Introduction to Focus: Graphic Nonfiction

In 1991, when Art Spiegelman published his serialized graphic memoir as the book Maus, it stood out like a sore thumb. Today, graphic nonfiction works are everywhere—across all variety of genres and covering every topic, subject, and experience under the sun: from LGBTQ autobiographies, histories of slavery, and PTSD memoirs to journeys of forced migration, war-torn communities, and global upheavals, among many others. Creators from all over the planet have used the visual (and verbal) shaping devices of graphic nonfiction to distill and critically reconstruct the historical, social, and political bricks that make the minutiae of everyday life for people around the world. They have used graphic nonfiction narratives to grab us and our attention and to our open eyes to otherwise censored histories, political and social movements, and historically marginalized people.

From Maus, Barefoot Gen (1976), and Persepolis (2000) to Nat Turner (2006), Nylon Road (2006), and Dare to Disappoint (2015), among many others, creators have used their unique visual and verbal styles to put a spotlight on how different eras and regions around the world have been marked by state and institutionally sanctioned violence, torture, murder, oppression, and exploitation of everyday people. They have also used their unique styles and visions while creating graphic nonfictional narratives that seek to humanize people systematically dehumanized within such a world.

We see this powerfully in, for instance, Inverna Lockpez’s Cuba: My Revolution (2010), Clément Baloup’s Mémoires de Viet Kieu (2013), GB Tran’s Vietnamerica (2010), and Vannak Anan Prum’s The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea (2018). The history of the civil rights struggle is powerfully conveyed in the personal journeys visually (and verbally) reconstructed in John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March (2013) and in Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom (2012)—a testimonio of a Latina growing up in the South during this epoch. The biographically verifiable becomes the anchor for recounting other moments of social revolution seen in Ho Che Anderson’s King: A Comics Biography (2005), Wilfred Santiago’s 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente (2014), and Kazuki Ebine’s Gandhi (2011), among others.

In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi chooses a monochromatic, no-frills visual style to convey how life in Iran under the Shah and during the Islamic Revolution informed the fears, joys, and imagination of a young girl. Contrastively, in Palestine (1996) Joe Sacco uses a maximalist style to bombard readers with hard-hitting facts about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In Deogratias (2000), J.P. Stassen chooses a brown color palette to depict the daily lives of regular people that stands in sharp contrast to the horrors they experience during the Rwandan genocides. In Hostage (2017), Guy Delisle uses a series of uniform panels (rectangles or squares) along with a minimum of detail to convey the sense of terrifying loneliness experienced by Christophe André (a Doctors Without Borders administrator in 1997) who was kidnapped and imprisoned, spending 100 days in isolation in the Caucasus.

I think, too, of how creators such as Thi Bui, Rutu Modan, Ali Folman, Magdy El Shafee, and Lamia Ziadé carefully craft visual (and verbal) nonfiction stories to immerse readers in the traumas of violent events around the world that have ripped apart the social fabric that holds humanity together.

Graphic nonfiction takes its readers everywhere, including into the complex subjectivities of those who experience the world from non-normative physical and psychological states. In Epileptic (1996), David B’s use of a sharp, monochromatic ink style along with a contrastive minimalist versus maximalist mise-en-scène conveys his brother’s lonely struggle with epilepsy in an unsympathetic world. In Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (2012), Ellen Forney uses the graphic nonfiction form to at once share with readers her own experiences with bipolar depression and as a way to create a new community as she identifies a long history of other artists and writers with bipolar depression. In El Deafo (2014), Cece Bell chooses graphic nonfiction to distill then reconstruct her trials and tribulations as a deaf child. These and other graphic...