The Truth is Out There
As with graphic memoir, the combined visual/verbal format of the comics medium allows artists to share impactful nonfiction stories or slightly fictionalized stories based on real-world events. Comics included in this case are dramatizations of historical events, journalistic works and creative reactions to tragedies and real-world events.
Some titles, such as Marvel Comic’s The Amazing Spider-Man #583, are works of sheer fiction, but help to immortalize important moments in history. Released a week before President Obama’s Inauguration Day in 2009, the comic demonstrated the trailblazing importance of our nation’s first black president, sold over 350,000 copies and went to five printings. Other titles, such as IDW’s Presidential Material: Barack Obama, draw on research and news reporting to recreate, in graphic format, true events.
Nonfiction comics are often intended to educate the reader about social issues and historical events.
Peter Bagge’s Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story (2013) tells the story of American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse, Margaret Sanger. Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States and established organizations that later evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Graphic textbooks are a growing sub-genre of nonfiction comics as evidenced by works such as Mark Schultz’s The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and Ilan Stavans and SDSU Alumnus Lalo Alcaraz’s Latino USA. Nonfiction comics present complex and sometimes painful information with a cinematic feel, increasing both intellectual understanding of a topic and imparting upon the reader an emotional connection to our human past. But readers beware--nonfiction graphic narratives are rumored to be a gateway drug to the comic art form in general!
Tales of war and survival are common themes in historical nonfiction graphic narratives.
The first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, Art Spiegelman’s Maus (serialized in RAW magazine from 1980 to 1991) depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor.
Miriam Katin’s We Are On Our Own: A Memoir (2006) tells the harrowing tale of how she and her mother faked their own deaths and escaped on foot from the Nazi invasion of Budapest during WWII.
In Citizen 13660 (first published in 1946, then reissued by University of Washington Press in 1983), American-born Japanese, Miné Okubo, details the humiliation and racial intolerance she experienced when confined to the Japanese-American internment camp of Tanforan for two years during World War II. An American citizen and talented professional artist, not accused of a crime, Miné was one of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent forced into concentration camps, or “relocation centers.”
A dramatized history of the author's first-person experiences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (2004) was originally published as a Japanese manga series, Hadashi No Gen, in the Weekly Shōnen Jump manga magazine beginning in 1973. Told from the point-of-view of a six-year-old child living in poverty, the story is a stark reminder of the horrors of war.
The struggle for political rights, social justice and equality is abundantly reflected in historical nonfiction graphic narrative.
Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia is often considered a precursor to the Civil Rights Movement. Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner (2008) retells the story in a poignant and unique, nearly wordless, style.
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a sixteen-page comic book about Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was originally published in 1957 and reprinted in 2013 by Top Shelf Productions. Disseminated among civil rights groups, churches, and schools, the comic was intended to inspire nonviolent protest and resistance.
John Lewis’s award-winning March trilogy is about the Civil Rights Movement, told through the perspective of civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman, John Lewis.
A nod to an MLK quote, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” Silence of Our Friends (2012) is a semi-autobiographical tale set in 1967 Texas, against the backdrop of the fight for civil rights. Slightly dramatized, the narrative follows two families during an event at Texas Southern University, where students staged walkouts and sit-in protests that turned violent and resulted in the death of a police officer. Five students were charged with the murder of the slain officer, but the trial ended with the dismissal of all charges when it was discovered that the officer was shot accidentally by another officer.
Dan Méndez Moore’s Six Days in Cincinnati: A Graphic Account of the Riots That Shook the Nation a Decade Before Black Lives Matter (2017) depicts the history of the 2001 Cincinnati riots. Civil unrest and community outrage were sparked when 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African American man, was shot and killed by an officer of the Cincinnati Police Department during an attempt to arrest him for non-violent misdemeanors.
Comics journalism, or graphic journalism, and autobiographical comics based on living and travelling abroad, or travel comics, have blossomed into a popular genre for the exploration of diverse, global topics.
In Smile Through the Tears, genocide survivor, Rupert Bazambanza, shares a heartbreaking look at hatred and racial discrimination during the Tutsi genocide that took place in Rwanda between April and July of 1994.
Joe Sacco, widely considered one of the pioneers of comics journalism, explores Israeli–Palestinian relations in Palestine (1996) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009). On display is his Eisner Award winning Safe Area Goražde (2000), which shares the author's experiences during four months spent in Goražde, a mainly Bosniak enclave in eastern Bosnia surrounded by hostile Serb-dominated regions.
In 2001, cartoonist Guy Delisle lived in the capital of North Korea for two months on a work visa for a French film company. In Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2003), he details what he saw of the culture and lives in one of the last remaining totalitarian communist societies.
Part comic, part photo journal, and part travel book, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders tells the story of photographer Didier Lefèvre's 1986 journey through Afghanistan with the international non-profit organization Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
Curated by Pamela Jackson