Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics [1 ed.] 9783030633028, 9783030633035

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

FRAMES AND FRAMING IN DOCUMENTARY COMICS Johannes C. P. Schmid

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels Series Editor Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK

This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643

Johannes C. P. Schmid

Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics

Johannes C. P. Schmid English and American Studies University of Flensburg Flensburg, Germany

ISSN 2634-6370     ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-030-63302-8    ISBN 978-3-030-63303-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Logorilla / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Annkatrin

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Astrid Böger, who first introduced me to Comics Studies, supervised my PhD thesis which generated this book, and consistently supported, encouraged, and guided me throughout my studies at the University of Hamburg. Also, I am indebted to Hillary Chute and Christina Meyer for their advice on this project, and to Roger Sabin and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan for making this publication possible. My wonderful friends who have helped me with the manuscript at different stages include Christoph Rogge, Johanna Gustin, Laura Schlichting, Julia Tegtmeyer, and Andreas Veits. This project has greatly benefitted from the feedback and counsel of several scholars, in particular, Christian Bachmann, Florian Busch, Dominic Davies, Harriet Earle, Lukas Etter, Markus Kuhn, Nina Mickwitz,  Stephan Packard, Candida Rifkind, Daniel Stein,  JanNoël Thon, and Laurike in ‘t Veld. I thank everyone at the Department for English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg, in particular, Johanna Heinemeyer for her invaluable help over the years. Also, I am grateful for the opportunity to have participated in the Forschergruppe “Übersetzen und Rahmen,” which made possible my PhD research and prompted my interest in framing. Moreover, I am grateful to Birgit Däwes and everyone at the English Department at the University of Flensburg that I am now part of such a fantastic team. Part of my PhD research was generously funded by a completion scholarship from the University of Hamburg. Many thanks  to  Kenny Oravetz and everyone at the Northeastern University English Department for making my 2018 research visit to the US such a wonderful experience. I also thank Sarah Glidden and Joe Sacco for letting me discuss their work with them. vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Finally, I want to thank my parents, the Schmid family, and the Babbe family for their support, especially Ilona Babbe for her warmth and kindness. Most importantly, I thank my partner Annkatrin Babbe for her unwavering support and patience as well as for her keen observations and painstaking help with the manuscript.

Contents

1 Introduction: Comics Framing and the Construction of Facts  1 2 Framing Actuality: Frame Theory, Graphic Narrative, and (Post)-Documentary 31 3 Material Framing: The Paratext 65 4 Visual Framing: From the Line to the Multiframe123 5 Narrative Framing: Storytelling, Structures, and Perspectives201 6 Conclusion: Redrawing Boundaries in the Digital Age275 Index285

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About the Author

Johannes C. P. Schmid  is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Studies at Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany, and associate editor at Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly, the official journal of the German Society for American Studies (GAAS). His other recent publications include Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood: The Photographic Image in the Graphic War Memoir (2016) and, as co-editor, the 2019 special issue “Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism” (ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 11.1) and Framing [in] Comics and Cartoons: Essays on Aesthetics, History, and Mediality (2021).  Johannes has received the Roland Faelske-Award for Comics and Animation Studies for his M.A.thesis as well as for his PhD dissertation.

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The Special Edition (Fantagraphics Books 2011), front cover 79 Fig. 3.2 Joe Sacco, The Fixer and Other Stories (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009), front cover 82 Fig. 3.3 Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The Special Edition (Fantagraphics Books 2011), n.p. 108 Fig. 4.1 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 254–255133 Fig. 4.2 Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 14 134 Fig. 4.3 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 35 136 Fig. 4.4 Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 122–123 138 Fig. 4.5 Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 208 140 Fig. 4.6 Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 110 142 Fig. 4.7 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 49 143 Fig. 4.8 Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 93 145 Fig. 4.9 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 43 146 Fig. 4.10 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 317 147 Fig. 4.11 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 62 148 xiii

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.12 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 271 Fig. 4.13 Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), n.p. Fig. 4.14 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 335 Fig. 4.15 Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 151 Fig. 4.16 Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 203 Fig. 4.17 Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 80 Fig. 4.18 Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 30 Fig. 4.19 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 280 Fig. 4.20 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 105 Fig. 4.21 Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 150–151 Fig. 4.22 Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 173 Fig. 4.23 Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 218 Fig. 4.24 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 178 Fig. 4.25 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 318 Fig. 4.26 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 322 Fig. 4.27 Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (Metropolitan Books 2020), 7 Fig. 4.28 Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (Metropolitan Books 2020), 122 Fig. 4.29 Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 146 Fig. 5.1 Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), ii Fig. 5.2 Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 6 Fig. 5.3 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 5 Fig. 5.4 Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 20–21 Fig. 5.5 Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (Metropolitan Books 2020), 107 Fig. 5.6 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 63 Fig. 5.7 Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 68–69

149 152 154 155 160 162 163 164 166 168 170 177 181 184 185 187 189 190 210 214 217 219 227 237 246

  List of Figures 

Fig. 5.8

Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 139 Fig. 5.9 Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 56–57 Fig. 5.10 Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 174 Fig. 5.11 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 305 Fig. 5.12 Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 287

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Comics Framing and the Construction of Facts

Although the noun “frame” and its verb “framing” can be understood in multiple ways, concerning comics, most people will arguably first think of the comics panel. The panel will receive its share of attention, but  this study will assume a broader understanding of the concept. First, framing will refer to the strategic use of communicative resources to encourage a particular interpretation of a scenario; second, to the process of structuring a representation (or portions thereof) by situating it within certain boundaries—for example, a panel. These two aspects of framing are profoundly interrelated. By structuring the text through frames and framings, the author embeds an interpretation of the represented events and cultivates a specific state of mind for their reception. Any kind of communication needs a semiotic and/or material form. Far from being neutral containers, the medial forms we choose shape what it is that we say, write, or draw. In turn, we understand a situation or a story by extrapolating from the limited information we have, closing the gaps by making assumptions about the parts we do not know. Hence, meaning-making strongly relies on interpretative schemata, or cognitive frames. Frames inform our thinking: they tell us what we can and should expect by default, and, coincidentally, obscure other aspects. The object of this investigation will be documentary comics as materialized1 through the graphic narrative book. In general, documentary forms aim to portray actual events in such a manner as to support a specific © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5_1

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argument or point of view. Therefore, framing is an essential strategic aspect of the genre. The graphic narrative book is constituted by several different instances of framing that inform the reading process. For instance, outer appendages like the cover and the title prime expectations and label the reported events as a whole. The narrative discourse determines the perspective on the represented situations and the state of knowledge that readers carry toward them at a specific point in the story. The story of an event can be told in multiple ways and by selecting one way to tell it, the author asserts that this version is true—by default, exclusively so. Any given narrative presents a distinct perspective, subtracts, and emphasizes aspects of a reported scenario, and thus assumes a particular story logic. Likewise, any visual representation takes on a specific angle and perspective. Comics depicts2 stories through the fragmented visual frames of its panels and grids, and translates characters and objects into abstract depictions, using distinct graphic styles. Through cartooning, the author emphasizes certain features while subtracting others, and the comics grammar prominently visualizes its inherent absences through the “gutter” in between panels. To reiterate, these textual elements are not neutral borders or containers, but implicitly or explicitly categorize, organize, and evaluate the information presented within. Alternative frames can be applied to the same situation and by framing a situation differently, divergent readings of that situation are proposed. Frames and framing usually serve to influence meaning-making unconsciously. Acknowledging these processes is an integral aspect of documentary comics. Graphic narratives so obviously frame the events they represent that documentary cartoonists use the medium to interrogate medial processes of framing per se. This self-reflexive element is central to documentary comics’ credibility. For nonfiction graphic narratives that address actual events and experiences, authentication is a crucial element. To convince readers that their accounts are true and that comics is a valid documentary medium, cartoonists disclose and explain their framing choices, highlighting personal accountability and transparency of process. This strategy of conscientious authentication entails that authors, sincerely and to the best of their knowledge and judgment, reveal inconsistencies, acknowledge limitations, and explain how they came by the information the present. This way, the author’s integrity, as performed in the text, comes to the forefront as a means of authentication—in apparent contrast to the inherent medial evidentiality that is ascribed to film and photography. Using an overtly subjective and interpretative medium like comics

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and abandoning conventional modes of presenting documentary evidence mandates that the authors take special care to reflect upon the fact-finding process. Yet this obligation serves as a catalyst to interrogate and renegotiate documentary as a genre and processes of framing that characterize all reportage. The terms “frame” and “framing” are unsurprisingly prevalent in comics studies, most uses of the term “frame” focusing on its visual aspect. The comics panel has received a substantial amount of attention and is often addressed as a “frame,” beginning with foundational theory work of Will Eisner (2008, 39). Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007) prominently conceives of comics as a system of interlocking frames on various levels coalescing into a “multiframe” (2007, 22, 24, 28; see also Lefèvre 2012, 73). So far, these approaches have not been brought into dialogue with theories of cognition and political framing. Only very few articles consider framing as a cognitive phenomenon or political strategy. Nevertheless, several scholars have demonstrated the usefulness of a multi-­ level framing approach to describe culturally shared frames of thought through a close reading of the formal enclosing elements of the graphic narrative text (Meyer 2010, Denson 2012; Böger 2017; Fisher Davies 2018; Schmid 2018; Bachmann and Schmid 2021). This study presents the first comprehensive account of the frames and framing practices materialized in the documentary graphic narrative book. In contrast to quantitative or experimental forms of framing analysis which are pertinent to the social sciences and which seek to determine the prevalence of specific cognitive frames in producers or audiences, the method applied in this study will be a qualitative one. The aim of this work is not to single out one “correct” reading or pinpoint authorial intent, but to describe especially salient interpretative options manifested in the respective texts. In these efforts, methods of both literary and rhetorical criticism will be used. As Jim Kuypers discusses, “a rhetorical version of framing analysis begins with the assumption that frames induce us to view issues and situations in a particular way.” In the analysis of news, he employs rhetorical criticism to “inductively [look] for themes that reside within news narratives across time and then determin[e] how those themes are framed” (2010, 298). This approach will be transferred to the documentary graphic narrative book. As already discussed, the terms “frame” and “framing” may refer to a variety of different visual, textual, and cognitive phenomena, even within

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this study. Especially in graphic literature, the different levels and aspects of frames and framing are inextricably intertwined. The approach aims to illustrate how the authors influence the meaning-making process on the various levels of the graphic narrative book concerning the conflicts and crises they report on. The way this multi-level process is implemented into the text will be discussed as “framing.” To facilitate better reading flow, I will refrain from mentioning in every instance that I consider the phenomena discussed as pertaining to framing practices.

1.1   Frames and Cognition: Making Sense of Experience The concept of framing has drawn significant attention in recent years and extends beyond academic expert audiences. Several instructional books advise communication professionals and other interested parties on how to employ framing techniques: cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who also founded the communications agency FrameLab, has written The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (2014), explaining how “liberals” should choose their words to reach their key demographics. In Thinking Fast and Slow (2012), psychologist, 2002 Nobel Prize laureate, and leading proponent of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman explains cognitive biases and how they influence decision making. Both bestselling authors Kahneman and Lakoff stress that cognition is largely shaped by unconscious processes that select and filter information and make us prioritize aspects of reality instead of letting us access our surroundings impartially. Moreover, Thinking Fast and Slow contains a reprint of Kahneman’s groundbreaking 1984 article “Choices, Values, and Frames,” co-authored with his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, in which they discuss the effects of framing on decision making. Numerous other publications instruct “leaders” and managers how to optimize their career performances via framing strategies; likewise, self-­ help guides employ the approach, or, at least, the terminology, promising readers to help find inner peace and happiness. As these examples indicate, framing encompasses a wide variety of different fields and uses. The same is true of its application across various academic fields. Such diverse disciplines as sociology, political science, and psychology, but also philosophy, media and communication studies, and linguistics have developed theories of framing. As a fundamental metaphor

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of comprehension, framing translates well between different contexts and is discussed by narratologist Mieke Bal as a “traveling concept” (2002, 133). This translatability of the term coincidentally presents a major advantage but also a significant challenge for the concept. Naturally, the different approaches are geared toward the research interests of their respective fields. Therefore, Robert M. Entman describes frame theory in his landmark 1993 article “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm” as essentially “disparate” and “scattered” (51). For instance, the study of frames commonly focuses either on their material realizations or on their cognitive processing, hence oscillating between the literal and the metaphorical pole of the term (Wirth 2013, 20). Nevertheless, Werner Wolf convincingly argues that, at the very least, the various applications of the concept “converge in one frame function, namely to guide and even to enable interpretation” (2006, 3). To this end, frames label, categorize, and associate on the one hand, and they select, delimit, and structure, on the other. In doing so, frames also fulfill a critical function in everyday life: they simplify reality by suggesting default assumptions and evaluations that reduce complexity and enable us to fall back on what we know, predominantly on an unconscious level (cf. Lakoff 2014, xi). Such limitation of thought options enables us to navigate the world efficiently. This entails that once a frame is accepted and internalized by audiences, it becomes increasingly hard to break with it. Cognitive scientists attribute this phenomenon to the presence of two distinct “complementary mental modules: the neocortical and the hippocampal learning/memory systems” in the brain (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000, 94; see also Kahneman 2012). The neocortical system provides “schematic knowledge” as “the cognitive backdrop against which the stimulus world is construed” and is “highly resistant to modification or change.” In turn, the hippocampal system “enables perceivers to form temporary representations of novel or surprising stimulus events,” which only enter the generic long-term knowledge when activated regularly (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000, 94). These dual systems enable us to understand new stimuli in terms of a stable fundament of prior experience that only changes with repeated counterindication. Activated automatically by the neocortical system as part of the “cognitive unconscious” (Lakoff 2014, xii), frames are slow to modify. Likewise, it is straining to consciously make the effort of taking the proverbial step back and questioning our perception to become aware of the frames we have adopted. Generally, this step is avoided in everyday life in

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favor of what Kahneman calls “cognitive ease” (2012, 59; see also Lakoff 1987, 5). It is simply easier for us to apply the thought patterns that we have already internalized instead of approaching a situation cluelessly, even when thinking “outside the box” might yield more advantageous results. The implications of this aspect of human cognition are far-reaching, and the influence of framing on opinion formation is well-substantiated. In a now-classic experiment, Tversky and Kahneman demonstrate that an alternative framing of a problem either in terms of potential loss or of gain inverts the willingness of test subjects to take risks (1981). Likewise, the usage of competing terms that highlight different aspects influences political leanings. To cite just one example, a study by political scientists Adam F.  Simon and Jennifer Jerit showed that the exclusive use of either the term “baby” or the term “fetus” in articles elicited increased or decreased support for banning so-called partial-birth abortion in participants (2007). Hence, word choice matters, as different terminology invokes different frames that highlight different aspects of the same issue. Importantly, by adopting the same language as a political opponent, we perpetuate their frame and, thus, mode of thinking, even if we negate what was said, Lakoff stresses (2014, xii). Indeed, psychological studies have shown that even when an accusation is negated, it is nevertheless linked to the accused in an incriminating way (Fine 2006, 123); indeed, belief in an assumption is frequently maintained even when indicators of its falseness are presented (Gilbert 1991). Therefore, framing is an essential task for political actors that seek to shape discourses by establishing frames that are favorable to them. The recent rise of right-wing populism with its promises of essential and stable categories may at least partly be explained by a hunger for simplicity in a rapidly changing world. To expose such categories as discursive constructions instead of naturalized facts continues to be a core ambition for the humanities. Even though categorization constitutes a fundamental mechanism of human meaning-making, it is an important task to strip categories of their self-evidence and explore how frames of thought perpetuate power structures. One such way to problematize established frames is to facilitate tension between such categories, for instance, by combining a medium and genre which, in their conventional understanding, appear to be at odds with one another.

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1.2   Documentary Comics: A Very Brief History To the uninitiated, the term “documentary comics” may appear oxymoronic. Even “graphic nonfiction” as an umbrella term for comics based on actual events might seem counterintuitive. Since their advent in the nineteenth century, comics have conventionally been associated with fantasy and entertainment—themes that still dominate mainstream publications. In apparent contrast, the genre of documentary entails accurate representation based on facts and observations. However, it has become well-­ accepted that graphic narratives are capable of telling true stories taken from the actual world, despite their mainstream legacy. Often, graphic nonfiction makes productive use of its particular medial capacities to address complex issues that elude more straightforward means of representation, especially concerning the representation of crises. Many of the works of so-called alternative comics (Hatfield 2005) revolve around experiences of illness, persecution, or war. Finding a means of expression for traumatic experience, personal or collective, constitutes a central aspect of the emergence of nonfiction comics. Hillary Chute, for instance, traces back the rise of nonfiction graphic narratives in the late twentieth century to the crisis of representation induced by the Second World War and the holocaust (2016, 5), and Birte Wege connects documentary comics to the changes in visual culture after 9/11 (2019, 14). Here, comics serves as a means to problematize and negotiate preconceived notions of factuality. Indeed, graphic narrative very much highlights that fact and fiction—or fiction and nonfiction—do not constitute essential categories or pertain to specific content or media, but rather are matters of convention and contextualization. Markers in, adjacent to, and around a text indicate whether we should receive a representation as factual or imaginary, and as readers, we may very well disagree with such suggestions. As scholars like Hayden White have extensively demonstrated, narrative fiction and nonfiction primarily function by the same inherent principles. Hence, the distinction routinely comes down to a matter of framing as well. In terms of narrative persuasion, however, it is important to note that a story’s fictionality appears not to be a hindrance to its persuasiveness. Even when readers are aware that a story is fictional, it may have a persuasive effect on their real-­ world beliefs. Accordingly, “research in a variety of domains shows that the fact-fiction distinction is overstated” (Green et  al. 2004, 161; see Chap. 5).

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Still, the relationship of graphic narrative and truth-telling is complex and multi-faceted. When looking at the history of comics and factuality, the type of true story that graphic narratives tell has changed over time. One might start with educational publications. Since the 1940s, educational comics have communicated didactic content to more or less enthusiastic students (Mickwitz 2016, 14, 2019; Vanderbeke 2019). Aimed at younger audiences, their primary purpose was to spark readerly interest through a medium associated with entertainment and excitement.3 Although these works convey “true” information about the actual world, their main purpose is to adapt and remediate already established and verified information. Telling original factual stories as graphic narratives was introduced by underground comix in the 1970s.4 Series of alternative comics such as Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (2003) introduced the notion of using graphic narrative not only to tell true stories but to document experiences that would otherwise go unrecorded. Graphic memoirs chronicle and reveal personal experiences and worldviews, often in a confessional manner. As part of graphic memoir, transforming actual experiences through drawing provides a means to underline the inherently subjective nature of life-writing (cf. Chaney 2011, 4). In this case, cartooning serves as a means to express ultimately private experiences and emotional states instead of making educational content more palatable. Alternative comics and especially graphic memoirs soon came to be recognized as “an emerging literature” (Hatfield 2005). The success of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (2003), which was first serialized in the 1980s and won Spiegelman the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, marks a paradigm shift for comics “in aligning the graphic novel medium with the idea of realist documentary, all within a wider forum of the mainstream book market” (Adams 2008, 195). Although Maus is predominantly (auto)biographical, is has laid the groundwork for documentary comics. Spiegelman not only works through his family’s history but also documents his father’s experience in a form of history writing; notably, the work has introduced the strategy of using a self-reflexive framing narrative to contextualize his father’s witness account of Auschwitz. In the 1990s, a form of comics emerged that does not primarily chronicle the author’s personal experiences or family history but seeks to document the experiences of others by way of reportage. Pioneered by Joe Sacco, comics journalism has become an established element of alternative comics and gained recognition among literature enthusiasts. For his first

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major work Palestine, which was first serialized in the early 1990s and later released as a collected volume (2006), Sacco traveled to the Middle East to conduct his research. Whereas Palestine is still strongly autobiographical and focusses on the author’s own impressions and reflections of the places he visits, in his later works, Sacco has established a new form, which will be called “documentary comics.”5 At this point, one may take a step back, however, and ask whether the idea to draw reality for documentary purposes is really so new and unique. Without qualification, such a claim can hardly be maintained. The desire to visually “capture” events and occurrences of political and historical importance undoubtedly precedes the twentieth century. To leave a visual account of experiences on canvas, paper, or tapestry and, in doing so, materialize an account of reality may well be considered a fundamentally human ambition. Comics scholars trace documentary impulses in visual culture back to drawings and paintings, from the representation of the Norman conquest of England on the Bayeux Tapestry in the eleventh century to William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century woodcuts and Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War series that depicts the Spanish-French war in the early nineteenth century (see Lefèvre 2013, 50–51; Chute 2016, 29 ff.; Duncan et al. 2016, 1, 13 ff.). Dirk Vanderbeke convincingly argues that before comics became a mass medium in the nineteenth century, graphic narratives were primarily used for factual depiction. Before photography had been invented and verbal literacy had become widespread, graphic narrative allowed for making statements about the world that could be understood by large parts of the mostly illiterate European population in the Early Modern Age (2019). However, this legacy of manual recording was ruptured by the advent of the camera as a visual recording tool, which has thoroughly shaped our understanding of documentation ever since. From the beginning of the twentieth century onward, recording reality has essentially been synonymous with photography, film, and audio recording. Although comics undoubtedly connects to a long tradition of graphic documentation, this current manifestation must be approached as a reaction to a cultural environment shaped by the idea of photographic evidence. The influence is clearly traceable in documentary comics. For Joe Sacco, in particular, “photography is the visual medium his work is most in dialogue with, and many of his framing choices clearly demonstrate that this dialogue structures his aesthetic and critical sensibilities” (Scherr 2015, 121; see also Wege 2019). Indeed, the rediscovery of graphic narrative for

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documentary purposes specifically critiques the all too simple notion of “capturing reality” through recording technologies. For documentary comics, as conceived of in this study, the aspect of materializing observations is essential. Understood broadly, the term “documentary comics” may include various works and genres that serve as a record of actual events. Besides the already mentioned educational and autobiographical comics, this includes the growing corpus of comics biographies, travel writing, or essayistic comics. In The Unquotable Trump (2017a), for example, R. Sikoryak illustrates actual quotes by US President Donald Trump with cartoon images inspired by the stockpile of the comics canon. In another work, Terms and Conditions (2017b), Sikoryak uses the same approach to reframe the iTunes user agreement. Although these works document actual items or statements, their primary mode of operation is humorously reframing these nonfiction elements by adding fantastic imagery. Similarly, editorial cartoons form a longstanding tradition of commenting upon public discourse by means of exaggerations, metaphor, and symbolism. Likewise, nonfiction comics intersects with political advocacy work; for instance, Gord Hill’s The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010) or The Antifa Comic Book (2018) employ graphic narrative as a form of counter-­ historiography. These works often use similar framing strategies as those discussed in this study. However, even though they are based on facts, they reframe already established historical events rather than reporting newly gathered accounts. In this study, documentary comics will be understood in a narrower sense as a form reportage, following the approach of social documentary.6 In particular, documentaries generally do not arise from professional obligations but personal moral convictions; they represent the experiences and give voice to the interests of others (Nichols 2001, 3). Accordingly, Nina Mickwitz stresses the notion of the encounter as a basic premise of the form (2016, 9; see also Chute 2016, 205). As a reporter, the author actively seeks out regions of crisis, records their observations, and conducts interviews with witnesses and people affected (cf. Weber and Rall 2017, 1). Coincidentally, the comics form serves to disrupt naturalized assumptions of medial truth-telling, but also to generate affect and empathy for the represented groups and individuals. Moreover, recording actual events and gathering oral testimony serves not only an informational but also a moral end. Following an ethical imperative, the author seeks to portray the experiences of others in conflicts and crises often ignored by the

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fast-paced news cycle, or which go against dominant cultural narratives. Hence, within the self-set ethical boundaries of the genre, documentary comics borders on advocacy work, arguing for the plights of disenfranchised groups, and criticizing Western society and its media landscape. Even though earlier works such as the aforementioned Maus (2003), Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2006), or the 1988 compendium Brought to Light: Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals, and Covert Action by Joyce Brabner and Tom along with Yeats Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz (see Mickwitz 2019) constitute important predecessors, documentary comics as a genre narrowly defined has emerged since the turn of the millennium. Six genre-defining documentary graphic narrative books have been selected for this study. The earliest work of documentary comics in the presented definition is Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (2000), which I consider to be prototypical. In contrast to Palestine, Sacco now lets his own experiences recede into the background and focusses more on his interview partners. Besides Goražde, the chapters in this book will systematically focus on two more books by Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (2003) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), along with Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2009), Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2015), and Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (2016). More works by these authors will be brought to the discussion for comparison and to address particular issues. All of these works more or less follow the formula that Sacco has established with Goražde, despite the fact that Guy Delisle understands his own work as primarily memoiristic, and Josh Neufeld omits autobiographical aspects. What connects all these works is the fact that they employ graphic narrative to make their cases about specific crises and to tell the stories of particular individuals they have encountered. Approaching nonfiction graphic narratives as “documentary” constitutes a steadily growing trend in comics studies as well. The concept has been pioneered by Jeff Adams in his book Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism (2008), and Benjamin Woo, who proposed the application of the term to Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2010). More recently, the approach has been articulated further by Hillary Chute in Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016), Nina Mickwitz in Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age (2016) and Birte Wege in Drawing on the Past: Graphic Narrative Documentary (2019).7 The works that will be considered in this study as “documentary

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comics” have been previously addressed as “comics journalism” (see, for instance, Vanderbeke 2010; Worden 2015; Duncan et  al. 2016; Weber and Rall 2017). However, the concept of documentary offers a more precise analytical category for books of graphic narrative reportage. “Journalism” serves as an umbrella term for different genres that seek to inform about actual events: broadly defined, it “involves seeking out information, vetting it, crafting and contextualizing it, and getting it to a public” (Uricchio 2019, 29). In this sense, the form “documentary” can be subsumed under this category as a particular type of journalistic text (see Corner 2002, 259; Stein and Cashman 2009, 449). Even though specialized longer formats, such as investigative reportages, do exist, without further specification, journalism is commonly associated with news journalism. A graphic narrative book, in contrast, takes several years to produce and clearly cannot be considered “news” (Woo 2010, 173). In particular, the “slow” medium of the long-form graphic narrative book reports on conflicts and crises that have lost their newsworthiness in the public eye. As singular releases, the documentary graphic narrative book aligns with the production cycle of documentary film. Although comics journalism does include pieces that address current events, which are published and sometimes serialized as webcomics or in newspapers (see below), the long form of the graphic narrative book constitutes the dominant outlet for nonfiction comics. Most importantly, the term “documentary” highlights the personal motivation of its creator and a particular activist stance, as opposed to fulfilling an assignment for a journalistic outlet. Documentarians advocate for social change, seeking to reframe and educate about the plights of others in order for readers to reevaluate their own views. Distinctions made concerning photography offer a helpful analogy: photojournalists, as Martha Rosler proposes, are generally hired by agencies and news organizations and have less personal attachment to their topic, whereas documentary photographers work of their own accord and without any institutional safety, choosing their stories based on personal conviction. “In reality, however, many photographers engage in both practices, and the same image may function in both frames as well,” Rosler concludes (2004, 225). Both personal motivation and long-form publication format form basic premises of the selected works. Moreover, documentary often involves a self-reflexive address of its underlying fact-finding processes that mainstream journalism generally eschews—a tenet strongly advanced by the medium of comics.

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In documentary comics, the framing dualism of exclusion and inclusion takes on a particularly interesting role: graphic narrative breaks down stories into single panels; hence, like photographs, comics panels only show portions of a represented scenario. However, on the comics page, the reader is confronted with a multitude of panels, which draws attention to their very status as fragments. The aspect of exclusion becomes expressly evident in graphic narrative, as comics provide only limited information in their panels and thus rely heavily on the reader to “fill in the gaps” and construct the story from the fragments on the page. This process of “observing the parts and perceiving the whole” was famously termed “closure” by Scott McCloud (1994, 63). Therefore, the reading of comics is particularly frame-driven: since the reader only receives fragmentary information, filling in the gaps requires frames of reference that reliably let the reader form inferences to arrive at a coherent story. Likewise, the procedure of cartooning, which according to McCloud, amounts to “amplification through simplification” (1994, 30), is essentially the work of framing, privileging certain aspects of a represented character or scene while discarding others. Cartoon drawings constitute abstractions of people, places, and things that, in contrast to naturalistic depictions, draw heavily on conventionalized schemata (cf. Cohn 2013, 25). By translating information into the visual language of comics, it is being reframed within the logic and conditions of the medium (cf. Mickwitz 2016, 35). Moreover, the practice of drawing highlights the very presence of the artist as a mediator of the represented events. In the introduction to his 2012 compendium Journalism, Joe Sacco characterizes the subjective element of his work as follows: A cartoonist assembles elements deliberately and places them with intent on a page. There is none of the photographer’s luck at snapping a picture at precisely the right moment. A cartoonist “snaps” his drawing at any moment he or she chooses. It is this choosing that makes cartooning an inherently subjective medium. (xi–xii)

The graphic reconstruction of the represented events that Sacco addresses distinguishes comics from other documentary media. Although subjective elements in photography and film have long been theorized (for an overview, see Schmid 2016, 27), camera-based media hold a long-­ established convention of factual representation. In contrast, comics and documentary present an unfamiliar combination of medium and genre.

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Whereas camera-made images make it easy to forget their mediatedness, nonfiction graphic narratives force the reader to continually confront the tension between factual aspiration and its apparent interpretative and subjective faculties. Comics cannot conceal its reliance on readers to extrapolate from the limited narrative discourse, making its mediatedness especially noticeable. Hence, reading comics is inherently characterized by an awareness that the cartoonist is framing the reported scenarios and incidents. At the same time, documentary cartoonists also seek to tell compelling stories that make readers empathize with the documented individuals. Therefore, documentary graphic narratives operate in a mode of persuasive tension between narrative immersion and self-reflexive genre critique. The explicitly or implicitly stated intent of the authors is to present honest works of documentary that do not exaggerate or exclude. This does mean that their works do not include partisan edges and biases of their own. Authors seek to persuade readers of a certain interpretation of the reported events and, thus, constitute rhetoric in the sense of “the strategic use of communication … to achieve specifiable goals” (Kuypers 2010, 288; original emphasis). Documentary comics employs factual graphic narrative to argue very specific cases of the authors choosing, framing them in a manner that aligns with their conclusions and convictions. Besides their long-form publications, the selected authors have also produced shorter works, often published in cooperation with established magazines, especially as webcomics. It is no coincidence that several of these works address the pressing topic of the ongoing refugee crisis: Joe Sacco created a reportage about African migrants titled “The Unwanted” for the Virginia Quarterly Review (2010), Josh Neufeld traces the route of Syrian refugees in “Road to Germany: $2400” for Foreign Policy (2016), and Sarah Glidden pre-released a part of her reportage in Syria for Rolling Blackouts as “The Waiting Room” on Cartoon Movement (2011). The mediality of webcomics allows authors to react more quickly to current events, and the platforms that host them enable interaction with readers on comment sections and sharing on social media (see Mickwitz 2016, 143; Schmid 2019). In recent years, several established news organizations have indeed published short-form comics articles, including the New York Times (Halpern and Sloan 2017), The Guardian (Positive Negatives 2015), or Mother Jones (Quinn and Roche 2014). Significantly, Josh Neufeld’s A.D. was first serialized as a webcomic in Smith Magazine (2007–2008). In its digital manifestation, the work pointedly includes audio and video materials and links to other medial

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resources, thus, creating a wider archive of Hurricane Katrina (see Hoefer 2012). The subsequent print publication by Pantheon Books forgoes these digital possibilities, gaining, however, the affordances of the print medium. In the afterword—a distinct feature of the book—the author explains, “I always planned for ‘A.D.’ to be a book. When graphic narratives are presented on the web—often one panel at a time—something of the gestalt of the comic book is lost” (2009, 193). Never a mere transfer medium or vessel, its physical form constitutes an essential aspect of graphic narrative. The graphic narrative book remains the most sophisticated and elaborate form of documentary comics, and the printed page itself serves as an antithesis to the accelerating media culture of the digital age.8 To explain why the anachronistic form of the book is such an important aspect of documentary comics as a twenty-first-century media phenomenon, its place in this wider cultural environment needs to be considered.

1.3   Post-Truth Politics and Twenty-First-­Century Visual Culture The advent of the digital era in the late twentieth century presents a watershed moment for the production and consumption of fact-based media, with their very distinction becoming increasingly blurred. The widespread adoption of smartphones with powerful digital cameras enables on-the-­ scene witnesses to document events as they unfold. Amateurs may now produce video clips or podcasts that have a similar look and feel to the programs of multinational media corporations. Simultaneously, image-­ processing software has become widely available, allowing moderately competent users to manipulate pictures and videos in ways that formerly required considerable skill and resources. Social media has made spreading such materials cheap, uncomplicated, and immeasurably fast. In stark contrast, creating documentary graphic narratives entails an arduous amount of meticulous manual labor and may take years to accomplish. Against the ubiquitous and powerful recording technologies, they posit drawing—a form of image production that is decidedly slower and overtly subjective. As a craft, comics requires practice and education, positing professionalism against the egalitarian tendency of amateurs increasingly having equal access to visual culture production through cameras. Likewise, reading a graphic narrative book of several hundreds of pages,

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such as Sacco’s Footnotes or Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts, requires substantial time and effort.9 So, why do people take the time to write and read documentary  graphic narratives? After all, established publishers have enough “faith in [their] market value” to release such massive works (Mickwitz 2016, 65). To understand the exceptional position of the documentary graphic narrative book, a closer look at the cultural environment that correlates with its emergence is warranted. In recent years, trust in the capacity of the mainstream media to represent the world accurately and honestly has increasingly deteriorated. Shifts in technology and attacks from right-wing populists continue to undermine fundamental assumptions about the representation of facts and evidence. At the same time, media ownership has experienced a contraction, as William Uricchio discusses, which led to the consolidation of power with global media conglomerates, “emblematized today by figures such as Rupert Murdoch or companies such as Bertelsmann and The Walt Disney Company” (2019, 26). Documentary comics has a unique position in this new media ecology. Commonly, documentary cartoonists critique the political status quo and the mainstream media in a non-partisan manner— the most striking example arguably being Joe Sacco’s scathing fictional satire of the Obama era, Bumf Vol. 1 (2014). Nevertheless, in their documentary works, the authors adhere to strict ethics and journalistic standards, and conscientiously gaps and inconsistencies in their reporting. Since comics constitutes a medium that so obviously constructs and frames the events and scenarios it seeks to document, a closer look at the contemporary conception of factuality and “Truth” is warranted. Eliminating gatekeeping mechanisms and communicational hierarchies, the advent of the digital age was initially hailed by some scholars as the catalyst for a more egalitarian democratic society (cf. Curran 2013, 227; Enli 2015, 87). However, it would soon become clear that the public sphere of the twenty-first century is increasingly polarized and fragmented into “sphericules,” as Todd Gitlin proposed as early as 1998 (173). In combination with the aforementioned development of media contraction, Uricchio writes that this “diffusion of the means of production and access to the means of distribution … has led to a considerable churn and uncertainty” (2019, 26). The digital era has allowed for a much greater variety of voices, yet it has not brought along a greater appreciation for the social mechanisms or the underlying power structures that devise the distinction of facts. Instead, the assumption that facts constitute natural and exclusive entities rather than dynamic social framing processes prevails as common

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sense. Therefore, the erosion of the mainstream media’s authority to establish facts has created a vacuum that has, to an alarming degree, been filled with conspiracy-prone and propaganda-driven alt-media. Likewise, the capacity of algorithms to distribute and curate news items has led to a decrease of common ground (cf. 31). With both the 2015 campaigns leading toward the election of real-­ estate billionaire and reality television personality Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States and the British “Brexit” referendum, the term “post-truth” has gained currency. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary selected the term as the “Word of the Year,” and the German Language Foundation bestowed an equivalent title upon its translation “post-faktisch.” In their 2016 cover story “The Art of the Lie,” the British weekly The Economist claims that the post-truth era describes a moment in history in which “truth is not falsified, or contested, but of secondary importance.” One may question, though, whether such insights are newsworthy at all. Certainly, the dismissal of facts to substantiate power structures is not new. Science historian Lee McIntyre suggests that “what seems new in the post-truth era is a challenge not just to the idea of knowing reality but to the existence of reality itself” (2018, 10; original emphasis). However, proclaiming a “post-truth era” conceals the fact that the contexts of the phenomena associated with this term are shaped by history. Moreover, the sic transit gloria mundi-manner of suggesting a binary between “truth” and “post-truth” disregards the fundamental constructedness of facts and evidence. Though others have adopted the term since (see, for instance, Keyes 2004), it is generally accepted that “post-truth” has been coined by Serbian American playwright and author Steve Tesich in his 1992 article “A Government of Lies,” published in The Nation. Tesich criticizes the acceptance of the lies that justified the First Gulf War during the first Bush administration, arguing that after the Watergate scandal, the American public “came to equate the truth with bad news and we didn’t want bad news anymore … We looked to our government to protect us from the truth” (12). By way of example, the late President George H. W. Bush’s 1988 responded to the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S. Navy: “I will never apologize for the United States. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are” (CSpanClassics 2010). However, such chauvinism in the face of facts forms a longstanding tradition, connecting to a larger cultural myth of powerful men being able to defy “the facts.” The call to “demand the impossible” attributed to Che Guevara exemplifies this gendered dynamic,

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as does the “reality distortion field” that Steve Jobs was said to possess. To proclaim defiance of facts is often plainly a gesture of power. In his recent book Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018), sociologist Bruno Latour traces back the current moment of “post-truth” to post-Cold War deregulation of global markets. Specifically, Latour singles out the efforts of what he calls the “globalist ruling classes” to undermine the dawning realization of impending climate change in order to politically maintain an economic status quo that is no longer environmentally sustainable (17). As both Tesich and Latour convincingly argue, the current moment of “post-truth” stems from a historical trajectory, decades in the making, that precedes digital tools of information warfare. A decade before the current discussion of post-truth politics, a more comical term was popularized for a similar dynamic: because comedian Stephen Colbert felt that “it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are,” in 2005 he coined the term “truthiness” in response to the post-9/11 Bush administration (Rabin 2006). The term was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2005 and Merriam-Webster in 2006. According to Colbert, “truthiness” essentially means: “What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true” (ibid.). Inadvertently, Colbert provides an apt definition of a Foucauldian regime of truth (Foucault 1984, 73). Accordingly, the philosophy and style of “Trumpism” does not mark a historical rupture but stems from a historical development of right-wing populism, which has now embraced the means of digital technologies and will, most likely, not disappear with the end of his term of office. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in the public conversation about the truth or falsehood of Trump’s and other populist’s statements, it appears that both documentary evidence and scientifically verified facts—what some commentators envision as “the Truth”—do not sway their supporters. The validity of a claim is verified less by its content and the evidence brought forth, but rather by the person or entity uttering them and their group membership. Examples of this dynamic can be found easily. The U.S. news media have exposed countless fabrications and untruths by the Trump administration. Such accusations are routinely met with a wholesale dismissal of news media as “fake news,” and President Trump has infamously claimed that the news media are “the enemy of the people.” Often, these lies are downplayed based on the reasoning that absolute truth and objective facts do not exist. Contradicting documentary evidence is rejected.

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Perhaps, the most iconic example of this dynamic concerns the 2017 Presidential inauguration ceremony: after the inauguration, the Trump administration falsely claimed that President Trump had drawn the largest inauguration crowd in history. The presentation of a wide-angle photograph disproved his claim but was famously rejected by the President’s spokesperson Kellyanne Conway with the declaration that the President had “alternative facts.” However, the conclusion that documentary evidence does not matter anymore is too simple. Rather, misinformation is weaponized in different ways. Concerning the inauguration, according to The Guardian, a government photographer was later instructed to crop the official photograph to edit out the empty space “where the crowd ended” (Swaine 2018). The visual frame of the photograph was adjusted to fit the official narrative. Since sociologists and philosophers have time and again attacked positivistic notions of facts as naturally occurring entities, The Economist attributes the rise of “post-truth politics” in part also to critical thinking toward the media as practiced in left-leaning academia (see also McIntyre 2018, 93). This implicit accusation has not gone unheard in academic circles: as early as 2004, Bruno Latour wondered ironically, in response to the debate about climate change, whether he was “foolishly mistaken” in his intention “to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts” (227; original emphasis).10 Latour claims that the “constructedness” of facts has been misconstrued as their invalidity or falseness. “In plain English,” he explains, “to say something is constructed means that it’s not a mystery that has popped out of nowhere” (2005, 88). Indeed, practices, institutions, and networks are essential to the construction of facts and can outweigh the inherent validity: “No attested knowledge can stand on its own … Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture” (Latour 2018, 23). Likewise, Lakoff stresses, “[f]acts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance … If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled” (2014, xiv). Wittingly or not, politicians and pundits in the vein of Trumpism, to a considerable extent, embrace the insight that facts are constructed and that they rely on an institutional network—and they have used it to attack and undermine that common culture. Perhaps even more so, they have embraced the practice of proactively framing a scenario to influence public discourses.

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It is a striking correlation that the effort by political elites to dismantle the shared sets of established facts coincides with the emergence of comics as a documentary form. Documentary comics is inherently premised both on the author’s integrity and personal accountability—qualities that are strikingly absent in both post-truth politics and in the ubiquitous free-­ floating images and video clips on the Internet that appear to document actual events. Moreover, documentary graphic narratives do not just state what “the facts” are, but specifically represent the fact-finding process. Although the different authors have their own convictions and agendas, a critique of Western politics and media culture is inherent in documentary as a comics genre. As a general tendency, the selected authors not only criticize the global political status quo but also problematize the medial mechanisms to represent facts, which increasingly fail to convince the public at large. Documentary comics punctures naturalized assumptions of medial truth-telling and mandates that we reconsider conventionalized preconceptions of factuality. In this respect, comics as documentary presents an antithesis to the claims to objectivity based on naturalized facts in other media. In drawing and thus overtly transforming the events that they depict, documentary cartoonists do not lay claim to the authenticity of their stories based on inherent medial capacities. Instead, the authors authenticate their claims through complex argument, and importantly by showing their personal integrity. They employ narrative techniques to make transparent the complex web that led to the construction of the facts they seek to establish and to stimulate debate about medial representation of facts, per se. By virtue of its conspicuous framing capacities, comics problematizes documentary. This tension serves to spark further discussions that are sorely needed to make sense of both social and political crises, and the crisis of representation that shapes twenty-first-century media culture.

1.4   Chapter Overview This study will disseminate the various layers of the graphic narrative book to investigate how comics materializes documentary and how framing practices guide the reader in interpreting the represented events. To this end, the corpus of documentary graphic narratives introduced above will be discussed in terms of three different aspects of framing. Initially, however, the second chapter will discuss the central theoretical concepts of the study in detail, that is, frame theory, documentary as a genre, and the

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medium of comics as means of materializing documentary. After discussing the approaches to frames and framing from various disciplines, cognitive narratology is introduced to account for the functions of cognitive frames in the comprehension of narrative texts. Next, the history and the technological foundation of documentary are discussed; following, the chapter addresses recent shifts in the perception of medial truth claims, connecting post-truth politics to notions of a “post-documentary” or “post-photographic” era. Documentary comics is identified as a countermovement to digitalism, the mediality of comics presenting a unique way to materialize documentary in the mode of oral history. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 then explore different types of framing instances in the graphic narrative book. The analytical separation of the literary artifact into different layers certainly does not reflect the reading process itself. Since “analysis, or simply description, cannot differentiate except by ripping apart a tight web of connections,” as narratologist Gérard Genette phrases it, “[t]he demands of exposition constrain us to this unavoidable violence simply by the fact that critical discourse, like any other discourse, cannot say everything at once” (1983, 215; original emphasis). Hence, even though readers experience the different framing mechanism at work all at once, this study will compare the approaches of the individual works and authors in terms of three overarching instances: material framing, visual framing, and narrative framingChapter 3 will explore the paratext as part of the graphic narrative book’s extended medial apparatus and as a distinguishing factor concerning digital media. In particular, the chapter will discuss phenomena such as titles and covers, prefaces and blurbs, and notes and other appendices. The paratext is discussed not as a stable material frame or ontological boundary for the book but rather as a pragmatic space to manifest framing strategies—which are subject to change with editions. The different functions of the paratext include advertising the book as a commodity, sparking the reader’s interest, and offering clues toward the generic status—and, importantly, to guide (potential) readers in their interpretation of the text and the represented conflicts. Chapter 4 addresses the visual textuality of comics, both in terms of cues for particular frames—for instance, a drawing style referencing a particular genre or period—and as framing techniques that structure the reader’s gaze by inclusion and exclusion of particular elements, through cartooning, perspective and compositions in panels and grids, and page layout. Documentary graphic narratives generally operate in a mode of

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tension between naturalistic and abstract styles; the chapter demonstrates how both used for particular emphases and to facilitate different types of realism. The multiplicity of co-present images on the double page determines that each panel is framed by the panoptical vision of its surrounding elements, which presents a unique environment for documentary framing. The chapter examines how, by juxtaposing particular images, meaning is created beyond the sum of its parts, disruptions are performed, and how visual cues guide the interpretation of the represented events. Finally, Chap. 5 discusses narrative framing strategies in the selected works. Each narrative discourse frames the represented events through particular representational choices. Moreover, different narrative levels frame each other: similar to a detective story, many documentary graphic narratives include a framing narrative that outlines the reporter’s investigation, and into which witness accounts are embedded. The chapter explores the various instances of graphic narrative framing: structural devices such as prologues and epilogues, embedded witness accounts and interviews as means of materializing oral history, and the role of the author as a subjective autodiegetic narrator as well as metajournalistic commentator. In particular, the chapter discusses how authors make productive use of the underlying contradiction that define documentary comics: authors both seek to immerse their readers in gripping stories, and they also draw attention to the constructedness of the reported events. By way of conclusion, Chap. 6 then discusses the place of comics in contemporary documentary media culture. As an emerging documentary phenomenon and a new visual language, comics enables authors to reframe the stagnating discourse of the mainstream media and interrogate its medial ideologies and truth claims. In its more enduring materiality, it presents a counterapproach to digital media, setting the limitation of single authorship and personal accountability against the vast availability of constantly developing information online.

Notes 1. Following Hillary Chute, I conceive of comics as “materializing” the represented events to stress the fact that graphic narratives “are not only about events but also, explicitly, about how we frame them” (2010, 2–3; original emphasis). 2. To highlight the fact that comics is a medium in its own right—one that is “plural in form,” the term “comics” will be “used with a singular verb”

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when referring to the medium (McCloud 1994, 9; see also Chute 2010, 5; 2017, 2). In turn, to enhance readability, individual works of documentary comics will be referred to as “documentary graphic narratives” where applicable (see Chute and DeKoven 2006). 3. In recent years, the product range of educational comics has increasingly incorporated works aimed at adult readers, such as Josh Neufeld’s adaptation of The Influencing Machine: Brook Gladstone on the Media (Gladstone and Neufeld 2012) or the “Graphic Guides” of the Introducing series by publisher Icon Books that include a variety of topics from physics to politics and history. 4. One notable exception would be true crime comics which retell stories of scandalous transgressions based on actual events and also emerged in the 1940s. These works are chiefly conceptualized as entertainments and are characterized by “melodrama, lurid sensationalism, and graphic depictions of violence” (Mickwitz 2016, 15; see also 2019). 5. Whereas authors of documentary comics commonly “employ autobiographic devices that serve to privilege narrative authenticity and to certify documentary truth, as they perceived it” (Adams 2008, 11), these accounts pointedly serve as a conduit to tell the stories of others. Hence, autobiographic elements serve as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself (see also Schmid 2020). 6. Nina Mickwitz opts for another option by claiming “documentary of social concern” as a sub-category (2016, 115). Yet, social concern will be treated here as a core element of documentary comics (see also Adams 2008, 9) and be considered a prerequisite for inclusion in the category. 7. Published after the completion of my PhD thesis on which this book is based, Drawing on the Past includes a chapter on Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza that addresses several of the same scenes and issues. Any similarities are coincidental. 8. Several of the selected works have also been published as eBooks on Kindle or ComiXology. This study will focus on the graphic narrative book as a bounded assemblage of printed pages, or codex (see Borsuk 2018, 47). As an emerging form, the documentary graphic narrative book in its digital form deserves scholarly attention in its own right. However, this study will assume that the printed materiality of the graphic narrative book is a constitutive element of its documentary practices (cf. Chute 2016, 14). 9. It is true that comics can be read very quickly—more so than other media, especially verbal literature. Nevertheless, documentary graphic narratives are generally designed to make the process of reading mindful and thorough in order to be gratifying and to unfold the medium’s unique potential. 10. Latour pioneered theorizing the constructedness of scientific facts and demonstrated how they are persuasively generated in conversations and

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­ iscussions among scientists and through literary inscription into docud ments (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 88, 151, 154). Yet, even in Laboratory Life, the authors stress, “Our argument is not that facts are not real, nor that they are merely artificial” (176).

