Infofiche

A rancher and an illegal immigrant find themelves stranded on an alien spacecraft, their own language barriers dwarfed by that they have with their captors.

Barrier is a comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin, with Muntsa Vicente. It is available online (pay what you want!) and its well worth a read for when my descriptions are sub-par. The thing that caught my eye, aside from it being an "unconventional drama about violence, language and illegal immigration," was the fact its a Spanish/English bilingual comic, and since I can read Spanish, I decided to give it a go. Spoilers beyond!

It turns out that not only is my Spanish not great, it's Castellano which is the wrong variety for me to understand every word the fluent and Honduras-native Oscar says. This is a comic about language barriers, and there's one right there. This gave the first few Oscar sequences (in which he and an unnamed woman attempt to cross the Mexico-America border) a surreal edge, as I didn't fully understand the dynamics of his conversation with the cartel or relation to the woman, even if I could piece together what was said.

I had a better time understanding Liddy, the English speaking rancher whose land the cartels have been crossing - she thinks. Her early sequences are about establishing that her life is marked by tragedy, but supported by community and that she's very tough. A cartel has killed one of her horses as a warning, and she hates them and anyone who associates with them.

In a wonderful sequence showing the sky they both share, Oscar falls and injures his leg whilst on Liddy's land and she aims a gun at him. This is prevented from further escalation (at least further violence) by the appearance of a fungal alien craft which promptly abducts the two, ending the chapter with a tractor beam cliffhanger. The rest of the comic is about them working together to escape the spacecraft and return to Earth, overcoming the language barriers in the process.

(I'm going to stop describing the rest of the plot chronologically as a) Barrier doesn't do that, and b) it'll be more useful if we can group it together in chunks.)

The language barriers here are set up in two directions:

• Between Oscar and Liddy, since they don't share a language they communicate by emphasis, general tone of speech and non-verbally.

• Between the humans and the aliens. The aliens have a language, however hearing it causes our two humans' ears to bleed and temporarily deafens them (this is only short term, so its not a third item on this list.)

Vaughan and Martin have chosen a really effective way to depict the alien speech: via these wonderfully impressionistic speech bubbles:

They succeed at both allowing me to work out what the aliens are saying from context whilst ensuring I am sufficiently alienated from them to still be on Oscar and Liddy's 'side' - even if I am slighly endeared to them by the rolling.

After battling through the alien ship's landscape - we learn that no cartel killed Liddy's horse, it was abduction and alien life. They sometimes succesfully navigate around their language barrier and sometimes don't, frequently misunderstanding each other in a way that manages to be dramatic without being frustrating. Eventually, they persuade the aliens to enter negotiations by taking a hostage.

Until this point, the bi(tri if we count alien)lingual nature of the comic has meant that we have more information about what's going on than any one of the characters, even those who are in the same scenes. I can understand both Oscar and Liddy, but they can't understand each other and though none of us understand the aliens' speech, the reader has more of an idea of what they're like too. This asymmetry is broken down when the aliens come to negotiate and enter into a sort of communion with the humans, swapping languages around.

The mechanics of this flashback sequence are very fun: the aliens speak Spanish, Oscar gets English and Liddy gets alien. We watch as backstories play out before us, but all the dialogue is translated to a different character's language. We learn motives and once the language barriers are changed (not removed, but changed) we get a more complete view of these characters' pasts and why they are doing what they are doing. Explicitly, this is because before we could only understand Oscar if we knew his language, but now we get information in a different language - same with the aliens. Liddy's language becomes more incomprehensible in the shift, as she is now remembering in alien and we have no idea what's being said (whereas before she spoke English, the language most familiar to most readers.)

This sequence bypasses language barriers within the comic too, as each character shares their pasts with the others. The aliens clearly get something out of this exchange, because the next thing that happens is Liddy and Oscar are strapped to a transporter and beamed back to Earth. The comic ends on an ironic note, with the two of them stranded in Damascus with a new language barrier between them and the world (my thanks to Fathi for translating the Arabic in the last sequence for me.)

This comic was very successful at what I think it was trying to do: present and examine language barriers. It did this very well by simply placing those same language barriers on the reader, we genuinely don't know what the aliens are saying or the characters whose languages we don't speak. The shared-consciousness trope ending worked because it was also the climax of the character arcs where both we and the characters learnt each others pasts and the mystery of the aliens were resolved satisfyingly.

Most interesting to me were how the alien language was rendered in the art (because I love that kind of stuff) and how similar the language barriers were between Liddy, Oscar, the aliens and the reader. There was the same linguistic distance between all of us - less in my case as, unlike Liddy, I could understand Oscar's dialogue - as the barriers were changed in the comic, they were changed with the reader. It was a very interesting experience that I've never seen in fiction before. This is an excellent and novel-to-me example of fictional language being used to explore real-world language issues.

Additionally, the comic was visualy striking and graphic (and violent). The designs of the aliens were very interesting and the warp effects looked really cool. I highly recommend giving it a read.