Lena Irmgard Merhej

• In a country of ongoing conflict like Lebanon, war comics constitute about half of the national comics production, representing an emerging market share of the publishing sector in the country. It is said that Lebanon suffered a 'state of amnesia' after the 1975-1990 Civil War; something which has turned into a 'state-sponsored amnesia'. However, civic movements have been initiating debates around the war, its consequences, and its results as it monopolizes a large part of the cultural production in the country. Indeed, a big portion of recent Lebanese comics contributes that debate. This study examines the large narrative corpus of these particular comics with the interest on the narrative strategies used to tell the violence of war. The system of comics and its narrativity were visualized to facilitates the application of its analysis. The visualization is an analytical interface that enables the annotation and the mapping of comics using the visual, the linguistic and the spatial modes of comics. The interface, called Amphibian, enables the analysis of narratological elements such as events and characters – the focus of the thesis focuses. A survey of thematic reoccurrences was conducted on all the pages of the corpus revealing significant violent events and armed men. Both multimodal and narrative analysis were used to extract the narratives of war from the comics material. Visualization was also used to dissect and map the icono-textual constituents and accommodate the linear and tabular deployment of the comics. A mapping of 'men/guns' was applied, and narratives of war were extracted and analyzed. A chronology of the warfare events and their focalization, and the character's identity and agency, determined the nature of the graphic narratives and their contribution to the war debate.