In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.
Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Modern nonfiction comics emerged from the shattering experience of World War II, developing in the 1970s with Art Spiegelman’s first “Maus” story about his immigrant family’s survival of Nazi death camps and with Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa’s inaugural work of “atomic bomb manga,” the comic book Ore Wa Mita (“I Saw It”)—a title that alludes to Goya’s famous Disasters of War etchings.
Chute explains how the form of comics—its collection of frames—lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness.
Hillary L. Chute is Professor of English at Northeastern University.
Table of Contents
Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction | Seeing New War Comics Framing Documentary Comics, Photography, Film Drawing History Materializing Witness, Reference, Presence The Gutter Chapter 1. Histories of Visual Witness Chapter 2. Time, Space, and Picture Writing in Modern Comics Chapter 3. I Saw It and the Work of Atomic Bomb Manga The Mark versus the Bomb as Documentarian: I Saw It Plasticity and Corporeality Chapter 4. Maus’s Archival Images and the Postwar Comics Field “Maus”: Comics, War, Witness Picturing the Oxymoron of Life in a Death Camp Maus: Creating a Testimonial Archive Coffins/Archives Chapter 5. History and the Visible in Joe Sacco Comics and Ethics Decoding, Density, and “Double-Vision” Style and Suffering Comics and the Rhythm of Knowing “Events Are Continuous”: Footnotes in Gaza and the Counterarchive of Comics Coda | New Locations, New Forms Notes Acknowledgments Index
