This special issue brings together innovative and interdisciplinary comics scholarship that rethinks the epistemic, aesthetic, political, material, and decolonial aspects of comics across the Global South. These forms prompt renewed reflection and inquiry into what it means to draw knowledge, memory, community, dissent, and futurity, while simultaneously interrogating the foundational categories of representation, authorship, narrative form, and colonial epistemology.

• How do comics from the Global South articulate epistemic justice and decolonial resistance? 
• How do these works convene and address subjects, publics, and reading communities as witnesses embedded in decolonial struggles? 
• What modes of witnessing, caring, documenting, or resisting are made possible through the affordances of comics? 
• How do comics reshape the politics and poetics of the Global South? 
• What possibilities do comics hold for pedagogies that are innovative and transformative in their engagement with local and/or imagined contexts? 
• How do comics participate in world-making through decolonial aesthetics, visual epistemologies, and affective storytelling? 
• What decolonial counter-genealogies to Euro-American trajectories do Global South comics offer through multimodal practices of drawing knowledge, dissent, and memory? 

By foregrounding comics as critical sites of inquiry, this call invites contributions that reimagine and reconceptualize the visual as a decolonial modality of knowledge production. It asks how the drawn line may be read as a line of flight that traces histories of struggle, remembrance, and collective imagination. From a decolonial perspective, such practices foreground modes of seeing and narrating that predate and contest colonial epistemologies, thereby challenging the assumption that comics are exclusively a Western, modern form. Building on these cues, this special issue welcomes submissions that examine the political, aesthetic, epistemic, pedagogic and affective dimensions of comics from the Global South. 

Topics may include but not limited to: 

• Indigenous visual traditions and proto-comics 
• Decolonial caricature and critique 
• Nation-building, pedagogy, and mythography 
• Caste, gender, sexuality, and representation 
• Comics journalism, reportage, documentary comics 
• War memory, partition, conflict, and reconciliation 
• Environmental storytelling and ecological activism 
• Migration, precarity, urbanity 
• Illness, disability, trauma, caregiving 
• Digital webcomics, zine cultures, feminist/queer collectives 
• Materiality, circulation, festivals, exhibitions, and comics economies 
• Diasporic and transnational graphic worlds 
• Decolonial visual epistemologies, Global South world-making, and Futurity 

Submission Instructions 

A 500-word abstract (excluding bibliography) and a 100-word biographic statement should be sent as a single MS Word file to special issue editors Ajith Cherian, Ana Ferreira and Sathyaraj Venkatesan (comicsgsls@gmail.com) no later than July 15, 2026. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the special issue editors. The guest editors will communicate their decision on the abstract submission by August 15, 2026. The deadline for submitting full manuscripts is December 31, 2026. 

It will be highly appreciated if the potential contributors discuss the aims and scope of their abstracts to avoid repetitive and highly discussed issues, given that unnoticed and overlooked areas should be considered. Thus, if you have any notes of interest, please contact the guest editors via email before the submission of your abstract.