would normally be depicted as “speechless”—for the translation that delivers the strip’s punchline: “Woodstock’s stories always start off good, but then they get very sad...”

As an anthropologist, I get more out of these animistic moments in comics than the simple pleasure of the gag. Not all of the “others” we encounter in ethnographic research are living people with the capacity to tell us their stories. How can we engage with the multiplicity of living, non-living, and more-than-human actors who appear in ethnographic research, but do not possess traditional speech (see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2013; Lien 2015; Cohen 2025)?

Comics, which are emerging as fertile ground for exploring new ways of doing ethnographic research and sharing it with audiences (see Theodossopoulos 2022), offer unique ways to push against the constraints of speech and intelligibility. The art form offers special affordances for imagining ourselves into conversations with interlocutors whom we cannot “hear” via traditional methods and engaging with the epistemic and ethical complexities that unfold from there.

In my own research, the most important of these “impossible interlocutors”—whose presences haunt both the physical spaces and the ethics of my work—are dead people buried in systemically neglected burial grounds. My book Cemetery Citizens is a study of grassroots groups who are reclaiming overgrown and precarious cemeteries; the book’s major focus is African American burial grounds in the United States (Rosenblatt 2024). Volunteers who join cemetery reclamation groups do physical labor, clearing away trash and overgrowth, repairing graves, and making them visible again. They also conduct research on the people buried in cemeteries, the lives they lived, and the context in which those lives unfolded. The storytelling they produce from this research—whether offered up during tours of a cemetery, in Facebook posts, or on a website—is an attempt to bring the dead buried in these places back into the social world, the “memory landscapes” of our cities (Rosenblatt 2024, 4).

How should these dead people factor into my ethnography of cemetery reclamation? Marginalized and discriminated against during their lives, after their deaths they suffered another form of violence: the systemic neglect of their burial grounds. As I’ve worked with and written about grassroots groups that are transforming these cemeteries, I’ve wondered what the dead would say about it all: the changes volunteers are making to the cemeteries, and the stories they encounter as they use census records, marriage and death certificates, and other research to piece together the life stories that go beyond a simple name on a headstone. These life stories can be inspiring and edifying, but also dark and disturbing (see Rosenblatt 2026, 6–7). Would the dead always want them told? As for the work I do as an ethnographer, spending time in these cemeteries and writing about their transformations: What would they think about the choices I make, from the vocabulary I use to describe these cemeteries to the politics and power struggles that captured my attention, ultimately occupying far more pages of my book than community histories or the stories of the dead? Can I be part of the broader effort to reclaim the dignity of these cemeteries and the dead buried in their soil, while also focusing on present-day tensions and strife?

Drawing Impossible Conversations with Chosen Ancestors

Affordances for speculative conversations we could never have within the bounds of “the real”—dialogues with the dead, the non-human, the inanimate—are both plentiful and highly accessible in the comics medium. For example, we can invite our “impossible interlocutors” into conversation without necessarily representing them realistically. As long as the cartoonist establishes a consistent system of representation and then communicates it clearly, stick figures or even more abstract representations will do. In the panels below, cartoonist Fionn McCabe depicts himself and his children as mere blobs of color—but with clever verbal cues that guide us into understanding the visual language used in the comic. I show these panels to students when introducing them to comics-based research techniques, so that they understand the extent to which good cartooning is a completely different skill from “good,” i.e. realistic, drawing.

In classes I teach to undergraduates, as well as workshops with graduate students and early career researchers, I offer the opportunity to have speculative conversations with “impossible interlocutors” as part of the research process. In my class Death, Burial, and Justice in the Americas, students make comics as a way to begin a dialogue between them and a “chosen ancestor”—a dead person, biologically related to them or not, with whom they share (or would like to share) some ongoing connection. 

Early in the semester, my students receive training from a genealogist or public historian so that they can research this ancestor, then make a research archive and zine about their life history and fate after death. At the end of the semester, drawing on months of readings and conversations about violence, repair, and memorialization, they design a “speculative memorial” for their chosen ancestor, which they present on “Ancestor Day”—the last day of class.

Towards the beginning of this semester-long process, I lead them through the following comics-based exercise using adhesive notes placed on copy paper and then stapled into their class journals (I learned from Fionn McCabe, whose art appears above, and from the cartoonist Lynda Barry that using cheap, familiar office supplies helps ease the anxiety many students will feel about being “bad at drawing”). In this low-stakes, ungraded, and highly creative space, students get a feel for trying to connect with their chosen ancestor: seeing whether the ancestor speaks back to them, and where the conversation leads.

In the excerpt below, Hannah Levine-Rothfeld playfully imagines an encounter with her deceased great-grandfather, who is in heaven living out one of his unfulfilled dreams: becoming a stand-up comedian. The humorous scenario, complete with jokes from “Papa Hy” about being dead, provided a warm, gentle entry point into Hannah’s semester-long engagement with her great-grandfather’s life, faith, business decisions, immigrant identity, and influence on her family.