References Adams, Jeff. 2008. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. Bern: Peter Lang. Bachmann, Christian A., and Johannes C.P.  Schmid, eds. 2021. Framing [in] Comics and Cartoons: Essays on Aesthetics, History, and Mediality. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann. Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press. Böger, Astrid. 2017. Kreative Zwischenräume. Medienästhetische Strategien des Rahmens und Übersetzens in Graphic Novels. In Übersetzen und Rahmen. Praktiken medialer Transformationen, ed. Claudia Benthien and Gabriele Klein, 75–87. Paderborn: Fink. Borsuk, Amaranth. 2018. The Book. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Brabner, Joyce, Alan Moore, Thomas Yeates, and Bill Sienkiewicz. 1989. Brought to Light: A Graphic Docudrama. New York: Eclipse Comics. Chaney, Michal A. 2011. Introduction. In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A.  Chaney, 3–12. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Chute, Hillary L. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. Disaster Drawn. Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2017. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New  York: HarperCollins. Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. Introduction: Graphic Narrative. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4, Winter): 767–782. Cohn, Neil. 2013. The Visual Language of Comics. Bloomsbury: London et al. Corner, John. 2002. Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions. Television & New Media 3 (3, Aug.): 255–269. CSpanClassics. 2010. GHW Bush: ‘I don’t care what the facts are.’ YouTube, December 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qatUWwIeg. Curran, James. 2013. Global Journalism: A Case Study of the Internet. In Contesting Media Power: Institutions, Politics, and Culture, ed. Nick Couldry and James Curran, 227–242. Lanham et al.: Rowman & Littlefield. Delisle, Guy. 2015. Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Translated by Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.

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Denson, Shane. 2012. Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective. In Transnational American Studies, ed. Udo J. Hebel, 561–580. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Duncan, Randy, Michael Ray Taylor, and David Stoddard. 2016. Creating Comics as Journalism, Memoir and Nonfiction. New York: Routledge. The Economist. 2016. Art of the Lie: Post-Truth Politics. Leaders, September 10. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/09/10/art-­of-­the-­lie. Eisner, Will. 2008. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: Norton & Company. Enli, Gunn. 2015. Mediated Authenticity: How the Media Constructs Reality. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang. Entman, Robert M. 1993. Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication 43 (4, Autumn): 51–58. Fine, Cordelia. 2006. A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives. New York: Norton. Fisher Davies, Paul. 2018. Goffman’s Frame Analysis, Modality and Comics. Studies in Comics 9 (2): 297–295. Foucault, Michel. 1984. Truth and Power. In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 51–76. New York: Pantheon. Genette, Gérard. 1983. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gilbert, Daniel T. 1991. How Mental Systems Believe. American Psychologist 46 (2 Feb.): 107–119. Gitlin, Todd. 1998. Public Sphere or Public Sphericules? In Media, Ritual, and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes and James Curran, 168–174. London and New York: Routledge. Gladstone, Brooke, and Josh Neufeld. 2012. The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media. New York and London: Norton. Glidden, Sarah. 2011. The Waiting Room. Cartoon Movement, April 13. http:// www.cartoonmovement.com/comic/10. ———. 2016. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Green, Melanie C., Jennifer Garst, and Timothy C. Brock. 2004. The Power of Fiction: Determinants and Boundaries. In The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines Between Entertainment and Persuasion, ed. J.J. Shrum, 161–176. Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Halpern, Jake, and Michael Sloan. 2017. Welcome to the New World. New York Times, January 6–September 30. https://www.nytimes.com/series/ syrian-­refugee-­family-­welcome-­america. Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

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Hill, Gord. 2010. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. ———. 2018. The Antifa Comic Book. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Hoefer, Anthony Dyer. 2012. A Revision of the Record: The Demands of Reading Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. In Comics and the American South, ed. Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted, 293–323. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Kahneman, Daniel. 2012. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. 1984. Choices, Values, and Frames. American Psychologist 39 (4, Apr.): 341–350. Keyes, Ralph. 2004. The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. New York: St. Martin’s. Kuypers, Jim A. 2010. Framing Analysis from a Rhetorical Perspective. In Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Paul D’Angelo and Jim Kuypers, 286–311. New York and London: Routledge. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2014. The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction: Chelsea Green. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter): 225–248. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge and Medford: Polity. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lefèvre, Pascal. 2012. Mise en scène and Framing: Visual Storytelling in Lone Wolf and Cub. In Critical Approaches to Comics, Theories and Methods, ed. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, 71–83. New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. The Modes of Documentary Comics. In Der dokumentarische Comic. Reportage und Biographie, ed. Dietrich Grünewald, 50–61. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann. Macrae, Neil C., and Galen V. Bodenhausen. 2000. Social Cognition: Thinking Categorically about Others. Annual Review of Psychology 51: 93–120. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: William Morrow. McIntyre, Lee C. 2018. Post-Truth. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Meyer, Christina. 2010. ‘Putting it into boxes’: Framing Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. In Trauma’s Continuum September 11th Re-visited, ed. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, and Andrew Gross. Special Issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies 55 (3): 479–494.

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Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics. Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. “True Story”: The Aesthetic Balancing Act of Documentary Comics. In Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism, ed. Laura Schlichting and Johannes C.  P. Schmid, Special Issue of ImageTexT 11 (1). Neufeld, Josh. 2007–2008. A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Smith Magazine. http://www.smithmag.net/afterthedeluge/. ———. 2009. A. D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Hardcover. New York: Pantheon. ———. 2016. The Road to Germany: $2400. Foreign Policy, January 29. https:// foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/29/the-­road-­to-­germany-­2400-­refugee-­syria-­ migrant-­germany-­nonfiction-­comic/. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Pekar, Harvey. 2003. American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar. New York: Ballantine Books. Positive Negatives. 2015. A Perilous Journey: Khalid’s Flight to Europe from Syria—An Illustrated Account. The Guardian, November 11. https://www. theguardian.com/world/ng-­interactive/2015/nov/11/a-­perilous-­journey-­ khalids-­story-­syrian-­refugee. Quinn, Audrey, and Jackie Roche. 2014. “Syria’s Climate-Fueled Conflict, In One Stunning Comic Strip.” Mother Jones, May 29, 2014. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/syria-climate-years-living-dangerouslysymbolia/. Rabin, Nathan. 2006. Interview: Stephen Colbert. Interview with Stephen Colbert. AV Club, January 25. https://tv.avclub.com/stephen-­ colbert-­1798208958. Rosler, Martha. 2004. Post-Documentary, Post-Photography? In Decoys and Disruptions. Selected Writings, 1975–2001, 207–244. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Sacco, Joe. 2000. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ———. 2003. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Hardcover. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2006. Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ———. 2009. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan. ———. 2010. The Unwanted, Part 1. Virginia Quarterly Review. https://www. vqronline.org/vqr-­gallery/unwanted-­part-­1. ———. 2012. Preface: A Manifesto, Anyone? In Journalism, xi–xiv. New  York: Metropolitan. ———. 2014. Bumf vol. 1. London: Jonathan Cape. Scherr, Rebecca. 2015. Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. Textual Practice 29 (1): 111–132.

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Schmid, Johannes C.P. 2016. Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood: The Photographic Image in the Graphic War Memoir. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann. ———. 2018. Graphic Nonviolence: Framing ‘Good Trouble’ in John Lewis’ March. In Envisioning Justice: Mediating the Question of Rights in American Visual Culture, ed. Astrid Böger and Nicole Maruo-Schröder. Special Issue of European Journal of American Studies 13 (4). http://journals.openedition. org/ejas/13922. ———. 2019. “Documentary Webcomics: Mediality and Contexts.” In Perspectives on Digital Comics, edited by Jeffrey S. J. Kirchoff and Mike P. Cook, 63–88. Jefferson: McFarland. ———. 2020. Comics as Memoir and Documentary: A Case Study of Sarah Glidden. In Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage, ed. Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 317–333. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sikoryak, R. 2017a. The Unquotable Trump. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2017b. Terms and Conditions. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Simon, Adama F., and Jennifer Jerit. 2007. Toward a Theory Relating Political Discourse, Media, and Public Opinion. Journal of Communication 57: 254–271. Spiegelman, Art. 2003. The Complete Maus. London et al.: Penguin. Stein, Sarah R., and Shaun Cashman. 2009. Documentaries, Motion Picture. In Encyclopedia of Journalism, ed. Christopher H. Sterling, 449–457. Los Angeles et al.: Sage. Swaine, Jon. 2018. Trump Inauguration Crows Photos Were Edited after He Intervened. The Guardian, September 6. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2018/sep/06/donald-­trump-­inauguration-­crowd-­size-­photos-­edited. Tesich, Steve. 1992. A Government of Lies. The Nation 254 (1, Jan.): 12–14. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. 1981. The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice. Science 211 (4481, Jan.): 453–458. Uricchio, William. 2019. Reassessing the Situation of the Text in the Algorithmic Age. In Situated in Translation: Cultural Communities and Media Practices, ed. Michaela Ott and Thomas Weber, 23–38. Bielefeld: Transcript. Vanderbeke, Dirk. 2010. In the Art of the Beholder: Comics as Political Journalism. In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures. Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives, ed. Mark Berninger et al., 70–81. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland. ———. 2019. “Graphic Narratives as Non-Fiction in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era.” In Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism, ed. Laura Schlichting and Johannes C. P. Schmid. Special Issue of ImageTexT 11 (1). Weber, Wibke, and Hans-Martin Rall. 2017. Authenticity in Comics Journalism. Visual Strategies for Reporting Facts. Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2017.1299020.

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Wege, Birte. 2019. Drawing on the Past: Graphic Narrative Documentary. Frankfurt and New York: Campus. Wirth, Uwe. 2013. Rahmenbrüche, Rahmenwechsel. Nachwort des Herausgebers, welches aus Versehen des Druckers zu einem Vorwort gemacht wurde. In Rahmenbrüche, Rahmenwechsel, ed. Uwe Wirth, 15–60. Berlin: Kadmos. Wolf, Werner. 2006. Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. In Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, 1–42. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Woo, Benjamin. 2010. Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Information and Experience in Joe Sacco’s Palestine. In The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form, ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest, 166–177. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Worden, Daniel, ed. 2015. The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

CHAPTER 2

Framing Actuality: Frame Theory, Graphic Narrative, and (Post)-Documentary

In his seminal introduction to documentary film, Bill Nichols likens the role of the documentarian to a lawyer: both reconstruct past events in a particular manner in order to make a case for their “clients” (2001, 4). Presenting proof of actual events lies at the heart of the genre: “Documentary (as an adjective and a noun),” as Hillary Chute succinctly puts it, “is about the presentation of evidence” (2016, 2; original emphasis). This description addresses not only a referentiality to the actual world, but also a distinctly pragmatic function of the genre; documentary revolves around framing the represented events in a particular manner to argue a point. In his comparison, Nichols asserts, documentaries may represent the world in the same way a lawyer may represent a client’s interests: they put the case for a particular view or interpretation of evidence before us. In this sense documentaries do not simply stand for others, representing them in ways they could not do themselves, but rather they more actively make a case or argument; they assert what the nature of a matter is to win consent or influence opinion. (2001, 4)

Reassembling the relevant incidents into a narrative from the defendant’s perspective and choosing favorable terminology, lawyers maintain a specific version of events and frame the scenario to support their side in a court case. Likewise, documentarians essentially frame the represented © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5_2

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scenarios to “make a case” for a particular group or individual involved in a larger conflict. The analogy between a documentarian and a lawyer highlights the delicacy and weight of the endeavor to reveal the truth, or at least its best approximation. In a court of law, all participants are—in theory—compelled to tell the truth; yet, the concrete interest in a specific reading of the truth is inherent to all participants. Like a lawyer, the producer of documentary has an agenda, making their case via the selection of certain occurrences and by presenting certain of their aspects more saliently than others. The role of the documentarian is also that of an investigator who gathers information and evidence first. In this regard, comics is a decidedly retroactive medium: documentary conventionally entails “capturing” evidence instantly through recording devices, in contrast, cartoonists rely on their notes, sketches, or reference photographs to recreate the story afterward.1 Based on oral testimony and personal observations as evidence, documentary cartoonists seek to frame, or reframe, the stories of marginalized groups to challenge mainstream readings of the respective crises or conflicts. In contrast to conventional news media, documentary—and documentary comics, in particular—involves an activist stance and the endorsement of disenfranchised groups. In this respect, some authors are very clear about their intentions to make particular cases. This presents one of the central tensions of the genre: authors of documentary need to persuade their audiences, but their framing strategies must not be taken as manipulative or as markers of fiction. Frame theory provides efficient analytical tools to describe documentary comics in its unorthodox combination of genre and medium and, specifically, its prominent employment of visual frames. This study will investigate framing as textual practices that structure the story to guide the reader’s interpretation. The corresponding cognitive frames evoked by the text can be primarily conventional, such as story types, genres, or world knowledges that serve as proverbial frames of reference. They can also be highly specific and refer to the cognitive model, or storyworld, that readers form mentally as a causal framework that encompasses the rules and logic by which the represented world works. This chapter will further explore frame theory and outline its application toward documentary comics, discussing documentary as the genre frame and comics as the medial frame, both of which constitute fundamental categories for the reception of the selected works.

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2.1   Frame(s) and Framing(s): Cognition and Storytelling The terms frames and framing refer to a variety of phenomena that serve to focus attention, structure perception, and shape interpretation. Besides the material enclosures of images and other texts, these include cognitive categories for meaning-making and their strategic use in communication. Documentary comics presents a compelling object for the study of framing because, in this case, these different aspects of framing all intersect. In graphic narrative books, frames refer to the semiotic phenomena of the panels and grids on the page or the book itself as the material manifestation, but also to the cognitive categories that are evoked with regard to the interpretation of the represented events. Hillary Chute summarizes, [W]hile all media do the work of framing, comics manifests material frames—and the absences between them. It thereby literalizes on the page the work of framing and making, and also what framing excludes … Comics offers attention both to the creation of evidence and to what is outside the frame. It invokes visual efficacy and limitation, creating dynamic texts inclined to express the layered horizon of history implied by “documentary.” (2016, 17; original emphasis)

This assessment offers an excellent starting point for further exploration of the terms frame and framing, as it encompasses both the aspects of material and medial framing. This study will investigate precisely this intersection and discuss how the semiotic and material frames of the comics medium structure and shape documented realities in relation to cognitive frames on different levels. Since frames characterize an essential aspect of human meaning-­making, scholars from various fields have pointed out their influence. Sociologist and social movements scholar David A. Snow claims, “it is arguable that [frames] are fundamental to interpretation, so much so that few, if any, objects, things, utterances, gestures, actions, experience, or events could be meaningfully understood apart from the way they are framed” (2016, 125). Semiotician Gunther Kress even more boldly states: “Without frame no meaning” (2010, 149). Accordingly, literary scholar Werner Wolf proposes that frames constitute “basic orientational aids [they] help us to navigate through our experiential universe, inform our cognitive activities

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and generally function as preconditions of interpretation” (2006, 5). These claims effectively summarize both the complexity and the appeal of frame theory: frames apply on all levels of meaning-making, and, therefore, the concept is highly relevant under a wide variety of aspects and approaches. The fundamental assumption that unites these approaches is that cognition constitutes a frame-driven process. Cognitive frames organize knowledges and provide default assumptions for the evaluation of situations and artifacts; visual and material frames structure representations and organize them with regard to cognitive categories. Although, the concept of the “frame” gained popularity in the 1970s,2 anthropologist Gregory Bateson provides an important early account of “psychological frames” as metacommunication in his 1955 essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (2006). Bateson discusses “psychological frames,” which characterize the faculty in human and nonhuman animals to distinguish between make-believe and reality. In Bateson’s account, metacommunications enable participants to perform and identify certain actions as “play” instead of what these actions would normally mean, for instance, play fighting among puppies. However, the earliest use of the term can, arguably, be traced back to literary theorist Kenneth Burke’s book Attitudes Toward History, first published in 1937. Burke defines “frames of acceptance” as “the more or less organized system of meanings by which a thinking man gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it” (1984, 5). However, a full-fledged “frame theory” was first developed by sociologist Erving Goffman in his seminal 1974 work Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. With his primary interest being invested in social life, Goffman discusses frames as a means to determine “[w]hat is going on here?” in social situations (1986, 8). In his conception, frames constitute “schemata of interpretation” that enable participants to determine the appropriate behavior in communal interactions (21). A short time later, linguist Charles J. Fillmore developed “frame semantics.” In contrast to Goffman, Fillmore conceptualizes “frames as tools for the description and explanation of lexical and grammatical meaning” (1985, 232), and postulates that words activate networks of interrelated concepts (2006, 373). Semantic frames “provide an overall conceptual structure defining the semantic relationships among whole “fields” of related concepts and the words that express them” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 116). In this respect, a frame “characterizes the structured background knowledge” relative to the concepts associated with a particular

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field as “propositional information” (116–117), which helps generate inferences based on knowledge and prior experience. Whereas Goffman investigates broad structures of social interaction, Fillmore sheds light on a micro level of communication. Consider, however, the fundamental implication for the construction of meaning that unites both approaches. Through acquired and socially shared knowledges we make sense of environments, people, and objects we encounter in terms of networked categories. However, meaning-­ making is a dynamic process, and the borders of frames are not always definite or clear-cut. In contrast to Goffman’s more static approach, science and technology scholar Michel Callon therefore argues, cognitive frames overlap and meaning transcends—or overflows—the boundaries of individual frames (1998, 252). In practice, different actors seek to establish framings for particular scenarios and therefore different frames may not only coincide but also their borders should be envisioned as permeable. Cognitive frames find their communicative counterpart in the material world. Both the manifest semiotic, material, and structural characteristics of a medial representation and cues inserted into a text serve to suggest understanding a given issue in terms of a particular frame. The process of framing as a strategic endeavor entails representing a scenario in terms of a particular cognitive category for concrete communicative purposes, harnessing medial predispositions to influence audiences’ opinions. Textual markers and boundaries serve as framing devices to situate the represented events within specific cognitive categories. This aspect has been widely discussed with regard to news media and their effects to describe and how they naturalize certain assumptions by selecting and filtering their reports. As Todd Gitlin describes, media frames “organize the world both for journalists who report it and, in some important degree, for us who rely on their reports. … Frames enable journalists to process large amounts of information quickly and routinely” (Gitlin 1980, 7; see also Gamson 1989; Scheufele 1999). Since documentary graphic narratives are not news media, they function differently: rather than establishing frames for recent developments, they routinely react to and counteract already established media frames. Nevertheless, the underlying process is similar. In his seminal definition, Robert M. Entman characterizes framing as follows: “Framing essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text” (1993, 52; original emphasis). Framing influences which information we perceive and how we perceive it. By excluding some

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aspects of a situation in a representation and including and accentuating others, a specific understanding of that situation is facilitated. Which cognitive frame is evoked is shaped by the aspects that a representation emphasizes. As part of this process, “frames in communication” shape individual “frames in thought” and produce a “framing effect,” influencing our judgment (Druckman 2001, 227–228). Thus, “by emphasizing a subset of potentially relevant considerations, a speaker can lead individuals to focus on these considerations when constructing their opinions” (230). Control over which frames dominate public discourse is subject to constant negotiation between social actors and institutions. As scholars like Judith Butler claim, one can often only be made aware of cognitive frames and the ideological implications they carry, through a disruption, or breaking of frame (cf. 2010, 71; see also Goffman 1986, 347). As indicated earlier, comics present a unique phenomenon concerning framing. By literalizing the framing process, as Chute puts it, comics prominently displays processes that influence how represented realities are construed and, unlike any other medium, comics makes its readers aware of omissions and absences. Using graphic narrative for the purposes of documentary unsettles the frame of factual representation to a considerable degree and problematizes its very foundations. Documentary comics generates an impression similar to the distancing or alienation effect that German playwright and theoretician Bertold Brecht advocated for in theater (1961). Breaking frames not only constitutes a tacit aspect of the comics form, but the selected authors purposefully include self-reflexive and metanarrative moments in their works. Similar to Brecht’s technique of breaking the fourth wall, documentary cartoonists often actively remind their readers of the constructedness of a given work, sharing a similar didactic purpose. As indicated earlier, documentary comics oscillates between unsettling conventional medial frames and framing the respective scenarios so that they persuade readers. The framing process is characterized both by the aspects of choosing particular content and of providing a default structure for its interpretation. “[T]ying together the various punctuated elements of the scene,” framing entails “that one set of meanings rather than another is conveyed, or, in the language of narrativity, one story rather than another is told” (Snow 2016, 124). Indeed, storytelling is an essential aspect of framing, especially in longer texts, such as documentary graphic narratives. Narrative comprehension structures our experience of the world around us, as “a strategy for making our world of experiences and desires intelligible” and

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“a fundamental way of organizing data” (Branigan 1992, 1). We make sense of the world by understanding events as chains of cause and effect with chronological order. In turn, narratives rely on schematic expectations and conventionalized patterns. A story appeals to the reader to make specific default assumptions; how it is told, and what roles and causal relationships it attaches to the different actors establishes a frame for the represented scenario. When a representation adopts a frame toward a scenario, it prompts the reader to maintain it not only during the time spent reading the current account but for future encounters with that topic as well. Despite frequent acknowledgments of how narrative shapes human cognition, the study of narrative has been mostly focused on fiction, or as Marie-Laure Ryan remarks, “[i]n the thinking of literary theorists, the concepts of narrative and of fiction are magnetically attracted to each other” (1991, 1). While Ryan argues that the understanding of fiction is shaped by our knowledge of the actual world (48), the most pervasive example of nonfiction narratology would be the work of historian Hayden White. In his groundbreaking Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1975), White demonstrates how historiography employs explanatory strategies akin to fiction, a process he calls “emplotment.” To White, historiography constitutes a “form of narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (2; original emphasis). Moreover, we only deem a particular history “true” if it can be subsumed under the logic of a narrative (cf. 1987, 6). “[T]hat finding of the ‘true story,’ that discovery of the ‘real story’ within or behind the events,” as White puts it, constitutes a profoundly human desire (4). At the same time, he stresses that even though we have this desire, actual events have a tendency to resist such ordering and the gratification of narrative closure. Representing actual events through stories is a fundamental mechanism of human communication, yet, telling a story entails a particular framing of actual events. Finding the “true story” effectively amounts to the power to assert which narrative framing of actual events is authoritative. How a story is told, in what order and from whose perspective, is the work framing, and provides a particular interpretation of events. Whereas certain textual strategies, such as abstaining from overt commentary, may be employed to achieve a sense of objectivity, storytelling is, as Mieke Bal puts it, “inevitably slanted or subjective in nature, and to deny this constitutes a dubious political act, for it means denying narrative responsibility”

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(2017, 132). Nevertheless, insistence on objectivity is a common trope both in politics and in mainstream journalism. A complex narrative text presents textual frames in different shapes and forms. The “concentrical” narrative layers in novels have been hierarchically described as more general “outer” and more specific “inner” frames (Young 2004, 80; see also Ryan 1991, 178). Borrowing from “computer language,” Ryan extends this model by describing the various frames not only as layered but also as “stacked” to distinguish between contrasting types of frames (1991, 182). Such metaphorical layering and the “stacking” of different narrative frames characterize the organization of graphic narrative as well. Eric Berlatsky even proposes that the multiplicity of stacked, layered, and juxtaposed panels of the comics page—and the gutters in between—more aptly describes narrative texts than the notion of “a frame” (2009, 163). Accordingly, the reading process of a long-form narrative text is characterized by a mosaic of interlocking, overlapping, and overflowing frames that the reader simultaneously calls up to make sense of the story. The exact relationship between the various framings that inform the reading process eludes exact classification and various cognitive frames, on a spectrum from generic to specific, inform the interpretation of every single moment in the story. This study will focus on “textual framings” (16), which “comprise all elements within the main ‘text’ that signal particular cognitive frames which are relevant to the reception of the work in consideration (or parts of it)” (Wolf 2006, 20). Concerning medial artifacts, Wolf differentiates these from “contextual framings,” which include the situational conditions during the reception process and the transmedial environment into which the text might be placed (16). Moreover, the analysis will broadly differentiate broader, global textual framings that inform the reading process as a whole and the more concrete local framings that pertain to the representation of a concrete moment within the text. Global framings are properties that enclose other parts of the text contained within. They include paratexts such as titles or prefaces, and framing narratives that present a certain vantage point for the story as a whole. In contrast, local framings involve the graphic narrative setup of a particular situation or story, including their placement within the order of the narrative discourse, the narrator’s explicit commentary, and their visual representation, of course. Fundamentally, represented events draw on frames of social interaction that the reader knows from everyday life and which draw on their generic

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world knowledges, in the sense of Fillmore’s semantic frames or Goffman’s interpretative schemata. These frames of reference are respective to each reader and inform the interpretation of every event in a story (cf. Bal 2017, 109; see also Ryan 1991, 54). However, texts also contain cues that call up specific frames. Wolf calls such textual properties “framings,” which he defines as “codings of abstract cognitive frames that exist or are formed within, or on the margins and in the immediate context of, the framed situation or phenomenon” (2006, 6). The sum of the various local framings that a text includes serves to aid and instruct readers in forming a global cognitive model on how the represented world works. Narrative texts are, as David Herman proposes, “best viewed as cues used by interpreters to construct mental representations of narrated worlds, that is, storyworlds” (2009, 19; for earlier approaches to “narrative worlds” see also Bruner 1986; Gerrig 1993). The notion of a “storyworld” describes a “semantic domain” (Ryan 1991, 3) that comprises the recipient’s assumptions and presuppositions regarding the inherent rules and logic governing a narrative representation.3 Concisely defined, the storyworld “provides the basic frame for the propositional and emotional inferences drawn during the reading process” that enables the reader to construe inferences about the represented events (Kukkonen 2013, 31). The concept highlights the fact that reading a story is a subjective cognitive phenomenon and accounts for its intersubjective diversity of interpretation. Moreover, assumptions about such a rules system may change throughout a story. As Marie-Laure Ryan points out, rather than “a static container for the objects mentioned in a story” a storyworld is “a dynamic model of evolving situations, and its representation in the recipient’s mind is a simulation of the changes that are caused by the events of the plot” (2014, 33). In this respect, the reading process is characterized by a constant re-evaluation of and adjustment to the frames that the reader applies. Note that the term “storyworld” must not be misconstrued as a fictional world, since nonfictional stories by definition ought to refer to the “actual world.” This is decidedly not the case. The concept of a storyworld points to the fact that nonfictional stories do not represent the world as a stable entity but construct an interpretation of it. Like fiction, representations of reality create intrinsically structured cognitive models, and as Ryan outlines, there can be several forms of divergence between a nonfictional story and the actual world4: “The storyteller can be lying, misinformed, or playing loosely with the facts” (2014, 33). Terminologically distinguishing a storyworld from the actual world it represents helps assess

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the degree of their correspondence. Whereas Ryan breaks down this correspondence to a matter of true or false, the reality of storytelling and framing is more complex. Different people experience the same events differently; hence, they will tell different stories about them. Goffman illustrates this point, arguing, “opposing rooters at a football game do not experience the ‘same’ game” (1986, 9; see also Gamson 1989, 158), or as Hayden White puts it, in such cases “the conflict between ‘competing narratives’ has less to do with the facts of the matter in question than with the different story-meanings with which the facts can be endowed by emplotment” (1992, 38). Both accounts may all be presented and received as factual or “true.” However, by telling a story in a particular manner, we present a certain framing of the represented events as authoritative. Storytelling proposes a system of rules and logic concerning the actual word. In other words, when we tell a factual story, this process asserts an understanding of how the world works. Finally, as a personal cognitive model, the storyworld is informed by a broader socially shared knowledges of genre and medium. Genre, medium, and storyworld constitute dynamically interrelated aspects of the reception of any given narrative text and shape the meaning-making process. The discussion of documentary comics warrants close attention to both genre and medium, since they ostensibly conflict with each other in this particular combination. As coexistent global frames for the respective works, they create tensions and, therefore, draw attention toward framing processes. Genres, Karin Kukkonen writes, “provide schemata, that is, mental frames within which we draw our inferences and understand texts” (2013, 68; see also Frow 2006, 103). Accordingly, genres will be understood neither as exclusive and clear-cut categories nor as properties inherent in (a group of) texts, but as cultural categories formed by discursive practices. They facilitate “a mode of recognition instantiated in discourse … that is collective, spontaneous, and dynamic” (Gitelman 2014, 2; see also Mittell 2001). When we encounter a text, it “establishes a set of knowledges … by invoking them in a compressed form … setting out new information on the basis of old information which is not explicitly given but which it supposes the reader to have” (Frow 2006, 7; original emphasis). Both genre and storyworld are constantly tested against and aligned with the text throughout the reading process, as texts “are always potentially metacommunications about their frames” (17; original emphasis). In turn, the medium that materializes the concrete text is not a constitutive element of a genre, but rather forms “part of the framing conditions

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which govern and may signal generic structure” (Frow 2006, 73). A “medium” will be understood as a conglomerate of prototypical aesthetic, semiotic, and technological characteristics that are “conventionally perceived as distinct,” thus, calling up a specific cognitive frame in recipients (Rajewsky 2010, 61; original emphasis). At the same time, media do not present mere containers but take on a formative role in materializing documentary texts—a genre that is distinctly premised upon recording technologies. Although this does not constitute an ontological necessity, conventional assumptions strongly associate documentary with techniques of “capturing” images, sound, or both instantly in part through automated machinery. The association between the genre frame and certain media depends upon the set of assumptions that forms the medial frame, in turn. As such, the medial frame both provides the material conditions for a text and evokes a cognitive frame of its own. In this manner, both genre and medium—especially in their concrete conglomeration—form global frames that shape expectations toward the medial artifact and provide both possibilities and constraints. They inform the storyworld as the reader’s mental model, presenting global frames that shape the narrative comprehension of a text in its entirety. In the following two chapters, these global frames will therefore be discussed in more detail.

2.2   Documentary Approaches from Analog to Digital Even though genres are transmedial in principle—a Western could be a book, a film, or a comic, and still be recognized as such—for some genres, mediality is a crucial element. This applies to documentary, in particular, which has been conventionally associated with recording technologies that assert their authority by claiming an indexical relation to reality. Although many documentary forms employ some strategies that are primarily associated with fiction, such as narrativization, the accusation of being fiction attacks a work of documentary at its core. Either including or excluding a text in a nonfiction genre, amounts to the struggle over who has the authority and power to assert what counts as true. As such, “genres create effects of reality and truth” and “[t]he semiotic frames within which genres are embedded implicate and specify layered ontological domains” (Frow 2006, 19; original emphasis). In the case of documentary, the ontological aspect of genre and its capacity to structure and convey affect is of

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particular importance (cf. Butler 2010, 67). How such effects are created follows specific rules and constraints that differ among different genres of nonfiction and are historically and culturally situated. The invention of technologies to record images and sound in the nineteenth century has largely shaped the modern understanding of representing actual events. Documentary techniques have been contingent on technological innovations, such as the transition from stationary to portable, handheld, and later even concealable devices that allow documentarians to “capture” new kinds of recordings. The genre of documentary developed in an analog world of mechanical indexicality, but it has transitioned since into the digital age. The emergence of documentary graphic narratives starting in the 1990s roughly correlates with this shift toward digital technology. The graphic narrative book constitutes a counterapproach to digital culture and the changes it has brought about for documentary. Therefore, to understand comics as a documentary form, it is imperative to revisit the history of the genre and its recent technological upheaval. Purportedly the term “documentary” was first coined by the British filmmaker and producer John Grierson, who famously described it as “the creative treatment of actuality” (1933, 7). Already, this definition encapsulates a fundamental awareness of the struggle between recording evidence and the artistic interpretation thereof as a basic tenet of the genre. Comics as a documentary form take the aspect of creativity to its logical conclusion. At the same time, documentary is also associated with a certain restraint toward artistic means, which Nichols describes as “discourses of sobriety” (2001, 39), or as John Corner puts it, “[a]n apparent absence of style … constitutes at least part of the conventional grounds of trust and credibility” (2003, 96; see also Mickwitz 2016, 24). Likewise, narrative means such as focalization that are conventionally associated with fiction are discouraged in conservative interpretations of the genre (cf. Branigan 1992, 205). Documentary is characterized by both the ideal of presenting evidence objectively and the impossibility of attaining it. Therefore, documentaries must balance the extent to which they embrace the aesthetic potential of the respective medium. The complicated relationship between the ambition to (re-)produce evidence and its unattainability has been repeatedly emphasized. As documentary film researcher Stella Bruzzi states,

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[D]ocumentary is a negotiation between reality on the one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other. Documentary is predicated upon a dialectical relationship between aspiration and potential, that the text itself reveals the tensions between the documentary pursuit of the most authentic mode of factual representation and the impossibility of this aim. (2006, 6–7)

Therefore, documentary can be said to be more of an aspiration or mode of working than a certain capacity. Nevertheless, reliability and authenticity remain essentials aspects of documentaries. Comics makes this fundamental contradiction at the heart of the genre even more pronounced. As outlined above, the authenticity of documentary is by convention premised upon recording technologies, which may be visual, audial, or audiovisual. Accordingly, documentary is typically defined in alignment with a transfer medium, such as documentary film, documentary photography, or radio documentary. As Astrid Böger claims, “documentary works by positing its essential (indexical) connection with reality. In order to be effective and persuasive, this claim to reality and its truthful representation has to be believable, and any resistance or hesitation to it minimized.” Böger attributes the prevalence of the indexical truth claim to public demand for ontological clarity in people’s everyday lives. Documentary, she argues, functions as a means of social and political activism “precisely because of its insistence on that anchor in reality which might open one specific window on the world for others to see through” (2001, 25). This assessment aligns with the common sense understanding of the genre that persists to this day. Therefore, the notion of visual documentary can hardly be separated from the camera; hence, a nonphotographic documentary medium such as comics can only be conceived of in contrast to it (cf. Wege 2019, 192). With its invention in the nineteenth century and its defining role of the media landscape of the twentieth century, the evidential function of the camera is generally construed based on its supposedly indexical mode of image production. Photography and film have been readily assumed to produce documents of actual events by establishing a continual relationship between signifier and signified.5 In contrast to the authenticating function of writing in documents, the camera, as John Peters states, was upon its invention hailed as a scientific tool able to bypass subjective distortions of the human witness by means of mechanical image production (2009, 33–34). Hence, the camera neatly aligned with the

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mid-nineteenth-century scientific ideal of “objectivity,” which science historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison characterize as “blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence” (2007, 17). Cameras as “mechanical witnesses” were envisioned as a way to bridge that gap without any human interpretation or bias, based on the positivist belief that “empirical truths can be established through visual evidence” (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 16; original emphasis). The idea of the camera as an objective recording tool remains a fantasy, however. Scholars of visual culture have time and again conclusively established that photography and film include subjective moments in all stages of image production (cf. Tagg 1988; Bourdieu 1990; Sontag 2008). But regardless of such academic and intellectual discourses, the trust placed in camera-made images could never entirely be swayed, and a “myth of photographic truth” has prevailed to a considerable extent throughout the twentieth century (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 17; see also Böger 2001, 3). Fred Ritchin claims, Despite being inevitably interpreted and framed according to the photographer’s own point of view, a photograph, no matter how unfamiliar or even grotesque its depiction, was considered difficult to refute given its status as a reliable trace of the visible and the “real.” (2013, 8)

The reason for this desire to believe in photographic artifacts is linked to a larger predominance of the visual in contemporary Western media culture. Visual perception is deemed especially reliable, hence the popular truism “seeing is believing” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 154). This bias not only concerns eye witnessing but extends toward representations. Indeed, as Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses, our understanding of what the planet we live on looks like is very much based upon the 1972 photograph “Blue Marble” taken by astronaut Jack Schmitt on the Apollo 17 spacecraft—even though virtually nobody has so far been able to share the perspective from which it was taken (2016, 1). As is frequently mentioned, due to technological advances the postmodern media experience is characterized by an overabundance of images (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 11; Mirzoeff 2016, 6). Especially the accelerated news cycle and influx of amateur content in the twenty-first century has produced an overwhelming availability of documents of the actual world, in which attention is a pivotal currency.

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Visual culture is shaped not only by the consumption of images, but also by a “modern tendency to picture or visualize existence” (Mirzoeff 1999, 6). Consumer technologies have become readily available to the majority of the world’s population and provide amateurs with means of visual (self-) documentation (Bourdieu 1990, 7; Sontag 2008, 6). To appreciate the significance of comics as a way of materializing documentary, it is crucial to acknowledge the changing attitudes toward truth, evidence, and the representation thereof around the turn of the millennium. The advent of the digital era has marked a watershed moment for the recording and distribution of facts and documents. While it is doubtful that the belief in the evidential function of visual recordings will ever wane entirely, the recent shift from analog to digital culture has further dismantled its premises. Digital technologies have presented a paradigm shift for documentary and have created a new sense of the mutability of recordings as evidence. As Ritchin suggests, the shift from material objects to ephemeral online data has led to a new high in awareness of the manipulability of all kinds of recordings (2013, 10). Even though methods to manipulate images, such as retouching or cropping, have existed since the early days of the camera, such means are now cheaply and readily available to every competent smartphone or computer user. This circumstance is multiplied by the fact that the gatekeeping function of traditional news outlets is in decline and news items can readily be recontextualized online. Here, William Uricchio also points to the role of social media: “The way that Facebook and other social media disaggregate news for its editorial sources effectively resituates reports into a free-floating position as possibly true or false” (2019, 28). Accordingly, a distinction between “reliable” and “unreliable” sources of information becomes increasingly difficult. Similarly to the notion of “post-truth,” which has been outlined in the introduction, several scholars have characterized this new moment in history as “post-documentary” and/or “post-photographic,” claiming that the genre can no longer sustain a truth-claim that is primarily based on recording technologies (Corner 2002; Rosler 2004, 207; Ritchin 2013, 49). In relation to documentary television, John Corner describes a shift of “documentary authority” toward reality television programs that employ documentary aesthetics for “diversion” from matters of social and political concern (2002, 263). As such, the line between documentary and entertainment has been blurred. The advent of YouTube and its ubiquity of channels that operate in a grey area between blogging, marketing, journalism, and fiction has further promoted this development. Concerning

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photography, Ritchin locates the shift in visual authority as being directed from established news institutions toward user-generated content online and so-called citizen journalism, arguing that amateurs inspire trust where professionals do not. “Rather than claiming a doctrine of journalistic objectivity or neutrality, the very subjectivity of nonprofessionals, their transparent self-involvement and lack of financial incentive, can be reassuring,” Ritchin claims (2013, 11). In short, trust toward professionalism gives way to a demand for individual citizens—or “real people”—as witnesses. All forms of documentation contain a human element—even security cameras and covert listening devices need to be placed—however,  this aspect has conventionally been downplayed in forms of representation to cater to expectations of mechanical objectivity. In order to face the era of post-documentary, photographer and video artist Martha Rosler suggests that photographers embrace subjectivity and interpretation to make the role of the photographer as a witness more explicit (Rosler 2004, 240; see also Ritchin 2013, 49). Such proposed rediscovery of the human witness can be seen as a counterapproach to digital technologies. Similar dynamics are found in documentary comics: with its inherent and overt subjectivity and handmade quality, documentary graphic narratives carry this approach of human witnessing even further, not least because comics bear the trace of their authors’ penmanship inscribed into their very materiality. Concerning documentary, such suggestions are not entirely unfamiliar. Instead of envisioning a “post-documentary” era, Bruzzi suggests it might be “more constructive to view these changes as symptomatic of documentary’s renewed … interest in the more overt forms of performativity: reconstruction, acknowledgment of and interplay with the camera, image manipulation, performance” (2006, 252). A sense of its own mediatedness and interpretative faculties has always been ingrained in documentary as a genre. Moreover, a personal, even intimate component has been part of documentary as well, as Grierson identifies “[i]ntimacy with the fact of the matter” as “the distinguishing mark of documentary” (1946, 159). It is hardly surprising that a sense of closeness between the documentarian and their materials becomes increasingly important again, as evidence is increasingly found in impermanent computer data. Whether one defines documentary as fundamentally self-reflexive and subjective or assumes the advent of a “post-documentary” era ultimately comes down to a preference of terminology. Although the importance of the changes and

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challenges of the digital era for documentary can hardly be overstated, it is erroneous to assume that the genre belongs to the past. The emergence of comics as a documentary form conforms to and has, to some degree, anticipated these new challenges of the digital age. Following the Griersonian understanding of documentary, comics underlines the creativity in the treatment of actuality and embraces the renewed interest in subjectivity. Comics also stresses the human element in authenticating documentary claims. In contrast to the myriad of unverified online sources, documentary graphic narrative books serve as material evidence into which the authors inscribe their persona through their lines on the page. One might think of documentary comics as either the logical extreme of documentary self-reflexivity or a plausible response to the “post-documentary” challenges. Jeff Adams even characterizes documentary comics as a specific critique of the genre (2008, 66). Although a critique of journalistic practices is inherent, comics forms less a rejection and rather a radical exploration of documentary. Even though documentary’s awareness of its own limitations might be more relevant than ever, it is still imperative that works situated in this genre are recognized as authoritative in their relation to reality and include what Corner calls an “artistic commitment to the real” (2011, 179). It is essential for a documentary to be perceived as “true,” or at least honest in that it is not purposefully misleading. By labeling a work “documentary,” the author makes an authoritative statement about reality, which entails that their framing of reality must be plausible. As a means of authentication in film and photography, Böger points toward multimodal strategies such as captions or voice-over narration (2001, 4). Likewise, paratexts and other medial and material cues that evoke specific frames of reception and situate the work in the genre frame of documentary are of central importance (cf. Böger 2001, 13; Gitelman 2014, 3; Mickwitz 2016, 25). Since comics cannot lay claim to the indexicality of its images or voice-over recordings, such framings become all the more important. At the same time, even without photographic images, documentaries need to present the world in a way that is recognizable to audiences. Bill Nichols claims that “documentaries offer us a likeness or depiction of the world that bears a recognizable familiarity” (2001, 2). “Likeness,” strikingly, does not require exactitude to the point of naturalism, but pointedly leaves room for more detached approximations. This can be clay puppets, as Rithy Panh uses for his documentary film The Missing Picture (2013) on the Khmer Rouge, computer-generated images in digital documentary,

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and the abstract cartoon imagery of comics. In order to be perceived as documentary, such nonphotographic manifestations need to negotiate and counterbalance abstraction and recognizability. While naturalistic representation is the default mode for documentary, comics may nonetheless achieve a form of realism by way of cartooning (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1). This makes media such as comics especially productive for exploring the genre’s central tension between aiming to be both believable and persuasive.

