Graphic History and the Art of Collaboration

To be totally honest, I agreed to write a review of a graphic history because I thought it would let me get some work done while being a good parent. Since we had our second child four years ago, I have constantly struggled to carve out time for research and writing while also teaching and putting out administrative fires. Here was a chance to sneak a work assignment into our bedtime reading rotation, and I knew both kids were game. My seven-year-old son had recently discovered comic books, and his younger brother was always eager to follow his lead. They were also already somewhat familiar with the story, since I had recently published a book about the Apollo program and 1960s grassroots politics. It was perfect; they could learn about history and I could start thinking about the review, while in bed. The first night seemed promising, when just before Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon my seven-year-old proclaimed it a “great story” and his brother chimed in that he liked the pictures.

My sons unwittingly hit the nail on the head when it comes to the way historians think about graphic histories. For the most part, those reviewing such books focus their analysis on the story and whether the narrative is complex enough, includes enough voices, and covers enough historical ground. If they then turn to the graphics side of the genre (and “if,” rather than “when,” is the correct term here), reviewers explain, as my four-year-old son did, that they “like the pictures” by deploying overused adjectives such as “gorgeous,” “rich,” and “stunning” to describe the artwork.¹ Reviewers rarely analyze those images and almost never place such analysis in dialogue with their assessment of the history. Historians tend to do the same in their own research and writing, at least according to my experiences during an eight-year stint as graphics editor of an academic history journal. Authors loved to submit essays peppered with maps, photographs, and artwork that illustrated arguments made with other textual materials, but rarely analyzed the images themselves as sources in their own right.² When it comes to graphics and graphic histories, it seems, historians tend to think deeply about the story while passively enjoying the visual culture that carries it along.

Such an approach is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it ignores the inherent interdisciplinarity of the genre. Graphic history is by definition a collaboration—of two distinct disciplines, of text and art, of words we hear in our head and images we see with our eyes. Focusing solely on the textual side of this partnership ignores an important part of story, and thus shortchanges our understanding of both the specific history being depicted and this type of scholarship more generally. Such dismissal also limits the history profession’s reach. For at least a generation, students have increasingly encountered history in visual form, whether in the classroom or on the Internet, while the post-secondary-school public continues to abandon the historical monograph for documentaries, image-driven blogs, and the History Channel.³ Sales of graphic books, in contrast, are booming.⁴ Some historians, having seen the writing (and pictures) on the wall, have jumped on this bandwagon, including two of my colleagues who have published graphic histories in the past two years alone.⁵ Publishing houses have followed suit, with Oxford University Press and Hill and Wang recently establishing their own graphic history book series.⁶

What follows here is one small step towards re-centering graphics within graphic histories. It builds on my sons’ bedtime review of Moonbound: Apollo and the Dream of Spaceflight by placing the book’s artwork into conversation with its history, which in this case unfurls in eighteen chapters that alternate between two parallel narratives. One thread tells the chronological history of the Apollo 11 mission, beginning with the lunar landing and proceeding through the astronauts’ first steps on...