Retelling history through graphic fiction

Rakesh Khanna examines the graphic fiction genre in The Caravan

Comics, in the last 20 years or so, have increasingly been used to tell stories about real-life wars, revolutions, and political upheavals. The first graphic novel—that’s what book-length comics are called even if they are non-fictional or autobiographical—that was taken seriously by English-language critics was the two-volume opus Maus (1986 and 1991) by Art Spiegelman. It was also the first graphic novel to be read widely in American colleges as literature, and the first to win a Pulitzer Prize. Spiegelman won that acclaim by weaving his father’s oral history of persecution by the Nazis into a deeply personal present-day story of family relationships and tensions. Nine years after Maus came Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir, originally published in French, of growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq war. This book, too, was widely acclaimed, and eventually turned into a successful movie. Then there is the comics journalism of Joe Sacco. His oeuvre includes Safe Area Goražde (2000), Palestine (2001), The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo (2003) and Footnotes in Gaza (2010). In these books, the author draws himself interviewing the residents of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Bosnia about their experiences under occupation and siege.