2.3   Documentary Comics and the Graphic Narrative Book Materializing documentary through comics constitutes a distinct counterapproach to the dominance of recording-based media and the digital technologies that increasingly define it. Despite, or perhaps because of, the cultural shift to digitalism, for many documentary cartoonists, the, to a degree anachronistic, printed book is still the primary medium. It is symptomatic that Joe Sacco characterizes his work as “slow journalism” (cf. Chute 2016, 201). Drawing images to fill a book can be a years-long process, whereas a digital photograph can be taken and distributed online in mere seconds. Reading Sacco’s densely filled pages pose a stark contrast to the rapid intake of digital photographs, memes, and video clips that dominate the digital sphere. As a means to represent actual events, drawing is inconvenient and impractical—a technology out of time. So, why go slow when documenting crises? The turn toward books—and graphic narrative books specifically, whose materiality is so explicitly ingrained through drawing—presents a critical stance toward digitalization, perhaps even a form of cultural resistance. Hence, Chute points out the significance of the print-form for documentary comics (2016, 14). Likewise, W. J. T. Mitchell argues that “the historical coincidence between the rise of the new digital media and the emergence of comics as a newly ‘serious’ medium of art” fashions comics “as a kind of bookish and materialist alternative to the dominance of virtuality and screen-based media” (2014, 255). Coincidentally, “‘[m]aterializing’ history through the work of marks on the page creates it as a space and substance, gives it a corporeality, a physical shape … to make, in other words, the twisting lines of history legible through form” (Chute 2016, 27). Indeed, the length and complexity of the long-form publication,

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sometimes labeled “graphic novel,” draws on a historically conventionalized format that demands prolonged interaction. Besides its status as an object, a particular content, or an idea, to poet and scholar of textual materiality Amaranth Borsuk, the book is “essentially an interface through which we encounter ideas.” As such, it frames the reading process by “subconsciously drawing on a history of physical and embodied interaction” (2018, 197). Likewise, the act of publication “presume[s] cultural capital: some editorial body has deemed this worthy of print” (239). In terms of cultural recognition, the print form adds “a weight and permanence, that further underlines an implicit claim to status” (Mickwitz 2016, 14). Documentary graphic narrative books set the materiality and traditional social prestige of the book and its gatekeeping institutions against the incessant flux of news and entertainment online, decelerating both the creation and the reception process. Virtually anyone can publish their ideas on the Internet and print-on-demand services offered by online retailers have reduced barriers for non-professional writers to put their ideas into print (cf. Borsuk 2018, 239). Likewise, the ability to photograph can be considered a universal cultural skill. In contrast, cartoonists need to become proficient in drawing first, the commitment to drawing serving as an authentication strategy. Hence, the required craftsmanship of drawing comics sets it apart from the amateurism of citizen journalism. As documents transcend into the immaterial cybersphere, artifact-based media such as the printed book have increasingly shifted from ubiquitous mass commodities toward a peripheral phenomenon. The anachronicity of the book becomes meaningful precisely because it does not cater to default assumptions anymore. Publishing a graphic narrative book constitutes a choice rather than a necessity to materialize documentary and therefore draws attention to its function as a medial interface. “Media archeologist” Lori Emerson discusses the growing trend of making digital interfaces user-friendly and thus “invisible,” masking their framing capacities (2014, 1; see also Borsuk 2018, 198). As the printed book becomes less self-­ evident, its particular choice draws attention not only to its interface, but to the presence of interfaces per se. Hence, a cultural critique is inherent not only in the content of the selected works but already in the material form of the documentary graphic narrative book. Before discussing comics specifically, it is worthwhile to revisit its relationship with other documentary media. Despite the obvious difference in recording practices, documentary comics bears some resemblance to

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conventional documentary media. Comics can be located somewhere in between documentary film, sharing its narrative qualities, and photography, sharing the status of still images as opposed to the immersive continuous flow of film (cf. Chute 2016, 14). Aspects of “documentary writing” (see Corner 2011, 168) or “nonfiction novels” are included as well. Nonfiction novels also employ “the styles and techniques of fictional discourse,” such as dialogues, dramatization, and narrative perspective (Zipfel 2008, 397). With these long-form verbal narratives, documentary comics shares the impulse to make the reporter discernable as a subjective voice, which connects the form to the literary genre of New Journalism (Vanderbeke 2010, 74; Chute 2016, 6–7; Wege 2019, 162 ff.). The reproduction and interpretation of previously witnessed events unite nonfiction novels and comics in their employment of narrative devices that are conventionally associated with fiction and  serve to problematize and negotiate notions of factuality. New approaches to documentary can be found in another “unlikely” documentary form as well. Contemporary “verbatim,” “documentary,” or “theater of the real” reenacts witness accounts and seeks to engage the audience with collaborative encounters (Forsyth and Megson 2009; Stephenson 2017). Drama scholar Carol Martin links the phenomenon explicitly to the concept of post-truth (2017). Theater of the real, she argues, is characterized by “the particularization of subjectivity, the rejection of a blanket universality, an acknowledgment of the contradictions of staging the real within the frame of the fictional, and questioning the relationship between facts and truth.” Documentary comics fundamentally shares these ambitions: graphic narrative blurs fact and fiction and aims to renegotiate their delicate demarcation. As these analog developments show, the challenges for documentary in the digital age demand renegotiation of its fundamental assumptions of truth and factuality. As documentaries, both theater and comics share what Jeff Adams calls “the issue of ‘presence of absence’” in their recreation of prior actual events (2008, 59). Artists create their images instead of “taking” them. In their capacity to reproduce witness accounts, the implications of comics crucially differ from recording-based media. Filmic reenactment seems ethically dubious as documentary practice and may give the impression of being actual footage. “Docudramas” have been criticized for being potentially manipulative (cf. Thornton 2009, 448). However, as Lukas Wilde extensively demonstrates, filmic reenactment has long been part of documentary film approaches and argues that a staged scene can hardly be

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equated with a fictional one (2019). Nevertheless, filmic reenactment involves a certain ontological ambiguity. Like theater of the real, graphic narratives do not raise such concerns, as “[c]omics texts … eliminate the question of ‘staging’ entirely: they are evidently staged, built, made images as opposed to ‘taken’ ones” (Chute 2016, 21). Both comics and theater stress the processual and performative aspects of materializing documentary. However, in contrast to the transitory characteristic of theater, graphic narratives manifest material evidence on the page. Instead of staging and, thus, reenacting testimony, comics produces it through drawing, “utilising all the artifices of the graphic artist—spatial illusions, formal mark making, cultural references to other visual practices etc., all of which conspire to recreate the presence of the event or moment that once was” (ibid.). Shifting the weight of authentication from technology to human agency, documentary graphic narratives “challenge the tacit assumption that a documentary mode of address is dependent on recording technologies” (Mickwitz 2016, 31), setting a decidedly subjective and artificial form against the pledges of objectivity of camera-based news media. The fact alone that documentary comics employs drawings instead of recordings invites critical evaluations of the represented events from readers. However, even though comics problematizes notions like “truth” and objectivity, it does not negate the existence of these notions but acknowledges them as aspirations rather than as stable absolutes. The slowness of the medium translates into a focus on the underlying process, rather than a mere presentation of its outcomes. Whereas photography and film are able to present accounts that deemphasize their own mediatedness, documentary comics provides no camouflage: Graphic narrative … does not offer the possibility of ever forgetting the medium, losing sight of the material text or the physical labor of its production. … Comics is a medium that calls attention with every line to its own boundaries, frames, and limitations—and to the labor involved in both accommodating and challenging those limitations. (Gardner 2011, 65)

Abstract and selective, the medium highlights subjectivity and interpretation; however, “[t]he notion of subjectivity becomes a virtue rather than a vice, and its overt display works to preempt skepticism” (Mickwitz 2016, 57). Nina Mickwitz pointedly argues that “the subjective qualities of

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drawing, and the overt display of their principle of construction, work as a rebuttal and caveat that to some degree preempt essentialist notions of both truth and transparency” (26; see also 35). Through the inherent self-­ reflexivity of drawing, comics makes the constant exposition of its own “madeness” a prerequisite of its material frame. Graphic narratives are inherently and ostensibly stylized and reductive, “and this manifest contouring creates a striking aesthetic distance” (Chute 2010, 6). The presence of the gutter serves as a constant reminder that “the whole story” is not—and cannot be shown. Likewise, the fact that comics rests upon hand-drawn cartoons unsettles conventionalized expectations toward a visual documentary medium, drawing attention to the fact that they involve conscious choices of inclusion and exclusion, or, in other words, to dynamics of framing. By continuously underlining that their documentary work is based on their own subjective experience, making transparent their research process, and explaining the choices they made, the authors also assert their authority to report. Attention to framing and admission of subjectivity enables the authors to frame their reportages in line with their personal ideologies and agendas without manipulating the reader. Documentary comics is fundamentally propelled by the author’s activist stance and personal moral imperative to tell the stories of marginalized groups in order to reframe the collective perception of crises and conflicts. Concerning film, Thornton suggests that a “need on the part of the viewer to know what is essentially unknowable may be at the heart of the controversy that surrounds the docudrama” (2009, 448). Since documentary comics involves the representation and reconstruction of past events from witness accounts, Jörn Ahrens argues that all graphic narratives are essentially fictional, even when they address actual events (2019). This assessment misconstrues the retroactive representation of testimonies as original creations and overlooks the difference between fiction and fictionalization. Instead of “inventing” stories, fictionalization serves not only to problematize factual representation, but also to manifest accounts that could not be recorded otherwise. Hence, I will follow David Herman’s assessment that “there is nothing intrinsically fictional about the medium of comics, or any other narrative medium for that matter” (2009, 46). As a central tenet of the form, comics allows cartoonists to visualize eyewitness testimonies, materializing oral history—an approach that entails “the interviewing of eye-witness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction” (Grele 1996, 63). Even though

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not all the selected works are as explicitly historical as Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009), the genre utilizes this method and its underlying ideological implications, namely “to include within the historical record the experiences and perspectives of groups of people who might otherwise have been ‘hidden from history’” (Perks and Thompson 1998, ix). Documentary graphic narratives facilitate oral history in an essentially two-fold process: it tells stories that detail how the authoring characters encounter witnesses, who in turn then tell their stories. Through this process, the author becomes a subsidiary witness to the eyewitnesses delivering their testimony to them, on the basis of which they construe one coherent narrative. As Chute states in her reading of Footnotes, the author is “bearing witness to others bearing witness—showing us not only the scene of enunciation but also his materialization of others’ life narratives” (2011, 116). This dynamic is essential for documentary comics in its entirety. The oral history approach of documentary comics posits subjective witness accounts against the supposed objectivity of what is conventionally conceived of as “documentary evidence.” Instead of transmitting “purely documentary knowledge,” oral history accounts “attempt to understand experience and its aftermath, including the role of memory and its lapses, in coming to terms with or denying and repressing the past” (LaCapra 2014, 86). Hence, human experience is not only acknowledged as a mediating factor but becomes an essential conduit for this approach, enabling the author to give voice and visibility to victims of oppression, even for situations where no camera could be carried. This faculty of comics is especially powerful in cases of state oppression and other instances in which measures are taken to prevent recordings to keep human rights abuses literally and figuratively “in the dark” (cf. Chute 2016, 5; Schmid 2016, 92). Relying on witnesses instead of documents also presents the author with a set of problems. Witnesses must be willing to tell their stories honestly; they must be able to convey their knowledge in a comprehensible manner; the author receiving their testimonies must be able to mediatize them in a way that is both accurate and coherent. Dominick LaCapra therefore acknowledges that “[h]istorians who see testimonies as sources of facts or information about the past are justifiably concerned about their reliability” (2014, 86). Indeed, witnessing and oral testimony are by definition imperfect: “Witnesses, human or mechanical, are notoriously contradictory and inarticulate. Different people who witness the ‘same’ event

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can produce remarkably divergent accounts” (Peters 2009, 26). Witnesses may misrepresent events unwittingly, especially in cases of traumatic experiences—a frequent subject of documentary comics—communicative resources fail to translate the immensity of the experience (cf. Caruth 1995, 4). In cases of trauma, reliability becomes particularly problematic, as “the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (Felman and Laub 1992, 57). Therefore, the contextualization and evaluation of witness accounts comprise an essential task for the documentarian. In turn, the power to present testimony as either reliable or unreliable constitutes as a principal device for the author to frame a represented conflict. Fundamentally, the process of witnessing is characterized by the dilemma that what has been subjectively experienced must be sorted into some communicative framework to be made intelligible to others. John Peters distinguishes an active and a passive aspect of witnessing—“the passive one of seeing and the active one of saying.” First, the passive witness is an observer of the world around her or him through direct and personal sensory experience. In the next step, the witness can become active as a “privileged possessor and producer of knowledge” that has to bridge “the difficult juncture between experience and discourse.” Peters summarizes the fundamental paradox of bridging these two positions as follows: “Witnessing presupposes a discrepancy between the ignorance of one person and the knowledge of another.” This, Peters identifies as “an intensification of the problem of communication more generally” (2009, 26). Before accurate transmissions of the account become relevant, trust in the witness and the accuracy of their account is an essential aspect to the act of bearing witness. Jacques Derrida stresses the personal aspect of witnessing: Witnessing appeals to the act of faith with regard to a speech given under oath, and is therefore itself produced in the space of sworn faith (“I swear to speak the truth”), or of a promise involving a responsibility before the law, a promise always open to betrayal, always hanging on this possibility of perjury, infidelity, or abjuration. What does “I bear witness” mean? What do I mean when I say “I bear witness” (for one only bears witness in the first person)? I mean not “I prove,” but “I swear that I have seen, I have heard, I have touched, I have felt, I have been present.” (2000, 188–189; original emphasis)

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Hence, witnessing is an essentially personal act and bound to the believability of an individual person or the author as the subsidiary witness of their accounts. The validity of such witness accounts therefore largely amounts to a matter of trust. The author needs to be able to trust their witnesses, and, in turn, the reader must be able to trust the author as the translator and evaluator of these accounts. Therefore, the way in which the author frames a given witness within the primary narrative is of fundamental importance. Since the reader has no access to the actual testimony, they must rely on the author not only to select witnesses in the first place, but to contextualize and evaluate such accounts. When disparities between different testimonies arise or they conflict with verifiable facts, drawing these accounts become especially delicate. Therefore, the assessment of witness accounts by the author—and their own part as both observer and catalysts for the accounts they collect— regularly make up part of their stories. Drawing the stories of eyewitnesses based on their oral testimony poses another challenge for cartoonists. Joe Sacco outlines: “I must necessarily use my imagination, or, rather, my informed imagination. By this I mean that whatever I draw must have grounding in the specifics of time, place, and situation I am trying to re-­ create.” Asking detailed questions of the witness, he seeks to “orient readers to a particular moment,” but his primary aim is “to satisfy an eyewitness that my drawn depiction essentially represents his or her experience” (2012, xii; original emphasis). Again, such statements emphasize the importance of trust that goes both ways. While documentary comics must include a recognizable representation of the actual world, the inherent features of the medial artifact may not be the deciding factor for its authentication. Like the autobiographic pact which Philippe Lejeune has proposed for distinguishing between autobiography and novels (1995, 5), documentary comics relies to a considerable degree on a contractual accord between author and reader. In a similar manner, a documentary pact requires that the author does not only tell the truth about their own experiences during the reportage but also accurately conveys what was relayed to them by witnesses. El Refaie, therefore, points toward “the ‘performed’ integrity of the image producer(s)” (2012, 137): as a means of authentication, cartoonists insert the mark of their own hand on every page, infusing every drawing and letter with their personal style. Whereas the photographs contain a “trace” of the realities they represent, drawing style provides a personal trace of the creator. Obviously, there can be no such thing as an actual contract between the

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individual reader and the actual author. However, envisioning a contract serves as a helpful metaphorical approximation. Rather directly referring to an actual person, “the author,” must be understood as a function of discourse and as a “means of classification” instead (Foucault 1984, 105, 118). In this manner, the concept of “the author” may well serve to illuminate the pragmatics of placing trust in the veracity of a documentary work based on its creator and their self-performance in the text. Still, authors are distinctly present in documentary comics: this concerns not only their graphic self-representation as characters and correspondence to the narrative instances, but also their specific graphic style on the page. Drawing encompasses a particular quality of immediateness between the artist and their markings on the page. The line as a direct outcome of the artist’s physical interaction with the page via the drawing utensil to a large extent accounts for his or her individual drawing style (cf. Gardner 2011, 58) Therefore, Lukas Etter likens any drawing, “[h]owever elaborate or crude,” to a personal signature, “as long as it does not consist of geometrical forms made with templates or stencils” (2017, 96; see also Chute 2016, 20). Likewise, Gardner compares the unique idiosyncrasies of drawing to the sound of the human voice (2011, 66). Although such analogies might be compelling, they should not be strained. Cartooning also draws heavily upon a shared repertoire of conventionalized patterns (cf. Cohn 2013, 25). Drawing styles can be imitated, and in mainstream productions of comics and animation, it is common for numerous artists to collaborate using one coherent style. A distinctly personal style forms an important aspect of documentary comics. Still, it is important to note that such a style can be an artistic choice in the same way as a signature is a choice compared to other kinds of handwriting, such as cursive, block letters, or calligraphy. Drawing may produce a recognizable trace of pen on paper, yet, it is the author’s decision to highlight this trace to the degree that elevates it to the level of a personal style. As Jan Baetens emphasizes, this phenomenon of “graphiation” is subject to socially shared codes and conventions and “varies in intensity.” He claims, “The closer a drawing is to a sketch, the more the reader has the impression that he or she can discover something of the initial graphiation” (2001, 147; see also El Refaie 2012, 150; Kukkonen 2013, 56). Even though this technique may be used as a distinct style in itself, it cannot be overlooked that “the line compels a physical, bodily encounter with an imagined scene of embodied enunciation” (Gardner 2011, 66). Insinuating a direct physical connection to the author,

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graphiation constitutes a highly significant authentication strategy that connects the veracity of the work to the person of the author and their subjective account, rather than to any inherent logic of the work. The authenticating function of the author extends to concrete artistic gestures that may be implicit or explicit in the graphic narrative text. In autobiographical comics, authors employ what Charles Hatfield calls “ironic authentication”: by means of “authentication through artifice,” the very possibility of naïve truth is explicitly rejected in order to make a show of honesty by self-reflexively attesting to their own limitations (2005, 125–126). While this strategy may apply to many works of graphic life writing, irony generally seems inappropriate for works of documentary. Documentary cartoonists acknowledge their own limitations, but, as opposed to the stinging irony of some memoirists, with a sincere show of honesty. Since documentary comics is contingent on trust, the selected authors regularly seek to demonstrate trustworthiness by making transparent the fact-finding process and the inconsistencies and contradictions it includes. Documentary comics often include rectifications and elaborations regarding how and why inconsistencies were inevitable, practicing conscientious authentication. Although documentary graphic narratives problematize their own mediatedness to a considerable degree, they also seek to tell persuasive and compelling stories. Drawn by hand, comics “creates an intriguing aesthetic intimacy,” according to Chute, which counterbalances its aesthetic distance (2010, 6). Hence, as a documentary form, comics is defined by the tension between drawing attention to its own mediatedness and persuading the reader—through the emphasis of personal witnessing and intimate authorial presence, but also through compelling storytelling and the generation of affect. The “truthfulness” of documentary comics is strongly connected to the subjective experience of the author and to their individual artistic interpretation. As Joe Sacco explains, “No two cartoonists are going to draw a UN truck exactly the same way even if working from the same reference material.” Therefore, “[t]he cartoonists draws with the essential truth in mind, not the literal truth” (2012, xii). This factor is especially relevant for the representation of witness accounts: artistic expression enables the representation of emotion and affect with regard to traumata, which permits comics to uniquely encapsulate a subjective truth that is specific to certain individuals. The same goes for storytelling. Echoing Sacco’s point, Josh Neufeld states:

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I often turn to novelistic techniques to craft a dramatic story—while of course adhering to the facts. Whenever possible, I use actual dialogue from my sources and from interviews. But I reserve the right to compress scenes, eliminate minor characters, and even (in rare cases) invent dialogue—as long as these techniques serve to convey the emotional truth of the story. And I believe the reader accepts certain creative liberties … But this trust can be broken if the comic becomes too fanciful. (2016, xi; original emphasis)

As these statements outline, comics is a medium in which believability is strongly dependent on the readers’ trust in the author’s integrity and judgment concerning and “essential” or “emotional” truth that goes beyond mere facts. However, balancing factual truth and subjective experience is not a new characteristic for documentary. In his survey of 1930s documentary William Stott makes the useful distinction between “historical documents” and “human documents,” claiming, “We understand a historical document intellectually, but we understand a human document emotionally. In the second kind of document, as in documentary and in the thirties’ documentary movement as a whole, feeling comes first” (1986, 8). Drawn by hand, graphic narratives certainly constitute “human documents” in the truest sense of the term. The documentary claim of comics is fundamentally predicated upon the representation of subjective experiences, which entails the author’s own judgment and subsequent framing of their observations, the human experiences of others with all their idiosyncrasies, and, finally, the suturing of these different subjective experiences into a coherent story.

Notes 1. Both Joe Sacco (2012, xxiii) and Sarah Glidden (Seligson 2016) address their extensive use of recording devices to gather reference materials while they are in the field. 2. Similar phenomena have also been addressed using concepts such as “schema,” “gestalt,” or “script” (see Bartlett 1932; Schank and Abelson 1977). 3. The concept of a “storyworld” has been predominantly employed in “transmedia” narratology to describe the cumulative mental construct that is evoked through various stories that are spread across different media (see, for instance, Ryan 2014). In this study, the term will be used to describe individual nonfiction stories instead of franchises or series. As such, the aim is not to describe more or less coherent storyworlds that are spread across different representations, but to account for the disparity between the logic of a narrative and the actual world.

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4. Likewise, fiction does not simply correspond to “telling lies,” but a fictional storyworld, too, entails a complex system of rules (cf. Ryan 1991, 13). 5. For a more detailed discussion of photography, comics, and their interrelation, see Schmid (2016).

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CHAPTER 3

Material Framing: The Paratext

The graphic narrative book offers various textual cues on its outer appendages that inform the reader’s expectation for the narrative. “The paratext,” as coined by Gérard Genette (1997), constitutes a necessity to give shape to a text and provides a crucial avenue to frame the narrative. To guide their readers toward a particular mode of reading, the author and the publisher place explicit labels and instructions on the book’s material boundaries. Paratexts1 mediate between the text and its situation—“the contextual and often material conditions and practices that position and frame the text” (Uricchio 2019, 23). Likewise, they implicitly evoke frames concerning the represented events, instructing the reader in how to make sense of them and showing them why they should care. While the prefix “para-” suggests a hierarchy between such “marginal” texts and the narrative discourse, the paratext is a constitutive element of the documentary graphic narrative book and necessitates investigative attention. Instead of being a frame that contains the story within, the various paratexts are active components of documentary comics’ work of framing. Paratexts are essential for a number of reasons: first, documentary comics present an unconventional combination of medium and genre. Hence, authors and publishers invest considerable effort to situate graphic narratives within the frame of documentary to ensure that readers approach the text with the appropriate genre expectations in mind. Moreover, paratexts are crucial to fulfilling the conventional requirements of documentary, as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5_3

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notes and appendices corroborate, extend, or qualify the represented events. At the same time, paratexts enable authors to counterbalance the mediality of comics and the demands of documentary, since prefaces and introductions give authors the opportunity to address readers directly in order to contextualize and substantiate their respective approach. Coincidentally, they “aim to establish a sense of truthfulness by moving away from kitsch and excess in favour of a more restrained representation of events” (in ’t Veld 2019, 194). While titles and cover art are obligatory, the scope and extent of other paratexts differ considerably in documentary graphic narratives. Guy Delisle, for instance, does not include any longer materials such as prefaces or notes, whereas Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009a) contains a foreword, four extensive appendices, and a bibliography. Crucially, these paratexts offer different semiotic modes to complement the graphic narrative discourse, for instance, with segments of uninterrupted written text. The written word contrasts the ambiguity of images with semantic exactitude and provides, in particular, the opportunity to retrospectively comment on and provide updates for the graphic reportage. Hence, the graphic narrative book typically functions in dialogue with verbal texts to expand its semantic scope. However, in contrast to books that contain purely verbal narratives, comics covers and other paratexts feature visual content from the graphic narrative itself, instead of presenting cover art that is added more or less arbitrarily later. Therefore, in documentary comics, cohesion between the reportage and its paratexts is particularly strong. Generally, the paratext presents the first encounter with a book and, therefore, introduces a set of information that enables the reader to form an initial understanding of the text. As commodities, books must attract potential buyers who rely on genre frames to match products with their interests and needs. A basic function of the paratext is to advertise the book, but also to provide information about it that is deemed essential for making a purchase decision. As Valerie Pellatt aptly summarizes, the “[p]aratext primes, explains, contextualises, justifies and through beautification, tempts” (2013, 3; see also Wolf 2006, 20). In his largely influential conception, Genette characterizes “the paratext” as a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that—whether well or poorly understood and achieved—is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading

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of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies). (1997, 2)

Importantly, the paratext helps establish documentary comics as nonfiction. In this regard, Genette points to the “illocutionary force” of the paratextual message functioning as a speech act that communicates a “genre indication” and mentions the “commitment” and “contractual force” of autobiography, history, and memoir explicitly (10–11; Wirth 2013, 46; see also Lejeune 1995). While Genette does not systematically employ the term “frame” himself, the close relation between both concepts has been firmly established (see Berlatsky 2009, 165; Wirth 2013). In particular, the idea of the paratext corresponds to Erving Goffman’s suggestion that socially shared frames are structured by spatial or temporal boundary markers that he calls “brackets” (1986, 251–252). In a book, the paratext contains several such boundary markers that encompass a great variety of different text formats and practices. Genette’s conception essentially distinguishes paratexts that are materially attached to the book and those that are not. The elements directly attached to a book—or the “peritext” (1997, 4–5)—have also been described by John Frow as the “literary frame,” emphasizing its status as a “limit, at once material and immaterial, literal and figurative, between adjacent and dissimilar ontological realms” (1982, 25).2 In contrast, Genette extends his conception toward the “epitext,” which consists of “any paratextual element not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space” (1997, 344). This includes marketing materials, interviews, the author’s private correspondences, or, nowadays, websites and social media. Consequently, the study of the epitext is complicated by the fact that it lacks any definite boundary, as Genette acknowledges (346). Werner Wolf therefore proposes a narrower understanding of “paratexts,” restricting them to “textual framings” directly attached to the artifact (2006, 20). Following Wolf, this study will refer to the individual framing elements directly attached to and included in the medial artifact as “paratexts.” Especially in contrast to digital media, the book and its paratext provide an ostensibly stable and fixed frame, whereas in digital comics paratexts fluctuate and frequently alternate as content is shared and recontextualized (cf. Schmid 2019, 71). Although, as Borsuk points out, paratexts

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“help us recognize … a book, even when published in digital form (2018, 241). However, understanding the paratext as a frame presents certain difficulties. The most controversial and, coincidentally, the most fundamental aspect of the paratext is its function to enclose the representation of the storyworld and, thus, situate the book as a material artifact in the “real” world. Indeed, the physical boundary of the book is a necessary prerequisite: to be made available as a distinct entity, any medium requires a material container—or as Frow phrases it, “[e]very aesthetic object or process has a frame or frames peculiar to it” (1982, 25; see also Kress 2010, 152). As Genette puts it, “the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers” (1997, 1). The concept of the paratext as a frame becomes less precise when its status as a physical boundary is extended toward an ontological distinction between the narrative, the paratext, and the outside world. For instance, Frow proposes that the material margin of the book “acts as a sign of a qualitative difference, a sign of the boundary between a marked and an unmarked space” (1982, 25). However, the suggested separatory function of the paratext proves to be anything but definite—neither toward the inside of the narrative proper, nor toward the outside world. As Wolf describes, “paratexts possess a characteristic ambiguity: they are positioned in between text and context and belong to the ‘work’ but not to the text proper” (2006, 20). Likewise, Genette instantly calls attention to the fact that “we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text” (1997, 1), and baroquely likens the paratext to a “vestibule” and “an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundaries” (2). In this capacity, the paratext has been compared to the frame of a painting (Wolf 2006, 29; Wirth 2013); indeed, theories of the picture frame are instructive to comprehending the ambiguous status of the paratext. The picture frame as a boundary has been traditionally conceptualized as a fixed and definite border between ontological domains that defines and “outside” against an “inside” (Simmel 1994 [1902]). Unsurprisingly, the picture has been frequently employed as an analogy for cognitive frames. Erving Goffman explicitly likens brackets—his terms for the manifest temporal and spatial boundaries of a frame—to a picture frame (1986, 251–252). Likewise, Gregory Bateson explicitly theorizes picture frames as a delimitation of logical types and claims, “the picture frame is an instruction to the viewer that he should not extend the premises which obtain between figures within the picture to the wall paper behind it”

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(2006, 324). In turn, post-structuralist philosophers have deconstructed the frame’s binary of inside and outside, and, instead, stressed the processual relationship between the frame and the artwork it encloses. In The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida discusses the picture frame’s unstable location between the work and its outside without being attributable to either (1987, 54, 61). Derrida agrees that the frame serves to separate the painting itself from the wall, but it cannot be attributed to either domain, he argues. Instead, depending on which domain the onlooker focusses on—the work or its surrounding—the frame merges with the other (61). Analogously, the paratext blends with the text when the book is stored away and with the outside world when the reader is immersed in the narrative. For Derrida, the frame is therefore dynamic and unstable; it “labors” and it “overflows” into either domain (75). In this regard, the frame of the painting it not so different from cognitive frames (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1). Of course, the picture frame can only provide a limited analogy, and “the sheer volume and variety of paratextual features for written texts creates an elasticity of frame(s) that exceeds that of a single picture frame” (Berlatsky 2009, 165). However, this elasticity is far from self-evident in the notion of the book as a stable container enclosed by the paratext. Michel Foucault strongly problematizes the conception of “the book” as a distinct and stable entity, and instead points to its discursive construction, arguing that “it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (2010, 23). Foucault points to the fact that the material paratext does not offer one definite cognitive category for the book and highlights the relevance of discursive knowledges that constitute the various cognitive frames that readers apply to the text. Indeed, rather than exempting the object from its semantic environment, the paratext primarily offers a privileged locus for calling up particular discursively constructed frames. Here, the metaphoric transfer of the picture frame’s fixed and stable materiality onto the mental conception of the artwork becomes especially limiting: “Genette’s division indicates the inherent problems in trying to maintain frames as fundamentally both liminal and cognitively directive: the two ideas may overlap at times, but do not necessarily do so in all cases” (Berlatsky 2009, 166). Hence, the concept of the paratext oscillates between its manifest function as a material boundary and the diversity of the various cognitive frames it evokes. Therefore, Berlatsky makes the compelling point that it is not the frame of

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the painting that provides the appropriate metaphor for the cognitive categories that shape the reading experience, but rather the multiple frames and gutters of comics (174). The fact that the paratext does not separate entirely distinct ontological domains is especially clear in nonfiction. Both the price on the dust jacket and the events described in the narrative refer to the actual world. This does not mean that there is no distinction, though. In the particular context of a bookstore, the price label concretely indexes the required payment, pragmatically enabling it to be purchased. By contrast, the events represented in the story are geographically and temporally far removed from the situation of the material artifact. In any case, “[w]ith the advent of any narrative, of course, someone is narrating, separating the ‘real’ world in which we are listening or reading from the ‘told’ world of the narrative” (Berlatsky 2009, 172; see also Young 2004, 85). Paratextual information is thus concrete and pragmatic, whereas the narrative discourse presents a retrospective transformation of previously witnessed events. Genette’s conceptualization of the paratext focuses on written sources only, although he mentions “illustration” in his outlook for further studies (1997, 406). However, the paratexts of the graphic narrative book share a profound relationship with visual materials beyond illustration. Therefore, comics further complicates any attempt of differentiation between the narrative discourse and its paratexts as the “content” and its “attachments,” especially concerning the hierarchy that such terminology suggests (cf. Baetens and Lefèvre 2014, 191; Bachmann 2016, 145–147; see also Hatfield 2005, 60). As a visual narrative medium encompassing written text and images, comics impedes differentiating narrative and paratext on the semiotic channel. While verbal literature quite clearly distinguishes the cover image of a novel from its narrative, all the selected authors in this study create their own cover art. Moreover, titles can be lettered so elaborately that they can hardly be called a mere attachment to the work (Baetens and Lefèvre 2014, 191). At the same time, documentary graphic narrative books often contain purely verbal fore- and afterwords—most likely to minimize ambiguity. However, purely verbal paratexts only subtract rather than add semiotic resources from the narrative discourse. Even though documentary comics is a relatively new phenomenon, some of the works discussed here have a publication history that encompasses several editions and reprints with different cover artworks and different paratexts. Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, as the “oldest” work in

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this survey, was first published in 2000 and is currently in its ninth edition (2010), including one special edition (2011) with at least partially different paratext. Similarly, his story “The Fixer” has been published as a stand-­ alone book (2004) and as a collection with other stories (2009), which also had been published in another collection (2005), and initially in serial formats in the 1990s as well. Of course, new packaging serves to appeal to buyers, tempting them with added materials, and competition between different publishing houses factors in. The “Special Edition” of Safe Area Goražde is especially instructive, as it is clearly marketed toward a loyal audience already familiar with Sacco’s work. While repackaging also includes the aspect of finding the “best” presentation that is most suited to the individual work, the genre, and the current “tastes,” alternating paratexts manifest different framings that shape the understanding of the narrative and the actual events that it represents. Hence, each particular edition materializes documentary comics differently. The following subchapters will discuss a range of different paratextual phenomena that differ not only between authors but also between editions of the same work. Accordingly, the different paratexts that these editions include, highlight different aspects of the respective stories by evoking diverse frames.

3.1   The Cover: Titles and Artworks The cover of a graphic narrative book constitutes the outermost instance of the paratext. Therefore, it needs to contain all the information necessary for a potential reader without any prior knowledge to make an informed decision on whether to read it or not. The term “cover” refers to the front and back cover, and title pages or inside covers further into the book. Besides the name of the author,3 the most prominent paratexts that the outer cover, or dust jacket, contains are the title and the cover artwork. Genette attributes the design of the cover, and the material construction of the book, including typesetting, chiefly to the publisher, even though the author may serve as a consultant (1997, 16). In comics, the author’s role exceeds the status of a possible consultant by far. Whereas mainstream comic book series commonly commission third-party artists for cover artworks, in documentary comics, cover images are typically drawn by the authors themselves. Hence, Joe Sacco’s publications with Metropolitan Books credit him for the “Cover Illustration” but different artists for the “Cover Design” (2009b; 2020). Documentary cartoonists usually letter the graphic narrative discourse themselves, which extends to

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portions of the cover too. Hence, the matter of typesetting is limited to verbal paratexts. Moreover, the material construction of the book is, to a considerable degree, predetermined by the pages that the author draws, which cannot be so readily rearranged as written prose. In verbal literature, “[i]t is not uncommon to find a dust jacket which in no way reflects the content of the book but is simply sensational and sexy” (Pellatt 2013, 3). Leigh Gilmore even argues that a cover image of a memoir may “risk deflecting readers from engaging with a self-­ representational discourse about pain.” In contrast, covers of documentary comics offer a preview of the actual narrative. While Gilmore claims that the book cover “sticks to the text as it lodges in the reader mind” (2015, 105), this capacity is arguably less pertinent in comics, where the reader faces a multitude of impinging images. The cover image as part of the graphic narrative book image is not exceptional to the degree that characterizes verbal literature; rather, it stands more in dialogue with the graphic narrative discourse, anticipating it, and privileging a particular excerpt from it. However, the covers of documentary graphic narrative books also need to grasp the potential buyer’s attention and alert them to the importance of the represented crises. Consequently, titles and cover art must provide frames for what is represented and signal why the reader should care. The employment of illustrations in the paratext often serves as an implicit genre indication and to set a particular mood for the story. Sarah Glidden, for example, includes drawings of her recording tools in the paratext of Rolling Blackouts. Upon opening the book, the reader is first presented with a picture of Glidden’s camera, two audio recorders, and a notepad and pen. Hence, Glidden, references photographs and field recordings as the foundations of her reportage, immediately indicating documentary and authenticating her work. Paratextual illustrations can also be employed to induce emotional responses and set a particular mood for the story: Josh Neufeld’s A.D. includes bleak and foreboding images of rain and storm throughout the paratext, while Joe Sacco’s The Fixer and Other Stories places impressions from the destroyed city of Sarajevo on the opening pages of the book. These images, respectively, cover the whole page with no further addition, although they are printed more translucently than the graphic narrative discourse. This presents them as haunting and imposing but only subtle so, creating a somber atmosphere without distracting the reader or providing an exhaustive look at the scene.

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Further images can be found as part of inside covers, which will be discussed in more detail below. Titles and subtitles are crucial for marking genre and informing the reader about content. Genette identifies four functions of titles, in general: firstly, the title identifies and singles out the exact work. Secondly, the title describes the work, either thematically, which addresses the subject matter, or “rhematically,” which self-referentially addresses the form and/or genre. Thirdly, description also involves a connotative function. Finally, in fourth place, titles also fulfill a “temptation function” (1997, 93). These categories are not exclusive, and instead describe aspects that are, to some degree, inherent in every title. In documentary comics, titles prominently attach interpretative frames to the documented crises. Evocative metaphoric titles put forth evaluations by situating the respective work and its documented events within the associated target domain. Ostensibly straightforward descriptive titles contain a high level of ideological categorization as well, starting with the fact that some locales are being explained and others are presumed to be known. Moreover, the visuality of the title lettering and placement within the layout constitutes a meaningful aspect of the graphic narrative book. In documentary comics, the thematic descriptive function of titles to identify a particular crisis is especially notable. One of the most prevalent strategies for titling documentary graphic narratives is to locate the reportage temporarily and geographically, either in the main or in the subtitle. The main title may even solely consist of the name of a locale, as Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde exemplifies. The town of Goražde and the historical context that “safe area” references, though, will be unfamiliar to many readers. The subtitle, therefore, specifies the topic further, in this case, The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (2010). Subtitles are not always prominently included on the front cover: in the case of Goražde, it is absent from the 2007 edition’s front cover, and for the special edition, it is rhematically replaced with The Special Edition (2011). The title, though, is far from purely descriptive: the fact that Goražde was the location of atrocities, which the reader soon realizes, connotatively adds a bitter irony to a supposed “safe area.” In geographic titles, spelling is particularly important as well. As Sacco explains in an “Author’s Note on Pronunciation” (2010, I; see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3), he decided to leave out accents on Bosnian names. In the title of the book, however, the háček on “Goražde” is retained, which can be read as both an authentication strategy and a show of respect toward its

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inhabitants. While place names are the most prevalent aspects of the titles, they are not the only objects of thematic description. Sacco’s follow up work The Fixer (2004), for instance, presents the exemplary case of an actor in the journalistic process, and War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96 (2005) uses a general term to refer to the specific case of the Bosnian War. Such generalization is an aspect shared by all thematic descriptions: in naming a book after a specific place, event, or function, the author claims to represent the entirety of what that name implies, even though their scope is necessarily limited. Thus, descriptive titles enlarge particular events to the status of a representative account of a place, profession, or historical event. This is apparent in the work of Guy Delisle too. In his earlier works, he contextualizes concrete geographic main titles with more general subtitles, as in Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2015a) and Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China (2014). Alternatively, geographical descriptions can be completely relegated to the subtitle, as is the case with Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (Glidden 2016), A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Neufeld 2010), or The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Sacco 2004). The name of the location in which the graphic narrative takes place appears to be an obligatory aspect of documentary comics’ titles—although some titles specify the locale explicitly and others do not. Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009a) and Paying the Land (2020) forego any subtitle. Rather than locating the place more concretely, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Delisle 2015a) and A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Neufeld 2010) evoke religious frames rather than specifying the locale. Hence, authors and publishers assume their audiences to be familiar with Israel, Palestine, and New Orleans, but not with Pyongyang or Goražde. Therefore, Candida Rifkind connects Delisle’s titles “to the colonial European traditions of travel writing and the Westerner’s ‘discovery’ of closed and forbidden societies” (2010, 268), which generates temptation by way of exoticism. Rhematic descriptions, especially genre indications, are common aspects as well. The specificity with which the genre is marked varies: some titles denote reportage clearly, whereas others describe the form more metaphorically. Authors alternate such descriptions from book to book: for example, Delisle labels his books “chronicles” (2010; 2015a), “travelogue” (2014), or “journey” (2015a), respectively. These different labels are chosen purposefully: Shenzhen is marked as “travelogue” and focuses more strongly on Delisle’s own experience and inner life than his other

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works do, as Rifkind points out (2010, 268). In contrast, Jerusalem, which is marked as “chronicles,” includes more documentary aspects, such as historical descriptions and reports by encountered witnesses. Whereas “chronicle” and “travelogue” might offer straightforward descriptions of literary nonfiction genres, “journey,” such as in Pyongyang (2015a), is more open and metaphoric: a journey is not necessarily nonfictional and draws attention to the one who experiences the journey, rather than to what they encounter. In practice, however, such labels are used for nonfiction travel writing and fiction alike and rhematic markers in titles offer therefore limited reliability. Rhematic descriptions also highlight the particular approach of a work. Joe Sacco calls The Fixer “a story” in both editions, which highlights the fact that the narrative is chiefly based on the singular account of the primary witness Neven, who also proves himself as not consistently reliable (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.4). At the same time, “story” is also common journalistic jargon. However, the focus on the singular account stresses the focus on witnessing. Art Spiegelman’s labeling of Maus as “A Survivor’s Tale” (2003; emphasis added) presents a similar case. Rhematic descriptions also vary among different editions: Sacco’s War’s End includes the subtitle “Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96” (2005), which clearly details a form of journalism. Although, the included pieces were later republished in The Fixer and Other Stories (Sacco 2009b), as already discussed. This shows that titles and genre labels are not necessarily stable either, and new titles may shift emphasis or reframe a work. Descriptions oscillate between concrete genre indications and references to the content. As part of Glidden’s subtitle, the term “dispatch,” nominally denotes “a news item filed by a correspondent.”4 As a description, “dispatches” refers both thematically to the work of the journalists she documents and rhematically to her book as a piece of journalism. As a concrete genre indication, though, “dispatches” would be highly inaccurate, contrasting the time delay between documentation and publication. Despite this ambiguity, the title situates the book within a larger journalistic frame of reference: connotatively, the term signals the urgency and gravity of war journalism, which Rolling Blackouts itself—in contrast to the documented journalism—decidedly is not. Therefore, the title particularly highlights the meta-documentary approach of the work (see  also Schmid 2020). Likewise, Glidden also evokes Michael Herr’s memoir Dispatches (1977)—a New Journalism classic.

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Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza takes on a polysemous meaning as well. The term “footnotes” implies both scholarly reference and historiography (LaCapra 2014, 5–6), of which the book includes plenty, but also the fact that the depicted massacres are historically marginalized and thus constitute only “footnotes” in history—a metaphor that Sacco frequently employs in the narrative. This metaphor encompasses a strong judgment of the official history writings and collective remembrances: the suggestion that massacres constitute mere footnotes in the shared cultural perception, and to adopt the phrase for the title, constitutes a calculated provocation. This strategy aligns with Genette’s temptation function: by presenting massacres as “footnotes,” the potential reader is accused of sharing the collective cultural ignorance of the documented atrocities. The book, then, offers absolution through reading it. This way, the metaphoric title emphasizes Sacco’s position toward and his opinion on the documented conflict, and why the reader should engage with the topic. Sarah Glidden employs metaphor to similar effect in her main title Rolling Blackouts. The term “rolling blackout” denotes a form of planned power outages in certain parts of a power grid to conserve energy, which not only refers literally to genuine phenomena in refugee camps worldwide but can be read metaphorically as a comment upon refugee streams as “collateral damages” that belligerent nations willingly accept. Like Sacco, she employs metaphor to make a point about the place of the documented phenomena in Western collective perception. Sacco’s latest work, Paying the Land (2020), features as similar approach: the titular phrase refers to an Indigenous tradition, as the reader learns in the second chapter: “You give [the land] something, he says. … It is like visiting someone. You bring the land a gift” (50). Adopting this phrase as a title can be read as a gesture of respect to the Dene people. At the same time, a second, more straightforward meaning references the purchase of native lands for resource extraction. In this polysemy, the book’s central conflict between Indigenous tradition and modern industry is introduced. Metaphors also extend toward the spiritual: Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge invokes a biblical frame of reference through “A.D.” as an abbreviation of “anno domini” and especially the term “Deluge” in the subtitle. Biblical titles and analogies constitute a common practice in documentary. The metaphor of the deluge for the flooding after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has several implications: first, the indication seems to be that this catastrophe is decidedly not human-made but rather of such proportions that it exceeds what can be controlled and

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managed. In this regard, the title evokes the idea of righteous divine punishment of sinners enacted by a vengeful god. Neufeld’s narrative, however, addresses the human-made failures, especially in the aftermath of Katrina and the handling of its fallout. For the title as the most public and manifest denomination of his book, Neufeld, nonetheless, chose a metaphoric frame of reference that inflicts no blame upon any human authority. The religious framing has another more pertinent aspect: the reference to the biblical flood narrative frames the geographically contained catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina as a catastrophe “of biblical proportions” that, allegedly, extinguished all life on Earth and, thus, elevates it to an event of global consequence. Here, A.D. aligns with several documentary photography collection  titles and elevates a particular event to the status of a universal catastrophe, pertaining globally to the “fate” of humankind. Specifically, appealing to Christianity and Christian values such as charitableness, reframes Hurricane Katrina from an event that affected others to one that connects all of America, the world even. In doing so, Neufeld perpetuates the cultural dominance of Christianity in American culture as a common denominator. Although the biblical theme extends to the prologue, this framing does not present a prominent aspect of A.D. as a whole. Hence, the titles primarily serve the function of tempting the potential reader, appealing, in particular, to more conservative audiences than are customarily familiar with documentary comics. While all book titles require a typographic manifestation, the graphic narrative book draws particular attention to the visual representation of titles and creates more pronounced interaction with the respective image. Location, size, color, and typeface need to be taken into account. Large block letters are frequently employed, as on Delisle’s books or Sacco’s Footnotes. The color scheme also commonly aligns with the cover image. However, the semantically charged color red stands out. On the cover of Rolling Blackouts, the primary title is placed in large crimson letters on the upper quarter of the cover. Whereas the title, as previously discussed, includes a rather complex metaphorical political analogy, its visual presentation takes on metaphoric meaning, as well, albeit more straightforwardly. Red as a signal color, especially in the blood-red shade, highlights the graveness of the documented events. The association with blood that the color draws, then, highlights war and injury as an aspect of the narrative and also serves to alert potential buyers. Interestingly, the subtitle Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq is included underneath in small

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black machine typeface. This style, in contrast, draws connotations of “seriousness” but also the typewriter as an anachronistic writing tool, partly referring to the era of New Journalism. Thus, title and subtitle differ in their visual salience but align visual presentation with their linguistic content. In Footnotes, Sacco opts for the color red as well, albeit a slightly lighter variety. In contrast to Rolling Blackouts, though, the title Footnotes in Gaza is the only colored element, a stark contrast to the greyscale background, rendering the lettering highly salient. The allusion to blood is consistent with the book’s theme and cover image. Red letters can be found in Sacco’s earlier work too. In Goražde, interestingly, chromatic emphasis shifts with editions: in the first edition (2000), the name “Goražde” was highlighted in red with the words “Safe Area” above, smaller and in black. In the 2007 edition, “Safe Area” is blood red, while the place name is included in white and slightly larger. The shift from locating the “bloodiness” in the town name to its military designation presents a quite straightforward framing mechanism that employs the connotative qualities of the color red to blame the military powers in question. Moreover, the blood-red letters emphasize the bitter irony of a “safe area” being all but safe. The two most recent editions of Safe Area Goražde (2010; 2011) abandon the color red and present both title and subtitle in the same typeface. The regular edition features all letters in gold-embossed print. This form not only presents a far more nuanced contrast against the grey and white cover but also conveys a heightened sense of value. The special edition similarly includes the title in silver-embossed print and uses silver ink for the whole of the cover image (see Fig. 3.1). The connotation that is highlighted here seems less a political statement than an indication of the book’s value. While displays of luxury serve to tempt some potential buyers, they contrast with the social aspects of the genre and may alienate others. The placement of the title as part of the cover composition in its entirety offers semantic potential as well (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 2006). In most cases, the letters are superimposed on the cover image in monochrome areas, such as the sky in Rolling Blackouts, that “leave room” so they do not cover important pictorial elements. In The Fixer (2004), such superimposing becomes more semantically charged, though, as the title is placed upon the upper body of the main character, Neven, who is, indeed, “the fixer.” The Fixer and Other Stories (2009b), however, places the title

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Fig. 3.1  Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The Special Edition (Fantagraphics Books 2011), front cover

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and all other writing on a red banderole that, through its simulated materiality, is set apart from the cover image. In Paying the Land (2020), the placement of the title in the middle of the front cover separates two different images on the cover: a display of traditional Indigenous life cast in a sepia tone above and an industrial plant in striking shades of dark gray below, complementing the semantic dualism of the titular phrase itself. This example shows, however, that to make sense of the layout, the cover images themselves need to be discussed. As indicated above, in contrast to the covers of novels, documentary comics cover images present an excerpt from within, anticipating the graphic narrative discourse itself. By selecting a scene, or part of a scene, the cover image prioritizes a particular aspect of the narrative. The depicted situations, character constellations, and, also importantly, the drawing style—in the absence of further narrative cues—create a prototypical example of what to expect from the narrative. The most pertinent subjects of documentary comic book covers are the documented people and places. Locales, commonly, exhibit sights of destruction or exoticism, whereas the people that inhabit them, the documentary subjects, are commonly shown metonymically, with specific characters referencing larger social groups. Often, the authors include themselves too, and thus establish both prototypical roles for themselves and their relations to places and people and their presence as a means of authentication. While titles are mostly used consistently, it is not uncommon that cover images vary between different editions of the same work. As part of a graphic narrative, images serve as a means of narration and not illustration. On the front cover, images are rarely narrative in the sequential sense or include speech balloons or text boxes.5 Predominantly, a single image envelops the whole front cover and written elements are superimposed onto it.6 Instead of a narrative explanation, they offer a first glimpse at the documented events. Hence, while they do not represent narratives, they can evoke stories by prompting the reader to speculate about the possible events that led up to the depicted moments and those that would likely follow them (cf. Wolf 2008, 433). Inherent features of images can support such inferences. For instance, through vectors, such as the direction of a gaze or represented movement, “[t]wo objects may be represented as involved in a process of interaction” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 42) without actually representing the process as such. Moreover, single images draw on world- and genre-­ knowledges and activate preconceived story frames based on recurring

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types. As already discussed above, comic book covers, at least in alternative comics, not only point to a story but reference the story that lies underneath. At the same time, exposure to the cover image will typically precede knowledge of the narrative. Therefore, the cover image as a possible pregnant moment is a vital element for the early inference of narrative schemata. Displays of destruction are especially prevalent and pertinent on documentary comics covers. Destroyed cities and houses show the aftermath of destruction and, thus, point to events that came before, but also reference the people inhabiting them. The 2007 edition of Goražde shows a military convoy driving through the destroyed city. The whole image is tinted a surreal green, causing the olive drab of the vehicles to merges with its surroundings. However, not all catastrophes are human-made: the front covers of A.D.  New Orleans After the Deluge, which vary between the paperback (2010) and hardcover edition (2009), both show the city of New Orleans—one before and the other after the storm. On the upper two thirds, the hardcover shows a panel that centers on the hurricane towering menacingly above the skyline of downtown New Orleans, whereas the paperback edition shows the letters “A.D.” as a meta-panel that frames a vision of the flooded city. Both images place the familiar sight of the American cityscape skyline against imminent disaster and its aftermath, respectively. Such displays evoke what Miles Orvell in his discussion of 9/11 photographs calls “the destructive sublime” (2006, n.p.; see also Chap. 4, Sect. 4.3): both the collapsing World Trade Center and the flooded city of New Orleans exhibit a vista of cutting-edge architecture yielding to sheer physical force—and the medial representation perpetuates the spectacle thereof. A feeling of awe in the face of the destruction of humankind’s technological achievements connects to the title’s biblical frame of reference. The meta-panel, too, presents a quite literal means of framing: the biblical reference evoked by the abbreviation of “anno domini” presents the outline through which the events are to be witnessed and understood. The Fixer and Other Stories, too, features a cover image that adheres to the notion of the destructive sublime7 (cf. Banita 2014, 58), presenting a portion of a larger image that spans a complete double page in the narrative (2009b, 12–13; see Fig.  3.2), The image shows a hunching Sacco walking through the ruins of Sarajevan skyscrapers set against a stormy sky. As Hillary Chute describes, “[t]he composition emphasizes their height and stature. The left of the twin skyscrapers bleeds off the page; they are relics of modernity and also, abandoned artifacts of violence” (2016, 225).

