AustLit

' A questioning about the ethics of reading and the visualization of refugees and asylum-seekers in graphic life narratives recurs throughout this issue, and necessarily so, given the urgency of scholarly work on the inhumanities of forced migration now. How do we bear “adequate witness” to graphic narratives that document the undocumented, receiving their testimony without deforming it by doubt, or substituting different terms of value than the ones offered by the witnesses themselves? The distinction between the spectator, as the detached observer, and the witness, who undertakes an ethical look that mobilizes a sense of responsibility, is critical here. Many of us have claimed that the gutters, frames, and lines of autographic art, its grammar and technology, summon ethical engagement. Comics do not merely represent; they materialize, they are productive, creating ways of seeing and feeling. As the editors of this special issue suggest in their introduction—which immediately alerts us to these questions on the ethical positioning of the artist-witness and the reader-witness—comics are an intersubjective, immersive representational form, where the reader is drawn into affective and ethical exchanges as we project meanings into the gaps and gutters on the page. But what forms does this ethical engagement take? What are the outcomes of “mobilizing responsibility” and why do these questions become urgent and personal when the subjects of autographic art are refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers?' (Introduction)