Abstract

This paper draws upon «slow» ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2022 that examined the transition to adulthood of young West African men hosted in a reception centre for male unaccompanied minors in Bologna. Placing focus on a short research-based comic Il Gioco dell’Oca (Snakes and Ladders), it interrogates the capacity of the spatial grammar of the comic form to reveal the complexities of these racialised young migrants and to recentre the «migrant crisis» in its historical colonial roots. The young men prove to be both wrestlers – capable of taking care of themselves and others, wrestling with the system to achieve their best results – and vulnerable, «wounded boys» – in need of some support. We argue that the comic form offers the potential to contest such binary logics, and instead draws out the multiplicities and complexities of these young men’s identities