Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: The King of Bangkok (Sopranzetti, Fabbri & Natalucci 2021) is a non-fictional graphic novel, based on more than a decade of anthropological research and an attempt to think graphically through ethnography and think ethnographically through comics.The book, which was first published in Italian, then in Thai, and finally in English, tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village.Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of northeastern Thailand, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010.The story narrated in the graphic novel is based on real events.Hundreds of hours of interviews and archival research, filtered through three pairs of eyes and hands, provide the ground for this account.The characters are composite and the product of narrative fiction.Every detail of their lives is real, yet none of them correspond in their totality to an existing person.The social, economic, and historical context in which the characters move summarizes the most significant events in the last fifty years of Thai history, without any claim to exhaustiveness.Some events have been omitted and condensed to make the narration more fluid.On the contrary, the reconstruction of locations, clothes, architecture, and graphic material is fully realistic.Every frame is based on a photographic and cinematographic archive, which the authors put together during a residency in Thailand in 2015, composed of more than 5,000 items from the Bangkok National Library, the National Archive of Thai Cinema, and some private collections.Following one composite character, The King of Bangkok is a story of migration to the city, distant families in the countryside, economic development eroding the land, and violent political protest.Ultimately, it is a story about contemporary Thailand and how the waves of history lift, engulf, and crash against ordinary people.In the following pages, you will find an excerpt from the graphic novel and three reflections we wrote about the process of producing the comic, collaborating, making Journal of the Royal
Authors: Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri, Chiara Natalucci
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,000
OpenAlex ID: W4285729050