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Critical posthumanism analyses tensions within traditional accounts of human ontology and epistemology. The modes by which we recognize humanity are often founded on hierarchical binaries of self and other. These binaries concomitantly inflect disciplinary boundaries of humanities scholarship. While recent advances in biotechnology have destabilized the boundaries of the human subject, the humanities appear ossified in their categories of human forms. How can work in the humanities reflect ‘the crisis in humanism’, while offering different optics for engaging the posthuman world? Comics provide an ideal media technology for posthuman knowledge production. The knowledge that each panel of a comic produces is contingent upon non-linear navigation between text and image and panel presentation. Panels and gutters operate as an assemblage, in networks of patterns, resonances and repetitions. Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth (2009–present) mobilizes hybrid modes of knowledge production around an additional hybridity: the hybrid human/non-human protagonist. In compelling the reader to identify with an inhuman subject, this work exploits the dynamic tension of the form and renders tensions within humanity itself graphically explicit.

This article examines the critical reception of works by comic artists Zeina Abirached and Marjane Satrapi, and specifically articulations of likeness and contrast between them. Surveying the frequent comparisons of Abirached's A Game for Swallows (2007, 2012) to Satrapi's Persepolis (2000–2004) provides a methodological framework by which to reconsider the cultural and capital economies of world literature and global comics. This analysis is guided by questions regarding global comics as an emergent textual form that complicates world literature as a system of cultural recognition. What role does the emphasis on these two women authors as Middle Easterners play in the reception of their books in Europe and the United States? How do transnational literatures capitulate to (neo)imperial projects? How do comics, by introducing new criteria for literary assessment, compel us to radically remap the location of culture?

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This chapter examines comics at the level of the page by considering the cultural techniques of reading and spatial navigation. The page, it is argued, is the space in comics where readers locate themselves politically and where, due to cultural and aesthetic conventions, readers may be dislocated and transformed. After first revisiting some theories of page layout in order to diagram how spatial orientation has been studied, the chapter then provides close readings of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Red: A Haida Manga. Focusing on the diversity of modes by which these comics both serve as and utilize spatial navigation according to paginal design—how they may be representations of space and spaces of representation simultaneously—it ultimately considers how comics and, in turn, how users, both artists and readers alike, activate and mobilize these technical possibilities into emergent forms of expression and meaning.