A conference at the University of London in 2012 provided the occasion for the presentations that became this book, and its contents retain the character of proceedings. Judged from this perspective, the collection is rather well done. The editors and authors have several strengths, especially the commitment to using comics as expressions of collective and social memory. Others include the attention to lesser-known comics such as those from Peru and Nicaragua, the utilization of several theoretical approaches to memory, especially those laid out in Maurice Halbwachs's On Collective Memory and Alison Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, and the appropriate recognition of the importance of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald without resorting to its shopworn and simplistic dependency thesis.
Two essays express the volume's best features. Jorge L. Catalá Carrasco's “Raising the Cuban Flag: Comics, Collective...