Leviathan’s Maw figures the European Union’s maritime border regime as a horrendous waterborne Leviathan: an apparatus of routes, jurisdictions, interdiction, surveillance, and perilous sea crossings.
The illustration was conceived on the island of Lesvos during the 2017 “Cultures, Migrations, Borders” summer program, jointly organized by the University of the Aegean and the University of Amsterdam. It approaches the Mediterranean migration crisis as both a humanitarian crisis and a problem of representation.
Leviathan’s Maw
- Artist
- George Mantzios
- Publication
- Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics
- Publisher
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025
- Original context
- Lesvos, “Cultures, Migrations, Borders,” 2017
Sea, border, monster
The image renders the maritime border as something more than a territorial line. The Mediterranean becomes a political medium through which states, coast guards, ships, rescue organizations, legal regimes, and migrants are brought into violent and uneven relation.
As graphic ethnography, the work asks what illustration can show about migration that prose, cartography, or documentary evidence may not. The monstrous figure condenses the spatial distortions of a border that is mobile, distributed, and deadly.
Graphic art as ethnographic form.
Graphic Refuge
Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind with a foreword by Vinh Nguyen, examines graphic narratives about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees. Leviathan’s Maw appears as the opening figure in the book’s first chapter, “Clandestine Crossings: Refugee Comics at Sea.”