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Fig. 3.2  Joe Sacco, The Fixer and Other Stories (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009), front cover

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Again, the reader is left to imagine the events that damaged the buildings. Oppressive rain clouds contribute further to the bleak atmosphere. The combination of natural force and war damages combines technological and natural aspects of destruction. The image is reiterated as a translucent inside cover on a double page, presenting another portion of the larger image that zooms in on Sacco and draws attention to the fact that he “is the only human in the scene, walking determinedly across the page from left to right” (ibid.). The impressive size of the image, especially in combination with a richness in detail, seems overwhelming, a feeling that is only enhanced when the reader subsequently encounters the larger image. While the escalating repetition emphasizes the sensation of Sacco’s loneliness against his oppressive surroundings, repeated exposure does not help the reader toward a clearer understanding of the conflict itself. Rather, its reiteration and the adding of further details makes a point of exhibiting the bottomlessness of war. This quality aligns with inherent characteristics of the image, which through its silence and emptiness, “evoke[s] the unknowable” (Chute 2016, 228). At the same time, the cover and the title-page images omit the fact that Sacco is walking toward the Holiday Inn Hotel, which serves as an anchor of recognition: “The imagery of a globalized American corporation standing near two buildings echoing New  York’s late landmark disturbs the reader with their familiarity … These could be our streets” (Walker 2010, 86). Thus, even though the events themselves do not become more knowable, they become gradually more relatable. Besides its immediate affective quality, its evocative qualities are an inherent part of images that harness the destructive sublime. One can hardly help but imagine the events that led to such enormous destruction. The 2010 edition of Safe Area Goražde combines displays of destruction—a road riddled with craters from mortar fire and a damaged shopping center in the back—with narrative anticipation. Forming a vector, the road leads outside the borders of the image in one direction, toward the position of the reader’s point of view, and away from it on the other—further into the city. Left and right soldiers flank the road, and a haggard-­ looking crowd of considerable size gathered behind them. All of the depicted people look expectantly toward an unseen occurrence on the road toward the position of the onlooker. Something is clearly coming, and the newly incited reader is left to guess and to imagine what the crowd is waiting for. The reader wonders who is responsible for the blasted road and the worn and weary looks of the people depicted beside it. Interestingly,

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the cover image omits the text box that is superimposed on the road at the bottom of the image in the first chapter of the narrative. In the text box, Sacco reports that he heard an American journalist say, “I wish Gorazde would go away” (2010, 4). Combined with this statement, the page takes on a different meaning and becomes a critique of the arrogance of Western journalists: the crowd of people, all painstakingly individualized by Sacco, looks upon an uncertain future and will not simply “go away.” However, this critique of the U.S. media trivializing the conflict is only added once the reader engages the narrative discourse, and the page is re-encountered. The cover image and layout of Footnotes takes this “teaser” function even further. The picture shows a group of eight Palestinian men with upraised arms from behind. Significantly, the layering of the cover places the image in the foreground, and some of the upraised arms overlay the title. The depicted characters are placed in such a way as to appear to be walking toward the title; hence, figuratively, they move toward becoming bloody “footnotes.” They also walk away from someone—someone forcing them into that direction at gunpoint, as can be safely assumed from their upraised arms. The point of view roughly aligns with this unseen menace; thus, the reader is positioned with the party that victimizes the group. The reader is urged to imagine what will happen after this moment. Inside the book, a title page takes this theme up again and now presents the reader with a scene showing a similar group of Palestinian men lined up against a wall with two soldiers aiming guns at them (Sacco 2009a, v). Thus, what was only indicated on the front cover is confirmed on the title page: a massacre is about to occur. On the title page of the first chapter “Khan Younis” (1), the reader then sees a bloodstained young man with an expression of horror on his face as he carries the body of an older man on a stretcher. Thus, through these three cover and title images,8 Sacco establishes a clear chain of cause and effect that assigns the default roles of victims to the Palestinians and perpetrators to the Israeli military. This way, Sacco generates sympathy and identification with the depicted victimized Palestinians and raises the question of perpetratorship. While Sacco identifies his documentary subjects collectively on his covers, both editions of A.D. contain color-coded panels with close-up portraits of the individual main characters. Although there is no direct causality indicated between the portraits and the larger image of the storm, their proximity in the layout generates a connection. This allows the reader to form a clear expectation about not only what but also whom the narrative

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is specifically about. Thus, the reader is confronted instantaneously not only with the storm but also with individual lives impacted by it. A single character can also be the sole focus of a cover: the 2004 cover of Sacco’s portrait The Fixer depicts Neven, the main subject, widely grinning in an upper-body portrait, spending money and smoking at a bar. This portrait of Neven does not immediately point toward war; instead, a banknote that he pulls from his wallet is the focus of the image. The image primarily presents the fundament for prototypical assumptions about the character. This scene of excess leads to the question of why he is spending money so rashly and what led to this lifestyle. Squandering money in conjunction with smoking does not inspire great trust in his reliability as a witness. Ambiguity is particularly salient in the depiction of his face: we do not see his eyes, yet a gloriole surrounds his head. Hence, the cover presents Neven both as an outgoing, even alluring character, but not as a trustworthy one—an impression that permeates the narrative as well. The author as a spectator and a witness is especially salient in Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem (2015a). Whereas his earlier Burma Chronicles (2010) shows his character as a tourist pushing a stroller, the cover image of Jerusalem represents Delisle diligently drawing the Western Wall, as seen in the background. While the first cover points to the more accidental quality of a memoir, the latter emphasizes Delisle’s active role as a documentarian. The author’s inclusion, his assignment of an active role, also introduces a self-reflexive moment and highlights the role of the author as a witness. Of course, it also exhibits a distinctly autobiographical quality. In The Fixer and Other Stories, for instance, the image used on the cover “seeks to create the mood in the reader that Sacco the character is also experiencing,” as Chute describes (2016, 228). Comparing the naturalism of the buildings with the dwarfed presence of Sacco, Worden, likewise, describes the image as a “curious blend of the objective … and the subjective” (2015b, 11). This way, the cover images align the reader with the author-character as the conduit for the represented experiences and also introduce the genre-defining tension between mediation and authenticity. In some cases, cover images also contain both reporter(s) and witness(es) together. Rolling Blackouts shows the scene of a rooftop interview: the image centers around the two reporters, Alex and Sarah, interviewing one of the work’s principal witnesses, Sam Malkandi. Glidden herself is on the very side of the image, further away and drawn smaller, with her notebook in hand. In contrast to the portraits of A.D., the characters are depicted from a distance without much recognizable detail. Instead of identifying

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particular characters, this image primarily emphasizes the relationship between them, thus, assigning default roles toward each individual, such as interviewer, interviewed, and documentarian. As the cover image already establishes, Rolling Blackouts functions both as a documentary and as a meta-documentary in which Glidden records not only their encounters with refugees but also the journalistic practices of her friends. The interview scene also prominently features the camera and microphone that record the interview, and Glidden is depicted with her recording tool, a note- or sketchbook—endowing the image with a certain metapictorial quality as well (see Mitchell 1994, 35). Thus, the cover contains quite clear genre indications toward reportage, which are specified further still by the cityscape in the background. Additionally, the point of view also draws the eye toward the Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah, to which the vectors of the rooftop point. The situation of the scene within these surroundings allows the reader to draw further assumptions about the locale of the story. Cover images prominently introduce the primary themes of the book and include several strategies to spark readerly interest, such as the inclusion of absences to be filled, or the display of especially affecting sights. What appears to be absent from the cover imagery of documentary graphic narratives, are depictions of the actual acts of violence that are plentiful within the narratives, most notably in Sacco’s work. Instead, what we see are the effects of violence. Ethical considerations about voyeurism in the representation of violence have been discussed at length with regards to photography (for an overview, see Schmid 2016, 37–40) and keep documentary cartoonists from showcasing the suffering of others too publicly. Strikingly, however, scholarly works on documentary comics do employ violent imagery. Hillary Chute uses one of the most violent images from Goražde (2017, 203; see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2) for the cover of Disaster Drawn (2016) and the volume The Comics of Joe Sacco (2015a) edited by Daniel Worden exhibits the final massacre sequence of Footnotes (2009a, 388), replacing the final black panel on the page with a white panel that contains the subtitle “Journalism in a Visual World” and the editor’s name. Chute states, wondering if this gesture was “actually exploitative,” she asked Sacco about it and cites his reply as follows: “Well, it happened.” Chute takes this answer as a larger point about documentary comics: “This brief exchange about the representation of genocide hit home for me, profoundly and instantly, how comics seek, in a world arena, to deliver such images in order to inform, to reveal” (2017, 309). The point can

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certainly be transferred to the cover of Worden’s collection. But while documentary graphic narratives do seek to visualize the horrors of war and other catastrophes, the fact remains that the selected authors abstain from doing so too visibly on the dust jacket. Their cover images indicate rather than reveal violence and save the more horrific images to be contextualized within the narrative.

3.2   Labels, Praise, and Descriptions The dustjacket, and the front and back matter of the graphic narrative book, commonly contain genre labels and shorter texts, such as blurbs or testimonials. These paratexts primarily provide both incentives for the potential buyer and services to the seller or librarian, suggesting how to list and display the book. Since genre indications as part of titles or cover images are commonly metaphoric or implicit, explicit descriptions, such as genre labels or press quotations, are frequently printed on the cover as well. Typically, graphic narrative books also contain longer verbal texts on the backside, which allow for a more exact description of the work and what to expect from it. While titles and cover images can be attributed to the sphere of the authors, the layout of the cover is the publisher’s responsibility and serves as a primary avenue for marketing the book. Accordingly, blurbs and praise may change with the edition. This transitory status makes these paratexts all the more interesting: they offer insights into what kind of description the publisher deemed most relevant and beneficial at the time of publication. Paratexts indicating the genre or thematic classification are of critical importance for documentary comics. Providing pragmatic cues, they serve to situate the documentary graphic narrative book in its cultural environment and ensure exposure to interested audiences. Thus, the paratext contributes to the negation of cultural power structures: genre and thematic classification inform where books are displayed in shops and libraries and how they are listed and tagged in catalogs. The way works are indexed greatly affects for which purposes and interests they can or cannot be accessed later. In this regard, the critical analysis of library classifications by information scholar Hope A.  Olson, aptly titled The Power to Name (2002), is particularly instructive: rather than being neutral indexes, library catalogs reflect social values and biases and have historically limited subject representation outside the cultural mainstream (7, 14). Hence, while easily overlooked by the reader once they have obtained the book, genre

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classifications on the outside covers, and suggested keywords as part of the front matter shape the distribution process and its underlying cultural norms.9 However, labels that publishers attach to a work are not automatically accepted by third parties, as an anecdote involving Art Spiegelman exemplifies. As Hillary Chute describes in her introduction to Disaster Drawn (2016, 1–2), when the second volume of Maus appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, it was categorized as fiction. Spiegelman took objection and responded with a letter to the editor, in which he argues that his father’s memories of Auschwitz could hardly be labeled “fiction.” Spiegelman also acknowledges that his cartoon style poses “problems of taxonomy” and proposes the somewhat ironic new category “nonfiction/ mice.” In response, The New York Times indeed moved the work to the nonfiction list, acknowledging that both the publisher Pantheon Books and the Library of Congress categorize Maus as nonfiction (1991). This incident shows that the genre status of nonfiction graphic narratives is all but self-evident, underlining the importance of such trailblazing works as Maus in promoting documentary comics. On the front cover, overt genre indications are quite rare. The first edition of Safe Area Goražde (2000), which contains the label “A New Work of Comics Journalism from the Author of Palestine,” is the exception rather than the rule. Commonly, genre indications are often put forth as part of the publisher’s in-house series on the back cover. In most cases, though, they are general and inconsistent. The publisher Drawn & Quarterly categorizes Rolling Blackouts as “Comics and Graphic Novels/ Literary” (2016) but Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem as “Comics & Graphic Novels / Non-fiction” (2015a). Metropolitan Books marks Footnotes in Gaza “History” (2009a), while both Safe Area Goražde (2007) and Paying the Land (2020) are listed as a “Graphic Novel.” Jonathan Cape classifies The Fixer (2004) under “Current Affairs,” but the 2009 reprint of Sacco’s The Fixer and Other Stories by Drawn & Quarterly is categorized as “Comics & Graphic Novels/literary,” again. Similarly, A.D. is listed by Pantheon Books as “Current Affairs; Graphic Novel.” These more general categories suit the demands of booksellers, libraries, or archives to include larger amounts of individual works within given categories. It is, nevertheless, striking how dissimilar and even contradictory these labels are concerning their classification of fiction or nonfiction. Whether a documentary comic book is to be found in a “current affairs,”

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“literary,” or “graphic novel” section, strongly influences not only the initial response to a book, but also who is exposed to it, in the first place. These classifications are commonly grouped with the barcode and International Standard Book Number, or ISBN (see Borsuk 2018, 241 ff.). Such distribution devices and the name of the publishing house point toward the institutional situatedness of the respective documentary graphic narrative. It is worth pointing out that the indication of the publisher and the associated distribution devices indicate the cultural situatedness of the particular work: while the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly is an independent publisher of comic books, Jonathan Cape and Pantheon are imprints of the international publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House. Each company awards cultural prestige to their respective works differently, for instance, as part of a subculture or by awarding legitimacy through a renowned corporate history. However, the selected works have all been commercially published: besides cultural prestige, this situates them in a non-partisan environment, separating them from publications by political organizations and government institutions but also underground artists who self-publish. Since commercial categories are not always helpful to the reader, publishers often rely on praise to not only underline the book’s merits but also, importantly, address the genre. Praise includes favorable review quotes, lists of accolades, and testimonials by other authors or public figures. In referencing either established journalistic institutions or acclaimed authors and intellectuals, such texts serve as testaments to the work’s merit and authenticity. Similarly, marketing labels that indicate critical and popular appreciation, such as “New York Times Bestseller,” heighten the author’s status. Even such accolades can carry pragmatic information as the label “MTV Best Nonfiction Comic of 2009” on A.D. (2009) exemplifies. Quotes from reviews and testimonials often contain strikingly thematic descriptions and genre labels, allowing publishers to combine praise with additional pragmatic information. Including praise also serves as an authentication strategy through which the quoted reviewers and institutions confirm both the quality and the veracity of the respective work by allowing their names to be associated with it. While praise is commonly found on the back cover or the front matter of the book, some works also include quotes from reviews on the front cover, which draws particular attention. For instance, the front cover of the paperback edition of A.D. presents an endorsement by Dave Eggers, identifying the book as

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“one of the best-ever examples of comics reportage,” and calling it “[a]n essential addition to the ongoing conversation on what Katrina means.” As the acclaimed author of Zeitoun (2011)—a literary nonfiction account of Hurricane Katrina, Eggers’s endorsements awards A.D. connection to or even patronage from the more established form of verbal nonfiction literature. At the same time, the highly visible quote clearly identifies it as graphic nonfiction. Similarly, Footnotes in Gaza quotes The New  York Times Book Review on its front cover, claiming “Joe Sacco stands alone as a reporter-cartoonist because his ability to tell a story through his art is combined with investigative reporting of the highest quality.” Here, the quote is presented less saliently, placed on the top of the page in much smaller print. Nevertheless, by way of inclusion on the front cover, these statements are singled out as especially authoritative. Genre indications can be found in blurbs on the inside- or back cover as well: The Economist describes the Goražde (2010) as follows: “As a fusion of comics and reportage, Safe Area Gorazde is greater than its parts.” Praise helps distinguish a new work from the author’s previous works as well. The Boston Globe points out that “Jerusalem is not a personal memoir but a breathtaking chronicle of one year in the holy city, written by a visitor with insatiable curiosity and a sketchbook” (2015a). Indeed, these quotes indicate far more clearly than any other of the covers’ elements on that the respective books are works of reportage. Praise is also employed to highlight the medium: The Guardian calls Delisle’s Pyongyang “a fascinating, even important document” and writes, “Its simple yet highly evocative artwork brings us a kind of photo-­ reportage from a country where photography is restricted, journalists are barred and visitors in general are discouraged.” Thus, not only the documentary status is mentioned, but also affordances of comics are praised. Similarly, Time is quoted on Footnotes: “Sacco’s journalism sheds new light on these tragedies … but it’s the art that resonates. The hopelessness etched across the face of Sacco’s war-weary Palestinians would be near impossible to duplicate solely in the written word.” Other quotes point to the literary value of the presented work. The Los Angeles Times calls A.D. “The People’s History of Katrina. A work of literature, of high art, and of reverence for nature and humanity.” Likewise, on the cover of Pyongyang, Newsweek is quoted, saying, “Books like Persepolis—as well as Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde and Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang— are held up not only as great literature but also as instructive guides to global combat zones.” Here, both the literariness and the documentary

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merit of not only Pyongyang but also similar works are highlighted, which is all but self-evident for graphic narratives. This example also shows another common strategy of implicit categorization: grouping and thus canonizing one work with others through intertextual references. Time, for instance, is quoted on Goražde (2007) as comparing the book to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. However, references to art and literature, though they describe truthfulness in an artistic sense, diverge from the notion of objective and factual portrayal. In comics, as these blurbs show, artfulness, even though present in every documentary medium, is particularly emphasized. Quotes from third parties are presented in a highly selective manner, but they are still dependent on chance. The publisher has a higher degree of control over framing the work through their own descriptions, which are commonly found on the back cover or on the flaps of the dust jacket. This means that the publisher is also more directly accountable for misleading information. At the same time, overt advertisement and exaggeration are expected here, making clear that the primary aspect of these texts is marketing. To this end, publishers point to the gratification readers should expect from reading the presented work. However, the focus of this subchapter will not so much be on advertising claims, but rather on the expectations that are primed as a result of these claims. Significantly, publishers make abundantly clear that their authors work fairly and accurately, but also empathetically. Drawn & Quarterly describes Delisle’s approach in Jerusalem as follows: “When observing the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations that call Jerusalem home Delisle’s drawn line is both sensitive and fair, assuming nothing and drawing everything.” Similarly, it is claimed that Sarah Glidden “records all that she encounters with a sympathetic and searching eye.” Drawn & Quarterly, furthermore, claims, “Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy” and “transforms a critical conflict of our age into an intimate and immediate experience.” Such grandiose superlatives, to some degree, strain the genre constraints of documentary, and are emblematic of the balancing act between ambition for authenticity and commercial interests. Besides explicit advertising claims, back cover descriptions also evoke prototypical narrative formulas through the language and metaphors they employ. Implicitly, these story frames also promote the work by raising abstract expectations of excitement and reading pleasures. Accordingly, the most prevalent story frames that are invoked orbit around the notion of adventure—either through personal heroism, the discovery of a hidden

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secret, or the exploration of strange and exotic cultures. Thematic descriptions too are an important part of blurbs. Due to the concise format, publishers must heavily summarize the book’s topic and find more concrete and less nuanced labels for complex scenarios. This necessitates that publishers frame conflicts through their choice of terminology, which in turn provides evaluations and assigns culpability. Hence, descriptions prime expectations and frame the reading experience, even though, media-­ literate audiences are aware of the fact that blurbs, as primary avenues for advertising, simplify and exaggerate. On the back-cover of A.D. (2010), the publisher proclaims the work to be “a masterful portrait of a city under siege” and that Neufeld “depicts five extraordinary true stories of survival in the days leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina.” The claim that the experiences of these individuals constitute a “portrait” frames the documentary as representative of all the experiences of the New Orleans citizens. On the front cover flap, the respective characters are introduced with the foreboding description, “Each is forced to confront the same wrenching decision—whether to stay or flee.” Ignoring the claims of authorial proficiency, one finds metaphors and labels that quite clearly raise expectations toward the narrative content. “Siege” as a military and arguably historical metaphor primes a frame of reference that conceptualizes the storm as a grand adversary in an epic battle. The claim of “extraordinary true stories of survival” not only promises excitement but specifically evokes the adventure story: “The central fantasy of the adventure story is that of the hero—individual or group— overcoming obstacles and dangers and accomplishing some important and moral mission” (Cawelti 1976, 39). In this manner, the description triggers schematic plot expectations that involve ideas of heroism, overcoming sheer impossible odds, and also a happy ending. Safe Area Goražde (2007; 2010) also tackles the issue of survival and siege. The description reads: “But as much as Safe Area Gorazde is an account of a terrible siege, it presents a snapshot of people who were slowly letting themselves believe that a war was ending and that they had survived.” This sentence is preceded by a more detailed description of the military “siege” of Goražde as a mainly Muslim enclave surrounded by Serb forces. While the description employs similar language, it is less metaphoric. The referenced siege is to be taken literally. The narrative, here, is not framed as a “story of survival,” but rather as a “snapshot of people” who hoped to survive. This description caters less to prototypical plot expectations but promises to document the people who experienced these

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events, using vocabulary that is explicitly photographic. At the same time, the choice of words “letting themselves believe” creates suspense, leaving some ambiguity concerning their eventual survival. Descriptions also make claims about the cartoonist and their subject position as rhematic cues. Jerusalem promises “the groundwork for a cultural road map of contemporary Jerusalem, utilizing the classic stranger-­ in-­a-strange-land point of view.” Here, it is not so much excitement and adventure that is highlighted, but rather the role of the reporter as explainer. In particular, there is an emphasis on the promise of gaining insight through a reporter to whom the presented locale was initially just as foreign and other as it is to us. On Delisle’s earlier work Shenzhen (2014), this approach is described as “translating [Delisle’s] fish-out-of-­ water experiences” into comics. Likewise, such claims promise the reader a prototypical constellation of the Western traveler that encounters alien and exotic conditions in a faraway land and overcomes this strangeness with humor and wit, which constitutes yet another variety of the adventure story. Instead of “a superhero with exceptional strength or ability,” the hero, in this case, is presented as “‘one of us,’ a figure marked … by flawed abilities and attitudes presumably shared by the audience” (Cawelti 1976, 40). This approach is quite prominent in Delisle’s work, but Sacco and Glidden use it as well to generate relatability in their documentary narratives (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2). Descriptions often anticipate how the story is framed through its narrative situation and chronological order. Sacco’s The Fixer (2004) is described in terms of the author’s relationship with the main character, Neven. Initially, the description anticipates the book’s autobiographical framing story and describes Sacco’s return to Bosnia, his  reunion with Neven, and how he “gradually realized that Neven’s own story—a microcosm of the Balkan conflict itself—might be the most compelling of all.” This anecdotal introduction authenticates and justifies Sacco’s profile of Neven, who is described as “an army veteran … who, for the right price, could arrange anything for the visiting journalist.” The text then describes Neven as the conduit through which “Sacco tells the story of the warlords and gangsters who ran the country during the war.” Describing a single person’s experience as a model for a large-scale war immediately raises the expectation of ambiguity, or more literarily, conflict within the story itself. But the text ends with the even more clear announcement that “all the time he—and the reader—never know whether Neven is telling the truth.” While all forms of oral history rely on readerly faith in the veracity of an

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account instead of “knowing” its truthfulness—a fact that this text also indicates—instructing “the reader” how to feel about Neven’s reliability during the reading process explicitly induces skepticism. In the earlier 2003 hardcover edition by Drawn & Quarterly, such an indication of unreliability is absent and Neven is described as “a man looking to squeeze the last bit of profit from Bosnia before the reconstruction begins.” Sacco’s “complex relationship” to him is then characterized as a means of “discover[ing] the crimes of opportunistic warlords and gangsters who run the countryside in times of war.” In the later collection The Fixer and Other Stories, Neven is simply described as “a charismatic man who makes a shady living.” Nevertheless, such description invokes expectations of a gangster story and one press quote explicitly likens The Fixer (2004) to film noir. Thus, the three different texts approach Neven’s moral culpability quite differently and only the 2004 paperback edition introduces his unreliability. Footnotes in Gaza, as arguably the most extensive documentary graphic narrative, also contains the longest back cover description. Here, the adventure story frame is combined with the detective story formula of uncovering a hitherto concealed truth. Metropolitan Books begins the text in a storytelling mode: the reader is introduced to the town of Rafah through a descriptive mode of realist verisimilitude: “Raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men.” In this vivid scenario, the point of departure for Sacco’s documentary work is presented: Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah—cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake—reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war.

Accordingly, the narrative is introduced as twofold: the story of the massacre and the story of its unearthing. This narrative device most prominently used in detective fiction can be found in many documentary graphic narratives (see Chap. 5). The text employs language that presents Sacco as an archeologist, describing his work as “a quest to get to the heart of what happened … uncovering Gaza past and present.” At the same time, the text leaves some uncertainty about what really happened.

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The description attaches two possible labels to the “competing truths”: either “cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake.” Thus, the reader can immediately choose between two precise framings that evaluate the whole conflict, or, perhaps, imagine that the truth is more complicated. What the text is clear on is the number of victims, aligning itself with the official UN report, which is therefore presented as an objective account and quoted in the appendix. Palestinian and Israeli numbers, however, diverge. In combination with the cover that points to a massacre taking place, it is quite clear that the book takes the Palestinian point of view. Referencing the narrative formula of the detective story by beginning with an initial mystery implies that the ambiguity can finally be lifted, and the case solved. Hence, the description suggests that the truth will be found, and the questions answered. The narrative discourse of Footnotes itself, as well as Sacco’s preface, approach the knowability of what took place in a far less self-­ assured manner (see below). This instance exemplifies that the different paratexts serve different ends and interests and sometimes conflict with each other. Whereas the works discussed so far introduce their approaches to documentary in terms of somewhat metaphorical story frames, the description on the back of Rolling Blackouts explicates the genre-reflexive aspect already introduced by the cover. Overwritten in larger letters, the description starts with the three questions, “What is journalism? How are stories retold? Where do memory and truth meet?” This headline invites the reader to question the veracity of the work presented and reflect upon the process that led to its creation. By asking such broad, open questions, the text makes clear that no definite answer can be expected. The turn to the meta-level, of course, carries with it the underlying assumption that this book is journalism and that the stories it contains involve memory and truth rather than imagination—even when these categories are immediately problematized. Hence, the text also informs the reader that Glidden is vitally interested in the basic tenets and principles of journalism as a practice. The text also specifically assigns roles to Glidden and her travel companions: “Cartoonist Sarah Glidden accompanies her two friends—reporters and founders of a journalism non-profit—as they research potential stories.” This first sentence on the back cover encapsulates Rolling Blackouts structure as meta-documentary. A similar approach has been pioneered by Drawn & Quarterly on the first hardcover edition of Joe Sacco’s The Fixer (2003). The description on the back starts in a similar

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manner, with the question, “How much does the nightly news cost?” The answer follows promptly: “A carton of cigarettes maybe, or a pair of Levi’s.” Next, the text explains how fixers operate “[w]hen shells are falling and Western journalism is the only game left in town,” which it characterizes as “a dangerous occupation, a little amoral and a lot desperate.” After this general description of fixers, the text promises that “Joe Sacco goes behind the scenes of war correspondents to reveal the anatomy of frontline news gathering,” highlighting the meta-documentary aspect of the work as well. As has been shown, adventure is one of the primary story frames that blurbs employ as framing strategies. The reader is promised both excitement and the overcoming of obstacles through personal or collective heroism. Likewise, the detective story as the recovery of a hidden truth is pertinent and akin to the quest of reportage. Arguably, reportage as a story frame in itself, as found in Rolling Blackouts, is far less established than adventure, but it can also evoke preconceived expectations toward journalistic research and information gathering. Here, the documentary process is privileged over the expectation of exciting narrative development. Since blurbs lack the space to discuss the narrative at length, they primarily call up story frames with promises of readerly gratification. Knowledges of text genres help readers make sense of the disparity between the promises of the blurb and what the narrative delivers. Nevertheless, it is striking that many descriptions promise clear and definite accounts of complex crises whereas the narratives forgo them as a crucial tenet.

3.3   Dedications, Acknowledgments, and Notes on Names In documentary comics, another type of paratext is especially relevant: dedications and acknowledgments. Generally, dedications can be found as part of the front matter, whereas acknowledgments often appear in the back matter. It is common for documentary cartoonists to dedicate their book to someone, individually or collectively, acknowledging certain people or institutions. In doing so, a particular relationship between the author, the work, and actual people is enacted. Not only is the relation of the book to the actual world underlined, but the author often explicitly states their loyalties regarding the represented conflicts. Expressions of gratitude adhere to tacit rules of documentary: both dedications and

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acknowledgments—personally and/or collectively—addressed to the subjects whose experiences the work describes, highlight the special relationship between author and subjects and they indicate the author’s ethical responsibility to them. The display of this relationship, not just within the narrative but around it, also corroborates its authenticity. A dedication is a performative or “illocutionary” speech act that does not state a fact that is per se true or false, but only through its utterance generates or performs the gesture of inscribing the work to someone (see Austin 1962, 5, 101): only through the very fact that the respective sentence is printed into the book is the dedication accomplished. Moreover, a dedication is always addressed simultaneously to the dedicatee and the reader, “for dedicating is a public act that the reader is, as it were, called on to witness” (Genette 1997, 134). Genette writes: The dedication always is a matter of demonstration, ostentation, exhibition: it proclaims a relationship, whether intellectual or personal, actual or symbolic, and this proclamation is always at the service of the work, as a reason for elevating the work’s standing or as a theme for commentary. (135)

In the case of documentary, the author’s relationship to the documentary subjects is paramount, and only through a relationship of mutual trust can the author present the eyewitness accounts of his subjects as authentic. Dedications and acknowledgments, either individually or collectively, perform a public display of this trust. In the selected works, the acknowledgments and dedications are sincere, however: Josh Neufeld expresses his gratitude specifically to “Denise, Leo, Michelle, Abbas, Darnell, and Brobson, for opening up their lives to my prying brush.” He states, “Without them, ‘A.D.’ wouldn’t exist, and any errors or misrepresentations of their experiences are entirely my fault” (2010, 195). Neufeld dedicates the book to them as “the beating hearts and souls of ‘A.D.’” Hence, Neufeld elevates his subjects to the status of the primary authority and characterizes his own position as a mere mediator for their experiences. Whereas Delisle does not include acknowledgments in his older work, Jerusalem contains a short note in the front matter. Here, Delisle thanks several people mentioned only by the first name, whom the reader may or may not recognize from the narrative. This gesture is decidedly more reserved and, ostensibly, addresses primarily the respective persons rather than the audience. Sarah Glidden includes both collective and personal acknowledgments, mentioning her travel

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companions Dan O’Brien, Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill, and Jessica Partnow by name and thanking them “for giving me access to two months of their lives.” But she also extends her “Thank You” “To all the people we met who gave us their time and shared their stories (2016, 303).” Joe Sacco inserts the lines “To the people of Gaza” into Footnotes (2009a, vii) and “To the people of the land” in Paying (2020). These dedications serve not only to acknowledge their mutual cooperation in the documentary—and thus as a display of their relationship between the dedicatee and the author—but also as an implicit endorsement of their position in the conflict in which they are involved. In the case of Paying, the dedication also explicitly frames the native Dene as “of the land,” drawing an essential connection between them and the contested land. Such authorial positioning designates these documentaries as motivated efforts rather than detached and ideally objective journalistic reports. Goražde moreover includes the line “This book is dedicated to the town of Gorazde, where I spent some of my happiest moments” (2007). Sacco’s reference to “happiest moments,” adds another layer of meaning, which undermines some expectations of war reportage, for instance, that a reader might encounter only suffering and desolation in “foreign” parts of the world. This acknowledgment adds complexity and serves to humanize his subjects: Sacco reframes the preconceptions of the people of Goražde from victimized others to equal partners in a mutual encounter. Importantly, acknowledgments also facilitate transparency and include qualifications concerning the narrative and its underlying research methods. In Footnotes, Joe Sacco thanks the Israeli researchers he employed and connects this with a disclosure: “As I cannot speak Hebrew I had the help of two Israeli researchers” (2009a, 418). Likewise, in The Fixer, Sacco thanks the magazine Dani as his “primary source for the histories of the various warlords and most of the quotes attributed to them” (2004, 106). Josh Neufeld acknowledges several online resources: “Google images, Google maps, and Wikipedia were all vital to this project” (2010, 195). Sarah Glidden extends “a big thanks to the many people who through social media were so generous with their help on small translations, links to resources, and many other gestures” (2016, 303). Such acknowledgments that address people of institutions not mentioned directly in the story serve as a show of gratitude toward contributors, as well, but most prominently, they perform a show of honesty toward the reader. In Goražde (2007, 229), Footnotes (2009a, 418), and Paying (2020, 263–264), Sacco similarly thanks his main interview partners and, in some

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cases, local guides. Such gestures become especially relevant when the trustworthiness or character of a subject is called into question: despite Neven’s crimes (see Chap. 5, Sects. 5.3 and 5.4), Sacco concludes his “Acknowledgements” in The Fixer with the following line: “Finally, the most thanks to Neven. Good luck to you always” (2004, 106; also 2009b, 177). This expression of gratitude serves as Sacco’s final gesture of commitment to Neven and his accounts. However, dedications can also serve to denounce a particular individual. In War’s End, Sacco dedicates the story “Christmas with Karadzic” “to the people at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and all those who are working to arrest Radovan Karadzic” (2005, 69). Hence, Sacco explicitly supports the prosecution of Karadzic as a war criminal. Finally, acknowledgments also contain intertextual references when other authors are mentioned. Sarah Glidden, for instance, thanks Joe Sacco and Josh Neufeld, and several other cartoonists (2016, 303); in Footnotes, Sacco prominently thanks Chris Hedges (2009a, 418). The kinship that such acknowledgments proclaim, again, also presents the referenced individuals as likely guarantors of the author’s trustworthiness. Here, both authors authenticate their works by pointing toward their participation in a larger personal and professional network of cartoonists and journalists. Dedications and acknowledgments possess dual functionalities. They not only fulfill the purpose of addressing a specific contributor or clarifying pronunciation, but more importantly serve both as a performative display of documentary ethics toward the reader and as a means of reframing the relationship between American documentarian and their “foreign” subjects. Even though usually short in length, these texts serve as implicit genre markers, and prime readerly awareness of the fact that the people depicted are, indeed, living individuals who share relationships of mutual trust with the authors. This aspect is essential for documentary comics, as the selected works are premised upon the prolonged cohabitation of reporters and witnesses, as opposed to the brief encounters of mainstream news journalism.

3.4   Prefaces and Afterwords Commonly, works of documentary comics are accompanied by texts that either explain or extend the narrative discourse. Preceding or following the graphic narrative, prefaces or postfaces, respectively, present “a discourse … on the subjects of the text” (Genette 1997, 161), whereas notes

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and appendices supplement the story with references, qualifications, and further information.10 These paratexts differ not only in length but in function from those discussed above. Prefaces offer authors avenues for addressing the reader directly and an opportunity to comment on and discuss their works in more detail. Being longer than the previously discussed texts, they create space for nuance and explanation. Hence, after the narrative discourse, notes and references discuss, comment on, and contextualize the narrative, or portions thereof. Here, marketing concerns become far less relevant. As expansive metadiscourses, these texts provide a means for authors to discuss and reflect upon the genre status of their work and to situate it within broader discourses. Of all paratexts, prefaces allow the author the most extensive space for pragmatic discussion and contextual elaboration. Functionally, a preface differs from the cover and its appendages in that “it is no longer precisely a matter of attracting the reader—who has already made the considerable effort to procure a copy of the book by buying, borrowing, or stealing it—but of hanging onto him with a typically rhetorical apparatus of persuasion” (Genette 1997, 198). In particular, the author11 can state their own agenda. As Genette outlines, the “[t]he most important function of the original preface, perhaps, is to provide the author’s interpretation of the text or, if you prefer, his statement of intent” (221). Or more nonchalantly, as Erving Goffman phrases it in his introduction to Frame Analysis, a preface “allows a writer to try to set the terms of what he will write about. Accounts, excuses, apologies designed to reframe what follows after them … leaving him, he hopes, a little better defended than he might otherwise be” (1986, 16). Nevertheless, prefaces are non-obligatory paratexts (cf. Genette 1997, 63). Their prevalence in documentary comics indicates a particular inclination to ensure the intended understanding of the respective work. As these purely verbal paratexts are considerably faster to produce, prefaces offer the author a way to comment on their works after an often years-long production process is finished. Hence, the preface is often a space for personal reflection: whereas documentary graphic narratives privilege encounters with witnesses over personal impressions or opinions, the paratext offers the author a space for personal thoughts and anecdotes. Hence, the preface commonly involves autobiographic accounts of the creative process and provides a particularly straightforward channel for the author to address the reader directly. In this regard, it is not entirely

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surprising that Delisle, who conceptualizes himself as a memoirist, does not feel the need to include a paratext specifically addressing his thoughts.12 Authors often use a preface as a space to reflect upon their relationship with, and the “proper” treatment of, their documentary subjects. Such ethical imperative involves truthfulness both to the reader and to the documentary subjects, but also mandates not exposing any personal information which is not viable or necessary. Indeed, documentary ethics constitutes a major paratextual focus, and prefaces help moderate the obligations toward both subjects and audiences. Less common than authorial prefaces are third-party endorsements. Similar to the earlier Palestine (2006), which contains an “Homage to Joe Sacco” by Edward Said (i–v), Safe Area Goražde (2007) includes an “Introduction” by Christopher Hitchens. While they provide similar information as autographic prefaces, such as historical context, perhaps their most important service is providing personal authentication by major intellectuals who attest to Sacco’s integrity and proficiency. Most prominently, prefaces let authors instruct the reader to assume a particular genre frame in their reception. Prefaces often serve to demonstrate the author’s “truthfulness or, at the very least sincerity” (Genette 1997, 206). This applies to postfaces as well, although placement matters; whether framings are initially included or moderated afterward must be taken into account.13 This is especially relevant for explicit truth claims: Sarah Glidden includes a preface titled “About This Book” (2016, 6), the first line of which reads, “This is a story based on true events and real dialogue.” Glidden explicitly frames her book as nonfiction and devotes many of the following lines to describing her documentary practices, oscillating between autobiographical revelation and self-aware qualification. Josh Neufeld, in contrast, does not put forth his own authorial truth claim before, but rather after the narrative. In his “Afterword,” Neufeld states, DENISE, LEO, MICHELLE, ABBAS, DARNELL, KWAME and BROBSON (the Doctor) are real people who lived through Hurricane Katrina. The events that occur in “A.D.” actually happened to them, and most of the dialogue in this book is taken from our conversations, quotes from interviews, or entries from their blogs. The places and details are real too—down to the DVDs and comics on Leo’s shelves and the contents of Abbas’s store. (Some names and identifying characteristics, however, have been changed to protect people’s privacy.) (2010, 191)

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Taken at face value and discounting other indicators, it would follow that readers might approach Rolling Blackouts actively as nonfiction, whereas the nonfictionality of A.D. comes as a posterior emphasis, or even revelation. Markers of nonfictionality are multiple in and around A.D. though. Hence, such an emphasis attests to the author’s drive to underline the truthfulness of the depicted events and his sincerity as a lasting impression. The most in-depth genre discussion is undertaken by Sarah Glidden After her initial statement, Glidden makes a larger point about nonfiction narrative: “These true events and real dialogue have been crafted into a story, but a person’s life is not a story,” she writes. Narrative as an aspect of the human memory necessarily selects and highlights aspects of personal experience, she describes, and does not present a reliable and stable resource of information—a phenomenon that is worsened when stories are retold. “For this reason, true objectivity is impossible in narrative journalism (and arguably in any kind of journalism)” (2016, 6). This disclaimer very generally cautions the reader not to take the presented narrative at face value. Glidden preemptively qualifies her own truth claims and acknowledges the limitations of her efforts. This way, the preface also serves as a restrictive clause concerning the author’s moral culpability. Glidden also professes her good faith and discloses her documentary practices in an autobiographical account of the process. She writes, “I spent two months with the people portrayed in this book” and goes on to describe how she recorded and observed all she saw. While she presents this situation as a general dilemma, Glidden also professes her discomfort with not being able to apply “true objectivity,” yet she concludes, “[b]ut stories are how all of us try to make sense of a chaotic world, and I think it’s worth it, discomfort and all.” For the remaining paragraph, Glidden then writes about the comprehensiveness of her recording practices and the accuracy with which the recorded dialogues have been included, with only “some minimal cleanup done for grammar or clarity” (2016, 6). Finally, she continues, the instances “where a recording was not possible” have been marked in the “Notes” section at the end of the book. Thus, Glidden invests considerable effort in substantiating her trustworthiness as author and the authenticity of her story through a declaration of accuracy and work ethic. She also emphasizes the importance of her interviews and, most prominently, the role of the people encountered. Glidden goes on to reveal her practices of editing and condensing the recorded conversations “in order to be transformed into a readable comic that isn’t

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a thousand pages long.” She asserts that she “never edited dialogue in a way that would alter the meaning or context of what was being said.” Significantly, she adds, “Or at least, the meaning or context as I interpreted it” (2016, 6). This last point is typical of Glidden’s approach in general and perhaps even of the genre as a whole. Joe Sacco’s “Foreword” to Footnotes (2009a, ix–xi) presents the most comprehensive preface. Sacco, too, reflects upon his own documentary project and states that his “main priority was to record the stories of Palestinian eyewitnesses to the events in Khan Younis and Rafah.” Yet he also acknowledges the difficulty of recording memories of events that took place half a century ago. He writes, “[d]ocumentary evidence is usually considered more reliable than oral testimony by historians, but the record is scant and certain unsavory orders and reports are often kept “off the books” or are stored out of reach of even the most diligent researcher” (x). Still, he asserts he felt it important “that available avenues be explored,” he employed Israeli researchers to access several archives. As both Glidden’s and Sacco’s considerations showcase, that authentication in documentary comics oscillates between displays of effort toward accuracy and the forthright acknowledgment of both medial and epistemological limitations. To explicate these limitations while professing adherence to documentary ethics and veracity serves as conscientious authentication. Authenticity is generated through a voluntary gesture of acknowledging the necessity of framing mechanisms but also showcasing a sincere effort to make the narrative as transparent as possible. At the same time, these qualifications and warnings cede some responsibility to the reader. Here, the preface reflects on the fact that the medium of comics in particular requires the reader to add their own conclusions as part of the reading process. Indeed, Sacco also advocates for readerly awareness of the medial preconditions of comics: Besides the problems inherent in relying on memories … the reader should be aware that there is another filter through which these stories passed before reaching the page, namely my own visual interpretation. In essence, I am the set designer and the director of every scene that takes place in the 1940s and 1950s. (2009a, x)

Indeed, through this cinematic metaphor, Sacco makes abundantly clear that the visual reconstruction of events is his own interpretation. Yet he goes on to describe how he employed photographic archives provided

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by the United Nations. “Still,” he concludes, “any act of visualization— drawing, in this case—comes with an unavoidable measure of refraction” (ibid.). Hence, in Sacco’s introduction, both the limitations of documentary comics and his authorial integrity are continuously contrasted, without one taking precedence above the other. Sacco reiterates similar disclaimers in “A Note on Names, Portraits, and Interviews”: photographs were his primary resource for portraits, and where no portrait is provided although a name is given, “the likely explanation is that my camera malfunctioned” (2009a, 417). Ergo, he asserts that he had the best of intentions and that any fault is to be laid at the feet of the equipment. Likewise, Sacco claims that he “tried to be faithful to the words people used,” but “smoothed the language somewhat, though as little as necessary” to avoid confusion (ibid.). In this manner, he moderates the different and sometimes conflicting obligations to readers and subjects. While Neufeld does not include a much genre-reflection, he also states, “I took tons of photos, not just of the subjects and their pets, home, and cars, but also of the still flood-wrecked parts of New Orleans” (2010, 192). While the photographs are not included, referencing them signals trustworthiness and adherence to facts, counterbalancing the mediality of comics. Making transparent such practices of graphic reportage beyond its immediate medial surface constitutes a prominent authentication strategy. To some extent, the selected works’ prefaces all address autobiographical aspects of the respective creative processes and the historical contexts in which the works are situated. A common theme is the personal motivation for undertaking the documentary project. In the case of documentary, personal motivation commonly stems from a response to actual events of broader political and historical significance. Prefaces also substantiate the subjects’ urgency and importance (cf. Genette 1997, 199)— according to the author—and, thus, arguably showcase their motivation to show and tell the particular story. Such accounts primarily describe the impetus to document as a reaction to injustice encountered in the world. Genette describes this theme as the “genesis” of the book: “The original preface may inform the reader about the origin of the work, the circumstances in which it was written, the stages of its creation” (1997, 210). In Footnotes, Sacco confirms this suggestion in the first sentence of his “Foreword,” writing, “The genesis of this book dates to the spring of 2001” (2009a, ix). During an assignment with journalist Chris Hedges for Harper’s magazine to report on the

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Second Intifada, Sacco describes, they decided to follow up on a lead on the 1956 Khan Younis massacre, “seemingly the greatest massacre of Palestinians on Palestinian soil, if the U.N. figures of 275 dead are to be believed.” Sacco then describes that references to the massacre were later cut by the editor of Harper’s, which he found “galling.” So, he decided to return to Gaza for further investigation. This background story frames the entire investigation as a struggle against censorship and the suppression of evidence. Sacco also professes his personal investment: “To me, the story of the Khan Younis killings was not so easily dispensable. I had done some digging, and almost nothing had been written in English about the episode” (ix). Sacco highlights his motivation and personal moral obligation to uncover “what had taken place in 1956” and document an injustice that had been otherwise ignored. Personal moral obligation can also be related to specific individuals. In his afterword, Josh Neufeld immediately mentions his documentary subjects and their situations as his primary motivation, writing, “‘A.D.’ is my attempt to document the remarkable experiences of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.” But the project is also tied to his own biography: Neufeld outlines how the whole project came to fruition and discusses his work as a volunteer disaster response worker with the Red Cross in October 2005, stating, “I had been deeply affected by my volunteering experience and was looking for a way to bring it to life as a cartoonist” (2010, 191). This context of personal experience within disaster relief, of course, enhances Neufeld’s trustworthiness as an author but also his morality as a person. While A.D. does not tell his own story, Neufeld’s biography is intertwined with Hurricane Katrina through his humanitarian activism. Later, the “About the Author” section likewise begins with the fact that Neufeld “spent three weeks as an American Red Cross volunteer in Biloxi, Mississippi” (197). Regarding his documentary approach, Neufeld states that he aimed “to tell the story from the perspectives of a range of real people who had lived through the storm,” different in race, class, gender, age, and sexuality. He furthermore states, “I knew there were certain key experiences I had to document: evacuating the city, facing the flooding, being trapped at the Superdome or the Convention center, and losing all your possessions” (191), and describes that he invested considerable effort to find subjects fitting this profile. He thereby makes transparent his selection process while advertising the representativeness of his account and describing how and why he could relate personally to their specific experiences.

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However, Neufeld also acknowledges the limitations of his selections, concluding, “There are many, many stories about Katrina and its aftermath. Those of the seven people in ‘A.D.’ are quite particular and highly personal, but my hope is that they provide a window into a larger world, one that few of us understand and that we’ll be trying to make sense of for a long time to come” (193). This last statement is not only symptomatic for A.D., but for documentary in general. Highly selective stories are to be representative of larger conflicts and, ideally, even provide insight into the human condition per se. Neufeld primarily authenticates his work not through conscientious disclosure of inconsistencies, but rather autobiographically by describing his personal experience as part of the relief measures and, more importantly, through his personal relationship with the respective witnesses. The fact that these witnesses are all Americans and could theoretically either publicly object or corroborate Neufeld’s account constitutes a difference to the other works discussed in this study and strengthens this form of authentication. In the preface to Footnotes, Sacco stresses historiographical considerations, quoting eyewitness testimony from the senior Hamas official Abed El-Aziz El-Rantisi, who was nine years old in 1956 and “who was later assassinated by an Israeli missile.” El-Rantisi describes his trauma after the massacre, stating, “This sort of action can never be forgotten … they planted hatred in our hearts” (2009a, ix). In the last paragraph of the preface, Sacco reiterates this statement, directly asserting, “Perhaps it is worth our while to … examine one or two events that were not only a disaster for the people who lived them but might also be instructive for those who want to understand why and how … hatred was ‘planted’ in hearts” (xi). Through this quotation, Sacco perpetuates a framing of the conflict from the Hamas point of view that casts the Israelis as the original aggressors; the horticultural metaphor, moreover, presents “hatred” as a living organism that once sowed may grow further on its own. Likewise, Sacco presents his book both as a documentary of a specific historical event and as an explanation for the ongoing crisis. Present-day events also find their place in the preface: Sacco describes both the 2005 unilateral dismantlement of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the 2007 election of Hamas as the ruling party and subsequent blockade of Gaza, which occurred during the writing process. These cases exemplify how prefaces allow the author to react to current events, as they are solely verbal and much faster to complete than graphic narratives. Thus, the preface

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contextualizes Footnotes historically not just in terms of the timeline of the documented events but also of its creation process. Historical contextualization can also be inserted in a more detached manner. In place of the common autodiegtic authorial preface, Josh Neufeld includes a double-page spread (2010, n.p.) with a section containing historical information on Hurricane Katrina on the left and a “Who’s Who” introducing the seven main characters on the right side. In contrast to the story, which focuses on individual human experiences, Neufeld’s contextualization utilizes a description of Hurricane Katrina suffused with statistical information. This includes the storm’s 140 miles per hour velocity, the fact that eighty percent of the city was flooded, “with some areas as much as 15 feet under water.” Neufeld goes on to describe the extent of the human catastrophe and the devastation of the city. Notably, he includes specific location names and ends with the statement that “more than 700 New Orleanians died as a direct result of the hurricane and the flooding” and that “tens of thousands who evacuated or lost their homes are still unable to return.” These factual statements both provide context for the story and a sense of immediacy and urgency, especially through the last sentence. Prefaces do not have to be an original part of the work but can be added to subsequent editions as “later original prefaces” (cf. Genette 1997, 239). These are less common, as most documentary graphic narrative books do not have long publication histories. However, the special edition of Safe Area Goražde (2011) provides an example: one of several added paratexts, designated as “bonus materials,” that make this edition “special” is the new preface, “Some Reflections on Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Gorazde” (vii–viii). The book also contains a long, illustrated essay by Sacco on its creation, which includes several documents and reference photographs taken by Sacco (vii-viii). It is followed by seventeen nonpaginated pages containing drawings side by side with their original reference photographs, highlighting their similarity (see Fig. 3.3). Whereas photographs are commonly used to authenticate and corroborate other works nonfiction, documentary graphic narratives generally forgo this form of authentication (see also Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1). The fact that they are included here only as special edition “bonus content” shows that they are not meant to convince first-time readers, but primarily serve to provide a deeper understanding and appreciation for the already devoted reader. Ten years after the original publication, the new preface frames the narrative retrospectively and the text provides a fairly straightforward example

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Fig. 3.3  Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The Special Edition (Fantagraphics Books 2011), n.p.

