Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form by Hillary L. Chute (review)

Comics Studies has spent an inordinate amount of time defending itself, despite its existence within the academy since the 1980s. It seems as if any study of comics must begin with an explanation of why this form is worthy of scholarly attention. In truth, all literary and artistic forms go through a similar period of derision as they gain academic import and interest, but considering that comics are not a recent invention, this desire (or requirement) to argue for the comics form is starting to wear thin. With this in mind, any new text in the field must maintain a fine balance between arguing for the legitimacy of the form and avoiding an over-exuberant polemic against literary snobbery. In her 2016 book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form, Hillary Chute navigates this tricky path and boldly suggests, as many others have, that rather than languishing in their history as disposable narratives of little value, the form has developed into one that is both innovative and forward-thinking: the comics form has repeatedly shown that it is capable of representing difficult topics precisely because it dares to "engage the difficulty of spectacle instead of turning away from it" (17). Her primary textual focus is narrow, and she concentrates on texts by Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, after providing a historical reading of comics and conflict through the examples of two printmakers, Jacques Callot and Francisco Goya.

That comics can do fascinating and diverse things with questions of representation is and of itself not a new suggestion; indeed, Chute's book is one of many currently appearing in the academic marketplace that deal with the handling of trauma, conflicting, and witnessing in the comics form. These types of comics are among the most highly regarded within the field: "work that is historical and specifically 'testamentary' or testimonial is the strongest genre of comics" (Chute 6). She is explicit in her explanation of her corpus: she works with what she calls "documentary comics" -texts that represent historical events from the point of view of a witness, employing Lisa Gitelman's definition of documentary as "an epistemic practice: the kind of knowing that is all wrapped up with showing, and showing wrapped up with knowing" (qtd. in Chute 18). Her categorization of texts by this definition is clear and many of the works considered, especially Joe Sacco's works, are well-suited to this classification, although there is a wealth of theory that is thus ignored. Why, for example, does she decide to categorize the explicitly autobiographical Maus as documentary and not autographics? Are there ways in which the three artists herein discussed are more than just documentary but exist across different genres and categories? And what, if this is the case, does that say about such categories? These questions remain unanswered.

Regardless of questions of genre and categorization, Chute's insistence that comics are doing things with trauma that jars with traditional ideas of representation is a bold thread within the text: "Movingly, unflinchingly, comics works document, display, furnish. They engage the difficulty of spectacle instead of turning away from it. They risk representation" (Chute 17). One of the most important facets of contemporary trauma theory is the move away from seeing trauma as "unrepresentable" and positioning it more as an issue that raises questions of representation, agency, and affect. Chute brings comics to the fore as a form for the representation of trauma -and especially through the lens of witnessing-to add another prong to the intervention of contemporary trauma theory. If, indeed, trauma was so unrepresentable as previously believed, we would not have such a healthy corpus of comics that battle questions of trauma, that risk representation. If trauma is a highly visual experience, as many scholars believe it is, comics emerges as the preeminent form for its representation, as especially when those same narratives deal with "history." The spatial syntax of comics "offer opportunities to place pressure on traditional notions...