Drawn
There

In 1981, Joseph Campbell told Maureen Murdock that women had no need of the hero’s journey. “All she has to do,” he said, “is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” The remark is usually quoted as a gaffe. We would rather take it as a description: a candid account of a distribution that narrative has long made and rarely admits. Some people travel; others are what the travelers are drawn to. Some are figures; others are ground.

Narrative makes this decision in prose: some people are characters, others are setting — the landlady, the island, the mother at the window, the town the hero leaves. Images make it concrete. Every picture decides what stands out and what recedes, and the ground is never blank. The white of the page, the color of a background, the landscape behind a portrait, the interior a figure is placed in: each carries assumptions about who belongs in front and who is setting. Comics make these decisions visible on every page. A panel places a body somewhere, a layout decides what can be seen together, and someone holds the pen. When the subject is war, displacement, violence, or family memory, the question of who draws and who is drawn becomes a question of who gets to give a place its shape. Adaptation raises the same question. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (2026) had to cast, light, and frame Circe and Calypso, figures who in Homer are less antagonists than stations where the plot stops and waits, and the arguments over the film were arguments about who gets to be the place.

We invite papers from literary studies, comics studies, visual culture, film and media, art history, translation, and cultural theory that take up these questions in specific works and forms. We are particularly interested in where the arrangement breaks down: across race, class, colonial history, gender, sexuality, and disability, and in works that redraw the ground as figure.