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of a prefatorial statement of intent. Beneath the headline but clearly separated from the rest of the text through a thinly lined frame the preface begins with the following sentence: “My impetus to go to Bosnia was anger over a war that seemed more about slaughter than about combat between armies…” (vii). Again, Sacco cites moral responsibility to oppose injustice as his primary motivation. Now, however, Sacco reflects upon his own position and admits that his assessment may have “lacked nuanced,” though, he concludes, “I still think it was correct.” Hence, Sacco essentially reaffirms his emphatic framing of the war as one-sided and barbarous. It also privileges Sacco’s own emotional response toward more complex historical causal chains. The statement also immediately justifies why the topic was important enough to document. At the same time, Sacco admits that while war on European soil after 1945 presented an “ugly novelty,” such focus “admits to a certain Eurocentricity” (2011, vii). Sacco goes on to describe how, when he was living in Berlin in the early 1990s, Bosnia seemed different to him from other seceding Balkan states because he was familiar with Sarajevo from the 1984 winter Olympics—and the First World War. Sarajevo, he continues, initially impressed him with its multiethnic stability, but he disapproved of its inhabitants’ prejudices against refugees and its Muslim militias. But after the city prompted his attention, he began to follow the war. He states: I soon became angry at the international community’s insistence on treating Bosnia as a humanitarian case, as if feeding and clothing the victims of war was the issue and not the war itself. The Serb nationalists were behaving monstrously, and I thought a genuine effort—including using force, if necessary—should be made to stop them. Eventually, the need to take some sort of personal action, to impose myself constructively, became my own imperative, and I decided to go to Sarajevo to report on what was going on myself. (viii)

Sacco describes his personal anger at the international response as motivation to report on the war, treating his work as political activism based on personal convictions, rather than as objective news journalism. The reader is invited to share these convictions and approach the story with the same anger about an unjust and unchallenged war. While Sacco cites the barbarity of the Serb nationalists and his disillusionment with the international reactions as his main motivation, he also

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describes his personal affection for the people of Goražde, whom he found more welcoming and unpretentious than the Sarajevans, stating, “I fell in love with Gorazde on that first trip.” He points out the immense courageousness of the town’s population and the unprecedented situation that the town found itself in during the war. After the war, this unique situation had ended, and Sacco closes his segment by stating, “Goražde as a people in a moment between death and deliverance was gone forever, and it was that moment I tried to preserve in this book” (2011, viii). Sacco starts this segment by citing frustration with the larger political situation as his motivation and ends it by pointing to his intent to document the town’s story for posterity. Hence, this later preface both highlights his own biographical context at the time and locates the documented events in a larger historical trajectory.

3.5   Notes, Bibliographies, and Appendices Many documentary graphic narrative books include addenda, commonly found in the back matter, which provide additional information, deemed non-essential for the immediate understanding of the narrative. These can be singular notes, but they may also extend to several appendices. Genette defines a note as a “statement of variable length … connected to a more or less definite segment of text and placed either opposite or keyed to this segment” (1997, 319). Particularly strong cohesion between the narrative discourse and appendices is generated through endnotes as indexes. Notes often contain qualifications or explanations of events included in the narrative discourse. Qualification of facts and disclosure of inconsistencies authenticate ex negativo: when the author explicitly marks gaps and impasses, they correspondingly suggest that all other (unqualified) information is correct. This concerns the specific source material and/or the oral testimonies they received, but also the very general limitations and pitfalls of all reportage, with or without special attention to the medium of comics. The space of the comics page must be used economically, and the amount of text that can be included on the page is limited. Notes and appendices help remove information to the back matter that is not necessary for the immediate understanding of the story, but important enough to include. Generally, notes provide “definitions and explanations of terms used in the text” and “references for quotations; indication of sources; and presentation of supporting authorities; corroborating and supplementary

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information, and documents (Genette 1997, 325). Hence, notes contain information and qualifications that are, as Genette speculates, “not likely to interest the ordinary reader, but that [the author] is anxious to bring up in a note aimed at more exacting scholars” (326). Addressing such envisioned “more exacting scholars” performs a relational gesture to the “ordinary reader”: the inclusion of notes constitutes a display of comprehensiveness and scholarly ambition, even when left unread. For example, Sacco’s 27 pages of purely verbal appendices and notes to Footnotes constitute an impressive gesture of meticulousness, but, arguably, only few readers will study them in full. This way, notes also serve as a signal of conscientious authentication. Like prefaces, appendices are predominantly verbal, although they are sometimes illustrated. The verbal mode allows authors to substantiate the more polysemous graphic narrative with concrete and specific statements. Supplements may also be visual: Jerusalem contains the nonpaginated appendix “Jerusalem Sketches” (2008–2009), a collection of 22 color-­ scans of sketches from Delisle’s notebook. Here, the materiality of the yellowish notebook-page is retained, emphasizing the status of the sketch as an artifact produced on-site, which, in turn, corroborates the graphic narrative texts as material evidence. One form of appendix that particularly signals scholarly ambition is a bibliography, which references other works and sometimes includes personal remarks by the author. To the reader, bibliographies both offer avenues for further reading and demonstrate the author’s competence in the larger discourse. Sacco includes personal comments close to a prefatorial style in the Goražde bibliography, writing that he “never intended this book to be a comprehensive overview of the break-up of Yugoslavia and the war in Bosnia. However, I found it necessary to provide some context in order to tell the story of Gorazde” (2007, 288). He then references several history books, praising them as resources, and includes an acknowledgment “to the New York Times and The Guardian newspapers, which provided me a day-by-day account of the war in Bosnia.” These references to history books and established newspapers proclaim a kinship of sorts. Sacco continues this autobiographical tone in Footnotes and describes which books he “relied on” and which authors “helped him understand” nuances of the conflict (2009a, 416). Sacco specifically mentions, which books he consulted for the “Israeli point of view” and the “U.N. perspective.” Sacco states that he met authors Benny Morris and Mordechai Bar-On in person, while a subchapter contains a list of the “Archives and

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People Consulted” (416–417). This comprehensive and conscientious disclosure of Sacco’s sources and influences serves as a form of person-­ related authentication: Sacco generates transparency, but he also stresses his meticulous work process. At the same time, he locates his own work in a larger discursive formation, offering the inclined reader potential avenues for further research. Thus, Sacco perpetuates his own historiographical assessment of the vast corpus of research on the Middle East conflict. One prominent function of notes is the clarification of names, both personal and geographical, and their correct pronunciation, as most works discussed in this study constitute reportages from countries foreign to the author and their audiences. In Goražde (2007; 2010), a concise “Author’s Note about Pronunciation” precedes the narrative, in which Sacco explains that he did not include Bosnian-language accents in his spelling of personal and geographical names. Nevertheless, he produces a pronunciation guide for five towns. While correct pronunciation is inconsequential for written texts, this gesture renders both the depicted foreign places and people more familiar to anglophone audiences and heightens audience involvement and narrative immersion. This serves as a show of authorial attentiveness concerning the balance between accuracy and readability. Since Sacco could have abandoned the accents without comment and domestic audiences without the relevant background might not have noticed their absence, the note also performs a display of his ethical treatment of his documentary subjects. In Paying the Land (2020), this approach is extended with a short segment called “Notes of Dene Languages” (262). Here, Sacco not only makes transparent his process of adapted Indigenous spelling into the Latin alphabet, but also provides a list of online resources with further information, including dictionaries and audio samples. However, pronunciation is not the only difficulty concerning names. In The Fixer, Sacco does not include a preface, but a short “Last Words”section (2004, 106), which besides his “Acknowledgements,” only contains a paragraph titled “A Note on the Two Celos.” Here, Sacco clarifies that his story features two warlords that are both nicknamed “Celo” and that “[t]o avoid too much confusion” he refers to the person “Ismet Bajramovic,” who is more relevant to the story as “Celo” and to the other warlord by his given last name, “Delalic.” “During the war, however, most Sarajevans were apt to think of Delalic, who had a larger unit and was around longer, when someone mentioned the name Celo” (ibid.). Likewise, in Paying, Sacco clarifies in a “Note on Trout Lake” that the

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place has since been renamed in Dene to “Sambaa K’e” (262). Placed after the narrative, these corrections serve as displays of accuracy and respect, rather than clarifications necessary to understand the narrative. Beneath her preface, Sarah Glidden too includes the subsection “A Note on Names” (2016, 6). Glidden describes the difficulty of having another major character named Sarah in the book. “For a long time while working on the book, and with Sarah Stuteville’s permission, I changed her character’s name to Sal in order to avoid confusion.” Altering a name “for the sake of clarity” presented an ethical conflict for her, though, and so based on her “gut feeling,” she changed the name back. For the reader, there is hardly any necessity to have this information to make sense of the narrative. While the paragraph cautions the reader that there will be two eponymous characters, the information that she changed the name—with permission—during the work process performs a deliberate gesture of honesty. At the same time, this compulsive disclosure can also be received as a quasi-confessional statement. Similarly, Glidden states that the other characters “are called by their actual names unless they have requested otherwise for reasons of safety concerns.” These changes are included in the notes section as well. Glidden is not alone in doing so: Sacco includes a similar disclaimer in Footnotes (2009a, 418). The most important function of notes is for authors to address inconsistencies in their research process as well as underlying difficulties, to avoid dealing with such complexities in the narrative itself (cf. Genette 1997, 326). The “Notes” section that succeeds the narrative of Rolling Blackouts (Glidden 2016, 301) includes further disclosures about names and documentary inconsistencies, and credits for photographs that served as the basis for drawings. While her narrative discourse does not include indices, the notes reference specific pages. Glidden asserts that particular dialogues have not been recorded, but were later confirmed, or that some parts are based on recordings done by other people, while others are based on third-party accounts. She adds that in one instance, she was asked to employ fake names and that in another, she omitted a person from the narrative “for clarity’s sake” (301). Thus, Glidden’s notes disclose gaps, credit other creators, and explain stylistic choices. Besides such displays of sincerity, Glidden also adds further information in one instance. Referring to page 275, which summarizes the difficulties of Iraqi refugees in Syria, she adds, “Although the US accepts the most refugees worldwide in absolute number, other countries like Australia, Canada, and Norway receive a higher proportion of refugees per capita

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according to UNHCR data” (2016, 301). Glidden, pointedly presents an alternative statistical framing of refugee reception, shifting the angle from absolute to relative. Even though refugee aid work by her home country is not the topic of her book, the inclusion of this note highlights that the United States still constitutes the point of reference against which her experiences abroad are measured. In Goražde, Sacco includes “A Note on the Possible Use of Chemical Warfare by Serb Units at Srebrenica” (2007, 229), which provides a qualification that is more controversial. Sacco first admits that in 1995 he received two testimonies about the use of chemical weapons by Serbs against Muslim men and “didn’t ask many follow-up questions,” having been taken aback by an accusation he had not heard before. This was a mistake, he states, and refers to a report by Human Rights Watch that collected many such accounts, even though it does not present conclusive evidence. Sacco writes, I, for one, was convinced by the harrowing and detailed testimonials I read in the report. Those testimonials meshed with my own rather lazy interviews about the matter. As a result, I’ve chosen to present the accusations of the use of chemical weapons in the chapter that details the fall of Srebrenica. (2007, 229)

Here, Sacco justifies the choice to include the incident, despite its inconclusive evidence base, by claiming responsibility for his shortcomings in his personal response to the testimonies. Besides referring to the official report, he offers his personal judgment as an authenticating instance (see also Chap. 4, Sect. 4.5, and Chap. 5, Sect. 5.4). While this is the only note in Goražde, Footnotes, as mentioned above, includes four extensive appendices (2009a, 390–415). The first, “Documents and Sources, 1956” (390–403), is by far the longest and contains transcriptions of letters, military communiqués, newspaper articles, contemporary interviews and debates, a part of the UN report, and an interview that Sacco himself conducted. As Sacco himself puts it, he “present[s] extended cullings from some of the documents I quoted in the book to provide more context for the interested reader.” Here, the appendix serves, to some degree, as a counterweight to the oral history approach of the narrative discourse; even though Footnotes “is chiefly depended on the oral testimony of Palestinians,” Sacco writes that he has tried “[a]s much as possible … to present the available documentary evidence to

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supplement these personal accounts” (390). He then reiterates his effort and the fact that he employed two Israeli researchers. The lengthy appendix that collects Sacco’s transcripts of documents constitutes both a medial and a perspectival sea change. The graphic narrative that vividly reenacts and entertains is contrasted with the dreariness of the unadorned printed word. Likewise, the presented documents mostly originate from the Israeli side, including an interview with the historian Mordechai Bar-On. This positioning of one side of the conflict with graphic narrative and the other with documentation shifts sympathies without doubt toward the Palestinian side through medial framing. Nevertheless, Sacco takes great care to adhere to academic standards of transparency by documenting his sources. The transcripts often reference pages of the narrative itself and the last section, “Additional Notes on Sources” (2009a, 403), provides further references for sources used at specific points in the story. Moreover, Sacco points out inconsistencies in the source material, and marks his own additions using square brackets. In this appendix, Sacco provides a variety of historical documents that partly contradict each other and also exhibit the difficulty of transforming the historical source material into a coherent narrative. At the same time, these sources corroborate Sacco’s stories and balance the narrative with contrasting information—albeit with a far less favorable medial framing. The remaining three appendices shift the focus from historical documents to the present day. The second appendix, “The Demolition of Homes in Rafah: The Israeli View” (2009a, 404–412), presents transcripts of interviews with both official spokespersons of the Israeli military and three at least partly anonymous Israeli commanders. These interviews concern the contemporary practice of the Israeli military of demolishing Palestinian houses that they claim have been used for military purposes. The interviews present figures for the number of houses demolished—the official and unofficial accounts differ greatly—and personal experiences that explaining and justifying the practice. The next appendix, “The Demolition of Ashraf’s Home” (413–414), provides a personal account of a case that concerns one of the book’s characters and also Sacco’s memories and perceptions of the events. He writes, “Ashraf’s house was finally and completely demolished by the Israeli army on May 17, 2003, after I had finished researching the book” (413). He continues with a transcript from his own journal. This presents a decidedly more personal and persuasive approach than the interview included before. The section also contains a short interview with one of the Israeli commanders from the

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previous section, who presents a strongly diverging account of the case. He makes the case that the houses attacked were military positions (414)— an assessment that the reader “knows” to be mistaken after reading the story, and which is reiterated in the second to last chapter (379). Finally, the fourth appendix then presents “Palestinian Figures for Homes Demolished” (2009a, 415) from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—again as part of the narrative. These figures are unsurprisingly much higher than the Israeli figures. The last appendix ends with the reaction of the UNRWA public information officer, whom Sacco confronts with the Israeli counterclaim. He is quoted as follows: “I have no comment. These are the numbers we have” (2009a, 415). Thus, while Sacco provides some balance between the two opposing sides, the last word belongs to the Palestinians, before the reader is left to draw their own conclusions. The chronology of presenting the official Israeli version, which is then undermined first by the Israeli commanders, then by the personal account, and finally contrasted with the official Palestinian figures, undoubtedly privileges the Palestinian claims. For the last two appendices, Sacco chooses a narrative mode as opposed to the more distanced interview in appendix 2. Again, the anecdotal account of one incident that Sacco personally witnessed is contrasted with statistical data. Selecting Ashraf’s home as anecdotal evidence to support the statistical claims certainly cannot be considered proper historiographical practice, although the general makeup of the section suggests exactly that. In the preface, Sacco already points toward the appendices, stating that he hopes his work “will prompt former Israeli soldiers who might have witnessed the events in 1956 to offer their own recollections and points of view.” He then suggests, “[p]erhaps an Israeli historian needs to step into the breach” (x). This statement is emblematic: Sacco does not deny that there is a different side to the events and the conflict at large or that different voices could be amplified. But even though he includes Israeli voices to some extent, he clearly shows that he aligns his framing of the conflict with the Palestinian position. Documentary graphic narratives make no secret of the fact that they present events with a certain focus, which Sacco moderates through the inclusion of references to other perspectives. As Footnotes exemplifies, documentary can ultimately only acknowledge but not remedy the fact that every story necessarily puts forth a distinct framing of documented events. Nevertheless, paratextual

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qualifications constitute a prominent resource to raise readerly awareness of this very fact. Notes may also contain historical updates, adding newly gained insights to follow-up editions. Joe Sacco’s The Fixer was republished in 2009 as The Fixer and Other Stories together with the stories “Soba” and “Christmas with Karadzic.” Originally published in 1998 and 1997, respectively, the two stories were previously collected in the volume War’s End (2005). In The Fixer and Other Stories, Sacco includes an “Update” (2009b, 176), which provides an account of the lives of the portrayed individuals at the time of writing. Referring to personal correspondence, Sacco states that Neven left Bosnia and “obtained political asylum in France.” Positioned after the text, the new information does not “spoil” the original narrative by giving away premature conclusions but adds to the story “after the end.” At the same time, updates remind the reader that work presents only a momentary account of a continuous actuality. In some cases, previously included paratexts are updated as well. The “Afterword” to Sacco’s War’s End (2005, 70) originally included the subsection “Where Are They Now?” in which Sacco writes of Roman Karadzic that “as of this writing—nine years after he was indicted—he remains at large.” In the “Update” of the 2009 collection, Sacco now states that Karadzic was arrested and “is awaiting trial for war crimes” (2009b, 176). The special edition of Goražde includes a similar “Where Are They Now?” section (2011, 229) that provides short updates not only on the lives of the major characters but on the country of Bosnia as well. Here, Sacco outlines the country’s sociopolitical problems at the time of writing and quotes from exchanges with his primary guide, Edin. The current assessment is pessimistic and the euphoria at the end of the war did not last. Edin tells of economic hardship and the still clearly discernible remnants of war. These updates emphasize the ongoing relevance of the stories and reframe the documented narrative historically. They provide a sense of closure, as is the case with the indictment of Roman Karadzic, but also raise awareness that the documented lives continue after the tale is told. Such later additions reveal the more fluid and transitory status of the paratext, which is more readily altered than the narrative discourse itself. Comics is by definition elliptical: notes constitute an opportune device to supplement the narrative with further information. The case of Sacco’s note on chemical weapons is paradigmatic in this regard: whereas verbal description offers a means of addressing the complexities of assessing war reports concisely, in comics form, the same account would take up far

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more space and without offering much action. In many cases, notes and appendices offer additional information that provides context not necessarily needed for understanding the narrative. However, in documentary comics, paratexts are of fundamental importance to generate a thorough understanding of the complexities of the represented conflicts.

Notes 1. “Paratext” in the singular will describe the apparatus of different texts that are attached to the book, while “paratexts” in the plural will refer to its manifestation as different types of paratext. 2. Although Frow acknowledges that literary artifacts are also framed “on a general scale … by the publishing apparatus and by their position in the literary system” (1982, 26). 3. Indeed, the name of the author not only refers to an actual person, but primarily functions as a framing mechanism that discursively categories their various works, as Foucault argues (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.3). 4. Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “dispatch,” accessed June 24, 2019, https:// www.merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/dispatch. 5. Exceptions would include the presence of excerpt strips on the back cover of Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang (2015b) and Shenzhen (2014), which offer the reader a short preview of the respective work. 6. The special edition of Safe Area Goražde, once more, constitutes an exception. Here, the image is framed passe-partout style in the middle of the front cover and surrounded by two more silver-lined frames. The image itself, also printed in silver ink, is not taken from the narrative itself, but from another reportage Sacco did during his research, as he reveals in the included essay on the creation of the work (2011, n.p.). Such visual framing of the cover image adheres to practices of showcasing “high art” and serves as another indicator of the value of the special edition. The fact that the image does not anticipate the narrative discourse, is, undoubtedly, related to the fact that this edition is aimed at especially involved readers, who will likely already be familiar with the actual narrative. 7. This becomes especially pertinent in the use of the discussed image within the narrative (2009b, 12–13) and in relation to another page-spanning picture of the two towers that evokes the 9/11 attacks (cf. Walker 2010, 86; Banita 2014, 58; Chute 2016, 340). 8. Sacco also includes a foreword (2009a, ix) between the title page and the first chapter, which will be discussed in detail below. While this foreword explicitly introduces the 1956 Khan Younis massacre, for this consider-

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ation, it will be assumed that some readers may opt to initially skip this foreword and browse through the front matter first. 9. For further discussion of this matter concerning comics, see also Comics and Critical Librarianship: Reframing the Narrative in Academic Libraries (Piepmeier and Grimm 2019). 10. To enhance readability, all general considerations regarding “prefaces” are intended to apply to afterwords or “postfaces,” as well, unless otherwise stated (cf. Genette 1997, 196). Moreover, forewords and prefaces will be addressed synonymously. Likewise, the considerations concerning “notes” also apply to other appendices as well. 11. In documentary comics, prefaces are typically autographic and original; that is, they have been written by the authors and are an initial part of the work. Genette also addresses “allographic” prefaces that are not written by the author, but subsequent editors or publishers (1997, 237 ff.). Such prefaces are uncommon in documentary comics, which may be attributed to the close connection between the person of the author and the narrative discourse, and to the fact that all of the selected authors are still alive at the time of writing. 12. Commonly, graphic memoirs do not include prefaces or afterwords, as major works such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home exhibit. One explanation would be that a graphic memoir already allows authors to address their concerns and meta-reflections within their stories. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, however, includes an “Introduction” that outlines the history of Iran. Only in the last paragraph Satrapi addresses her intent, stating that with Persepolis she means to show the world a different side of Iran and also to commemorate her oppressed and murdered compatriots—a distinctly documentary aim. 13. Although some readers will likely diverge from this pattern and read prefaces later (cf. Genette 1997, 237), a chronological reading order will be assumed. For this study, the placement of a text as either pre- or postface will be taken as an indication of, at least, the hypothetical intent to offer such information before or after the narrative discourse.

References Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon. Bachmann, Christian A. 2016. Metamedialität und Materialität im Comic. Zeitungscomic—Comicheft—Comicbuch. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann. Baetens, Jan, and Pascal Lefèvre. 2014. The Work and its Surround. In The French Comics Theory Reader, ed. Ann Miller and Bart Beaty, 191–202. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

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Banita, Georgiana. 2014. Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence. In Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics as the Crossroads, ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, 49–66. London: Bloomsbury. Bateson, Gregory. 1955/2006. A Theory of Play and Fantasy. In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, 314–328. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Berlatsky, Eric. 2009. Within and Between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory. Narrative 17 (2): 162–187. Borsuk, Amaranth. 2018. The Book. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Cawelti, John G. 1976. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Chute, Hillary L. 2016. Disaster Drawn. Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2017. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New  York: HarperCollins. Delisle, Guy. 2010. Burma Chronicles. Translated by Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2014. Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China. Translated by Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2015a. Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Translated by Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2015b. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Translated by Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Eggers, Dave. 2011. Zeitoun. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. Frow, John. 1982. The Literary Frame. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 16 (2): 25–30. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 2015. Covering Pain: Pain Memoirs and Sequential Readings as an Ethical Practice. Biography 38 (1): 104–117. Glidden, Sarah. 2016. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Goffman, Erving. 1986. Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Herr, Michael. 1977. Dispatches. New York: Knopf.

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in ’t Veld, Laurike. 2019. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London and New York: Routledge. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. LaCapra, Dominick. 2014. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lejeune, Philippe. 1995. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University Press of Minnesota. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: The University Press of Chicago. Neufeld, Josh. 2009. A.  D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Hardcover. New York: Pantheon. ———. 2010. A. D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Paperback. New York: Pantheon. Olson, Hope A. 2002. The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries. Dordrecht: Springer-Science+Business Media. Orvell, Miles. 2006. After 9/11: Photography, The Destructive Sublime, and the Postmodern Archive. Michigan Quarterly Review XLV (2): n.p. http://hdl. handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0045.201. Pellatt, Valerie. 2013. Introduction. In Text, Extratext, Metatext and Paratext in Translation, ed. Valerie Pellatt, 1–8. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Piepmeier, Olivia, and Stephanie Grimm, eds. 2019. Comics and Critical Librarianship: Reframing the Narrative in Academic Libraries. Sacramento: Litwin Books. Rifkind, Candida. 2010. A Stranger in a Strange Land? Guy Delisle Redraws the Travelogue. International Journal of Comic Art 12 (2–3): 268–290. Sacco, Joe. 2000. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ———. 2003. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Hardcover. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2004. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Paperback. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2005. War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2006. Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ———. 2007. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2009a. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan. ———. 2009b. The Fixer and Other Stories. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2010. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ———. 2011. Safe Area Goražde: The Special Edition. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ———. 2020. Paying the Land. New York: Metropolitan.

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Schmid, Johannes. 2016. Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood: The Photographic Image in the Graphic War Memoir. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann. ———. 2019. Documentary Webcomics: Mediality and Contexts. In Perspectives on Digital Comics, ed. Jeffrey S.J. Kirchoff and Mike P. Cook, 63–88. Jefferson: McFarland. ———. 2020. Comics as Memoir and Documentary: A Case Study of Sarah Glidden. In Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage, ed. Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 317–333. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Simmel, Georg. 1994 [1902]. The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study. Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1): 11–7. Spiegelman, Art. 1991. A Problem of Taxonomy. New York Times, December 29. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/29/books/l-­a -­p r oblem-­o f­taxonomy-­37092.html. ———. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin. Uricchio, William. 2019. Reassessing the Situation of the Text in the Algorithmic Age. In Situated in Translation: Cultural Communities and Media Practices, ed. Michaela Ott and Thomas Weber, 23–38. Bielefeld: Transcript. Walker, Tristram. 2010. Graphic Wounds: The Comics Journalism of Joe Sacco. Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 11 (1): 69–81. Wirth, Uwe. 2013. Rahmenbrüche, Rahmenwechsel. Nachwort des Herausgebers, welches aus Versehen des Druckers zu einem Vorwort gemacht wurde. In Rahmenbrüche, Rahmenwechsel, ed. Uwe Wirth, 15–60. Berlin: Kadmos. Wolf, Werner. 2006. Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. In Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, 1–42. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. ———. 2008. Intermediality. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 252–256. London and New York: Routledge. Worden, Daniel, ed. 2015a. The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 2015b. Introduction: Drawing Conflicts. In The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, ed. Daniel Worden, 3–20. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Young, Katharine. 2004. Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Narrative. In Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, 76–107. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

CHAPTER 4

Visual Framing: From the Line to the Multiframe

Visual framing defines the graphic narratives in several fundamental ways: the reader gains access to the represented events through a matrix of stacked visual frames, all of which shape the comprehension in their own ways. Each character or object is cartoonized, each scene is contained within the borders of a particular panel, and each panel is embedded within sequences and grids that provide context through co-present images and written text. Through their lines and markings on the pages, the cartoonist segments distinct semantic spaces that designate moments in the representation, add linguistic information, or iconically resemble people and objects. Graphic narrative discourse is materialized as a system of interlocking frames which the reader must assemble mentally to create a coherent story (McCloud 1994, 67; Groensteen 2013, 138). As will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 5, graphic narrative especially relies on cognitive frames to guide the reader in filling in the information that is absent in between the panels—a fact that is prominently materialized as well through the space between the panels, known as the “gutter.” The study of visual framing in comics addresses two major aspects: first, visual and textual cues serve as framings, which evoke and negotiate abstract cognitive frames in the reader. A certain drawing style may serve as an intertextual reference to fine art, or a particular perspective alludes to conventions of film genres. Second, each representation materializes concrete visual frames on the page that structure the reader’s gaze and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5_4

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determine which parts of the documented events are included. In the reading process, both the visual framing of the depicted events and cognitive frames brought toward and evoked by the text are intertwined: how the events are represented continuously negotiates the cognitive frames that are relevant to the story; in turn, cognitive frames filter the reader’s perception of the graphic narrative discourse. The majority of frame theories address frames and framing either in their linguistic or in their visual manifestation (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1). An approach to framing in comics must address the interrelatedness of both modes in the semantics of graphic narrative, in which words and images form separate but interrelated narrative strands in which “[t]he words and images entwine, but never synthesize” (Chute 2010, 5; see also Chute and DeKoven 2006, 769). The point of departure for this chapter is the assumption that the semantic structure of comics constitutes a language in its own right (cf. McCloud 1994, 47; Chute and DeKoven 2006, 767; Groensteen 2007; Cohn 2013).1 This language is crucially defined by spatiality: comics unfolds its semantic potential through co-present elements on the page, which constitutes one of its principal distinguishing factor as a documentary form. As was suggested in the introduction, the comics panel might be the obvious place to begin investigating framing practices in graphic narrative. Indeed, each panel directs the reader’s gaze upon the represented events, determining what is included or excluded in a particular moment, and which elements of it are made especially salient. In this capacity, the panel shares some aspects with other visual media. Concerning photography, Judith Butler claims that “the frame functions not only as a boundary to the image, but as structuring the image itself.” Through its composition, she argues, the respective image already suggests its interpretation in relation to political agendas: “The question … concerns not only what it shows, but also how it shows what it shows. The ‘how’ not only organizes the image, but works to organize our perception and thinking as well” (2010, 71). This insight applies to the comics panel too. In arranging bodies, objects, and environments in relation to borders of an image, the author facilities specific relationships between them, framing the respective conflicts through the rendering of the represented actors. Photographs, however, are generally non-narrative, singular images, and, therefore, they frame differently. Studies of visual framing in photographs commonly investigate either how single images are spread and reframed among various medial contexts, or the prevalence of common features in

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independently made news images of the same event. In comics, visual framing means that the reader is confronted with a complex multiplicity of interdependent images and written materials within a single text. Because of the co-presence of various materials on the page, graphic narratives harness a unique documentary potential. The complex array of different images and writing predicates that “[c]omics makes a reader access the unfolding of evidence in the movement of its basic grammar, by aggregating and accumulating frames of information” (Chute 2016, 2). On the comics page, the reader finds various types of clues, comments, and observations—all purposefully arranged in relation to each other. Documentary graphic narratives juxtapose not only images and text, but also different types of images, encompassing the author’s2 personal observations, testimonies, and adaptations of other documents. They may also include conceptual images that illustrate an abstract idea through symbolism or metaphor, and statistics, diagrams, or maps. These different co-­ present visual elements contextualize each other constantly, either confirming or problematizing each other’s claims. The most sophisticated description of the visual frames of comics is Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007). Groensteen conceives of comics as a “multiframe”—a system of interdependent, multi-level frames, rather than a chronological sequence of individual frames (2007, 22, 24, 28). While comics breaks down stories into single panels that are read in a particular order, it is, first and foremost, a spatial medium. This separates comics from other visual media and their means of framing: “The fixed image, contrary to the moving image of cinema … only exists in a single dimension. Comics panels, situated relationally, are, necessarily, placed in relation to space and operate on a share of space” (21). Hence, in contrast to the single painting or photograph, the panel is not “unique and global” but part of a larger “system of proliferation” (5). Documentary comics employs this system for rhetoric purposes: repetition and regularity of panels and frames enable the author to focus the reader’s attention on details in the portraiture of witnesses and their emotions. Complex layouts of stacked panels, in turn, create semantic hierarchies that interrelate different timelines. At the same time, the multiplicity of different co-present element on the page produces a tension between the concrete focus of attention, the chronological reading path, and the information gathered from its environment: “the tension sequence vs. surface,” as Charles Hatfield puts it (2005, 58; original emphasis). Groensteen particularly rejects the notion

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that the vision of the page is only a gateway to the individual panel and instead describes the reading experience as a dynamic process of exchange between two “visions”: A page of comics is offered at first to a synthetic global vision, but that cannot be satisfactory. It demands to be traversed, crossed, glanced at, and analytically deciphered. This moment-to-moment reading does not take a lesser account of the totality of the panoptic field that constitutes the page (or the double page), since the focal vision never ceases to be enriched by peripheral vision. (2007, 19; see also Hatfield 2005, 52)

Thus, the process of reading comics is characterized by and situated between the effort to designate a specific area of the page to a certain moment in time and a “panoptic field” that surrounds every single frame and forces constant re-actualization of the perceived information. In other words: the object of “focal vision” is constantly framed and reframed by “peripheral vision” as the reader navigates the page. The pages of Joe Sacco especially are so much saturated with information that the reader often cannot help but receive multiple impressions at once. Scott McCloud relates this phenomenon to the narrative conversion of time into space: “Unlike other media, in comics, the past is more than just memories for the audience and the future is more than just possibilities. Both past and future are real and visible and all around us!” McCloud continues: “Wherever your eyes are focused that’s now. But at the same time your eyes take in the surrounding landscape of past and future!” (1994, 104; original emphasis). Thus, the spatial co-presence of images translates to some degree to a co-presence of narrative events that can freely be revisited, allowing the constant reevaluation of the “now.” Comics is equally characterized by the structural demarcation on the page and the requirement to traverse these enclosures. The author may actively exploit these inherent borders and transitions between the frames and semiotic resources to make a point; moreover, the sheer presence of borders and absences makes a point of its own. Due to “their medially constitutive infraction of such formal borders,” reading graphic narratives is characterized by “a series of transgressions, moving from panel to panel, violating the borders of individual images, and crossing the expanse of the gutter” (Denson et al. 2014, 6). At the same time, the individual moments often overflow dynamically, and different elements bleed into each other, forming a new whole. Hatfield calls this the tension between “‘breaking

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down’ a story into constituent images and the concept of laying out those images together on an unbroken surface,” which “lies at the heart of comics design” (2005, 48). Overflow between panels and page(s) is furthered by the fact that the individual images are interconnected in what Groensteen describes as “iconic solidarity” (2007, 17–18) that creates narrative cohesion through the repetition of similar forms and elements. Whether a particular page stresses cohesion or the distinction of its respective constituents is an essential aspect of its visual framing. The different semiotic resources writings and drawings engage in a constant dynamic of mutual (re-)framing that creates either consonances or dissonances in the reading experiences. This co-presence enables authors to actively address inconsistencies in their evidence base or in a witness account. Moreover, the gutter becomes a means to represent experiences that resist continuous representation, by creating “disjuncts between presence and absence and between word and image—in order to pressure linearity, causality, and sequence” (Chute 2016, 206). Performatively staging these limitations as part of its semantic structure, documentary comics offers a way to problematize the limitations of what can be represented. At the same time, the graphic narrative strains conventional expectations toward documentary representation. The different aspects that unsettle the notion of comics as a documentary medium center on the fact that graphic representations are, to a considerable degree, deliberate. Cartoonists may choose not only what they draw but also how. Comics “allows for a wide variety of interpretations to accommodate a wide variety of drawing styles,” as Joe Sacco points out (2012, xii). Not only does every cartoonist typically formulate their own personal style, but the same event can also be portrayed in a number of ways. This may involve the choices of “visual elements including drawing style, the visual quality of letters, the combination of image and text, and the composition of panels on a page—in combination with color, where applicable” (Etter 2017, 94; see also Lefèvre 2011, 15). To represent an event in a different style can evoke a different frame, and cartoonists may employ graphic styles to reference specific genres, periods, or media (Mikkonen 2013, 110). For instance, cartoonist Matt Bors employs two distinct styles for his works in different genres, framing his political cartoons through an abstract, “cartoony” style and his comics journalism more naturalistically (Declercq 2019). Neil Cohn uses the existence of geographically and temporally traceable comics styles to argue that the visual language of comics is not mainly perception-based but relies on conventionalized iconic

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patterns that are culturally specific (2013, 25). Hence, different styles may be used for concrete framing purposes. While certain styles may be included in what can be conceived of as “common knowledge,” others require expertise. Accordingly, the presence of a particular style may be more apparent in some cases than in others. Lukas Etter points toward the social constructedness of style through its surrounding discourses (2017, 104), and posits that “style is not so much ontologically inherent in a work as it is co-constructed by an audience of readership that reacts to the aesthetic choices” (103; see also Lefèvre 2011, 16). In graphic nonfiction, the aspect of graphiation—the function of graphic style to insinuate a trace of the author—is especially relevant as an authentication strategy and heavily depends on what the reader knows about the author as a person (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.3). These different aspects of style evoke several overlapping frames: in practice, the graphic style of a work will coincidentally reference the author’s personal style, the style of other artists, and more general artistic traditions—all depending on the knowledges of the respective reader. The following chapters will explore how documentary graphic narratives make use of these liberties to visually frame the represented events.

4.1   Drawing Styles: Cartooning and Realism(s) Whereas the panel frame limits what is to be seen and ascribes a certain perspective, drawing style defines the appearance of the represented events contained within. Through their drawings, “[t]he artist not only depicts something, but expresses at the same time a visual interpretation of the world, with every drawing style implying an ontology of the representable or visualizable” (Lefèvre 2011, 16). Drawing style serves as a means of framing in two ways: first, it constitutes a global technique through which the cartoonist renders the represented events in their entirety. Second, locally contained deviations from this norm facilitate specific framings of portions of the text; for instance, a character may be presented especially cartoonishly. Stylistic deviations may also demarcate intertextual or intermedial references: Sarah Glidden diverges from her principal style when depicting photographs, which she renders purely with brushstrokes and without outlines, endowing these images with a painting-like quality. Moreover, to differentiate parts of the narrative, color becomes an important device: while Josh Neufeld demarcates the different chapters of A.D. with individual color schemes, Guy Delisle differentiates

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historiographical accounts or embedded stories through a sepia hue. Differences and discontinuities in drawing styles, especially when directly juxtaposed, moreover, serve as a way to thwart any sense of immediate correspondence between representation and reality, and, hence, as a way of conscientious authentication. Regularly, drawing styles reference artistic traditions, which may either complement or clash with conventional expectations for documentary. For instance, Sarah Glidden works in the mode of ligne claire, a style most prominently associated with the Belgian author Hergé. The “clear line”style not only “assigns equal value to all the lines within the frame and de-emphasizes shading” (Duncan and Smith 2009, 318), but is also “marked by its traditional association with children’s comics” (Hatfield 2005, 60). In contrast, Joe Sacco takes cues from Renaissance-painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, famous for his depiction of peasant life in sixteenth-­century Europe (Groth 2011, 244; see also Chute 2016, 216). Moreover, Sacco’s depictions of violence have been likened to Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War-series (Acheson 2015, 300; Chute 2016, 240). Hence, Sacco specifically references fine art in his works and, in particular, relates his work to examples of genre painting that are associated with the iconographic documentation of their respective eras. It cannot be ignored that a normative division concerning the social prestige of comics and fine art prevails. Therefore, a reader, especially one only marginally familiar with comics, may see a childish naïveté in Glidden’s style of ligne claire, and a mature sophistication in Sacco’s references to Renaissance art and read their works with the corresponding frames in mind. The overt exhibition of “comics-ness” can also contribute to distinct authorial strategies: Guy Delisle emphasize his self-conception as a cartoonist, rather than a journalist or documentarian (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2)—a point that his particularly cartoony style underlines. In the same way, Sarah Glidden’s drawing style complements her meta-documentary approach to journalism, which specifically presents her character as a naïve novice journalist. In line with Charles Hatfield’s thesis that comics is an “art of tension” (2005, 32), documentary graphic narratives in particular are characterized by the pressure to reconcile abstraction and familiarity as well as exactitude and artistic interpretation. Cartoonists must attune the interpretative faculties of cartoon drawing to the necessity of creating a recognizable likeness of the actual world. Drawing documentary comics entails a “balancing act” between aestheticization and accuracy, as Nina Mickwitz puts it

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(2019). Indeed, the genre entails a specific expectation toward drawing style: it has to be—in a sense—realistic. Documentary cartoonists combine a genre that demands traceable and verifiable information and cartooning, which is to some degree abstract. Comics, per se, requires negotiation between these two poles: “Drawings found in comics and other forms of graphic narratives habitually position themselves on the continuum between cartoonized (or ‘cartoony’) and realistic” (Etter 2017, 96; see also McCloud 1994, 28–31). This tension is especially pronounced in documentary graphic narratives; however, a sense of “realism” can yet be pursued in more than one way. In the conventional understanding of documentary, an image is considered most “truthful’ when it conforms to expectations of naturalism, which, as semioticians Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen establish, entails close correspondence with the unmediated human gaze. Viewing habits are also bound up with dominant technologies, which, in this case, they identify as photography or “photorealism.” Photographic naturalism is established as the dominant mode of “truthful” visual representation. It is necessary to differentiate the concepts of realism from that of naturalism. Following Kress and van Leeuwen, a “realism” will be understood as a mode of representation that is associated with “the real” by social convention, which may too be achieved by abstract images such as diagrams or maps (2006, 158). Different forms of nonfiction graphic narratives have by now conclusively demonstrated that abstract representations in no way preclude correspondence to the actual world. As Elisabeth El Refaie convincingly argues, autobiographic comics achieve authenticity not primarily via graphic naturalism but by encapsulating the subjective experience of the cartoonist in their specific drawing style (2010, 171). In this case, cartooning serves as a form of realism by capturing an underlying truth through abstract graphic representation. Whereas any kind of drawing is an abstraction to some degree, no matter how closely it corresponds with the unmediated gaze, cartooning in particular is “often marked by simplification, exaggeration of proportions, and relatively clear contours” (Etter 2017, 96). Succinctly, Scott McCloud defines cartooning as “amplification through simplification” (1994, 30), which entails reducing some features of a person or object while exaggerating others. To a degree, cartooning distorts or at least alters the likeness of objects and persons. Yet as an abstract language, it entails a documentary potential of its own. With his trademark enthusiasm, McCloud argues,

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When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t. (1994, 30; original emphasis)3

It is striking how closely this characterization of cartooning resembles Robert M. Entman’s definition of framing: one could essentially paraphrase that cartooning selects some details of a perceived reality and makes them more salient in a communicating text. As was discussed in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1, efforts of framing generally serve to simplify and streamline the interpretation of complex realities; cartooning actuality allows authors to do exactly that, albeit graphically. Accordingly, “[s]tylized images may be less visually analogous to reality …, but they can very effectively capture the essence of an object or a person. Each image delivers a specific view on reality” (Lefèvre 2011, 15–16). Cartooning serves to reduce the polyvalence of different possible interpretations by ascribing particular categories to representations. Therefore, cartoon realism amplifies certain aspects of a represented reality; such as a person’s bodily display of emotion. A “smiley” or “frowny” face immediately evokes the respectively associated state of mind, whereas a naturalistic rendering of a face is more polyvalent and complex in different states of mind that it indicates. To this end, cartooning assigns concrete frames to a person or object in a way that naturalistic depiction does not. This concretization of certain aspects in a representation leads to cartooning, in general, being more readily recognized as “stylized,” as in having a style or aesthetic (Lefèvre 2011, 3–5); in a documentary text, an abstract and cartoony style more obviously exhibits its interpretative capacities. In contrast, naturalistic depictions tend to conceal the fact that they purposefully employ means of framing. Since documentary relies on recognizability and entails the representation of the experiences of others, visual verisimilitude remains an important aspect (Weber and Rall 2017, 11). Nevertheless, naturalism must not be misconstrued as an absence of style, but constitutes a stylistic choice in itself (cf. Worden 2015, 11). Documentary cartoonists employ styles that are naturalistic or cartoony to serve particular ends. Joe Sacco adheres to an especially naturalistic style (Worden 2015, 11; Chute 2016, 216). The close correspondence between his drawings and the reference photographs that inform them is clearly exhibited by the section “Photos” that juxtapose both media in the special edition of Goražde

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(see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.4). However, Sacco pointedly excludes photographs from his reportages and regular editions; rather, the drawings themselves exhibit a level of detail that references photographic documentation. Still, Sacco’s drawing style is not photorealistic, as he readily admits (Groth 2011, 238). While his drawings certainly do not fool any reader into mistaking them for photographs, his style can safely be described as graphic naturalism. Sacco himself professes that he tries “to draw people and objects as accurately as possible whenever possible.” In his opinion, “anything that can be drawn accurately should be drawn accurately,” and “a drawn thing must be easily recognizable as the real thing it is meant to represent” (2012, xii; original emphasis). Examples of this approach can be prominently found in large and densely detailed images of vistas and cityscapes that may even span over a whole double page (see, for instance, 2009, 28–29). Recreating realistic landscapes, architectures, and sceneries forms an important aspect of their correspondence to the actual world. Often, the most accurate and detailed drawings depict places, such as cityscapes and other large vistas. This is, to some extent, due to practical reasons. In contrast to human and nonhuman animals, architecture and scenery are stationary, which is accommodating for drawing. Likewise, buildings and cityscapes endure over time, allowing the author to visit at least the locations of historical events in the present. Therefore, detailed depictions of places and objects lend themselves to  serve as tokens of the author’s proficiency and work ethic. Importantly,  Sacco’s naturalistic style highlights his role as witness. Especially in Footnotes, he employs large, highly detailed, double-­ page images based on his own observations, for instance, when documenting the destruction of houses wrought by Israeli demolition operations. Consider an emblematic double-page spread that documents the damage wrought on an imploded eight-story building through a meticulous naturalistic rendering (see Fig.  4.1). Encompassing the whole double page without panel borders, the image provides ample space to expose the witnessed destruction in minute detail and with ample room to do so. Hence, the framing through the panel (or the absence thereof) and the page are important prerequisites that enable graphic naturalism. Sacco not only adheres to a particularly detailed and naturalistic style in his renderings of architecture and scenery for scenes that he observed himself. An important aspect of Sacco’s naturalistic style is its extension to the representation of historical events, including the witness accounts he

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Fig. 4.1  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 254–255

receives. As Aryn Bartley points out, by aligning his work with the conventions of photographic naturalism, Sacco transfers such a truth claim not only to those images that are based on his own observations but to those depicting historical events as well (2014, 70). In Bartley’s example, Sacco first draws a one-page image of the historical Khan Younis refugee camp in the time of 1948 to 1950 (2009, 27) and then contrasts it with a large and impressive double-page image that claims to show what the camp looks like “now” (28–29). Drawing both images in the same naturalistic style categorizes both scenes in the same cognitive frame of naturalistic realism. This way, Sacco generates an effect of continuity and parallelism that other media would not permit; archival photographs or footage would almost certainly cause disruption through their difference in quality (Mickwitz 2016, 73). In contrast, “Sacco’s drawn townscapes and the characters in them remain unified at the level of signification; equally proximate representations of two historical moments in a specific location” (ibid.). Consequently, Sacco generates cohesion among not only different timelines but also different ontologies.