When we do this exercise, there is no problem or penalty attached to silence or “failures” of communication: if, for example, the student depicts themselves speaking while the chosen ancestor refuses to answer. In fact, I have depicted this same situation in my own comics. In the page below, from my comic “After Camp,” I engage in a one-way dialogue with my dead grandfather, David Bialer, a Holocaust survivor whose wife and daughter were murdered in Auschwitz. I made this comic the day after visiting Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp outside Berlin where my grandfather was forced to work as an engraver in a Nazi counterfeiting scheme. (Another affordance of comics: Copying from an old photograph, I represent myself visually as a child, but speak from my perspective as an adult. I can thus dramatize both the hunger I feel for an evolving, adult understanding of my grandfather, and the impossibility of that happening—the sense that I am “frozen” in a childhood state in relation to him.)

As I mentioned earlier, the dead are far from the only entities we might encounter in our research and feel we are in relationship with—or accountable to—without being able converse with them in any traditional sense. In other workshops, working with students or other researchers who already have their own projects in motion, I prompt participants to write a list of potential “impossible interlocutors” in the context of their work: places, objects, nonhuman animals, dead people or entire communities of dead people, abstract concepts or ideas, or others whose communication is mediated or constrained by social, technological, or physical factors. Past participants have chosen to do this with absent loved ones, dead scholars whose work influenced their own, bees, or their own inner critic.

Building on the comics pedagogy of Fionn McCabe (2022, 2024), Lynda Barry (2019), and Ivan Brunetti (2011), I lead participants through the process of creating simple representations of their “characters”—usually themselves plus their impossible interlocutor—and producing a six-panel, one-page comic. 

My workshop template urges participants to spend the first two panels establishing context. These early panels answer questions such as: Who are you speaking with? What brought you together despite the “impossibility” of your getting to converse? How do you and your interlocutor feel about having this conversation? Panels three and four explore the frictions in this dialogue: What question, problem, or conflict arises in the dialogue between you and your impossible interlocutor? How does this impact your research process? Finally, in panels five and six, participants explore what resolution, reframing, or previously unexpressed idea or feeling emerges from this impossible conversation.

I am careful not to ask for a neat and tidy end to the conversation: a forced epiphany at the end of the comic. Rather, I ask participants, “What did each interlocutor hear during this conversation that they didn’t know before, and what will they do about it?” While the exercise can certainly provoke discomfort and awkwardness—which is always welcome—I have also been surprised how many participants seek, and find, forms of reassurance and healing. One participant had a conversation with her dead father, who had not been able to witness her defend her thesis and earn her PhD; she had not had any space, before drawing the comic, where she had let herself imagine or feel his pride at her accomplishments. When she worried aloud that the conversation she had drawn was “cheesy,” I merely asked her what happens when we label our feelings that way: what harm, exactly, a “cheesy” conversation with her dead father was doing, and to whom? I was thinking, at the time, of Lynda Barry’s gentle probing, in her works on creativity and comics, of what harm a “bad drawing” does.

Harm, Representation, and Speculation

Even given the space for frictions and discomfort that I incorporate into the comics-making exercise above, many participants (and I) understand how representing, or “speaking for,” our anthropological interlocutors recalls a history of academic research that is, at best, problematic. I see these speculative comics conversations as an exercise for sketchbooks and field notes: private spaces where it is safe to “write the unthinkable” (a phrase borrowed from the title of Lynda Barry’s writing workshops) and to confront failure as an inextricable part of the research process. Impossible conversations allow us to probe the areas of discomfort, and sometimes express the yearning for certainties, knowledge, and connection that arise in our research, which ultimately we cannot fulfill—as I did with my grandfather in “After Camp.” When I create comics or comics-inspired art about cemeteries, I always emphasize the silence of the dead in those places. I am trying to preserve for the dead, even in burial grounds where bustling teams of volunteers are at work, the “right to say nothing” (Rosenblatt 2026). And like my students, I keep the bulk of my own explorations in this vein—my comics conversations with impossible interlocutors—unpublished in my journals and sketchbooks.

Working on these interconnected blog posts with Federico Dupont Bernal and Joanna Marbaniang has helped me understand the nature of speculation and how it informs our research. In my new graphic novel project, I take my research on cemeteries and care for the dead to new, far more speculative places. In the pages below, I imagine humanity fleeing the Earth after some unnamed cataclysm. It is a common science fiction trope; but I depart from tradition in focusing on the dilemmas that this exodus would pose for people unwilling to leave their dead behind on the planet they are fleeing—which would become, in a sense, a giant, abandoned cemetery. My focus is less on the world-building—establishing the reasons why humans are leaving Earth, or explaining the mechanisms of the new “compression technology” used on human remains (which resembles methods already being used to compress bodies into “memorial diamonds”)—than in dramatizing the ongoing importance of the dead to the living. Even in this technologically advanced far-off future, inequities stretch from life into the fates and spaces of the dead: Fern, a character introduced earlier in the book as a volunteer with a cemetery reclamation group, is transformed into a stone and carried in the arms of her descendant to humanity’s unspecified new home. Kacey, another major character, is left behind in a grave buried beneath the weeds. The comic, while playing with speculative or even “impossible” futures, encompasses the two constants that have always coexisted in my research: radical transformation and irreparable harm.