‘I’ for iconoclasm: graphic novels and the (re)presentation of terrorism

Abstract

This article considers a ‘new-old’ media – that is, a relatively newly created medium with deep historical roots – that has gained increasing popularity in recent years: a subgenre of the comic book, most often referred to as the graphic novel. Presented here as an antidote to dominant interpretations of political violence ranging from the state terrorism of the Holocaust to the events of 9/11, the article briefly traces the history of graphic novels and details their growing popularity before describing and analysing representations of terrorism, both written and visual, in eight paradigmatic works that purvey variously victim, survivor and perpetrator perspectives.

Keywords:

• comics
• Holocaust
• popular culture
• Spiegelman
• visual
• 9/11

Acknowledgments

Part of this article previously appeared in ‘Graphic novels or novel graphics? The evolution of an iconoclastic genre’, The Comparatist, 35 (May 2011), 170–181. The paragraphs are reprinted here with permission.

Notes

1. Other terms for this somewhat contested genre include ‘sequential art’, ‘bande dessinée’, ‘picture novella’, ‘picto-fiction’, ‘art comic’, ‘illustories’ and ‘adult comics’, as well as ‘graphica’.

2. For a succinct and authoritative history of the comic genre, see Roger Sabin's Comics, comix and graphic novels (1996).

3. Encapsulated in Art Spiegelman's observation that a graphic novel is ‘a comic book that you need a bookmark for’ (as quoted in Fingeroth (2008, p. 4)).

4. Estimated overall sales in the combined comics market (i.e. periodical comics and graphic novels) in 2010 was $635 million, down from $680 million in 2009 (MacDonald and Reid 2011).

5. For additional information about graphic war stories, see Mike Conroy's War stories: a graphic history (2009), which provides an overview of the genre as well as analyses of individual works, including several on terrorism (see also Norlund 2006).

6. For an overview of theatrical films about terrorism, see Martin (2011).

7. Graphic novels about German history or literature seem to constitute a thriving enterprise, ranging from David Mairowitz and Chantal Montellier's The trial (2008, based on the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka) and Jon Muth's graphic novel version of Fritz Lang's film M (2008) to Jason Lutes’ volumes on Weimar Berlin: Berlin: city of stones (2004) and Berlin: city of smoke (2008). Of the various works, only Maus and The Search have been translated into German.

8. Spiegelman (2004) himself comments on the format of the work in his introduction ‘The Sky is Falling’: ‘The giant scale of the color newsprint pages seemed perfect for oversized skyscrapers and outsized events, and the idea of working in single page units corresponded to my existential conviction that I might not live long enough to see them published. I wanted to sort out the fragments of what I'd experienced from the media images that threatened to engulf what I actually saw, and the collage-like nature of a newspaper page encouraged my impulse to juxtapose my fragmentary thoughts in different styles.’

9. Other efforts to reach a wider public include the 2006 American docudrama 9/11 Commission Report, which like The Hamburg Cell (2004) was also based in part on the findings of The 9/11 Commission Report; this film is a prequel to 9/11.

10. Jacobson's and Colón's work calls to mind Howard Zinn's A people's history of American empire (2008). Like The 9/11 Commission Report, Zinn et al.’s graphic adaptation rests on an earlier text-only version, A people's history of the United States (1980), famous for its revisionary, multiply embedded history. In the graphic version, Professor Zinn is a character who presents the historical content as a university lecture, thus adding a critical framework.