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However, Sacco also includes more cartoony or expressive renderings; when juxtaposed, these different styles pointedly forgo any illusions of lifelikeness but make transparent Sacco’s naturalism as a particular stylistic choice. Chute discusses these stylistic variations as a means for Sacco to integrate the central problem of witnessing and mediatization into “the surface of his work.” For instance, he does so to provide a subjective account in scenes that are aligned with the experiencing-I of his character. Especially in The Fixer, Sacco includes “dramatic collisions or ruptures in the style the book stages” (Chute 2016, 223). This becomes apparent in scenes in which Sacco places his characters against abstract and surreal backgrounds, such as in the Sarajevan hotel lobby (see Fig. 4.2). Here, the

Fig. 4.2  Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 14

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surroundings become evocative of Sacco’s mental state—in this case, his loneliness and misery upon entering the foreign city alone. The subjectivity of this experience attributed to his character becomes even more pronounced through the clear visibility of his lines and crosshatches that make up his environment. Through this more abstract style, Sacco inscribes himself into the representation, highlighting his role as interlocutor and thus filter of the experiences. In this regard, drawing style also has another authenticating quality. The sheer amount of craftsmanship required to produce a comic book with recognizable renderings of actuality serves as evidence of the author’s commitment. Joe Sacco’s trademark pen strokes with which he often crosshatches large areas may not so much signify any idiosyncratic quality of Sacco’s specific pair of hands, but rather the fact that he chose to devote countless hours of his life to his drawings. This form of commitment to his work, thus, serves as testimony to his moral conviction that motivates his documentary effort. Significantly, Sacco also combines different styles within the same image: on the entire preceding double page (2004, 12–13; see also Chap. 3, Sect. 3.1), Sacco depicts himself walking toward the Holiday Inn hotel. The image provides a naturalistic representation of the damaged skyscrapers but sets them against a highly stylized sky full of clouds billowing in abstract, repeating shapes. Through visual verisimilitude, Sacco documents the destruction of the cityscape that he observed in Sarajevo; coincidentally, he inserts the emotional impression that this scenario wrought on him through a realism based on the expression of emotional qualities through cartooning. Hence, Sacco facilitates two different “realisms” that each supply the reader with particular information on the Bosnian War: a naturalistic realism and an emotional realism. However, the intrapictorial combination adds another effect. As Chute comments, “[t]his friction makes the image uneasy; the code-switching produces a tension, a sense of strafed repletion” (2016, 228). Making visible the fact that he uses specific styles, instead of simply recording actuality, Sacco draws attention to the fact that he actively frames the represented events. Guy Delisle’s stylistic markedly diverges between his cartoon characters that take on a high degree of abstraction and his depictions of architecture, monuments, and vistas, which exhibit a distinctly more naturalistic style. In contrast to Sacco, though, Delisle employs this style exclusively to represent his personal observations. In Jerusalem, Delisle includes sketches that he produces on-site, and which become a frequent self-referential

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element of the story. Retaining the original material quality of his notebook, these sketches adorn the title page to each chapter, each spanning a month of his stay, and, thus, also realizing a paratextual framing function (see Fig. 4.3). Likewise, the narrative proper includes depictions of architecture and vistas that offer a more sophisticated level of detail (see, for instance, 2015a, 91, 110, 140, 206). Often, these images are combined with depictions of Delisle sketching. This emphasis on the act of drawing—both as part of the narrative and by the inclusion of the materiality of the sketchbook—frames the narrative globally, referencing the process and craft. As such, Delisle’s settings locate the experiences of the characters, but they also present a documentary end in itself brought about by Delisle’s trademark composite of amateur

Fig. 4.3  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 35

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ethnography and educated tourism. Two especially large and detailed panels show the Wailing Wall (186), which both emphasizes its status as a historic landmark and also draws a clear parallel to Delisle’s frequent depictions of the Israel-Gaza-barrier wall (39, 49) and his efforts to draw said barrier, which are sometimes foiled by soldiers (179, 187, 270). Delisle not only documents places, underlining the fact that he was indeed present, but also shows off his veracity in researching his subject matter. Of course, Delisle also actively selects which places deserve detailed representation. This way, he not only partakes in (tourist) memory culture but also makes a political statement by drawing the separation wall between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories multiple times (39, 49, 187, 278). In his previous works, Delisle specifically documents totalitarian monuments. In Pyongyang, Delisle’s renderings of the North Korean socialist architecture intercut the narrative in silent, page-filling panels. These images, too, adhere to a far more naturalistic style than the rest of narrative discourse: the contrast is especially striking when Delisle depicts a statue of Kim Il-Sung (2015b, 7) or propaganda posters (17) with comparatively naturalistic human proportions relative to his regular cartoon style. This change in style and panel size singles out particular moments and thus exhibits the sharp contrast between Delisle’s everyday life experience in Pyongyang and the narrative that the North Korean regime tries to project. Switching drawing styles constitutes a means for Delisle to demarcate the totalitarian narrative from his own. Likewise, Josh Neufeld includes many large depictions of the cityscape of New Orleans. As one can see in his representation of the city before the storm (2010, 3–4), Neufeld displays a large range of houses in front of the New Orleans skyline but draws the individual elements in a distinctly cartoonish style with far fewer lines. Additionally, in contrast to Sacco’s sober black and white, Neufeld employs different shades of green, in which the same shade is used for skyscrapers, trees, and the river. Both Neufeld and Delisle include very detailed, but overtly stylized depictions of larger vistas. In their depiction of the respective cityscapes, they draw concretely enough to sustain recognizability but do not aspire to Sacco’s degree of naturalism. However, as the perhaps most conspicuous aspect of his drawing style, Josh Neufeld employs two-tone color to actively undercut any sense of immersive naturalism by not only employing monochromatic colorations but alternating them among the chapters. Although Sacco’s black and

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white too diverges from naturalism to some degree, it is conventionalized as documentary practice in both comics and other media. Neufeld’s striking colors, in contrast, create a disruption. Anthony Dyer Hoefer argues that Neufeld’s colors “evoke particular emotional content,” however, this may be more obvious in some cases, for instance, the “sickly green as the water stagnates,” but less so in others, such as the “foreboding purple as the storm looms” (2012, 298). Primarily, the distinctly abstract color scheme facilitates a defamiliarization effect. Although a certain emotional realism is included by the employment of color, its most noticeable effect is the departure from any pretense of naturalism that the drawing style may have achieved. Even though Neufeld includes little in the way of narrative disruptions that make transparent the work’s underlying research methods, through his coloring, he integrates a constant reminder of the work’s mediatedness. Neufeld’s approach to drawing architecture becomes even more striking in a later double-page image that shows the crowd in front of the Ernest N.  Morial Convention Center from a bird’s eye perspective (see Fig. 4.4). The gathered people are drawn particularly abstractly, almost to the degree of stick figures, whereas the straight lines of the architecture retain a form of clarity. The whole scene is washed in a shade of pink that bypasses any form of naturalism. Whereas parts of the architecture remain clearly recognizable, the resolute reduction of the individual people into

Fig. 4.4  Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 122–123

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an anonymous mass provides a distinctly affective quality, simulating the initial impression of the overwhelmed onlooker. It becomes clear that A.D. focuses on the experience of the selected characters without distracting the reader with naturalistic renderings of crowds. Sacco’s scenarios, in contrast, invite the reader to dwell and explore in a manner that can be described as almost playful. Here, it is not so much the initial response, but rather the cognitive effort to grasp the image as a whole that is made prominent. Even though Sarah Glidden also incorporates such affective display of settings, topographical renderings take up far less space in her work. In contrast to the other authors, Glidden includes no full-page depiction; she does include panels that omit characters, but these are rare. Furthermore, she does not portray landscapes and architecture in a decidedly more naturalistic manner than other subject matter. Rather, she employs expressive, bright watercolors for landscape depictions (see, for instance, 2016, 30, 49) and only very rarely includes slightly larger panels (70, 91, 98, 142). In these wide-angle depictions, her style often combines the sharp edges of her lines with soft water colorings that overflow these shapes and blend into each other. Glidden’s panoramas encapsulate certain moods rather than specific recognizable detail. Near the end of the book, two panels show the two Sarahs gazing over the Damascus skyline at night, reflecting upon their preceding efforts. Warm hues of the buildings set against the bluish-black night sky evoked both a sense of melancholy and of beauty (279–280). People, however, remain abstract in her wider panels (191). As such, Glidden’s sceneries provide the occasional atmospheric background for the interviews, which make up the bulk of her work. While she does include images that exhibit a certain naturalistic quality, these images are far smaller in size and depict dwellings and inhabitants abstractly and from afar. In contrast to the other authors, though, Glidden colors her images in quasi-naturalistic hues, as a rendering of a refugee camp exemplifies (see Fig. 4.5); shacks and surroundings blur at the edges in a simulation of the perception under the influence of desert heat, but the colors of clothing, makeshift tarpaulin walls, or a rose-patterned rug are distinctly recognizable. The color scheme corresponds not only to the unmediated gaze in the desert heat but also to the faded colors of aged photographs. Even though her depictions of land- and cityscapes are not extensive, Glidden achieves a sense of realism not through exactitude in drawing, but through a naturalistic color scheme. Thus, abstract drawing style and the faithful

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Fig. 4.5  Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 208

coloring style exhibit different degrees of naturalism. This way, and similarly to Sacco’s depiction of Sarajevo, Glidden combines both cartoon realism and naturalism overtly, emphasizing her dedication to reconciling recognizability and abstraction. While surroundings and mise-en-scène locate and contextualize the narrative as a representation of the actual world, the centrality of the people whose lives they represent is frequently emphasized. As Chute maintains, the accuracy of Sacco’s topography serves the purpose of locating the people whose lives he chronicles in a specific space (2016, 216). This is especially pertinent in his renderings of crowds in his large-scale images. Not only Sacco draws backgrounds naturalistically, but people are depicted as recognizable individuals as well, which is specifically important to him: “These are individuals that make up this mass of humanity. It’s important to me” (Groth 2011, 239). However, as Laurike in ’t Veld demonstrates, individualization also serves as a way of moral alignment: Sacco often portrays perpetrators “us[ing] distancing strategies such as drawing the events

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from a higher angle—which does not allow for full view of the individual faces—portraying [them] with closed or squinting eyes.” This way, “no evil, individualised perpetrators are singled out” (2019, 112). Hence, arguably even more important to documentary comics than the depiction of places is the portrayal of people. Drawing characters both as interview partners and as the experiencing characters of their own testimony constitutes a central capacity of documentary comics. In contrast to cityscapes and buildings, encounters with people are fleeting and require attention to constant motion and variation. The places of past experiences may often be revisited, whereas the past selves that experienced them cannot. A particularly important aspect of documentary comics is the representation of emotion and affect. Often, documentary graphic narratives simplify complex and tragic experiences into comprehensible narratives. In principle, cartooning enables the author to freely choose a form of representation that best fits their assessment of a particular person and to clearly represent distinct emotions through posture, gesture, and facial expression (cf. Eisner 2008, 111). However, a recognizable likeness needs to be retained. As discussed earlier, cartoon realism may, in this case, entail a sincere symbolic representation of inner states, rather than the accurate depiction of outer appearance. Cartoonists must strike a balance between naturalistic depictions of the encountered people as individuals and a conventionalized comics vocabulary of human emotion. As McCloud theorizes, cartoon representations of human beings invite identification with the depicted characters due to their “universality.” In contrast to naturalistic depictions, “[t]he more cartoony a face is … the more people it could be said to describe” (1994, 31; original emphasis). Individualizing witnesses through naturalistic drawing style, in contrast, highlights the aspect of personal witnessing. As indicated above, Joe Sacco makes a point of creating detailed depictions of the people he encounters. Even in large group scenes where the narrative purpose of individualization is limited, “his emphasis is on producing recognition of the visually elaborated other” (Chute 2016, 220–221). This distinct employment of naturalism serves both as an authentication strategy and as a gesture of recognition toward the encountered witnesses, which is especially prominent in Sacco’s rendering of witnesses and his interviews with them. Moreover, he situates these dialogues in naturalistically drawn environments such as the interviewee’s homes or on the street and with naturalistic posture, clothing, and recognizable facial features.

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A particularly important technique is Sacco’s use of portraits to attribute testimonies to specific individuals. As in documentary film, he presents frontal close-ups of a witness’ face and upper body against a neutral background and identifies them by name (see Fig. 4.6). Even when names are anonymized, a recognizable visual likeness is generally retained. This way, Sacco individualizes his witnesses and “puts a face”’ on the abstract tragedies, without subjecting the portrayed individual to exact identification and potential repercussions. As Chute points out, drawing their faces instead of photographing them “suggests an alternative practice of framing here explicitly aimed at acknowledging the particularity of the other, at giving face through drawing—making a picture as opposed to ‘taking’ it” (2016, 249; original emphasis). Of course, similar to a photograph, such a naturalistic portrayal also serves to authenticate their reports through personal identification. Especially in Footnotes, Sacco’s practices of identification resemble the style of passports, as Rebecca Scherr suggests, which is particularly meaningful as “these informants are in fact stateless, unable to obtain a passport” (2015, 126). Hence, Sacco’s use of graphic style evokes official visual identification, in order to critique and subvert the political status quo in the region. In particular, showing the witness speaking and simulating eye contact with the reader also furthers readerly engagement with the text. This form

Fig. 4.6  Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern  Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 110

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of representation facilitates what Kress and van Leeuwen call “direct address” toward the reader: “the participant’s gaze (and the gesture, if present) demands something from the viewer, demands that the viewer enter into some kind of imaginary relation with him or her” (2006, 118). This technique aligns the reader with the interviewer, thus simulating a sense of witnessing the process of testimony directly (cf. Bartley 2014, 71). However, in his naturalistic portraits, Sacco does not generally show strong emotions in his observations of the act of witnessing. In contrast to other encounters, in these sections, his interview partners are presented with stern and serious faces. They recount their testimonies of the war in a distinctly sober and seemingly unemotional state, framing their accounts as authoritative. Instead, Sacco relegates displays of emotions to his representations of interviewee’s accounts. When Sacco diverges from naturalistic portrayal in interviews, he does so for specific purposes. Often, he uses strategies of obscuring to indicate perpetratorship (see in ’t Veld 2019, 112). In Footnotes, Sacco includes a number of stylized images of a former fedayee fighter, who proves to be a central yet morally questionable witness as well as a laborious interview partner. The change in technique is modest but effective. In several cases, Sacco draws the man with a striking shadow over half of his face, endowing him with a noir-style quality of moral ambiguity (see Fig. 4.7). Safe for this detail, he is drawn naturalistically.

Fig. 4.7  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 49

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A similar technique is employed in The Fixer when the reader is first introduced to Neven. Sacco creates such portraits for ambiguous witnesses and detestable historical figures. Commonly, he also simulates a perspectival distortion for an alienation effect, drawing portraits almost symmetrically with a shadow splitting the face into two identical sides. However, these portraits also simulate eye-contact, forcing the reader into an imaginary relationship with these particularly questionable individuals. In Footnotes, Sacco depicts the old fedayee in this manner, parallel to contemporary insurgent Khaled (2009, 50)—both men have actively taken part in attacks on Israel. A few pages later, Sacco draws Khaled’s uncle in the same manner; he approves of killing Israeli soldiers but denounces attacks on women and children (54). The defamiliarizing perspective combined with the direct address challenges the reader to engage with the respective characters not only despite but because of the obvious moral predicaments that this engagement presents. This distortion allows Sacco to encapsulate the inherent dilemma of war documentary: both Palestinian fighters retain an unpalpable quality between combat fatigue and battle-hardened cold-bloodedness. To some extent, Sacco’s departure from his trademark naturalism serves as a concrete condemnation, but his portrayal of these figures despite their crimes also asks the reader to engage them, nonetheless. Even more severe distortion is found in Sacco’s depiction of paramilitary warlords in The Fixer. For instance, he portrays the warlord Caco in this manner in one of the last chapters, just prior to the depiction of the mysterious circumstances of his death (see Fig.  4.8). Caco confronts the reader with the stern gaze of a mad villain. It is not moral ambiguity that this portrait addresses; rather, the reader is forced to look the perpetrator of most horrendous crimes “in the eye”; the knowledge of his crimes makes this confrontation as horrifying as Sacco’s explicit rendering of the atrocities themselves. Sacco also employs cartooning for issues that are less grave, for instance, to poke fun at and criticize politicians or journalists. In Goražde, Sacco draws President Bill Clinton with a cartoonishly overexaggerated frown when he declares his determination to use airstrikes against the Serbs. The adjacent text box, however, qualifies this determination: “Facing the imminent collapse of Gorazde and a loss of its own credibility in foreign affairs, the Clinton administration reversed course again” (2007, 184). Even though Sacco’s seemingly approves of the U.S. intervention to help Goražde, the cartoonish exaggeration calls attention to the fact that the

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Fig. 4.8  Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 93

United States and NATO lack long-term reliability. Cartooning is employed for comic relief: when Goražde’s Riki spontaneously bursts into song, the representation highlights his body and that of his small audience, including Sacco, while the background is completely replaced by an immense comics gloriole of radial lines (24). To emphasize his loudness, Riki’s speech balloons are enlarged and the contained writing is printed in boldface. Here, Sacco’s experience of the situation, especially his bewilderment, is emphasized. Sacco employs these moments of cartoonish exaggeration, particularly in the primary narrative and during the lighter moments. Consequently, he creates a distinct contrast between his own experience as a reporter and the experiences of his witnesses. Guy Delisle’s portrayal of others is indiscriminately cartoonish as well. In contrast to Sacco, he individualizes the people he encounters chiefly through recognizable “props” such as haircuts, glasses, or heads. The characters are drawn as types rather than as individuals. In some group scenes, Delisle not even attempts a pretense of individualization. For instance, in his depiction of a hijab-wearing crowd at the Qalandiya checkpoint, Delisle omits the facial features of the waiting women entirely (see Fig. 4.9), emphasizing a sense of otherness and threat. Delisle also applies techniques of cartooning to ridicule the people he encounters, especially if they wrong him in some way. When a man verbally abuses and eventually threatens to stone his car after recognizing the Doctors without Borders emblem on it, he draws that man with typical comics icons of rage

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Fig. 4.9  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 43

emanating from his head, such as steam clouds and an explosion (2015a, 254). Moreover, similar to Sacco, Delisle caricaturizes expatriates and journalists in particular (33). This use of cartooning that emphasizes his personal experience highlights the memoiristic conception of the work. The documentary aspect of Delisle’s cartooning is especially striking when it serves to emphasize the disconnect between the representation of emotion and the experience thereof. For instance, with only very few lines and soft grey tones, Delisle captures his Palestinian baby-sitter Nabila’s anguish when she learns that her family has received a demolition notice for their home (317-318). Even though the narrator describes how “Nabila’s eyes are all red. Something’s wrong” (see Fig. 4.10), her eyes

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Fig. 4.10  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 317

are represented only as dots and circles, and as simple slanted lines later on. The graphic narrative discourse remains reduced to black, white, and shades of brownish grey, in which the color of her eyes remains entirely abstract. As she tells Delisle of the notice, two teardrops spraying from her face, her mouth forms a large o-shape, which in the next panel recedes to just a thin horizontal line. Delisle states: “I don’t know what to tell her.” His drawing style echoes his insecurity, clearly indicating her emotions but leaving them entirely abstract. Delisle does not insist on capturing these emotions accurately; rather, he creates an iconic likeness of these emotions, leaving it to the reader to imagine her experience. His own reactions

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are conspicuously absent in this scene; the reader sees Nabila mostly over Delisle’s shoulder. Using the simplicity of his cartoon faces, Delisle creates a sense of unreadability and precariousness that mimics his own experience as interlocutor. This way, cartooning works as a distancing mechanism that ultimately negates the attempt to represent emotion realistically, as a naturalistic representation would suggest. Even though Delisle does not assume the self-reflexive rigor of autobiographical comics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (2003), his style never fails to remind the reader that they are reading a comic. The already-mentioned capacity of cartooning to depict without exact identification helps protect witnesses from persecution but also from embarrassment. In Jerusalem, Delisle includes an episode in which his wife Nadège tells him about an encounter at the Gaza border during which Israeli soldiers forced an Arab woman at gunpoint to remove her robe and veil (see Fig.  4.11). Her embarrassment is visualized through cartoon vocabulary such as sweat drops spraying from her head, and her large eyes and mouth. Cartooning, in this case, allows Delisle to document the incident without exposing any individual woman without her headscarf. A striking example of this function of cartooning can be found in Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare’s documentary Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria (2017): to protect the identity of the Kurdish fighters he interviews, he depicts them—with considerable irony—as different

Fig. 4.11  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 62

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anthropomorphized local dishes, such as spicy olives or goat cheese (see Schmid 2018, 265). In contrast to Sacco, when Guy Delisle diverges from his principal style, he does so in a more naturalistic manner; however, these scenes also make transparent the constructedness of the mediatization. As with his architectural and topographical sketches, he follows a quasi-ethnographic approach in his recording the particularities of clothing in otherwise unusual detail (2015a, 126, 111). The juxtaposition of different drawing styles is most conspicuous in several metapictorial moments of the work. In one scene, he draws a portrait of a Palestinian who insists on drawing Delisle’s portrait in return (see Fig. 4.12). While Delisle’s drawing is skillfully done in his more naturalistic manner, the man’s portrait is crude. Here, Delisle’s non-documentary self-conception (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2) surfaces: by including the drawing, he ridicules the man in a way that the other authors avoid. In another instance, ridicule is even more pronounced. Delisle encounters posters for the electoral campaign of a Rabbi who uses a cartoon image of himself (145). Drawing him more naturalistically, even with a rare infusion of color for his beard, Delisle makes a point of exposing the difference between the man’s friendly campaign avatar and his actual look. He even speculates that the cartoon may have been chosen because of the man’s uncomely appearance, and, indeed, the cartoon looks much more appealing than Delisle’s rendering. The juxtaposition not only

Fig. 4.12  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 271

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makes transparent Delisle’s deliberate choice of style but also represents a self-aware display of drawing as his “weapon” to expose misrepresentations—if only as an ironic side note. In contrast to the other selected works, Josh Neufeld’s A.D. does not contain any distinct ruptures in drawing style. All characters, including Neufeld’s own avatar that briefly appears in the epilogues, are rendered in the same style that strikes a balance between cartooning and naturalism. As Hoefer, aptly summarizes, A.D.’s “visual style is clear, concise, and relatively unsurprising—that is to say, realistic but not photorealistic” (2012, 296). Neufeld’s characters are all readily recognizable by their individual facial features, which, in turn, display their emotions as they experience the catastrophe. “Neufeld seeks out an appropriate balance between the particular and the general,” as Hoefer states (294). Many panels explicitly show facial features that highlight the character’s fear but also determination. Kate Parker Horrigan criticizes that “individuals morph into stereotypes,” and Denise, in particular, “is interpreted as a stereotypical African American woman raging ineptly and inappropriately against her circumstances” (2018, 35). This assessment is somewhat shortsighted: Neufeld does contextualize her anger and frustration as comprehensible and relatable (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.4); he also introduces Denise in the paratext as “a sixth-generation New Orleanians with a master’s degree in guidance and counseling” (2010, n.p.). Accordingly, Hoefer concludes that “none of the characters adhere to the stereotypes that populate popular representations of the city” (2012, 296). While this is fundamentally true, the aspect of stereotyping is to some degree inherent to the comics medium, and specifically to the project of A.D. The author presents his characters both as particular types—which is also expressed by the fact that the characters are only identified by first names—yet, he also insists upon their personal experiences, representing them as individually recognizable with fully formed facial features that go beyond the assignment of props. In striking contrast to Neufeld, Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts largely contains renditions of the interviews that she conducted on the trip, and the portrayal of witnesses and their emotions constitutes a central aspect of the work. In general, Glidden employs a fairly reduced style for her characters that are oftentimes set against plain or even monochromatic backgrounds. Like Sacco, she frequently depicts interviews similar to documentary film through a frontal portrayal of the upper body or bodies of her characters, highlighting the interviewees’ facial expressions and

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gestures. The focus on facial expression is highlighted even more through her sparse employment of lines, which emphasizes the eyes and mouth areas. In many cases, Glidden shows an interviewer’s speech balloon but not the interviewer, focusing entirely on the interviewee instead. This offers Glidden a way to represent a character’s direct affective response to the question, before representing the answer. The reader encounters this practice right away in the prologue (see Fig. 4.13), which depicts a confrontation with an Iraqi refugee as part of an interview. When asked whether she wants to be interviewed, the reader first sees her flinching angrily and only in the next panel does she answer that she will agree to the interview. Through the disparity between unthinking response and premeditated answer, Glidden represents a character’s inner conflict. At the same time, the clear line style poignantly captures specific and instantly recognizable affects and emotions. While the drawing style is less articulated, Glidden achieves an emotional realism that is more focused than nuanced. Glidden’s array of facial expressions certainly supports Cohn’s argument concerning the predominance of a conventionalized visual vocabulary in comics as opposed to particular observations. It also confirms Eisner’s suggestions that in order to express emotions, “the artist must work from a ‘dictionary’ of human gestures” (2008, 101). Here, the cartoonist’s work very much centers around the translation of their own observations and testimonies received into their visual vocabulary in order to make them readily relatable and understandable. Documentary graphic narratives, generally, involve the presence of the author as a character within the primary narrative; hence, a particular likeness or avatar must be produced. Despite the fact that authors very obviously did not observe themselves from the outside, they continually insert self-portraits into the observed scenes. While documentary ethics demand closer adherence to the outwardly visible likeness of an encountered other, self-portraiture entails fewer ethical restraints. Since the artist and his subject are one person, they frequently take liberties in their self-depiction that they would eschew in the representation of the encountered witnesses. Cartooning and self-caricature serve as a way of aligning readerly identification with the author. Most strikingly, Joe Sacco represents his own character in a more abstract manner than the people he encounters. He exaggerates poses and facial expressions to the point of self-ridicule and notably excludes his own eyes. His opaque spectacles become a blank spot for both readerly projection and interpretation, coincidentally,

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Fig. 4.13  Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), n.p.

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highlighting their own capacity as “a tool for witnessing” (Walker 2010, 76). Sacco explains that he wants to cast his character in the role of a “nondescript figure” or “cipher”: “I don’t want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I’d rather emphasise their feelings,” he states. Instead, he seeks to make his own emotions visible only to “throw their situation into starker relief” (Cooke 2009, n.p.). However, Sacco’s self-conception of representing his own emotions in order to emphasize the situation of his respective witness fails to account for the framing capacity of such reactions (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.3). The readerly identification toward his character that Sacco seeks to facilitate presents his emotional and affective responses as the default reactions to the encountered stories. Guy Delisle vividly displays his frustration and bewilderment concerning the foreign cultures with which he engages (2015a, 144). Even though Delisle creates a recognizable contrast between the degree of cartooning of his own character and the people he encounters in North Korea (see, for instance, 2015b, 4), this distinction is less pronounced in the principal style in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, his character stands out, especially because he represents his nose as part of the outline of his head; in turn, he frequently depicts his likeness without a mouth. In contrast to the encountered others, his character is also particularly nondescript and lacks any recognizable clothing items. Delisle caricaturizes his own avatar strongly to emphasize certain sensations. When he is woken up by a minaret’s morning call to prayer, he first draws himself with grossly enlarged eyes to display his complete surprise, and then as just two small lines to represent his drowsiness (11). At the same time, the sound of the call fills the panel with a large and spikey sound field that emphasizes its loud and disturbing quality for Delisle. Such cartoonish reactions are mostly limited to his private experiences; however, these reactions indicate what the reader should understand as “foreign” or “weird,” normalizing such impressions. In contrast, as the interlocutor of the encountered witnesses, Delisle remains indeterminate, rarely displaying any visible emotions. In another conversation, Nabila tells Delisle how her cousin was killed, and that the family suspects his organs were illegally harvested (299). Here, Delisle simply listens and offers no commentary, his role as neutral chronicler emphasized by the absence of his mouth and that only his eye is represented through one tiny dot. The focus on the eyes and the absence of a mouth leaves a lingering sense of bewilderment that passes no direct judgment but invites the reader to judge for themselves, based on the narrative

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contextualization. This is especially pertinent in Delisle’s very last encounter when he witnesses the occupation of a Palestinian home by Jewish settlers. When a settler exclaims—“It’s my house now!”—Delisle’s avatar simply gazes upward speechlessly and mouthlessly (see Fig.  4.14). This depiction of an excessively cartoony nonreaction frames the encounter as mind-boggling to Delisle as a stand-in for the reader, which consequently throws the settler’s audacity into starker relief. Likewise, Sarah Glidden presents herself in an especially cartoonish manner, when she addresses her own shortcomings, even though there is no general distinction between her self-representation and that of others.

Fig. 4.14  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 335

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Glidden alternates between two drawing styles for human beings that entail different degrees of cartooning depending on the proximity to the point of view. One is more naturalistic with more sophisticated eye- and mouth-areas, whereas the other is more abstract, with the eyes, brows, and mouth drawn as single lines and dots. Though she does not use either style exclusively for either party, Glidden has a strong tendency to draw the encountered witnesses in a more naturalistic style, while she alternates between styles for the depiction of both herself and her group of friends. In the representation of interviews, she combines the two styles recurrently: for instance, one moment in the interview with Sam Malkandi adopts a perspective closer to Malkandi, in which he is drawn more naturalistically and Sarah Stuteville more abstractly (see Fig. 4.15). As Sam tells about his once-happy life in the United States, he is individualized as a person and his individual claim to citizenship is highlighted. In contrast, Stuteville’s concern for him is shown through her simple straight-line mouth and raised eyebrows, which serves to mirror his claim. Her reactions underline the impact emotional Sam’s words have on her, which, coincidentally, corroborates his story. In the final panel of this scene, Sam

Fig. 4.15  Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 151

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is shown from farther away and also in a simpler style. Here, the perspective accentuates his forlorn position in the emptiness of the room, and the simple drawing style exhibits his resignation as he says, “Without my wife and kids, I am useless” (2016, 151). The more simplistic rendering more definitely pins down one emotion, whereas the naturalistic approach makes a point of depicting Malkandi as an individual and a citizen.

4.2   The Panel: Perspective and Composition This section will examine the capacity of panels to frame the respective conflicts through their employment of perspective and composition. Straightforwardly defined, the panel is “simply a discernible area that contains a moment of the story” (Duncan and Smith 2009, 3). In comics grammar, the panel serves as the smallest unit that assumes the status of “a complete utterance” and “constitutes a specific contribution, however slim, to the story in which it participates” (Groensteen 2007, 56). The panel enables the reader’s gaze upon the represented events, structuring what can be seen and what cannot, and making salient particular aspects by aesthetic means. Hence, framing takes on a literal meaning, as well, in this case: “Functioning as a stage, the panel controls the viewpoint of the reader; the panel’s outline becomes the perimeter of the reader’s vision and establishes the perspective from which the site of action is viewed” (Eisner 2008, 90). Even though the rectangular shape predominates, not least because it mirrors the shape of the page, it is far from trivial that the panel assigns a concrete form to the representation of such a moment (cf. Groensteen 2007, 40). The shape of the panel frame may serve as an expression of particular moods or attitudes toward its content and may take on an expressive or even representative function, thus carrying a meaning of its own (Groensteen 2007, 50; Eisner 2008, 45, 61). Panel frames may become diegetic elements such as containers or structures: the formal experiments of Chris Ware or Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004, 2, 10) come to mind; likewise, such techniques have already been extensively used in comics strips since the advent of the form in the nineteenth century (see Bachmann and Schmid 2021). In documentary comics, however, such formal experiments are largely absent, as Delisle, Neufeld, and Glidden all overwhelmingly rely on rectangular panels. This regularity creates a sense of sobriety, conforming to a similar stasis of outer form that camera-based documentary media uphold.

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Only Joe Sacco very occasionally uses the panel shape for representative purposes; for instance, in the prologue to Footnotes, he presents a panel sequence metaphorically as a film reel (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.1). More frequently, Sacco includes irregular or contorted panel shapes. The abandonment of panel borders also serves as a means for emphasis and will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. Demarcating a particular moment within the confines of the panel borders determines both the perspective on and the composition of a scene, determining the visual vantage point and the relations of the depicted objects and subjects to each other. In this sense, “framing” entails “first the choice of perspective on a scene, and second the choice of borders of the image” (Lefèvre 2012, 73). These two aspects are inextricably intertwined, of course, and determine one another as artistic choices. As for the borders of the panel, Groensteen points out that in contrast to a photograph, “[t]he frame of a comics panel does not remove anything; it is contented to circumscribe” and “[t]o close the panel is not to stop the drawing. The graphic materiality cannot flee or flow out; no need, then, to limit it through coercive means” (2007, 40). The panel frame is not a medial border cast upon a continuous reality; rather, it actively enunciates an original representation by materializing a graphic narrative discourse. For nonfiction comics, this insight has to be taken with a grain of salt: indeed, documentary graphic narratives retrospectively recreate images of previously witnessed events, instead of “capturing” them in the particular moment as photographs do (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.3). Nevertheless, the artistic choice of what to include in the panel and what to exclude produces the same result: the artist structures the reader’s conception of historical reality by including some aspects of it, leaving out others, and aligning the representation with a specific point of view. Moreover, many comics journalists employ reference photographs and, thus, perpetuate particular photographic framings to some degree through adaptation. Like drawing style, the visual perspective that a panel entails can be subject to representative choices on a spectrum between a naturalistic style and expressive or dramatic techniques. In photojournalism, the correspondence to the unmediated gaze that Kress and van Leeuwen postulate as the maxim of naturalism (2006, 158), is facilitated by shooting pictures on eye level, from a proximity resembling “normal” encounters and without recognizable stylistic devices (Grittmann 2003, 142; see also Schmid 2016, 25). The portraits of interviews already discussed in the previous chapter serve as prime examples of such naturalistic panel framing. They

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mirror the unmediated gaze of interlocutors in a conversation by depicting the upper body of the interviewee with the eye-line in the upper third of the image, suggesting a distance between the point of view and character implicative of a normal conversation. In forgoing any visible background, they conform to a technique already conventionalized by documentary film. Simulating the natural gaze also presents an important strategy for other representations in the primary and embedded narratives. Divergence from such representations creates a noticeable shift toward a dramatization and/or aestheticization of the documented events. Beyond the alignment of the visual perspective with a natural gaze, the composition of the panels themselves and the relation between the different elements within are critical. Important factors of the composition involve the following aspects. Depending on whether elements are in the fore- or background or placed at the center or the margins of an image, the composition makes them salient in an image (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 176). Different elements, especially bodies, may be grouped or separated, thus, in the case of characters, either stressing their unity or their individuality (203). Lines and shapes may present vectors that lead the reader’s gaze from one element to another (59). As Hillary Chute emphasizes, in contrast to a photograph, “[w]hat matters here is the urge to articulate the physical parameters of space and the affective, immersive parameters of mood by harnessing the expressivity of drawing” (2016, 228). Accordingly, the size of the respective elements in relation to the simulated point of view—hence their felt proximity to the reader—may create either a sense of intimacy or of threat. A view from above may create “a sense of detachment,” casting the reader in the role of “an observer rather than a participant,” whereas a view from below “evokes a sense of smallness” (Eisner 2008, 92). These aspects are particularly relevant for the framing of relationships between the parties in a conflict, for instance, as the perpetrators and victims of injustice. The framing capacities of the panel become especially pertinent in the depiction of injustices, which are generally the subject of witness accounts, but, in some cases, have been personally observed by the authors as well. Not always are these accounts reproduced graphically, though: Sarah Glidden and Guy Delisle chiefly represent their encounters through the depiction of interviews and conversations. Differences are discernible, though. Most notably Glidden, but also Sacco and Neufeld, frequently rely on naturalistic frontal perspectives that create a sense of direct address and cast their readers in the role of participants in a conversation. In

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Delisle’s work, however, “the prevalent use of a mid-range perspective adds to a sense of surveying from a distanced position” (Mickwitz 2016, 102), which extends Delisle’s own self-conception as a detached observer to his reader. Arguably, the most wide-ranging use of visual framing devices can be found in the work of Joe Sacco. Prominently, Sacco visualizes oral testimonies of violence, warfare, and human rights violations of catastrophic proportions. Photographs of violence and disaster predominantly do not document an act of violence itself but its aftermath, referencing violence through its effects: what we see are the wounded and dead. Sacco depicts and frames horrendous crimes as they unfold and depicts the acts of violence themselves. Especially in Goražde, Sacco draws acts of violence as witnessed by his interview partners: mass graves (2007, 92–93), mangled corpses (90), and prominently also the slaughter of innocent women and children on a bridge over the Drina river (109–119). These scenes employ a natural gaze and create a sense of witnessing these atrocities first-hand. The meticulous rendering of forensic details raises ethical concerns of voyeurism and “risks being seen as an artifact of a wound culture” (Walker 2010, 79). To avoid this impression, Sacco “contextualizes the horrors within their own political and historical frames but, more important, he looks deeper than the grand sweep of history and finds the people affected by trauma” (86; see also Ahrens 2019). Therefore, Sacco’s images of pain and suffering rather “evok[e] the rhetoric of human rights,” as Rebecca Scherr suggests (2015, 115). Accounting for especially salient visuals, in any case, representations of violence are particularly important as framings of the represented conflict. One of the most striking images of Goražde is the large panel that depicts the massacre at Srebrenica (see Fig.  4.16). Chute describes this panel as “fully representational in its drive and desire—it is one of his most clinical drawings in the book, and the largest that exists within a frame” (2016, 221). The image exhibits one very brief instant in time, as indicated by the hyperrealistic portrayal of the bullet trajectories frozen in time as they pass through the falling victims. Coincidentally, the composition indicates a chronology of events: the body-filled trench segments the panel diagonally into two distinct spheres depicting the act of violence and the dead bodies as its result. Several vectors direct the viewer’s gaze through the image. Most saliently in the middle, the panel renders the concrete act of mass murder, while the bullet trajectories suggest that the bodies will fall beside the many corpses already filling the trench. The

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Fig. 4.16  Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern  Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 203

reader’s gaze follows the trench and is led to a bulldozer in the upper left corner, ready to either dig more graves or cover them up. From here, the gaze is led by the horizon to the upper right corner, where more victims are brought to the killing, back to the initial moment. This circularity formed by the lines and vectors of the composition suggests that the killings are continuous and highlights “[t]he planned nature of the genocide” (in ‘t Veld 2019, 146). This scene presents the genocide as a chain of cause and effect, identifying perpetrators and victims. Sacco visualizes a concrete framing for the

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war and the mass killings that have so far only emerged abstractly from eyewitness accounts, or through photographs of its aftermath. The reader becomes a silent and invisible witness to what constitutes “the largest mass killing in Europe in 50 years,” as Sacco emphasizes (2007, 203), and is forced to observe a historical reality that the international community allowed to happen. In contrast to a photograph, however, Sacco stages and composes his image in a manner that allows and mandates an unmistakable framing of history. Enunciating a representation informed by— but not directly imprinted off of historical reality—Sacco assumes the fictional privilege of representing the mass murder in a way that takes on a degree of compositional clarity that photographs seldomly permit. As he states, it is an “essential” and not a “literal truth” that he has in mind while drawing (2012, x). The naturalistic graphic style rubs against both pictorial hyperrealism that visualizes bullet trajectories and historical hyperrealism that, through visual condensation, allows fitting the logistics of genocide into a single frame. Even though this scene depicts the atrocities in a concrete representation of the act of mass murder, Sacco’s general approach is not to portray the perpetrators of warfare but their victims and casualties, and specifically in the moment of these acts unfolding. In Goražde and The Fixer, Sacco includes scenes that represent the beginning of the war. Both show crowds of civilians that flee the shelling, running toward the vantage point of the observer. In Goražde (2007, 80), this scene adopts a naturalistic perspective with a slight above angle on the approaching crowd, which lets the reader witness the horror of the individual faces, possibly aligning the point of view with a person in the crowd (see Fig. 4.17). By contrast, its counterpart in The Fixer (2004, 30) adopts a frog’s perspective with an extreme view from below, increasing the dramatization of the scene and extending its fictionalization (see Fig. 4.18). This difference also shows in the depiction of the destruction wrought upon the city: in Goražde, the shelling is represented by the impact of projectiles on the roofs in an otherwise idyllic suburban residential area. In The Fixer, in contrast, Sacco renders a narrow Sarajevan street, cramming a burning car and an explosion almost directly above the heads of the characters into the panel. Such dramatic devices create a sense of urgency, but also call attention to their mediatization, especially in combination with Neven’s chauvinist comment, “Then some bastards went to the hills and started shooting on my city.” Ultimately, the scene in The Fixer

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Fig. 4.17  Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in  Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 80

establishes this moment as Neven’s motivation for fighting, whereas the scene in Goražde sets up the fact that several witnesses lost their homes. Whereas Goražde and The Fixer display the most horrific scenes detached from personal experience, Footnotes pointedly presents personal accounts. Here, framing devices that highlight personal affective responses are employed more emphatically. The testimony of Nasrah Felfel, an eyewitness to the killing of her husband, is particularly striking (2009, 279–281). In Felfel’s account, four Israeli soldiers entering her home are depicted with a slight upward angle from behind the cowering family (279). While the frightened faces of the couple’s two sons can be seen, the faces of the soldiers towering above remain in shadows, drawing all the more attention to their rifles and bayonets, which are literally in the faces of the family. In

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Fig. 4.18  Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 30

the next panel, the huddled family is shown at the center of the image while the four soldiers stand at the four corners of the room, rummaging through the household’s belongings (see Fig.  4.19). This constellation emphasizes the unity of the family in opposition to the imminent threat that encircles them from all sides. Disputing the Israeli claim that insurgents were targeted, in this scene, Sacco frames the Israeli operation as an attack on an unarmed civilian family in their home. The solidarity that holds the family together is then abruptly violated as the soldiers drag the husband outside to be killed. Similar to the previously mentioned scene in

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Fig. 4.19  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 280

The Fixer, Sacco’s rendering adopts an unnatural point of view that creates a strong sense of intimacy but precludes any notion of an actual observer being present at the scene. This testimony is especially pertinent because, in contrast to many other interviews, no doubt is raised concerning Nasrah Felfel’s reliability. On the contrary, the depiction of the interview that frames her account continuously enhances the sense of intimacy, as the point of view moves closer to Felfel. In the middle of the encounter, Sacco calls particular attention to her face through a gloriole behind her head (280). The intensity of the encounter is finally brought to a climax, and in the final image of the chapter, her face fills the entire panel, as she states, directly addressing the reader: “And the body remained in the street in the same place until the next morning” (281). Unflinchingly, Nasrah Felfel tells her immensely traumatic story at a simulated proximity that would be close enough to touch. Hence, the cruelty of the embedded narrative, enhanced by Sacco’s composition, is further emphasized by the visual framing of her face in the primary narrative that renders her story uncommonly personal to the reader.

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Sacco’s extensive employment of visual framing devices in his depictions of history presents a stark contrast to the principal naturalism of his witness encounters. While his drawing style sutures both approaches together, a distinct sense of fictionalization is present in his witness accounts. This way, Sacco frames history by presenting historical constellations as well as personal experiences in their abstract or emotional truth, rather than creating the sort of “accurate” documents one might expect from a photojournalist. In comparison to Sacco, Guy Delisle’s depictions of injustices are far fewer and the witness accounts that he draws exhibit a high degree of abstraction. His renderings of an Israeli border control facility that he observed stand out in this regard. When Delisle describes his first visit to the Qalandiya checkpoint, he depicts the waiting crowd in one of the most tightly packed panels in the volume. Over the shoulders of the waiting guards, the Palestinian crowd is depicted as an amorphous mass of people and fumes surrounded by cameras. In the verbal narrative instance, Delisle describes the scene as “surreal” and draws attention to “a vendor weaving his way through the chaos, hawking sesame bread at the top of his lungs” (2015a, 48). With the border separating the point of view from the “chaos,” the tightly packed frame evokes a sense of imminent threat for the onlooker, a threat contained by the Israeli border guards. This sense of threat and containment is further emphasized by a wide-angle depiction of the separation wall mirroring the panel in form and placement (49). Delisle facilitates a different framing when he crosses the checkpoint into Ramallah himself (2015a, 104–105; see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2). His own experience of the crossing first adopts the first-person point of view, in which Delisle’s field of vision is starkly restricted by the fences and roofs of the gateway. The scene takes on a perspective that corresponds to his avatar’s perception, using the borders of the panel frame to evoke a feeling of oppressive fullness. The ubiquity of enclosing shapes and straight lines creates a sense of imprisonment, as does the dark coloring that dominates the scene. This sense is further heightened in the next scene when the people passing through behind the bars of the gateway are shown; through the borders of the panel, the depiction takes on the likeness of an actual cage (see Fig. 4.20). This panel is juxtaposed with a smaller panel showing an armed Israeli soldier, grimly scanning the crowd. In the penultimate panel, Delisle renders himself behind a turnstile encompassing the entire height of his body, yet again, placing his character “behind bars.” Compared to his previous

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Fig. 4.20  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 105

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encounter with the border, these two scenes frame the underlying conflict antithetically: whereas the first scene displays the Palestinian crowd as a threatening chaotic mass, the second scene adopts an individual perspective from within such a group. In the first scene, the border structures and military personnel suggest a sense of safety; now, the perspective presents the securities facilities as oppressive. A change of visual perspective facilitates the adoption of a contrasting cognitive frame. Like Sacco, Josh Neufeld employs perspectives and panel compositions that diverge from a naturalistic paradigm and purport an emotional realism toward the represented catastrophe. Hurricane Katrina constitutes a more recent crisis, which, above all, happened in the United States. In A.D., Neufeld specifically aimed to create countervisuals of an event that had already been televised extensively and photographed, as he stresses in the afterword (2010, 192). This way, A.D. “challenges the visual record of a highly mediated event, moving between the iconic and general to the unfamiliar and particular” (Hoefer 2012, 294). Two of Neufeld’s primary strategies are the juxtaposition of already familiar sights with counterperspectives, and the employment of perspectives and panel borders to emphasize the emotional experiences of his characters. This is achieved both through frequent close-ups of the characters’ faces that highlight individual emotions and in mass scenes that portray the aftermath of Katrina as a collective experience. In a particularly striking example, Neufeld employs the panel frame to express the claustrophobia and helplessness of the victims stranded in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in the final chapter of the narrative proper. Over an entire double page, yet still within a panel frame, the reader sees a mass of horrified individual faces, gazing helplessly toward an unseen occurrence behind the reader. The scene encapsulates a moment of mass panic as people start suspecting that the government’s inaction is deliberate. Speech balloons, ascribed to no one particular, but representing voices from the crowd state, “THEY BROUGHT US HERE TO DIE!” (see Fig. 4.21). In contrast to other moments in the book, no sense of direct address is evoked and the point of view from within the crowd does not cast the reader in the role of a participant. Rather, the reader takes on the role of a disembodied observer, forced to look upon the horrified faces without meeting their gazes. The angle of the perspective is tilted to the side and the nearest faces are close to the point of view, enhancing the sense of disarray and chaos, and “evoking feelings of claustrophobia, vertigo, and terror” (Hoefer 2012, 311). The border that the

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Fig. 4.21  Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 150–151

panel frame imposes is not aligned with any structure; it is clearly suggestive of the shared entrapment and, as such, a direct indictment of the government’s failure to help (cf. 308). This scene becomes especially noteworthy in comparison to an earlier scene that depicts the convention center from above discussed in the previous chapter. This image presents a view familiar to many readers: “an overhead shot that approximates the vantage point of a cable news helicopter looking down” (Hoefer 2012, 293). Neufeld strongly relies on news images for reference which he then remediates (300). While the overhead aerial perspective reduces the waiting crowd to a mass of stick figures, the ultra-close-up not only individualizes the victims but also brings the reader, almost literally, closer to the tragedy. These “scalar perspectival shifts … first evoke, and then jolt readers away from, the familiar overhead views from which the disaster was documented in mainstream media coverage” (Davies 2019, 6). Hence, A.D. is strongly characterized by juxtapositions of perspectives that challenge each other, thus, reframing the visual lexicon of the catastrophe. Through visual framing, Neufeld shifts the understanding of Hurricane Katrina from “something that happened to others” to a human tragedy, suffered by individual persons to whom the reader can and must relate.

