Aubrey Gabel

Aubrey Gabel is a specialist in French and Francophone literature and visual culture, especially cinema and comics and graphic albums. Her first book, The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics, is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press (Oct. 2025).

Gabel’s current research project looks at the rise of comics journalism. Surpassing the political or editorial cartoon in both space and scope, BD reportage is aligned with subjective or opinion journalism. It is rooted in long-form reporting, oral interviews, and embedded research—all communicated via the full arsenal of tools available in the comics medium. Comics reporting, like investigative journalism more broadly, covers the breadth of topics that affect modern life: from on-going wars and conflicts to mass migration and the immigrant experience, to environmental disasters, trial reporting, and the prison industrial-complex.