Graphic novels, or graphics, mine a rich heritage, from Francisco Goya's Disasters of War, his series of etchings recounting the atrocities perpetrated by Napoleon's army during its occupation of Madrid, to the political cartoons of Otto Dix and George Grosz, each of whom documented World War I and the rise of the Nazis, to the underground comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A startling proportion of the current offerings are non-fiction, rendering history, journalism, and memoir into a frame-by-frame marriage of words and pictures. Art Spiegelman set the stage for all this activity in 1986 with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a depiction of his parents' experiences during the Holocaust, in which he cast cats as the Nazis and mice as the Jews. The inheritors of Maus's legacy include journalistic works by Sacco from his trips to Palestine and Bosnia, Marjane Satrapi's two-volume memoir of growing up in revolutionary Iran, and Rosalind Penfold's account of abuse.


Why use comics, an idiom perhaps best suited to humour and satire, to depict events as tragic as the Holocaust or the war in Bosnia or spousal abuse Non-fiction graphics may be symptomatic of a greater malaise --a creeping weariness with our hyper-digitized, over-photographed reality. Photojournalism has left us inured to the gory traumas it portrays. Graphics, on the other hand, are visceral and intimate, their scribbled outlines contrasting with the sharp edges and sharper colours of photography.

Labels: graphic novels, reviews