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4.3   Intra-Panel Framing: Cohesion and Excess Although Groensteen conceives of the panel as the smallest unit in comics in System of Comics, instances of visual framing may be found within the panel as well. Within a single image, framing in the sense of designating logical assemblages may occur. An image may be structured by lines and shapes that connect or separate elements or segments of the images, “signifying that they belong or do not belong together in some sense” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 177). This way, a single static image may involve a spatial co-present display of various elements that each designate an individual area and may have a concrete rhetorical function (cf. Kress 2010, 81; Groensteen 2013, 23). Sacco’s rendering of the mass murder at Srebrenica that was discussed earlier presents such a case. A panel may also be sub-divided by the represented objects but also by nondiegetic elements. In Footnotes, for instance, Sacco prominently places a text box between himself and the last witness at the very end of the narrative proper to underline the fundamental separateness of their experiences as eyewitness and documentarian (2009, 394; see also Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5). As another type of “frame within a frame,” graphic representation of witness accounts may even be embedded in speech balloons. Guy Delisle represents a conversation with Doctors without Borders staff member Cécile who just experienced a shelling in Gaza. She describes the event as follows: “The first thing I saw when I crossed the Erez checkpoint was an F-16 dropping bombs” (see Fig. 4.22). Her utterance is accompanied by an abstract representation of a plane bombarding a row of houses. In this manner, Delisle depicts the bombardment and, at the same time, highlights the fact that his own capacity to imagine these events is limited. The co-presence of the interview with the graphic representation heightens the awareness of the layeredness of the storytelling process, emphasizing that a particular story has been relegated to Delisle and was not witnessed by him. Notably, Delisle diverges from his greyish default color scheme in this instant and represents the detonations in red and yellow. Despite their abstractness and cartoonish codification of the triangular depiction, these signal colors present a stark contrast to the rest of the page. Visualizing this incident provides a sense of urgency and drama, which exceeds the means of merely linguistic representation. The fact that comics not only allows but forces the author to segment their stories into different panels, makes even the absence of such visual framing devices especially notable. Two unique grouping techniques are

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Fig. 4.22  Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (Drawn & Quarterly 2015), 173

employed, in particular by Joe Sacco: the contraction of temporally or ontologically distinct elements within one panel, and the absence of a clear focus within vast and detailed depiction in a gesture of visual excess. For instance, in the first chapter of The Fixer, Sacco emphasizes Neven’s exuberant disposition during a bar scene, in which he boasts of his various exploits before the war (2004, 10). While Sacco’s character gazes upward, the towering Neven is depicted with multiple arms that display different moments of his gesturing. Moreover, several of Neven’s disembodied heads emanate from his body in a circular motion and continue his story. Illustrations of his story underlie his various speech balloons: a shadowy

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group of Neven’s “close friends,” Venetian architecture, and horror-struck border guards provide the backdrop for his tale. As in the prologue, the notion of gambling is invoked by cards fluttering toward the reader. This rendering expresses Neven’s talkativeness overwhelming Sacco by including multiple events happening at the same time. Blending narrative reality with conceptual imagery unsettles the boundary between fact and fiction: it is not entirely clear if the reader is to believe Neven’s tale, which Sacco primarily includes to make a point about Neven’s disposition rather than documenting his professed exploits. Breaking down the border between past and present, stressing the continuity and even circularity of the conflict lies at the heard of Sacco’s project in Footnotes. To create a sense of cohesion between past and present, Sacco prominently renders both within the same panels, frequently omitting boundaries between the representations of his investigation and his historiographical renderings. In his portrayal of the old fedayee, Sacco groups depictions of the interview with renditions of his witness accounts within the same borderless panels that often span across the whole page. These scenes place the interviewee in the foreground and his account in the background, thus, at least partially assigning a sense of temporal ordering (see, for instance, 2009, 42, 43, 45, 47, 64). It is especially striking that the man is portrayed naturalistically and with direct address, often also with a film noir-style shadow across his face. Again, the absence of clear boundaries between past and present, as well as the juxtaposition of naturalistic drawing style and intra-panel collage, problematizes the witness account by attributing conflicting frames to it. This friction between framings also entails a moral dimension; mainly, witnesses like the old fedayee and present-day insurgent Khaled (51) are portrayed in this manner when they mentions their acts of cruelty. In another instance, Sacco includes the old fedayee together with a rendering of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (2009, 73). Before an abstract crosshatched background, he positions the fedayee right behind Nasser, insinuating an attack from behind or, at least, Nasser being oblivious of the accusations. Both are directly addressing the reader; while Nasser smiles silently, the fedayee makes derogatory remarks about his skin color and claims that Nasser exploited the fedayee. The panel creates an eerie co-presence between the long-deceased leader and Sacco’s interview partner. To the fedayee, the past is alive according to Sacco’s rendering of his witness account: both men appear to inhabit the same memoryscape. At the same time, despite the silence of Nasser’s rendering,

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the parallelism between both faces appears to offer information beyond words. Their juxtaposition offers the reader the opportunity to make their own assumptions about them. In other cases, Sacco collapses past and present more benevolently. For instance, he depicts an interview with a man named Ahmed Khalil El-Bawab as a clear continuation of history, testimony, and documentation. Included in the same panel—a large bleed panel across the page— Sacco represents from left to right the killing of the man’s brother in 1995, then the El-Bawab testifying, and finally Sacco himself, taking notes (345) Moreover, El-Bawab’s speech balloons extend into the panel below that depicts his witness account. No friction between past and present or indications that draw the man’s reliability into question is present. Likewise, Sacco includes a page in Goražde which collects witness accounts of how their homes were damaged (2007, 127); each panel includes both the interviewee in the foreground on the left and the described memory and their past selves in the background on the right. Drawing together a past and a present self in the same panel emphasizes the importance of that these past experiences in their present-day personalities; the trauma remains in the back of their minds as they are in the background of the panel. While grouping together different elements within the confines of the same panel produces a semantic connection, the absence of any clear demarcation or focus produces a sense of visual excess that frustrates the reader’s attempt to segment the image into recognizable units of meaning. This not only concerns the differentiation of past and present but may also serve an affective purpose. Again, Sacco’s depiction of present-day Gaza provides a striking example (2009, 28–29) Over the entirety of a borderless double-page spread, Sacco overwhelms the reader with a staggering amount of details. The image presents no apparent focus; it is sharp and clear in all areas, people going about their everyday life can be found throughout. Moreover, the absence of panel borders provides the display with a timeless quality (cf. McCloud 1994, 103), and suggests that the vista extends far beyond the edges of the page. With this overabundance of visual information, the city vista overwhelms the reader through the absence of intrapictorial framing. On the entire preceding single page, Sacco shows an image of the camps in the 1950s, including a vast yet orderly row of detached single-­ story houses. As the reader turns the page, the difference from the present is stunning: not only is the second image double the size, but the orderly

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rows of smaller houses have turned into a sprawling cityscape of multi-­ story buildings. On the upper right corner, Sacco’s comment is succinct: “And now they look like this” (2009, 29). While what the reader sees here is deemed a “refugee camp,” the semantic frame that this word calls up clearly does not correspond to what is shown here, as the surprised reader is made to realize. The double-page spread discussed earlier (see Fig. 4.1) serves as a striking example in this case as well. First of all, the sheer size of the image evokes a sense of the “destructive sublime.” The spectator of scenes of destruction, Miles Orvell argues, feels not only horror as they imagine the suffering associated with it, but also a sense of spectacle (2006). However, the impressive sight does not stand for itself: circling the ruin and leading the reader’s gaze around it, text boxes present Abed’s contradiction of the Israeli claim that the building constituted a military position. Hence, the image in itself serves as a record of the destruction that Sacco witnessed— one that invites a certain sense of voyeurism, perhaps, but the encircling narrative contextualizes it and strongly frames the depicted destruction as unjust. This way, Sacco contrasts and contradicts the official records not only with Abed’s testimony but with a recording of his personal lived experience of the witnessed destruction. In Goražde, another borderless double-page spread can be found, which shows the everyday life in the city after the war. As people go about their everyday lives, Sacco wonders how they survived all the horrors. Adults chop wood; children play soccer: they are not “not raped and scattered” (2007, 14–15). In its richness of detail, this image is one of the clearest allusions to Brueghel, and as Sacco himself explains: “Goražde seemed to have slipped back five or six centuries. … I felt I’d stepped into a painting by Brueghel” (Groth 2011, 244). The image suggests that the frames concerning regions of crisis that Western readers have internalized do not correspond with Sacco’s observations. Overwhelming the reader with visual complexity becomes Sacco’s weapon of choice to counteract the lack of elaboration in the mainstream conception of the cultural other. This form of visual overabundance is also extended to Sacco’s depiction of crowds, such as, for instance, the interned Palestinians men in the chapter “The Screening” of Footnotes (2009, 298–299): the sheer mass of waiting people—all of them individualized—is already overwhelming. However, under closer scrutiny, various smaller individual moments of abuse and cruelty can be found all over the image: soldiers kicking, clubbing, threatening, shoving their respective victims. Even though all of

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these individual acts and experiences constitute tragedies in themselves, the visual equality with which they are presented frames them as a staggering assemblage that frustrates any attempt of doing justice to the image as an onlooker. As soon as the reader focuses on one aspect, several others are neglected. Sacco refuses to privilege one experience over another, thus, thwarting the reader’s desire to have the complexity of history reduced to a palatable narrative. Through the absence of visual demarcation, the image remains, to a degree, inscrutable. The frustrated reader can only acknowledge this impasse.

4.4   The Comics Page: Regularity and Disruption Whereas the individual panels already allow the authors to arrange complex compositions that position different actors and objects in particular relationships, these possibilities are further extended by arranging different panels in relation to each other. Page layout grants the author the opportunity to contextualize moments by juxtaposing them with others, or by superimposing them on a certain background. This way, meanings can be produced that the respective elements could not achieve individually (Berlatsky 2009, 174). Although comics is essentially characterized by fragmentariness, through a regular panel arrangement, a homogenous reading flow may be generated. Therefore, somewhat ironically, it is the absence of borders—for instance, in case of a splash page, a borderless, or a bleed panel—which may interrupt the reading flow for particular emphases. The co-presence of different elements induces a tension between the focal moment of the individual panel and the surface of the page as a coherent image of its own, as was discussed earlier. This section discusses how panels relate to each other in meaningful ways, evoking cohesion and disruption, and how the surface of the page becomes meaningful. The double-page spread also provides the definitive material limits for how much information can be displayed simultaneously. While the reader may jump back and forth between panels on a given double page, the reading process is interrupted when the page is turned (Eisner 2008, 65). The printed area is generally enclosed by another frame: the outer edges of the panel grid. Building on the work of Benoît Peeters, Groensteen calls this area the “hyperframe,”4 which “separates the useable surface of the page from its peripheral zone, or margin” (2007, 31). Within the margins of the page, the hyperframe provides the structure on the page through which the panels are positioned and organized. Not only the arrangement

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of different panels in a grid juxtaposes different images in ways that create meaning beyond their individual content, but the gutter itself may become semantically charged, especially concerning the performance of breaks and absences in the representation of testimony and trauma. As Groensteen emphasizes, the hyperframe is very much determined by the format of the page. For instance, Joe Sacco’s pages are considerably larger than those of Sarah Glidden or Guy Delisle, which allows Sacco to painstakingly include minute details that would be unrecognizable on smaller pages. In terms of page format, the square shape of A.D. constitutes the most noticeable peculiarity, which determines that only rarely more than four panels fill a single page—quite often even fewer. As a result, the work strongly privileges individual moments over complex sequences. Undoubtedly, this page arrangement constitutes an atavism of the original webcomics, which presents even less content at a time. Here, the reader sees only one large horizontal, or sequences of two or three small vertical panels, at a time, on which they must click to advance the story. The webcomic presents all panels equally within the same website frame. While the print edition of A.D. thus harbors a greater variety of visual framings than the webcomic, it still groups fewer images together than do the other selected works. Therefore, Neufeld employs predominantly subject-to-subject transitions, which rely to a higher degree on the reader’s ability to connect them (McCloud 1994, 71). This way, new compound meanings emerge: for instance, on one page of the last chapter in the narrative proper, different narrative strands are brought together in two horizontal panels. On the top, the reader sees Denise, who points toward the suffering elderly and children at the convention center, whereas below, Leo and Michelle are shown leaving the city by car (2010, 146). Such a pairing draws particular attention to the different experiences of the ethnic groups to which both parties belong (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5). Likewise, Guy Delisle facilitates a striking contrast between his elaborate rendering of the Wailing Wall on the left side, and one of his attempts to draw the separation wall on the right side of a double-page spread (2015a, 186–187). The fact alone that he was freely able to produce the drawing of the holy site but was hindered in drawing the more recent and less pleasant separation wall establishes a double standard in Israeli society. At the same time, drawing both together on the same double page relates them to each other in a way that establishes both as interdependent emblems of contemporary Israel.

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In comics layout, panel grids can be considered either regular or irregular, although the degree of irregularity is variable, of course. Groensteen posits that “frame regularity” presents “an objective criterion that makes it possible to classify all existing and possible pages into [these] two groups” (2013, 43). In a regular grid, all the panels are of the same shape and size, whereas irregular layouts exhibit some kind of variety. Mostly, Josh Neufeld and Guy Delisle create pages that are to some degree regular: the outer border of the grid remains stable, while the number and size of the panels contained within vary to accommodate their respective contents. Joe Sacco, in contrast, generally employs highly irregular layouts in which elements overlap and extend toward the edges of the page. The number, shapes, and sizes of panels vary greatly on Sacco’s pages. In consonance with ligne claire style, Sarah Glidden employs the highest degree of frame regularity, generally employing three-by-three panel-grids, with rare and only slight deviations from this norm. In a regular layout, the different panes have equal features, making chronology and placement but also changes in content all the more important. As Peeters points out, adopting a regular layout may serve to “reinforces the effect of the scene by concentrating the reader’s attention on some tiny changes in action and poses” (2007, 9). In the representation of interviews, such slight variations of pose or utterance fall in between two categories that McCloud establishes for panel transitions, sharing aspects of both “moment-to-moment” and “action-to-action” transitions (1994, 70). Although they only distinguish different moments within the same conversation, changing gestures and facial expressions become meaningful to the degree to which they serve as particular actions. McCloud points out that the reader needs to infer very little to make sense of such sequences; hence, the reader can focus their undivided attention on the meaning that these minute changes carry. In Rolling Blackouts, Glidden employs frame regularity particularly in her rendering of interviews, drawing attention to different gestures and facial expressions that, in combination with the represented utterances, are central to the work’s documentary method. Consider an interview with the Syrian Ambassador to the United States that Sarah Stuteville conducted before their trip. Glidden depicts the man over the course of six consecutive panels from roughly the same perspective, focusing the reader’s attention on his shifting body language, as he tries to convince the journalists to change their subject from the refugee crisis to Syria’s exports, such as soaps and even sex toys (see Fig. 4.23). First, his body language is

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Fig. 4.23  Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 218

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stern and serious: he sits upright and raises his index finger at Stuteville. This gradually shifts to smugness, as the man leans forward, then overturns his legs leaning back, and finally pointedly gazes at his fingernails with raised eyebrows. In another moment, frame regularity allows Glidden to express the stoicism with which their unimpressed taxi driver listens to Dan’s stories with an unchanging expression over the entire nine panels (2016, 90). Even though Glidden largely sticks to her regular layout, within her unchanging hyperframe she does alternate the size of her rectangular panels, which, in the absence of more conspicuous devices, unfold a strong semantic potential. The one-page prologue of Rolling Blackouts immediately introduces the reader to Glidden’s rhetorical employment of frame regularity (see Fig. 4.13). Over the course of seven regular vertical panels, Glidden depicts an Iraqi refugee using a naturalistic frontal perspective on the woman. The regularity emphasizes the different emotions that the woman exhibits as she first expresses hostility toward the journalists, but then agrees to talk to them. As the climax, the final panel is horizontal, encompassing the size of two regular panels. Here, the confrontation turns into a dialogue and the frame contains both the Iraqi woman and her interviewer Sarah Stuteville and the other journalists, both parties occupying roughly the same amount of space. This modest abandonment of the predominant regularity shifts the cognitive frame from confrontation to dialogue. In the second encounter with the woman at the end of the book, frame regularity performs another effect (2016, 287). Over a sequence of three panels, her utterances are left untranslated and displayed in Arabic writing. If the reader comprehends Arabic, the reading direction for this scene is reversed and the panels read from right to left. If the reader does not speak the language, the principal Western reading direction from left to right can be maintained and the incomprehensibility will produce a distinct alienation effect (see also Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5) In this scene, the language determines the reading direction; due to the regularity of the panels, the page layout does not predetermine either option. The other selected works frequently alternate the number of panels within one hyperframe; here, frame regularity constitutes a device for particular emphasis in turn. Delisle sets apart anecdotes through regular grids that are logically removed from the rest of the narrative, such as a holiday (2015a, 68), or an incident in which he finds and subsequently loses a turtle by the roadside (234–235). Principally, Joe Sacco produces highly

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irregular grids, in which the various panels take on shapes and sizes pertinent to their meaning, rather than being predetermined by a hyperframe. In Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco employs the frames on the page to coincidentally “draw together” and yet distinguish past and present by juxtaposing and superimposing portraits, interviews, and embedded witness accounts. This way, comics framing represents and deconstructs ontological binaries such as past and present as well as personal memory and history. However, in his earlier works, Sacco prominently differentiates the parts of the narrative discourse that focus on his own experiences from those which focus on the experiences of others clearly through the use of thick black frames around the pages. These chapters present witness accounts that receive a privileged and especially authoritative status. Through Western connotations of the color black, these frames not only evoke a sense of “death, sorrow, and destruction,” but by encapsulating the represented testimonies within, “the black conspires with the panels, creating a distinct sense of cohesive tragedy” (Acheson 2015, 295). While these black frames highlight the fact that Sacco himself was not an eyewitness to the depicted historical events (cf. Walker 2010, 76–77; Ahrens 2019), these chapters also include representations of multiple interview partners whose accounts form a coherent narrative. Here, the visual equality between Sacco’s depiction of past and present becomes especially striking. Even though the gutter separates the individual panels, they are still unified by the hyperframe: the duality of the interviews and the witnesses’ accounts are enclosed together. The edges of the hyperframe are regular in these chapters: they employ neither bleed panels that extend beyond the black frame nor text boxes superimposed onto the different panels or panel borders. Instead, the panel borders are kept intact, and text boxes are relegated to the edges of the respective panels. This heightened sense of regularity evokes a sense of sobriety and order. The stricter segmentation into regular panels may also insinuate the fragmentariness of memory and trauma. Sacco generally allows differently sized panels in these chapters; therefore, this effect becomes especially salient in the rare scenes in which he employs complete frame regularity. In Goražde, Sacco presents surgeon Dr. Alija Begovic’s testimony of his war-time medical practices in a hyperframe of 24 consistent panels (2007, 181). The sequence exhibits individual images of horror, without concrete narrative connection: surgery without anesthesia, amputation, the wounded, and the deceased. The linear succession of the layout provides

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cohesion for these singularly horrific impressions; a banderole containing the doctor’s oral account covers each row, further emphasizing their interrelatedness. By imposing this rigid, clearly reductive and artificial structure, the hyperframe represents the man’s traumatic memories, without negating their fundamental resistance to narrative coherence. Sacco abandons this separation of witness accounts from his personal experiences in Footnotes, which, instead of separating past and present, “us[es] the space of the page both to collapse temporalities and to arrive at dramatic juxtaposition” (Chute 2016, 234; see also Bartley 2014, 77). Here, Sacco creates palimpsestic pages in which different panels are commonly superimposed onto each other, “demonstrat[ing] on the page how events and experiences resist isolation” (Chute 2016, 235). This principal approach makes the contrast even more striking when frame regularity does occur in particular instances, such as in his portrayal of the militant Khaled suffering from combat fatigue. For twelve regular panels, three at the bottom of the preceding page and nine in a waffle iron grid, the utterly exhausted fighter directly addresses the reader (see Fig. 4.24) The first row of three panels employ a naturalistic view from his bedside, while the second row then shifts to a more aestheticized perspective above his bed, and, finally, the last six panels show only an ultra-close-up of his face. These only marginally different sequences alternate only in small measure and focus on his tired expression. As the panel frames gradually shift from naturalism to portraiture, details of Khaled’s physique become more pronounced. Wondering about a possible future for his family and himself, Khaled finally concludes, “I expect to be killed, I expect to be assassinated, but now it’s taking too long” (2009, 178). The page layout mirrors this sense of time dragging on, as the insistence on the same perspective creates a sense of momentary stillness—a striking contrast to the cluttered pages that pre- and succeed it. This way, Sacco employs frame regularity to set one moment apart to examine the toll that the conflict takes at an individual level. Coincidentally, the frame regularity forces the reader into a continuous confrontation with Khaled as a human being and generates sympathy for his emotional state. Certainly, the most striking display of frame regularity in Footnotes is its epilogue for which Sacco returns to the black hyperframes of his earlier volumes. In contrast to the predominant co-presence of different voices that define Sacco’s oral history approach, this final chapter presents a highly subjective individual account of one of the massacres. Here, frame regularity serves to emphasize this singular focus and its chronological

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Fig. 4.24  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 178

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cohesion. At the same time, the thick black panel frames expose so overtly that the presented vision excludes much of the simultaneous occurrences. The chapter concludes with a dissolution of the hyperframe; where the frame regularity would lead the reader to expect a final panel, only the black of the hyperframe remains, taking its place as a “non-panel.” The last page is completely black. Instead of a conclusion, the reader finds an absence, implying the eventual impasse between the personal experience of trauma and its representation limiting any documentary effort. To this end, Sacco makes active use of the gutter as a structuring device. Although the epilogue first signals clarity to the reader through its frame regularity, the separation between images and gutter eventually collapses and the blackness encompasses both, emphasizing the presence of absence materialized through the gutter. The hyperframe and the page layout become especially meaningful when the regular panel structure is exchanged for a more complex setup— or actively disrupted. To this end, the author may create a hierarchy of different images, superimposed onto each other. Footnotes contains complex and information-laden pages that include a multitude of different voices, perspectives, and timelines. Even the juxtaposition of only two images may create a striking co-presence. Rendering the witness account of a man named Faris Barbakh, Sacco creates a double page with two images that present the same perceptive on the outer wall of a fourteenth-­ century castle in Khan Younis: on the left the 14-year-old Barbakh walking among the massacred corpses in 1956, and on the right the elderly Barbakh walking in the same location 50 years later with Sacco and Abed (2009, 98). While the contemporary vision shows some differences—the castle wall is covered in posters, cars are parked in front of it, and newer buildings show in the background—both the medieval structure and the similar character placement account for an unmistakable sense of transhistorical consonance. Whereas both images are separated by the fold of the book, their juxtaposition within the cohesion of the double-page spread “makes legible the continuousness of past and present” (Chute 2016, 236). Sacco repeats this perspectival parallelism several times on the next two pages, albeit in smaller panels. In one of them, Faris utters a similar sentiment: “I feel like I am that child again” (2009, 101). The next panel shows the horror-struck teenager again carrying a dead body, a familiar image that is also placed on the title page of the chapter. Moreover, this page is exemplary of a technique widely used by Sacco: whereas four panels lead through the page diagonally, on the upper right

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and lower left corner are borderless bleed panels that reach toward the edge of the page. These two panels and another, more sizable one on the bottom of the next page display the present: Barbakh, Sacco, and Abed walking through the city and eventually arriving at the cemetery where the man’s relatives that died in the massacre are buried (102). Ostensibly, Sacco’s investigation provides the foundation upon which Barbakh’s witness account is superimposed and contained within the respective panels. However, the separation is not consistent: the panel from the present in the previously cited parallel pair is part of the contained trajectory as well, emphasizing not only the general continuity between past and present but crucially Faris Barbakh’s continuing trauma that he re-lives for Sacco’s documentation. Sacco facilitates a clearer semantic hierarchy when he positions smaller panels directly within a larger one. In The Fixer, Neven’s relationship to the refugees, or “hooves,” that flow into Sarajevo from rural areas is represented via two close up-panels of Neven dismissively talking about them placed upon a larger panel that depicts a group of refugees. In this arrangement, the posterior panel takes on an illustrative and explanatory function, showing the reader whom Neven is talking about, documenting the group in the tradition of social documentary photography and “giving a face” to the refugees individually. In this manner, the panel arrangement enacts a critique of Neven’s prejudices, especially because they are “nothing unusual for a born-and-bred Sarajevan,” as Sacco comments (2004, 73). The sense of criticism is further emphasized by the fact that the two panels focus on Neven’s mouth area, omitting his eyes, whereas the refugee’s faces are fully discernable: the adults look haggard and beaten; a young boy smiles mischievously in spite of it all. In juxtaposing the smug bigotry with a humanizing display of refugees, Sacco employs comics layout to represent Neven’s point of view and coincidentally contradict him. In Footnotes, Sacco frequently superimposes smaller panels that include the respective witnesses as “talking heads” upon their witness accounts, creating a co-presence between witness and witness accounts (cf. Scherr 2015, 126). The frequently alternating portraits also emphasize the number of different people whose accounts Sacco incorporates. Regularity serves as a device for emphasis in this context too: since these panels are “monotonous in their size and repetition,” they “suggest… a sense of truthfulness through consensus: the similarity of the frames reinforces the similarity of their stories,” as Scherr points out. Moreover, not only does this framing practice corroborate the cumulative oral history of the

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documented events, but the various people included in these frames are represented as a community, connected through this particular experience. By including these portraits within the same outer frame, superimposing the act of oral testimony on the reconstructed account, these arrangements authenticate the respective accounts by drawing together past and present, the witnesses and their accounts. The layout produces a particular tension: Scherr claims that “the passport frame clearly demarcates the face that is speaking ‘now’ … from the memory being spoken,” therefore, pointing to the absences that shape the reconstruction of memories. At the same time, the double framing facilitates cohesion too. In some cases, Sacco aligns portraits and accounts by juxtaposing the respective panels symmetrical and congruently (see Fig. 4.25) and, often, speech balloons

Fig. 4.25  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 318

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reach over into the past, breaking the clear demarcation between past and present. Scherr rightly claims that the double-framed portraits “offer the face as the initial point of spectator identification,” which is “directed outward” and transferring the identification “into an emotional, visceral engagement with the pain of others” (2015, 128). This dynamic is not unidirectional, however: by enclosing both the portraits of witnesses and their stories together, separating them which permeable only panel frames, Sacco emphasizes the interrelatedness between past and present as well. Such page arrangements commonly serve an expressive purpose beyond the fact that they are contained by the same outer frame. In a particularly captivating scene, Sacco draws the moment in which the interned Palestinians break through the outer walls of the schoolyard after the Israeli soldiers began firing into the crowd (2009, 323). The posterior image fills the entire page, with the crumbling wall cutting diagonally from the upper right to the lower left corner. Two witness portraits are “pasted” on the upper left and the lower right corner, leading the reader gaze “through the wall” and across the page. On the preceding page, a witness portrait is superimposed onto a depiction of the mass of Palestinians pressed against the very same wall. The man named Abdul-Malik Mohammed Kullab states, “I [thought I] would die. I didn’t have any space.” Placed directly “within” the crowd, the portrait comes close in size and perspective to the depicted heads (see Fig. 4.26). Although a panel

Fig. 4.26  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 322

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frame separates the portrait from the testimony, the very same frame also mirrors the man’s confinement in the experience he testifies. These arrangements range from documentary to conceptual: earlier, several witnesses report that Israeli soldiers beat the arriving men with heavy sticks at the school gate (236–237). Here, Sacco integrates a page in which seven talking heads are placed upon a chaotic background that consists of numerous club-swinging soldiers (238). While the men soberly state how they were attacked, the background image mirrors this experience by places the portraits right in the trajectory of the clubs. Likewise, the posterior image creates a sense of the utter confusion that the men must have felt as they were beaten from all sides. Another scene creates transhistorical cohesion even more concretely: over an entire page, Sacco presents a bird’s eye view of the group of waiting Palestinians sitting with their hands upon their heads; three panels lead the reader’s gaze through the page from the upper left to the lower right corner and depict three witnesses mimicking this body posture for Sacco (265). The correspondence between witness performance and the represented account authenticates the latter; perhaps, even more importantly, the affective potential of the image is enhanced. The historical image is already painful to behold with the bleed page, suggesting that the group is indefinitely larger. The three elderly men being cast into the very same position again after half a century pointedly evokes a sense of lingering trauma. In Paying the Land (2020), Sacco uses interview portraits superimposed on their accounts to different ends, namely, to emphasize the contrast between the Dene way of life before and after the efforts to assimilate them into Canadian society. The first chapter recounts the memories of Dene journalist Paul Andrew of how the First Nations peoples lived before they were colonized. In the entire work, Sacco forgoes the black hyperframes for witness accounts, and for these scenes, he notably omits panel borders at all, letting the various scenes of hunting-and-gathering life fade into each other (see Fig. 4.27). Not only are panel frames absent, but the individual scenes trade rectangular borders for softer edges tailored to the shapes of their content. Cohesion between the scenes is further enhanced by a white background that connects them. The absence of panel frames— or the use of “bleeds,” that is, when the panel extends until the very edges of a page (cf. McCloud 1994, 103)—may cause the panel to “take on a timeless quality” (102; original emphasis). In this case, this timeless quality evokes the notion of a continuous Indigenous way of life—“since time immemorial,” as the back cover description reads—that is diametrically

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Fig. 4.27  Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (Metropolitan Books 2020), 7

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opposed to the Western lifestyle defined by historical ruptures. The contrast between a “new” and an “old” way of life is emphasized by the fact that Andrew’s portraits that show him narrating the scenes are confined to panel borders and set against a black background. Sacco remains unseen, present only through this speech balloons. The traditional Dene way of life is thus cast as free and open, whereas modern life is confining; metaphorically, Andrew appears trapped in a dark place. Sacco underlines this conception when he later depicts the moment when Canadian government officials arrive at the Mackenzie River Valley by plane and take 80-year-old Paul Andrew away from this family to a “residential school.” The chapter “A Savage Who Can Read” starts with a page-filling vista of a beach set against a mountainous landscape and then depicts the moment when the plane arrives (see Fig. 4.28). Superimposed on the vast and open sky are now two large panel frames, mimicking high-­ rise buildings and drawing attention to a small aircraft. Furthermore, Sacco uses his text boxes to lead the reader’s gaze toward it. Imposing rigid borders upon the otherwise continuous vista, these frames again signal the arrival of Western culture as a watershed moment for the Indigenous people of the Northwest Territories. These frames symbolize the act of cultural assimilation through which the Canadian government sought to erase Indigenous cultures by metaphorically forcing them into the frames of Western culture. In turn, a sudden shift from framed to borderless or broken-framed panels constitutes a widely used technique for disrupting the narrative flow as well. Such techniques upset the regular reading and compel the reader to pay especially close attention when decoding the meanings contained in the particular arrangements, because due to their “unresolved nature [they] may linger in the reader’s mind” (McCloud 102; original emphasis). Often, a disruption of narrative chronology coincides with a breaking of the fourth wall. For instance, A.D. includes several scenes that show characters gazing directly at and addressing the reader. As Denise awaits rescue with other survivors in the Ernest N.  Morial Convention Center, Denise angrily shouts, “They bring us here, with no power, no sanitation, no food, no medicine—and they can’t even give us water? It’s like some kinda sick joke!” (2010, 137). At this moment, the character is looking directly at the reader from a borderless panel, with no background. Quite literally, the character is taken out of the story to address the reader. Subsequently, when she witnesses an elderly woman in a wheelchair offering her water bottle to an infant girl, both suffering from the sweltering

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Fig. 4.28  Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (Metropolitan Books 2020), 122

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heat, she again addresses the reader, pointing to the girl: “How can this be happening? Don’t the authorities know about us? Don’t they care?” (see Fig. 4.29). To further emphasize the extradiegetic address, her head actually breaks through the panel borders. Such scenes serve to remind the reader of their responsibility as citizens: “In this moment, she steps out of the spatial and temporal logic of the comic’s narrative to mobilise an alternative gaze that implicates readers themselves, as democratic citizens supporting a government committed to disaster capitalist policies” (Davies 2019, 9). Only a few pages earlier, Denise witnesses how two Black men fight over water bottles for their families. The fight is then broken up by two other Black men with guns who are depicted in a manner reminiscent of stereotypical gang members (2010, 138–139). “The dispute is filled with macho-bravado, but culminates in a revelation of total vulnerability and fear” (Hoefer 2012, 306), when the scene is followed by a whole double-­ page that solely shows one of the men holding up his infant daughter who has fainted. This scene forgoes any background depiction of the crowd around them or the convention center. It is the only one of this intensity in the book that breaks the conventional narrative frame. Coincidentally,

Fig. 4.29  Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 146

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“these individuals and their stories are given primacy; their experiences constitute unique and particular narratives of suffering and injustice, and the demand our individual attention” (ibid.). Pleading on his knees and staring at the reader through teary eyes, the man appears to try to hand over his daughter to the reader. While he talks to the “thugs,” his words appear to primarily address the reader: “But… you gotta help me… What am I s’posed to do with her?” (Neufeld 2010, 140–141) By asking the reader to help as part of this retrospective documentation, Neufeld emphasizes the impossibility of alleviating the harm that has been done to the survivors, the reader having neglected their responsibilities to their fellow citizens. The scene conveys a distinct sense of collective trauma: “It is an image, and a reaction, that disrupts any familiar discourse of community or nation” (Hoefer 2012, 311). A borderless panel may also be more concretely integrated into a particular sequence to make a point. In a sequence of four panels, The Fixer renders Neven’s relationship to Sacco as “master” and “pupil.” Sharing his “wisdom,” Neven first asks which the only animal is “that kills for pleasure”; before he provides the answer (“homo sapiens”), the second panel is border- and backgroundless, with the taller Neven looking the shorter Sacco in the eye (2004, 25). This disruption “freezes time” for an instant to ironically conceptualize the relationship between both men as a metanarrative aside from the continuous representation of their conversation. In the first chapter of Jerusalem, Guy Delisle employs this technique to a more serious end: after he realizes that the passenger next to him is a concentration camp survivor, the otherwise regular panel layout includes a border- and backgroundless panel depicting Delisle in deep thought. “We’ve seen so many horrific images from that time in history my imagination just takes off,” he writes (2015a, 7). His thought process is not represented, but the reader is prompted to reflect upon the Holocaust. The disruption of the regular panel structure suggests that Delisle’s thoughts linger for a while, taking him outside of the narrative’s “here and now”; perhaps, more importantly, this disruption also invites the reader to pause and consider the Holocaust for themselves before reading on. Although the narrative discourse provides context for scenes that stage disruptions, the absence of clear temporal and spatial boundaries and also a specifically rendered locale awards a more conceptual than representational quality to a particular image. In Footnotes, Sacco represents an incident in which an Israeli soldier opens fire onto a group of unarmed Palestinians (2009, 221). First, the shooting soldier is depicted over the

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course of three panels that already forgo any background. Then in the center of the page, a large borderless panel shows the soldier standing in front of eight motionless bodies. Apart from this, only the cartridge casings of the shots fired can be seen strewn across the ground, or where the ground would be. Again, any background is omitted, evoking a sense of the moment being frozen in time. Only the perpetrator, his victims, and the cartridge casings—and nothing else—can be seen. This composition pushes the image in the direction of a conceptual rather than documentary visualization, enacting an essential relationship for rhetorical purposes, rather than capturing a specific moment. The Israeli military has killed unarmed Palestinian—this fact is what remains across time, the image suggests. Such temporal disruptions can also act on a more direct representation of trauma. On the page of Goražde presenting reports of three locals about the damage to their homes (2007, 127), only the first two are included within panel borders. The third account, by a girl named Suada, is rendered in a borderless bleed-panel that spans the width of the page, with a portrait of her “pasted” on the left side. While the two accounts above draw the process of testimony and the account together into one panel (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.3), Suada’s account is separated from her portrait, emphasizing the disconnect between the experience and its processing. In this scene, Sacco renders her traumatic experience of finding “the bodies of her neighbors blown to bits” in the remains of their home. The image shows a younger Suada in shock, looking at the rubble. Only upon closer inspection can entrails and a severed hand be identified. This scene constitutes what Hillary Chute calls “a doubled scene of witness” (2016, 237): simultaneously, the reader looks at Suada witnessing and also at the object of her witnessing. This way, the reader is exposed both to a rendering of the horror itself and to the expression of horror on her face. To the reader, this image is challenging both in terms of deciphering its content and in terms of processing it emotionally. Through disruption, “Sacco beckons readers into a contemplative state” (Acheson 2015, 302) to account for the particular attention that the image mandates. The page layout represents Suada’s trauma by taking it out of the conventional narrative chronology and focusing attention on the traumatized. Her younger self is positioned at the very center of the page, framed by all the other elements on the page, such as panels and text boxes, making her character especially salient, on the one hand, but, on the other, also creating a sense of her being trapped. At the same time, the disruption of the continuous

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narrative sequentiality in exchange for a spatial logic of layering challenges the reader to approach the scene with special consideration.

4.5   Margins and Marginalia Finally, the graphic narrative book contains another liminal space that essentially serves as a paratext, but constitutes, nonetheless, an integral part of its mediality. Between the hyperframe and the page border, the page margin “acts as a supplemental frame with respect to the exterior outline of the hyperframe” (Groensteen 2007, 31–32). The margins may harbor meaningful information and administer a “structuring effect,” frequently welcome[ing] a title, a signature, a page number, inscriptions” (32). Such marginalia are especially relevant in documentary, as framing elements like footnotes or dates constitute markers of nonfictionality as well as gestures of accuracy. For instance, Josh Neufeld places calendar sheets that state the year, date, and weekday throughout large parts of A.D.’s narrative discourse. Not only do these dates signal the work’s relation to actual events by situating it within an exact time frame, but they also guide the reader in their comprehension of the chronology of actual events. Likewise, footnotes can be found in several instances of the different works, providing additional information, mark inconsistencies, or cite references. However, as text boxes offer the possibility to supply information and explanations within the hyperframe as well—either through the general narration or as notes inside a panel, or at least within the hyperframe (see, for instance, Sacco 2009, 246; Delisle 2015a, 71)—a footnote in the margins indeed signals the literal marginality of the included information. While Joe Sacco quite regularly fills his pages to the very edges, he also frequently includes notes, for instance, to explain names and abbreviations (2004, 32, 76; 2007, 59, 196, 201; see also Glidden 2016, 84) or a specific pronunciation (Sacco 2004, 39) or translation (2009, 270, 274). Such contextual information can also be more general: for instance, in Goražde, he explains the value of the deutschmark to the reader in a footnote that reads, “In late October 1995 1dm = 70 U.S. cents” (2007, 60). Moreover, Sacco hints at the fate of another Bosnian village (205) or points out the fate of a relative of a particular witness in Footnotes (2009, 109). Similarly, Sarah Glidden informs the reader that “[t]here are some Arabs in Kurdistan, but they are mostly internally displaced people” (2016, 84; see also Delisle 2015a, 55) or references the exact report by General

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Petraeus that Dan refers to in one scene (40). Sacco also employs footnotes to point out historical contexts that are explained elsewhere in the book (2007, 198; see also 2009, 383) or to emphasize that a source of his works was “a well respected Sarajevo magazine” (2004, 68). These references serve as tools to further the comprehension of the narrative, but they also constitute clear genre indicators that signal the documentary accuracy of the respective works. The aspect of genre and documentary ethics becomes even clearer in the following case: Joe Sacco employs a footnote to make transparent the uncertainty of a particular witness account that refers to the controversial use of combat gas in the Bosnian War. It reads, “Despite many eyewitness accounts, Human Rights Watch found evidence of gas attacks ‘inconclusive’ though such attacks ‘cannot be ruled out.’” (2007, 200). Later, Sacco acknowledges this controversy in another note in the book’s back matter, in which he also states that he believes the claims to be true (see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.5, and Chap. 5, Sect. 5.4). Hence, Sacco does represent the witness account; while he acknowledges the claims to be disputed, he relegates these qualifications to the book’s margins. In some cases, footnotes appear necessary to avoid confusion. In The Fixer, Sacco alerts the reader to the fact that two warlords have historically used the same nom du guerre, “Celo” (2004, 40). Footnotes also serve as a device to contextualize the story retrospectively. Sarah Glidden uses a note to point out that during the story’s present, the identity of whistleblower Chelsea Manning was not yet known (2016, 239). Likewise, Sacco retroactively points out that at the time of his investigation it was an option for a Palestinian man he meets to have a job in Israel, but “[a]fter the Hamas takeover in 2007, it was no longer an option. Israel sealed its border with Gaza,” he informs the reader (2009, 35). Such historical updates provide additional documentary veracity, and also alert the reader that despite the passage of considerable time during the production of the graphic reportage, the author maintains their pledge to accuracy. Finally, the passage of time is also underlined by Sacco’s signature, which he places at the bottom of many of his pages, including month and year of the page’s creation. In comparison, Guy Delisle only signs the last page of Jerusalem “Delisle 2011” in a gesture of finality (2015a, 336), whereas Sarah Glidden and Josh Neufeld forgo this device. Personal handwriting identifies the author as an actual person more directly than their graphic style and graphiation. As an authenticating device, a signature serves as the guarantee that a particular artwork or document was indeed

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created by an exact author. In nonfiction, this authentication extends both to the authorship of the representation and to the veracity of the represented content. Signatures underline the fact that documentary graphic narratives are not authenticated by any intrinsic quality of the work alone; indeed, their perceived authenticity is tied to the perception of the author as a person and their integrity. At the same time, Sacco’s signatures are diminutive so that the reader has to actively look for them to become aware of their presence. Nevertheless, they serve to reinforce Sacco’s authorial presence, which has been established through the paratexts and the narrative discourse. Moreover, Sacco’s signatures are included ubiquitously; once awareness of their presence is generated, the reader is constantly reminded of Sacco’s authorship. The fact that Sacco places his signatures in the margins of the page and not at the end of the work as a whole emphatically points toward the importance of the page as the determinant unit of synchronous witnessing in comics. Likewise, the marginal inclusion of information like signatures and footnotes—elements that are crucial to the documentary as a genre— demonstrates that the various framing elements of the graphic narrative book must be taken into account to comprehend documentary comics as a medial phenomenon.

Notes 1. Neil Cohn, however, stresses that comics “are not a language, but they are written in a visual language of sequential images” (2013, 2; original emphasis). 2. While there is some dispute concerning the most befitting terminology for the creators of comics, this study will address them as either author, artist, or cartoonist, depending on which aspect of their work the current context focuses on. The creators discussed here work as single authors of both the verbal and the visual text, whereas for works that involve a division of labor, further differentiation will be necessary. 3. With the focus of this study in mind, McCloud’s point may certainly be understood as referring to naturalistic, rather than realistic art. 4. Groensteen stresses the difference between “multiframe” and “hyperframe”: while the latter specifically corresponds to and is determined by the materiality of the page, “the multiframe does not have stable borders, assigned a priori. Its borders are those of the entire work … The multiframe is the sum of the frames that compose a given comic—that is, also, the sum of the hyperframes” (2007, 31).

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References Acheson, Charles. 2015. Expanding the Role of the Gutter in Nonfiction Comics: Forged Memories in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde. Studies in the Novel 47 (3): 291–307. Ahrens, Jörn. 2019. Joe Sacco and the Quest for Documentation in Comics. In Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism, ed. Laura Schlichting and Johannes C. P. Schmid, Special Issue of ImageTexT 11 (1). Bachmann, Christian A., and Johannes C.P.  Schmid, eds. 2021. Framing [in] Comics and Cartoons: Essays on Aesthetics, History, and Mediality. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann. Bartley, Aryn. 2014. Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. In Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, 67–82. London: Bloomsbury. Butler, Judith. 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso. Chute, Hillary L. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. Disaster Drawn. Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. Introduction: Graphic Narrative. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4): 767–782. Cohn, Neil. 2013. The Visual Language of Comics. London: Bloomsbury. Cooke, Rachel. 2009, November 22. Eyeless in Gaza. Interview with Joe Sacco. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/22/ joe-­sacco-­interview-­rachel-­cooke. Davies, Dominic. 2019. Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism, Tourism Gentrification and the Affect Economy in Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2009). Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 11: 325. https:// doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2019.1575256. Declercq, Dieter. 2019. Drawing Truth Differently: Matt Bors’ Fictional Satire and Non-Fictional Journalism. In Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism, eds. Laura Schlichting and Johannes C.  P. Schmid, Special Issue of ImageTexT 11 (1). Delisle, Guy. 2015a. Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Trans. Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2015b. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Trans. Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.

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Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein. 2014. Introducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. In Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, 1–14. London: Bloomsbury. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. 2009. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York and London: Continuum. Eisner, Will. 2008. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: Norton & Company. El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2010. Visual Modality Versus Authenticity: The Example of Autobiographic Comics. Visual Studies 25 (2): 162–174. Etter, Lukas. 2017. Visible Hand? Subjectivity and Its Stylistic Markers in Graphic Narratives. In Subjectivity Across Media. Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives, ed. Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon, 92–110. New York and London: Routledge. Glidden, S. 2016. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Grittmann, Elke. 2003. Die Konstruktion von Authentizität. Was ist echt an den Pressefotos im Informationsjournalismus? In Authentizität und Inszenierung von Bilderwelten, ed. Thomas Knieper and Marion G.  Müller, 123–149. Köln: Halem. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 2013. Comics and Narration. Trans. Ann Miller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Groth, Gary. 2011. Joe Sacco, Frontline Journalist. Interview with Joe Sacco. In Safe Area Goražde: Special Edition, authored by Joe Sacco, 231–254. Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hoefer, Anthony Dyer. 2012. A Revision of the Record: The Demands of Reading Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. In Comics and the American South, ed. Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted, 293–323. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London and New York: Routledge. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Lefèvre, Pascal. 2011. Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences. SubStance 40 (1): 14–33. ———. 2012. Mise en scène and Framing: Visual Storytelling in Lone Wolf and Cub. In Critical Approaches to Comics, Theories and Methods, ed. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, 71–83. New York: Routledge.

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McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: William Morrow. Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics. Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. ‘True Story’: The Aesthetic Balancing Act of Documentary Comics. In Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism, eds. Laura Schlichting and Johannes C. P. Schmid, Special Issue of ImageTexT 11 (1). Mikkonen, Kai. 2013. Subjectivity and Style in Graphic Narrative. In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, 101–126. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Neufeld, Josh. 2010. A.  D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Paperback. New York: Pantheon. Orvell, Miles. 2006. After 9/11: Photography, The Destructive Sublime, and the Postmodern Archive. Michigan Quarterly Review XLV, no. 2 (Spring): n.p. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0045.201. Parker Horrigan, Kate. 2018. Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Peeters, Benoît. 2007. Four Conceptions of the Page. Trans. Jesse Cohn. ImageTexT 3 (3). http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_3/peeters/. Sacco, Joe. 2004. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Paperback. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2007. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2009. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan. ———. 2012. Preface: A Manifesto, Anyone? In Journalism, xi–xiv. New  York: Metropolitan. ———. 2020. Paying the Land. New York: Metropolitan. Scherr, Rebecca. 2015. Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. Textual Practice 29 (1): 111–132. Schmid, Johannes C. P. 2016. Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood: The Photographic Image in the Graphic War Memoir. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann. ———. 2018. Cartooning Resistance: Irony and Authentication in Zerocalcare’s Kobane Calling. In Transnational Graphic Narratives, eds. Daniel Stein, Lukas Etter, and Michael A. Chaney, Special Symposium of International Journal of Comic Art IJoCA, 20, no. 2 (Spring/Summer): 153–169. Spiegelman, Art. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin. ———. 2004. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon. Walker, Tristram. 2010. Graphic Wounds: The Comics Journalism of Joe Sacco. Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 11 (1): 69–81.

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Weber, Wibke, and Hans-Martin Rall. 2017. Authenticity in Comics Journalism. Visual Strategies for Reporting Facts. Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels 8 (4): 376. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2017.1299020. Worden, Daniel. 2015. Introduction: Drawing Conflicts. In The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, ed. Daniel Worden, 3–20. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. in ’t Veld, Laurike. 2019. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considerung the Role of Kitsch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zerocalcare. 2017. Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria. St. Louis: Lion Forge.

