Drawing in shackles: Graphic witnessing and creative resistance in the drawings of Lelia Bicocca, an Argentine desaparecida.

This article examines the graphic production of Lelia Bicocca, an Argentine political activist who was kidnapped and disappeared in 1977 during the last military dictatorship. While imprisoned at the clandestine detention centre ESMA (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, or Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy), Bicocca created an eight-page comic strip titled *Il Capuchino*, featuring a skeletal protagonist and employing black humour to document the brutal conditions of captivity. The comic, along with other handmade objects, survived and was publicly presented in 2017 at the ESMA Memory Site Museum, serving as a rare and subversive form of testimonial art that challenges conventional narratives of victimhood and memory in Argentina. The article situates *Il Capuchino* within broader discussions of humour, memory studies, and comics scholarship, highlighting its exceptional nature as a graphic testimony produced under extreme repression and its role in the reconstruction of collective memory and justice.