WARNING! MAY CONTAIN GRAPHIC MATERIAL

The comic book may seem an odd medium in which to produce serious documentary works about major social crises such as Hiroshima and the Holocaust. However, this is what has been happening in graphic novels such as Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Jeff Adams, Reader in Education at Edge Hill brings some welcome academic attention to these texts in his new book, Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism.

What kind of works are you writing about in Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism? JA: The graphic novels that I was interested in were very politically engaged, which is why I use the word documentary in the title; they are mostly autobiographical, too. Joe Sacco went to Palestine and recorded his experience of participating in people’s lives under occupation there. There was Spiegelman’s very personal account of his father surviving the holocaust and Keiji Nakazawa’s work on surviving the Hiroshima bombing in 1945. It seemed to me that there was something very interesting going on here – the comic medium being used to make these kinds of very serious accounts of huge social crises.

But why use comics to deal with this kind of subject matter?
JA: Serious, respectable people have a bit of trouble thinking about work produced in the comic medium. You find people in schools saying, “oh, comics, you don’t really want to deal with those”, or if you go to Waterstones to buy these books they say, “go and look in science fiction”. There is a sense in which they are marginalised, but I think some artists enjoy the fact that it’s a marginalised medium so they have a bit more freedom to manoeuvre, and they can dodge censorship issues as well. But I think on a more fundamental level it’s to do with the relationship between image and text. Images do certain kinds of things, and you can do things with text extremely well, but something new happens when you put them together. You still retain some of the poignancy of still images and you can still retain some of the poetry of language. The other thing I think that’s interesting is that if you pick up Joe Sacco’s work, he’s developing new techniques on the hoof. And Spiegelman does the same – because it’s a medium in its infancy, you can be doing exciting things as you go. A medium such as film is so ubiquitous, you can almost guarantee that anything you come up with somebody has done before, whereas in this medium, because there’s fewer people working in it, you might be developing a whole new technique. And I think that’s quite inspiring.

It has been suggested that graphic novels ‘lack the depth, scope and artistry of the truly literary text.’
JA: I think it’s an unfair comparison – my partner reminded me just yesterday that literary novels when they were new a couple of hundred years ago, were thought of as being rather cheap and popular and not appropriate for lofty thought, in the same way that painting a landscape was thought of as being much lower in their hierarchy than history paintings. Art forms go through these developmental stages and at the moment comics are associated with cheap, popular, often pornographic, violent content. But that doesn’t mean to say that they cannot be used to produce poetic, poignant moments. I think at their best, they do their own thing in a very powerful way, just as novels do. One could say take the very best novels that have ever been written in western culture, and yes, there are some amazing pieces of work. But then there are millions of people who’ve been working at it, you would expect to find fabulous pieces of work. Maybe one day when everybody’s making comics, we’ll have a Shakespearean level of production in a graphic novel. But I think that’s still to come – it’s still an experimental medium. I’m interested in it because it’s still at that moment of discovery and innovation.