Swedish Feminist Manga and Critical Comics Pedagogy in Natalia Batista’s Sword Princess Amaltea

Abstract

This article considers the Swedish feminist manga Sword Princess Amaltea and its pedagogical paratexts. Originally released in three parts from 2013 to 2015, Sword Princess Amaltea was written and drawn by the Swedish comics artist Natalia Batista, and has been translated and published in several languages, including English and German. Batista’s manga draws inspiration from both Japanese shôjo or girls’ manga and Nordic feminist literature. In this article I show how Batista cleverly makes use of manga’s visual conventions to challenge conventional representations of gender, sexuality, and the gaze. As a manga aimed at least in part at younger readers in school contexts, Sword Princess Amaltea and its accompanying instructional materials raise questions of genre and visual literacy in the language and literature classroom. Calling attention to the transnational circulation of manga and its genres, I analyze Sword Princess Amaltea with its paratexts in order to demonstrate the potential for a queer and feminist comics pedagogy.