Multilingual Narration and Narrating Multilingualism in Comics: Mikael Ross’s Der verkehrte Himmel (2024)

Abstract

Comics have a rich multilingual heritage. Historically, they emerged in linguistically diverse US immigrant milieus. For decades, they were dominated by genres such as adventure or superhero, full of (presumably) translingual encounters. The world explored by the classic traveling hero of comics often seems to be governed by a common language everybody can understand. Yet, through their multimodal combination of simultaneity and sequentiality comics can create multilingual spaces and situations. The article explores the semiotic devices comics use to depict, indicate, or evoke multilingualism and how Mikael Ross uses them in his acclaimed graphic novel Der verkehrte Himmel (Il nirvana è qui in the Italian edition), a fast-paced crime and coming-of-age story set among Vietnamese-German youth in Berlin.