AustLit

"The ‘Ubby’s Underdogs’ books are the first graphic novels published by Magabala Books,representing an innovation which maintains the inventiveness characteristic of Magabala’s picture books. The trilogy’s treatment of the Underdogs’ exploits in multicultural Broome foregrounds the encounter between Aboriginal and Chinese cultural traditions. By drawing on a blend of cultural signifiers, the novels display the carnivalesque qualities described by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1984). In McKenna’s novels carnivalesque scenes, polyglot voices and intercultural dialogues give rise to a transformative vision of a community which resists monologic authoritarianism. Like graphic novels more generally, the Underdogs novels rely on visual, verbal and cultural stereotypes to enable rapid identification of characters of various ethnicities. They transform such stereotypical and exoticised figures through modes of representation and narrative which privilege the ‘culture of folk carnival humour’ (Bakhtin 1984, p. 4) to present negotiations between and across cultures in the setting of post-war Broome." (Introduction)