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Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form

Amazon.com Price:  $25.38 (as of 01/05/2019 12:42 PST- Details)

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Description

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 each turn new kinds of visual-verbal representation have arisen in accordance with the turmoil of war. Up to date 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 circle of relatives’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 type of comics―its choice of frames―lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing a couple of 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 be mindful hand-drawn images to be a number of the most powerful kinds of historical witness.

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