Monsters and Circles: Floating Signifiers in Halfdan Pisket’s Dansker Trilogy

This essay discusses how Halfdan Pisket’s Dansker comics trilogy uses the multiple meanings and potential for plural interpretations possible in the medium of comics to suggest the chaotic and fluid states of the migrated self. Using the idea of the floating signifier together with the monster theses of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the essay investigates the trilogy’s attempt to grasp the oscillating and layered qualities of identity by analyzing the formal aspects of comics as repetition and braiding. Through a close reading of the figure of the Minotaur and the repeated use of circles, the essay looks at how comics (auto)biography represents the many incarnations of its protagonist and deliberately refuses to pin down one version of this self.