CHAPTER 5

Narrative Framing: Storytelling, Structures, and Perspectives

Documentary comics presents evidence and constructs arguments about actuality through storytelling, in particular, by retelling oral testimonies of the represented events.1 Framing is facilitated by selecting who gets to tell their stories, by representing and evaluating their experiences in a specific manner, and by  situating their accounts within a broader narrative structure. Introducing a particular witness as either believable or doubtful leads the reader to pay attention to details that confirm this assessment. Adopting the perspective of a character on one side of a documented conflict assumes a default allocation of roles as victim or perpetrator—again priming the reader to look out for details confirming this judgment. This way, the narrative invites trust or distrust toward particular actors and channels the reader’s sympathies. In nonfiction, this selection process amounts to making an authoritative statement about which aspects of an event are important and which are not. In their storytelling capacity, graphic narratives differ from formats such as documentary photography, descriptive reportage, or essayistic reasoning. Graphic reportage presents personal accounts and experiences—a model of authentication grounded in the believability of human witnesses. Stories convey “accounts of what happened to particular people—and of what it was like for them to experience what happened—in particular circumstances and with specific consequences” (Herman 2009, 2; see also Kukkonen 2013, 30).2 Corresponding closely to everyday life, such personal accounts are especially persuasive. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5_5

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This section will explore instances of narrative framing in the selected works; to this end, narrative structures will be discussed as systems of textual frames and framings that shape the comprehension of the respective elements contained therein. Translating actual events into a narrative representation offers a variety of choices: in telling a story, the author “produces a particular manifestation, inflection, and ‘colouring’” of the narrated events and presents them “in a certain manner” (Bal 2017, 5; see also Genette 1983, 35). The same events can be narrated differently, each story facilitating a particular framing of the occurrences. Only the narrative discourse is manifest, and the story itself is a purely mental construct evoked in the reading process; as Mieke Bal phrases it, the story is “a memory trace that remains after the reading is completed” (2017, 9). As the reader progresses through the narrative, they formulate hypotheses toward these challenges and scrutinize the text for clues. As part of this process, each new event is understood through the lens of the different cognitive frames that have already been called up. Reading a narrative text can be described as “a global interpretation of changing data measured through sets of relationships” (Branigan 1992, 4). Such “sets of relationships” are established by frames that are evoked by framings within the text. Some frames pertain globally to the story as a whole; the storyworld guides the interpretation of a specific story as the global cognitive frame. Drawing on cues from the text, the reader continuously assembles and updates the storyworld as a semantic model (Kukkonen 2013, 25). To reiterate, this model is reciprocally aligned with global frames of mediality and genre which converge with the more concrete, local frames that are activated concerning a specific event in the story (cf. Palmer 2004, 47; Frow 2006, 7; Kukkonen 2013, 22; see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1). Some of the selected works have intricately layered narrative discourses, continuously jumping back and forth in time. The author may withhold information momentarily and reveal contradicting and even refuting accounts later, thus, reframing earlier accounts. Joe Sacco’s The Fixer includes the timeline of his first reportage in Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1996 alternated with different accounts of the Yugoslav war in Sarajevo from 1991 to 1993, and the biography of his primary witness, Neven, going back as far as 1984. Moreover, the narrative discourse first installs a “present” in 2001 as the vantage point from which all prior events are interpreted. In this timeline, Sacco tries to reestablish contact with Neven and reminisces about their former relationship. In contrast, Josh Neufeld’s A.D. and

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Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem are largely chronological. However, the present and past cannot always be neatly sorted into different timelines; in Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco collapses the traumatic historical events into the story of his investigations thereof, crafting a complex statement about trauma and memory (see Shay 2014; Chute 2016, 234–235). No story, fictional or nonfictional, no matter how detailed, can be described in full. Every narrative discourse is fundamentally incomplete and characterized by ellipses; therefore, frames and framing are crucial to their comprehension. This fragmentariness is expected and compensated for by the reader: “The gaps in the representation of the textual universe are regarded as withdrawn information, and not as ontological deficiencies” (Ryan 1991, 53). Hence, the reader extrapolates from what the text provides based on the various cognitive frames that the text activates. In comics, the cognitive process of inferring information that is “missing” between the panels to “mentally construct continuous, unified reality” has been theorized by Scott McCloud as “closure” (1994, 67; original emphasis). The reader assumes a change of state between panels and the continuation of the represented objects and subjects beyond what is depicted. Closure aligns with what Ryan calls “the principle of minimal departure”: when reading a story, “[w]e will project upon [the represented] worlds everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text” (1991, 51). However, what we “know about reality”—or think we know—also depends on the cognitive frames activated in a given moment. In contrast to the different aspects of framing in the graphic narrative book, verbal literature is more straightforward. Here, according to Ryan, the idea of narrative frames that structure a story is metaphorically “transposed from the domain of the visual to the domain of the temporal.” In novels, “[a] narrative territory frames another territory when its verbal representation both precedes and follows the verbal representation of the framed territory” (1991, 178). Graphic narrative discourse similarly involves different “narrative territories,” or diegetic levels. In comics, however, narrative framing takes on a visual meaning as well. Each depicted scene or event is framed not only by the narrative discourse that precedes and follows it temporally but also by the spatially co-present images. Juxtaposing different perspectives or statements on a page may produce either consonance or dissonance, implicitly confirming or contradicting each other. Moreover, the author’s explicit comments in text boxes

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commonly coincide with graphic representations, comparative to the voice-over narration in film (Ryan 2014, 39; Kuhn and Veits 2015, 43). Adhering to a formula established by Joe Sacco, most documentary comics follow what is called a “primary” (Bal 2017, 52) or “framing narrative” (Kuhn and Veits 2015, 246). Following the journalistic process, the framing narrative adopts the perspective of the reporter who investigates a preceding crisis, travels to the destination in questions, and interviews relevant witnesses, often reflecting on the nature of reportage as well. The primary narrative provides the fundament into which witness accounts of the past are embedded as stories of their own, which then collectively reconstruct the crisis. Hence, there is a clear temporal division between history and its documentation, although, as Jörn Ahrens points out, “both layers of narration have, in fact, become history already” (2019). Nevertheless, this double narration offers a way of framing the past through the “present” of the reportage. Indeed, Joe Sacco refers to the two timelines as “the historical track” and “the atmospheric track,” respectively, with the latter referring to his “impressions of the people I was meeting” (Groth 2011, 237). The presence of the author as a character in the primary narrative positions them “as a visible, narrative filter” in the story (in ‘t Veld 2019, 14). Moreover, the framing narrative may also be an important account of the represented crisis itself. The degree of significance placed on the framing narrative varies greatly. A.D. represents witness accounts without framing them as such for the most part, whereas Guy Delisle operates mostly as a memoirist, privileging his own subjective experience and including only very few accounts of other people. In this respect, documentary comics shares some characteristics with detective fiction. Both forms entail at least two different temporally removed stories combined into one narrative discourse: the reportage reconstructs the crisis, as the detective story’s investigation reconstructs the crime (cf. Todorov 1977, 44; Hühn 1987, 452). Both forms commonly include witness accounts through which the detective/reporter seeks to establish “what happened.” In contrast to the detective story, though, a documentary does not approach the reported crisis as a riddle to be solved, driven by good sportsmanship. Instead, documentaries seek to represent personal experiences and show how individual lives were affected. The complexity of the moral implications and political demands of a documentary would often be betrayed by an exact and conclusive solution or denouement. As fiction, detective stories cater strongly to the

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human desire to portray the world as ultimately intelligible. In contrast, documentary cartoonists commonly acknowledge that no definitive account of the world is to be made. Nevertheless, the author seeks to persuade the reader that a particular version of the addressed occurrences is essentially true. Representing experiences of both author and encountered witnesses makes a claim about the constitution of a crisis, often involving concrete messages of social change. However, stories persuade differently than logical reasoning. As psychologist Jerome Bruner explains, “arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude” (1986, 11). In the field of social psychology, the persuasive effects of narrative have been well-established.3 Stories are persuasive because they engage, or immerse, the recipient in a simulated experience (cf. Bilandzic and Busselle 2013, 214). This approach builds on “transportation theory,” which assumes that reading a story “is conceived as a holistic experiential state characterized by a close connection of the recipient to the story world and emotional components” (Appel and Richter 2010, 104; see also Gerrig 1993). From this state of “being transported,” it follows that “[w]hile the person is immersed in the story, he or she may be less aware of real-world facts that contradict assertions made in the narrative” (Green and Brock 2000, 702). Accordingly, this state of narrative engagement also furthers the unconscious adoption of the cognitive frames that the storyworld attaches to the represented events. In this regard, the approach of documentary comics reconciles somewhat antagonistic qualities; it is characterized by a balancing act of engaging the reader with a particular story, while at the same time conscientiously making transparent its medial predisposition. Although graphic narrative certainly invites a form of narrative immersion, documentary cartoonists frequently break the fourth wall and call on the reader to critically reflect upon the mediatedness and limitations of their reports through explicit metanarrative and metajournalistic statements. Because an especially salient aspect of documentary comics is its emotional rendering of the lived experiences of others, it is crucial to acknowledge both the affective and emotional implications of narrative and the interdependence of cognition and emotion (see Hogan 2003, 140). Stories let readers vicariously share a character’s experiences and emotions as they mentally enact the stories (Oatley 2002, 65; Bilandzic and Busselle

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2013, 205). Patrick C.  Hogan describes this process “as a form of ‘appraisal,’” as part of which the reader experiences emotions based on “a type of evaluation in which one judges the implications of a certain situation for oneself” (2003, 140). Evoking a sense of having experienced certain crisis situations lies at the heart of documentary as a genre. Whose emotional experience an author invites us to share strongly influences the suggested interpretation of a represented conflict. In graphic reportage, the primary object of emotional identification is the character corresponding to the author. Documentary graphic narratives commonly employ the autodiegetic narrative situation of autobiography that rests upon the union of narrator and author as an authenticating instance (cf. Genette 1983, 245, 1993, 70; see also Chap. 2, Sect. 2.3).4 In graphic nonfiction, the author corresponds both to an extradiegetic verbal narrative instance and to an “authoring character” within the graphic narrative discourse to which the authorship of the work is attributed (Thon 2016, 134). This means they tell their stories verbally as a “narrating I” in text boxes outside the diegetic representation in which their corresponding character is located as an “experiencing I” (Thon 2013, 76, 85). As Ryan suggests, “[t]he narrating-I is situated in the broader temporal frame of the storyworld while the experiencing-I (the narrator as character) is situated within the inner frame” (2014, 38). This distinction is crucial for documentary comics’ approach to narration, as it allows for the representation of disparities between the states of knowledge of their experiencing-I and their narrating-I. The narrating-I and the experiencing-I need not necessarily correspond to the same character. Narratology fundamentally differentiates between who tells a story and who perceives the events; in other words, a story can be represented from the mindset of a character other than the narrator. Character-based perspectivization, or internal focalization, applies particular framing conditions toward the narrative by filtering representations according to a character’s perception, while at the same time, potentially, allowing access to their private thoughts and feelings (Genette 1983, 186; Bal 2017, 7). Commonly, however, the author serves as narrative focalizer; hence, the representation of encounters with witnesses and interview partners is aligned with the perception of the character corresponding to the author. In some cases, witness accounts themselves are represented as stories too. In this case, the encountered witnesses narrate their experiences from their own subjective points of view.

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The effort to represent subjective experience faces limitations, especially in witness accounts that concern traumatizing events. Documentary comics faces the challenge of representing the lived experiences of cultural others so as to be relatable to its readership without, however, appropriating such experiences for the purposes of a vicarious thrill. In his discussion of emotions in narrative fiction, Keith Oatley points out the “laboratory quality” of storytelling: “We experience it in a place of safety away from the ordinary world, so that the prompting of emotions is more voluntary than in ordinary life. We choose whether or not to be engaged, we can put down a book, we can leave the theater” (2002, 63). The role of the witness is defined by the fact that they did not have this choice. The following chapters will now investigate how the respective authors approach storytelling and how they represent and contextualize their own experiences and those of others.

5.1   Prologues and Beginnings First establishing and then concluding the narrative, the beginning and end of a story present powerful positions to insert framings into the text. Indeed, “[f]or a narrative, the most intensive frame is that constituted by the beginning and, especially, the end of the narration” (Frow 1982, 26). While the opening introduces the narrative situation and primes expectations for the story as a whole, the end evaluates it conclusively. The frames that are established initially prime expectations for the entire narrative, whereas the way the ending frames or reframes previous events shapes the way the story is remembered. As such, beginning and end may mark a change of attitude toward the reported conflict. In Jerusalem, Guy Delisle begins the narrative with his flight to Israel in a section called “Takeoff” (2015, 6–7), and concludes with an image of the departing plane on the way back (336). If we only take the first and last scene, Jerusalem presents two contrasting frames toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the opening chapter, Delisle tries to start a conversation with an elderly Russian Jew on the plane. Despite the language barrier, the man plays endearingly with Delisle’s daughter, Alice, upon which his concentration camp tattoo becomes visible. He comments, “I’m floored by what I see … Good god! This guy is a camp survivor” (7). The final scene before Delisle leaves the country presents a sharp contrast. An NGO activist, his friend Marcel, shows Delisle how Jewish settlers have forcefully occupied a house from which a Palestinian

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family was just evicted, despite Marcel’s efforts (334–335). The final moments before the airport depict Delisle looking up toward a triumphant Jewish settler, who looks down on him, exclaiming: “It’s my house now!” (335). Although both incidents have apparently occurred by chance at these exact moments of Delisle’s travels, as narrative choices, their placement is a symbolic proclamation: Jerusalem opens with a display of the historical injustice against Jewish people and ends with a representation of contemporary injustice done by Israeli settlers. Although reducing the entire narrative to these two moments betrays the complexity of Delisle’s argument, these two symbolically charged scenes nevertheless occupy particularly conspicuous places in the narrative discourse that form a key component of Jerusalem’s account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Documentary graphic narratives frequently begin with prologues, short opening episodes that are logically and chronologically removed from the rest of the primary narrative. These often jump to a moment in medias res and anticipate events that occur later in the story. Commonly, prologues also serve as self-contained story excerpts that make a point of their own, introducing a core theme or problem.  This way, they prime a specific mindset for the ensuing story or set a particular mood. Often but not always, prologues are differentiated by a different form of page count or the absence of one. As such demarcations exemplify, they constitute liminal phenomena akin to prefaces. Nevertheless, since the graphic narrative discourse is already in place, prologues belong to the narrative proper. The framing function that both paratexts and prologues share exemplifies the fact that framing is a multi-level process that permeates the graphic narrative book as a whole. A prototypical example, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde opens with a short episode titled “Prologue” (2007, i–ii) in which Sacco and his local guide, Edin, are approached by a stranger in a bar. Neither the larger setting nor the characters are introduced; only the bar—“Alkatraz”—is named. Rather, the reader is “thrown” directly into the scene armed only with knowledges provided by the paratext. Hence, the retrospective verbal narrative instance initiates the storytelling process in the manner of a fictional short story. The narrator describes that they were sitting “‘backs to the wall Doc Holliday style’ as Edin liked to say, waiting for the end of the war …” (i), evoking the Western through the intertextual reference to the historical, but also the heavily fictionalized, figure of Doc Holliday. Yet the display of a shadowy bar scene evokes a sense of noir: the surrounding figures are shadow cast and Sacco is cast in half-shadow. Only Edin’s face

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is well-lit—the first sign of his trustworthiness. The reference to film noir then intensifies as a man in a trench coat and a fedora hat invites himself to their table. The visual representation of the ensuing confrontation is largely from Sacco’s first-person perspective, while the dialogue is told exclusively by the verbal narrative instance. The unnamed man claims to be the only one to have the “Real Truth” about Goražde and offers Sacco a manuscript that he calls “The Real Truth about this Town” (2007, i). According to the verbal narrator, “[h]e said he’d seen everything … During the worst of the shelling, he said, while everyone was in their cellars, he was out in the streets. He couldn’t be touched. He couldn’t. His dreams told him so…” Finally, he challenges Sacco that if he “were a real journalist … who sought the Real Truth [Sacco] would visit him and look over his manuscript about Gorazde” (ii; original emphasis; see Fig. 5.1). During the encounter, the man addresses the reader with a menacing stare. As the scene culminates, his face is depicted in an extreme close-up that fills the whole panel, evoking an uncomfortable sense of physical closeness. Adopting Sacco’s point of view from across the table, the scene put the reader, too, is on the receiving end of this confrontation. Representations of the man’s facial and bodily experience make up seven of the ten panels of the prologue; two show Edin’s and Sacco’s faces in reaction to his words. Whereas Edin looks the man in the eye with a slightly bemused smirk, Sacco looks down miserably, hiding behind his trademark spectacles. Crucially, the graphic narrative discourse is almost entirely silent. The characters’ dialogue is strikingly absent; the only character in the prologue to speak is Edin exclaims in the first panel. The silence highlights the disparity in this uncomfortable encounter between Sacco’s narrating-I and experiencing-I. The depiction of the man’s facial and bodily expressions, as perceived by Sacco, presents him as confrontational and aggressive and then smug and self-assured. However, Sacco assumes the authority to speak for the man, so his words are exclusively reported in the third person by the narrator. The reader can assume the man’s voice to be loud and booming; there is no hint of subtlety, making the scene’s silence all the more conspicuous. The lack of direct communication produces a sense of disconnection and otherness, creating a feeling of unpleasantness and threat. Finally, as the man leaves, Sacco narrates, “I never visited that man. In fact, after that evening I avoided him completely…” The prologue then closes with Sacco’s verbal narration outside the panel grid, telling the

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Fig. 5.1  Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern  Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), ii

reader that no announcement came, “and maybe the war was going to go on forever…” (ii). Thus, the man in the trench coat is not included as a witness with a story to be taken seriously; instead, he serves as a prop for Sacco to make a point about reportage. This prologue introduces the first potential witness as unstable and menacing. This may be taken as a first impression of the horrors of war and the highly traumatizing experiences that the book addresses. The representation suggests a less sympathetic reading as the confrontation centers around the idea of a “Real Truth,” which the man proposes. The suggestion that an absolute truth even exists is attributed to an unhinged individual, which sets an important precedent for the storyworld: absolute

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truth does not exist and should not be expected. Likewise, this episode generates empathy with Sacco and his task of approaching and evaluating potential witnesses, prompting the reader to empathize with the documentarian’s difficult task of assembling a version of the truth in good faith. As such, the prologue frames the following stories through a heightened awareness of the difficulty of truth-finding. Sarah Glidden utilizes a similar strategy in Rolling Blackouts. The narrative opens with an untitled one-page prologue that also starts with a confrontation (see also Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1, and Fig. 4.13). Likewise, the visual focus is unmistakably on the encountered witness—an Iraqi refugee, as the reader later learns—who also simulates direct address through her gaze and gestures. Glidden’s representation, however, stands in sharp contrast to Sacco’s. The Iraqi woman speaks for herself, while the verbal narrative instance initially only introduces time and place. The interviewers remain unseen until the last panel, their questions represented through word balloons only. The woman’s first words introduce a central problem of the book—and of journalism in general. She says, “Welcome. But. I never liked you.” When asked by the yet unseen interviewer whether she wants to talk, the woman answers, “No, no … I talk with you, but … I not like your government. I not like… EVERYBODY. I will cry. I am afraid.” With a pained facial expression, she then asks the interviewer to please understand her and adds a “But …” that she does not follow up on. What it is, exactly, that is to be understood remains unsaid, left to be explored throughout the story. For the moment, the woman’s inner conflict and possible trauma stand for themselves. Only in the final panel of the page is the reader introduced to the group of journalists, including Glidden. Here, the perspective switches from the first-person point of view to an outside perspective that places interviewee and interviewers left and right in the panel, allotting the journalists and their subject roughly the same space within the panel frame. The refugee and interviewer Sarah Stuteville mirror each other, equal in height and stature; their eye levels correspond, and their gazes meet (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4). Thus, the confrontation turns into a dialogue, which is also marked by the refugee woman’s final statement: “Afwan. Welcome.” “Afwan,” which is left untranslated, is an Arabic apology. In this panel, the narrator first appears and introduces a central question of the work: “What is journalism?” With the scene culminating in this question, Glidden frames the encounter as emblematic of journalism’s broader difficulties. Instead of focussing on her personal involvement, she addresses the larger

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problem of engaging witnesses. Hence, Glidden’s prologue establishes a sympathetic frame that highlights the human aspect of the journalistic encounter. These two examples both address difficulties of documentary. However, Sacco’s framing prompts skepticism; Glidden’s invites compassion and respect—her interlocutor is to be taken seriously. In Rolling Blackouts, the problem is not that an unreliable witness pushes his fantasies on the journalist, but that the witness is conflicted about talking to the reporter. The scene highlights journalists’ need to build rapport with interview partners, which cannot be divorced from the nationalities of interviewers and interviewees. These contrasting framings are highlighted by the fact that Glidden’s witness speaks for herself and gets undivided attention, whereas Sacco’s narrator speaks for his witness. The question of voice has been central in post-colonial discourses of representation. In her exploration of marginality, bell hooks states that “speech about the other annihilates, erases” and elaborates: “No need to hear your voice when I talk about you better than you can talk about yourself … I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer, the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk” (1990, 43; original emphasis). In the described example, Sacco assumes the authority to silence his interviewee. Even though this is not Sacco’s general modus operandi, he chooses to take away the voice of an encountered other to make a point about journalism. Both Sacco and Glidden employ a memoiristic strategy, aligning the reader with their own perspective while approaching a local other. By having the interview partner simulate direct address toward the reader, the author exposes the reader to an affective display of the other’s raw emotions and invites them to either sympathize with the witness or “experience” their aggressiveness. This way, the authors generate empathy toward their own experience as the interlocutor in these encounters. Both prologues serve to question the role of the journalist and their reportage practices. In Glidden’s case, the prologue reiterates the metajournalistic framing that the paratext already introduces, inviting the reader to actively question and explore the foundations of the genre. In contrast, Sacco provides a straightforward answer to the implied question, whether the “Real Truth” about Goražde exists; he rejects and silences the man who claims it does. A particularly complex setup can be found in Joe Sacco’s follow-up work The Fixer (2004), which includes two prologues in different timelines: “Prologue 2001” (1–4) and “Prologue 1995” (5–6). The first

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prologue introduces the work’s present tense: Sacco returns to Sarajevo to find his former fixer, Neven. The prologue begins on the first page with the representation of a game of outdoor chess. In a sequence of three panels, Sacco depicts the game itself as action-packed and draws attention to the high emotional involvement of the players and onlookers. As a character, Sacco is barely noticeable within this crowd, but his narration contextualizes the scene: after being stood up by another journalist, he is now “wasting time” (1). Sacco contrasts the game to his reporting efforts: “Chess is straightforward, unlike the pompous ass from the Serb Citizens Council who preferred to pontificate, or the military hero who changed the subject to mountain climbing” (2004, 1). Stating, “We all know the rules to chess…” (2), Sacco compares the straightforwardness of chess to his strenuous and rule-defying research. His verbal and visual insistence on the particular chess piece of the pawn evoke the metaphorical association of “being a pawn” in his efforts, that is being “played” or even “sacrificed” for other ends. In this manner, the chess-scene foreshadows and frames his exchanges with Neven, who continuously leaves Sacco wondering whether he can rely on him or if he intends to scam him. A common theme in detective fiction, chess mandates shrewdness and complex problem-solving. The game evokes a strategic exchange between two players, each seeking to dominate the other, leaving one winner and one loser. In this analogy, the cheering and jeering bystanders symbolize Sacco’s readership and critics that judge his every move. Having established the game of chess as a metaphor for the overarching theme of the book, Sacco continues to describe his failing efforts to develop a story in Sarajevo. He states, “My research has stalled. I can hardly get this city to tell me about my broader subject, much less whisper any of its terrible secrets” (2004, 3). To overcome this impasse, he wants to find Neven, whom he hasn’t contacted for years (4). With no sign of him, Sacco becomes a flaneur and gets lost in the crowd, roaming the city streets taking in the music and the cafés. In the depicted masses of crosshatched figures, only his black hair and trademark spectacles stand out. In contrast to the representation of loud music through large and ubiquitous half notes (2), this prologue also forgoes any depiction of speech. His musings are represented through verbal narration alone. This way, the prologue emphasizes his isolation from the rest of the city and generates empathy for his need to find his fixer. The prologue ends with Sacco scanning the crowd on a busy street as the narrator suggests, “Neven would

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talk. Neven liked to talk. Maybe he’ll walk by” (ibid.). Thus, the silence and his isolation are contrasted with the promise of a responsive interview partner, while the reader is left wondering to whom exactly Sacco is referring. This suspense is then lifted: on the following page, the “Prologue 1995” takes the reader back to their first encounter. In this short chapter Sacco, contemplates Neven’s situation before their first meeting. In contrast to the first prologue, this second one is speculative: what is represented is not a witness account, and Sacco could not possibly know what happened before his entrance. Rather, he pieces together what he has learned about Neven. Coincidentally, while the witness accounts to follow are enclosed on the page by a thick black frame (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4), this scene is contained by a white frame. The episode itself is enclosed by two long panels before and after that span the whole width of the page. These show Neven first looking directly at the reader (see Fig. 5.2) and then sideways as he encounters Sacco (6). Both panels employ chiaroscuro lighting and allude to film noir. Neven is lit sharply from one side, casting a shadow across his face, metaphorically alluding to the conflicting sides of his personality. Echoing the earlier metaphor of the chess games, Sacco then presents Neven as a card dealer as he goes through his business cards. In line with the noir visual style, framing the work of a fixer as a card game emphasizes several aspects: on the one hand, it presents Neven’s work as a risk, as he might not find any customers. On the other hand, the theme of gambling

Fig. 5.2  Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 6

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highlights that Neven may be primarily motivated by profit. The notion of “playing a game” also extends to the exchange between Sacco and Neven and entails that either of them might “lose.” The process of “dealing” the cards is presented through two rows of moment-to-moment panel transitions disrupted by two panels that first shows an empty seat and then a smoking Neven: “Sometimes you get up and go home. Sometimes you light another cigarette and wait some more” (6). The row of panels below is silent and Neven’s “card games” retains a timeless quality. The reader does not learn how long exactly Neven has waited, but the graphic narrative discourse suggests that this period has been strenuously long. Then Sacco walks in and the story unfolds. Again, the entire graphic narrative discourse is silent, and Sacco’s narrator speaks for Neven’s character. This time, however, the narrator strikes a different tone. The two prologues juxtapose both positions, Sacco’s and Neven’s, as two counterparts with particular needs and motivations. Although he is portrayed as Janus-faced, Sacco asks the reader to empathize with Neven upon introducing him. As Neven looks directly and confrontationally at the reader through squinting eyes, Sacco instructs: “His name is Neven, and put yourself in Neven’s shoes” (2004, 5); a phrase that is repeated multiple times throughout the narrative. In the following panels, Neven is depicted from various distances: from far away at first, emphasizing the surreal half-lit surroundings of the hotel lobby, and then in extreme close-up—but none of the panels allows a clear view of Neven. Simultaneously, Sacco describes Neven’s desperation waiting for potential journalist customers as the war recedes from the breaking news. Strikingly, Sacco uses the second person to narrate Neven’s experiences: “You’ve been sitting in the lobby waiting for someone. Anyone.” However, even though Sacco invites the reader to envisage the story from Neven’s point of view, the disparity between verbal and graphic narrative discourse frustrates this effort. Both the narrative situation and the graphic representation conflict with the request to empathize: although the narrator explains his position, the reader is cut off from Neven having no direct access to his words; the visual framing prevents a clear view of him, and the opening panel’s direct address of the reader presents his shadow-cast gaze as penetrating rather than inviting empathy. Ultimately, the second prologue suggests that even though readers might want to “put themselves in Neven’s shoes,” they simply cannot—similar to Sacco. The prologue strikingly exhibits Sacco’s own frustrated wish to empathize with Neven by undermining its

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proposed aspiration through its form. This ambition to understand Neven’s position prepares the reader for the moral contradictions that Neven bears. At the same time, the first prologue explains Sacco’s loyalty to and reliance on him. Hence, Sacco installs two contrasting frames regarding Neven: empathy and caution. These two conflicting frames are symptomatic of Sacco’s overall approach toward Neven throughout the book. Although not separated from the rest of the narrative, the first chapter of Footnotes in Gaza (2009) similarly “frames the graphic narrative’s entire trajectory” (Scherr 2015, 112; see also Wege 2019, 152). “Glimmer of Hope” (2009, 3–7) shows Sacco in Jerusalem mingling with international journalists while waiting for permission to enter Gaza. The first panel depicts him with his friend Mark, who has a “well-paying press job with the U.N.” standing on the balcony of his “luxurious West Jerusalem apartment.” Narrator and character echo each other in a rare moment of ironic double-emphasis, as Sacco tells Mark, “You’ve got it made!” while the narrating-I simultaneously insists, “I’ve gotta say, my pal Mark has got it made” (3). This display of wealth and success contrasts sharply with the succeeding almost 400 pages focusing on deprivation and hardship. Moreover, Sacco stresses the self-serving complacency of the journalists he encounters chatting over drinks. No amount of bloodshed can shock them anymore: “They shake their heads. They roll their eyes. It does get old” (5; original emphasis). In this scene, Sacco employs two striking visual metaphors (see Fig. 5.3): first, he represents the current events of the region as items on the menu, in the form of burned-out vehicles and a tank, overwritten with the words “Bombings!” “Assassinations!” and “Incursions!” The narrator explains, “They could file last month’s story today—or last year’s, for that matter— and who’d know the difference?” Presenting these atrocities as consumable items on a menu likens the relationship between the disinterested reporters and the atrocities to that of jaded consumers and unmarketable commodities. Applying this market-logic to a humanitarian crisis implies harsh cynicism on the part of mainstream journalism. The metaphor of the menu is followed by a row of three panels that resemble a film reel and mirror the pages of the menu directly underneath. Here, wailing and mourning Palestinians, Israelis, and insurgents are displayed, respectively overwritten with the words “Two dead!” “Five Dead!” and “20 Dead!” Sacco answers the question raised above: “Because they’ve wrung every word they can out of the Second Intifada, they’ve photographed every

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Fig. 5.3  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 5

wailing mother, quoted every lying spokesperson detailed every humiliation—and so what?” Despite their insistence that the conflict has become overreported, the screaming characters that he depicts within these three panels step and reach out of the panel borders. Reporting cannot contain the human tragedy that it seeks to represent. To the journalists, the Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict presents a glutted market; the victims of the conflict have been failed by their medial representation. Sacco uses this framing of mainstream reporting on the conflict to present his own project as a counterapproach. This concerns both his ethics and his choice of genre: he does not seek to address current events, but history. Sacco’s explicit genre usage is made especially clear in the prologue’s final scene. When his application for press credentials is turned down by the Foreign Press Office, he is told via telephone that “what you’re doing doesn’t fit the category of real-time news.” Successfully entering Gaza without the credentials after all, the narrator reflects: “‘Real-time news?’ I suppose he’s right. The world has already scraped last week off its shoe, and I want to poke at a story that’s half a century old?” (2009, 7). At this moment, Sacco does not directly explain

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his desire to investigate an old story. However, after his drastic assertion that news journalism has failed to represent the conflict, the implicit claim is that a historical approach is better suited than “real-time news” to make sense of the conflict. Sacco also insinuates that he will succeed where the journalists have failed by eschewing “breaking news” in favor of taking the time to get to the historical root of the conflict. In contrast, Josh Neufeld employs a prologue in A.D. (2010, 3–21) not to make a point about journalism but to contextualize the accounts that follow. Here, Neufeld depicts Hurricane Katrina itself without aligning the narrative with any character; the prologue omits dialogue, only text boxes provide dates and locations. This way, the chapter differs from the character-bound narration of the narrative proper, for which it provides mood and context. The original webcomic (Neufeld 2007–2008) features the same content as two different chapters: “Prologue, Part 1: ‘In the beginning…’” and “Prologue, Part 2: ‘The Storm.’” The book combines both under the plainer title: “The Storm.” Like the paratext, the prologue frames the story as a global epic and begins with an opening panel depicting planet Earth as a whole from space, “cosmically, biblically,” as Hoefer suggests (2012, 299). The next double page then shows a peaceful vista of the New Orleans-skyline surrounded by residential areas—a quintessential display of “the calm before the storm.” Through the following panels, the visual narrative instance “zooms in” on New Orleans from a birds-eye perspective (2010, 4). While the view is distant, the city is filled with life, displaying an ominous equilibrium. This equilibrium is then undercut when images of the city are juxtaposed with the brewing storm, displayed from a satellite-image view (8–9). The first half of prologue then culminates in a double-page spread showing a sublime display of the immense towering storm against the skyline of New Orleans (10–11). The following pages present images of destruction as the storm hits: moment-to-moment transitions of three panels depict a street sign being ripped off (12) and houses being swept away (15). Many of the locations the reader knows from earlier are now caught in the storm’s raw power. The biblical proportions of the catastrophe and the sense of “deluge” are evoked through multiple panels showing several houses engulfed in water. After these highly affective images of the catastrophe, the prologue’s climax features another double-page wide-angle display of the now flooded city (see Fig. 5.4). Like the first image of New Orleans, it spans the entire double  page without panel frames—a technique that Neufeld only uses

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Fig. 5.4  Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 20–21

twice more throughout the narrative. Thus, the prologue itself is framed by the two vistas of the first idyllic and then devastated cityscape of New Orleans. Up until this moment, people can only be seen from a distance. Page 18 pairs two bird’s-eye views of a group of survivors wading through waters on the left and a dead body floating on the right. The unsettling absence of people is enhanced by a monochromatic greyish green tone in which the prologue is colored. In the following chapters, Neufeld chooses more vibrant colors and sets characters apart from the background in the final chapters of the book. Whereas the rest of the narrative strongly focusses on the experiences of the characters, the prologue provides a sense of the catastrophe’s larger dimensions. As the events of Hurricane Katrina have been widely reported, Hoefer argues, the prologue can be cast in “discomforting quiet … because [it] does not need to offer the audience any information that it does not already possess” (2012, 299).5 The eerie silence and biblical allusions utilized in the prologue clearly seek to reframe existing perceptions of the catastrophe, and Neufeld does not shy away from superlative depictions. Displays of violent natural forces provide the context for the reader to assess the heroism of the characters and the cataclysmic adversity they face. Framing the hurricane as a global struggle, Neufeld presents his characters as representatives of all mankind.

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5.2   The Author Between Witnessing and Metajournalism While the selected authors emphasize the centrality of the gathered witness accounts, their representations of their own experiences are no less important as evaluative instances. They too are witnesses, both of the ongoing conflicts or, at least, their consequences, and—in their capacity as subsidiary witnesses—of the testimonies relayed to them in their encounters. Authoring characters hold a privileged position over other witnesses, as readers share their perspective and are aligned with their emotional experience. As the protagonists of the primary narrative, they, literally, have the last word. Moreover, the authors comment on their own research process, as well as the ethics and demands of journalism at large. The representation of the author’s experiences substantiates their authority to judge both the conflict and its witnesses as the narrator. The power to establish the “facts” of a story is to a degree inherent in the autodiegetic mode of narration. The representation of the author both as narrating-­I and as experiencing-I constitutes the central conduit through which the reader receives information about the storyworld. This is not always done overtly, however: in A.D., Josh Neufeld uses a covert and extradiegetic narrator for most of the story, only making a brief appearance as the authoring character in the last two chapters (2010, 157 ff.). The verbal narrative instance simply states dates and locations but does not “narrate” or comment upon any of the events. Concerning fiction, Lubomír Doležel suggests that an anonymous extradiegetic narrator can state or confirm “fictional facts” about the storyworld, whereas other characters or intradiegetic narrators have no such authority (1980, 11). The statements of an autodiegetic narrator have no absolute authority, yet, they still hold a “privileged position” above other narrative agents (17). This assessment is crucial for the narrator in documentary comics, when there is a clear hierarchy for the statement of facts as well. Even though the author of nonfiction holds no absolute authority toward stating facts about the actual world, they do hold such authority for the storyworld as a self-contained narrative system. It remains up to the reader to judge how far the story and actuality correspond. The author and their avatar are the primary evaluative instances whom the reader trusts to confirm, qualify, or contradict the testimonies obtained. Naturally, the narrative includes no such corrective instance concerning the narrator’s own statements. Verbal narrators and experiencing characters also

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hold different degrees of authority. The anonymous narrator of A.D. can simply state proposed facts without raising awareness of its subjectivity, whereas Sacco’s character as a subjectivized narrating-I is clearly aligned with his personal point of view. Documentary comics may also stage disparities of knowledge between the two instances. For example, The Fixer includes several scenes representing Sacco’s earlier and more naïve self, whose knowledge and experience are limited. His narrating-I tells the story from a retrospective position of hindsight in the verbal text boxes and comments upon the earlier affairs of his experiencing-­I represented through a graphic avatar. In a particularly cartoonish self-portrait, Sacco expresses his anxiety, feeling responsible for Neven being banned from a hotel lobby and fears that he has destroyed his subject’s livelihood (2004, 20). The accompanying text box gives away that he later discovered that Neven was barred from other hotel lobbies as well. This information comes in brackets that explicitly signal to the reader that this information is removed from the current state of the story. The information provided by the graphic narrative discourse is, thus, immediately reframed. The authoring character’s personal experience frames the documentation of the respective conflicts and allows for an especially vivid representation of their emotional experience. In Jerusalem, Guy Delisle includes a scene in which his character passes an Israeli checkpoint into Palestine (2015, 104–105). Silently, this scene first represents his first-person perspective in the densely packed crowd surrounded by security fences (104), then the checkpoint from the side so that the same fence resembles a barred cage while a grim-looking Israeli soldier inspects the stream of people passing through (105; see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2, and Fig. 4.20). In contrast to the rest of the graphic narrative discourse, this scene is presented in oppressive dark colors. To make the emotional impact on Delisle even more explicit, a circular line emanates from his head after he passes through. Joe Sacco includes a similar moment of crossing an Israeli checkpoint in Footnotes. The scene adopts his first-person perspective from within a taxi as he approaches the Israeli forces, and the reader sees an ominous guard tower from below (2009, 133). Imposed on this page-filling panel are several smaller panels that recount a suicide attack with a car on the very same checkpoint the day before. As the narrating-I comments and the impressive scene confirms, “little remains to tell the tale. The Israeli position is unscathed.” Presenting this experience from within another car, lets

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the reader share the dread of approaching such an imposing structure from the Palestinian perspective. Framing the scene with the story of the suicide attack, in turn, draws a parallel between Sacco’s experience at that moment and what the attackers must have seen as they raced to their deaths. Based on the authors’ personal experiences, these scenes appear especially authentic and authoritative in their framing of the represented conflicts. Both Delisle and Sacco invite the reader to vicariously share their experiences, presenting them as an example of the Israeli occupation’s oppressiveness. The opinions of the authoring character also serve as a default position. Sarah Glidden begins the first chapter of Rolling Blackouts, “Starting Out” (2016, 11–27), with a scene at an Istanbul train station in which her group examines a map of the countries they are about to visit. Sarah Stuteville exclaims, “BLAMMO! There they are! All the countries we’re supposed to be afraid of … And we’re about to be barreling straight toward them” (11). This statement introduces the characters’ activist stance and skepticism of cultural narratives surrounding Arab countries that the American mainstream media allegedly perpetuates. The reader is invited to feel included in the “we” and to share the same stance, priming them to pay attention to the story’s details that confirm this skepticism. As they board the train, Glidden comments, “I would be lying if I said that some of those places don’t make me a little nervous. Mostly, I’m not sure if I’m ready for what I’ve signed up for” (ibid.). By disclosing her doubts and fears, Glidden makes transparent that she is a subjective interlocutor and not merely a detached observer, while also normalizing her fears for her audiences. Not only does the author frame the narrative discourse as a character and narrator, but their presence routinely surpasses the exact limits of the representation, when the authors explicitly or implicitly comment upon their work as a reporter, often addressing the reader directly. Utterances that address the process of storytelling rather than the storyworld itself have been described as “metanarrative comments” (Nünning 2008, 304) or “metanarrative signs” that present glosses on various parts of a text and on the codes underlying them. To some extent at least, they point out the set of norms and constraints according to which the text deploys itself and makes sense; … they partially show how a given text could be understood, how it should be understood, how it wants to be understood. (Prince 1982, 125)

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As such, metanarrative signs or comments can be considered a type of “intratextual framing” that “signal[s] particular cognitive frames which are relevant to the reception of the work in consideration (or parts of it)” (Wolf 2006, 20). In other words, metanarrative comments invite the reader to adopt or maintain a particular frame toward the story. The comments that will be discussed in this section not only address narration itself but also reflect particularly on the reporting process from which the story was derived, and the underlying ethical implications of the genre. Comments that address the practices of reportage rather than the process of narration will be called “metajournalistic” (see Carlson 2016). In the practice of documentary comics, metajournalistic and metanarrative aspects frequently overlap, and, to some degree, documentary comics can be considered “metajournalistic” due to its mediality alone. Nevertheless, journalism itself often constitutes a subject and metajournalistic comments particularly serve to critique mainstream journalism contrast it to documentary comics. A primary function of metanarrative comments in general concerns authentication (Zipfel 2008, 397). Indeed, Weber and Rall point out that creating a “meta-story” to make journalistic choices of the production process more transparent constitutes a particular authentication strategy of documentary comics (2017, 14). Breaking the fourth wall, such utterances may also be used as “empathy-inducing, or parodic devices” (Nünning 2008, 305). In documentary comics, these two functions converge: the emotional alignment of the reader with the experience of the authoring character constitutes an essential authentication strategy. A scene from Rolling Blackouts elucidates this phenomenon. After first hearing her own words recorded in an interview, Glidden reflects upon listening to herself talk. Deeply embarrassed, she confesses, “It’s unbearable listening to me trying to impress my friends by repeating something I read in The Economist on the plane. I sound like an idiot” (2016, 42). Glidden immediately turns this personal reflection into a comment on genre: “If I were writing another memoir, all that would have to go in. I’d have to be honest and show all my flaws. But this isn’t a memoir. I’m here to report on Sarah and Alex and Dan and whoever else we meet. They are the ones I have to be honest about” (43). Including the scene after all, ostensibly betrays Glidden’s self-proclaimed purpose. Yet, since Rolling Blackouts is as much a documentary about journalism as it is a documentary about the post-Iraq-War refugee crisis, her metajournalistic comments fit in after all. She draws the conclusion that being honest about other

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people “is even more terrifying now that I think about it. But hey this is journalism! It all part of the job… …I guess.” Through this apparent paradox, she frames her writing as journalistic based on her initial memoiristic confession. This scene is a prime example of both the empathy-inducing and parodic qualities of metanarrative commentary, which also authenticates the work. Glidden not only explicitly frames her work as journalism, but, in a show of honesty, also professes that she will follow the genre rules she has defines. Arguably the most straightforward and also benevolent example of metajournalism in documentary comics is to be found in Sarah Glidden’s self-reflexive leitmotif “What is Journalism?” Although Glidden presents herself as a journalist, she makes clear from the beginning that she is a novice wanting to learn from her experienced reporter friends. In the opening chapter of Rolling Blackouts, Glidden provides the backstory of Sarah Stuteville, Alex, and their journalistic project, the Seattle Globalist (12). She states, “For some reason, my friends at the Globalist agreed to let me follow them on their next reporting trip so I could make a comic book about how journalism works” (14). Thus, Glidden presents herself as essentially indebted to her friends for bringing her along on their next reporting trip to Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. As an interview partner, reporter  Sarah Stuteville is positioned as an authority on “proper” journalism, and is asked to explain her concept of it multiple times throughout the book (26; 298). Glidden also enquires about the work ethic of other journalists she interviews; for instance, she asks the Iraqi journalist Kamran whether he would buy a heater for a refugee they just interviewed. He answers affirmatively, explaining, “During the interview, we will not promise them. But if something can help someone, just like if someone on the street asked me, we do it. I totally agree that you shouldn’t give your subject stuff. But sometimes they need help” (211). This ends the conversation, but the narrator subsequently reflects upon his words: “Is it even possible to report on a person’s life without intervening in it?” In this manner, Glidden continuously comments on her own reporting, raising questions about journalism and discussing the practices she encounters in the field while negotiating the genre frame of her work. In Footnotes, Sacco includes similar moments thematizing his research process, albeit with a darker subtext. In the chapter “Time Management” (2009, 200), he first describes the frustration that he and his local guide Abed feel after several unproductive interviews. Subsequently, they meet a witness whose account is fruitful (202). Here, Sacco combines frame

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regularity with layering (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4): a sequence of five evenly sized panels that show the traumatized man in various stages of agony is contrasted with one borderless bleed panel of Sacco and Abed walking away with a happy smile as the man looks after them. The layout suggests that the last panel is the direct outcome of the man’s retraumatizing testimony. The narrator comments, “He tells us, and we come away smiling.” The witness’s pain ostensibly provides the reporter’s pleasure. The following pages outline their system of classifying the various testimonies by numbering and charting them. The obvious contradiction between the affective display of the man’s agony and their systematic process of allocating him a number and placing him on a chart is enhanced by a cartoonish depiction of Sacco with unnaturally long arms (2009, 203). His tone is steeped in irony: “Abed and I are running a very organized investigation over here, and we’ve broken down the main event into its component parts. The chart allows us to make quick comparisons between the testimony of each witness.” Through this mock-irony, Sacco essentially includes a moment of confession. In pointing out his own professional ruthlessness, he makes the reader aware of the obvious impasse of reconciling compassion and accuracy that complicates his trade. Later in Footnotes, Sacco emphasizes the subjectivity of his endeavor even more explicitly. After a witness account, Abed “is somewhat skeptical that the man actually witnessed the killing … and Abed’s doubt is a good as a veto” (2009, 276). Sacco raises the question, “Who decides what is credible and what is not?” before promptly answering, “Abed and I, that’s who, sitting in our room drinking coffee. We decide. We edit. We determine.” Hence, the reader is kept almost forcefully aware of the procedural complexity. Sacco even employs an obviously oversimplified metaphor: “In the absence of UNRWA records, of Israeli records … it’s up to us to fill history’s glass with as much truthful, cogent testimony as we can.” The verbal narration is followed with a close-up of their coffee overwritten with a text box that reads, “If some truth spills along the way, we apologize” (277). Again, Sacco employs a self-deprecating tone combined with mock-ignorance or even petulance. The apparent inadequacy of their subjective decision-making toward the immense human tragedy that they document leads him to confess and address his shortcomings, conscientiously authenticating his work by making transparent its limitations. However, these confessions must be read in light of the shortcomings of the official historical accounts available on the reported massacres. In the chapter “Document” (2009, 117–119), Sacco details his research

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process in the archives of the United Nations in New York, casting himself in an entirely different role. In ironic contrast to the approach of oral history that characterizes Footnotes, he states: “To the historian, who rubs his hands together as the archivist wheels out a cart loaded with forgotten files, a contemporary document like this can represent a more definitive version of events than decades-old memories” (117). The text box containing this utterance is framed on left and right by two images depicting first the library cart and then the report from Sacco’s first-person perspective. Before the narrative discourse shows the events indicated by the report, the page is intercut from left to right by another comment: “But the report indicated ‘there is some conflict in the accounts given as to the causes of the casualties…’” (ibid.). Accordingly, Sacco highlights the disparity between conventional conceptions of documentary evidence and the reality thereof, and in doing so, “raises the question of what constitutes the production of history,” as Hillary Chute claims (2016, 246). The narrative discourse throughout the next panels represents the event that the report details. Text boxes framing the panels point out the report’s inconsistencies and paradoxes, and to an eyewitness report by an Israeli soldier. Chute suggests that this chapter “makes legible the project of Footnotes … The entire book is a counterdocument, a countermodality to the kind of archive Sacco encountered in the official records” (243). This way, Sacco continuously frames his work through gestures of transparency, contrasting it to conventional historiography (see also Wege 2019, 156–157). Sacco’s ironic and self-deprecating tone is not without complications. As a form of conscientious authentication, admission of shortcomings serves to frame the graphic narrative in terms of its limitations; admission does not do away with these limitations, however. While Sacco acknowledges the egotism of his work, it hardly deters him. A scene from Paying the Land exemplifies this self-critical acknowledgment: when to Sacco’s surprise many Dene people expect him to pay them for interviews, local social scientist Deborah Simmons suggests to Sacco that he “reflect on [his] inquiry through the lens of colonization” (2020, 107). In a striking visual metaphor, Sacco then compares his own work to the companies that seek to exploit Native lands through fracking (see Fig. 5.5). A man’s head is cut in half and where is brain would be, oil drilling equipment is placed, referencing Sacco’s research. He muses: “After all what’s the different between me and an oil company? We’ve both come here to extract something.” Sacco admits to a colonial aspect to his documentary work, yet he does not alter the dynamic of visiting Western interviewer and local Native

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Fig. 5.5  Joe Sacco, Paying the Land (Metropolitan Books 2020), 107

interviewee. However, in this latest work of his, the representations of his own experience are significantly diminished compared to his earlier reportages. This way, Sacco allots more space to Dene oral history, which is, however, still filtered through Sacco’s authorship and framing narration. The essential colonial dynamic remains in place, but it is now addressed as much, made visible, and attenuated to a degree. While these scenes address the particular journalistic process, authors also frequently make more general points about genre and their own role. In Footnotes, Sacco’s self-conception is ambiguous: although Chute points out that Sacco calls himself a “historian, albeit in the third person” (2016, 245), the chapter in question ends on a different note. Sacco cites a report by a former Israeli soldier named Gefen that contradicts official documents. Since Gefen had passed away, Sacco interviews one of his former comrades. The man “doubts Gefen’s story. He thinks he was prone to sensationalism. ‘He was a newspaperman at heart,’ by way of explanation” (2009, 119). Sacco reacts defensively: “Well, I’m a newspaperman at heart, and to me it’s never been a term of disparagement,” he writes.

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Since, unlike a historian, “[a] newspaperman wants the facts, the definitive version,” Sacco vows to “wrench nothing but the facts from our next batch of eyewitnesses, frail and imperfect as they might be.” These mock-­ delusions of grandeur contrast with a stream of witness-portraits emanating onto a black background, all directly addressing the reader with their gazes. Highlighting their humanity and individuality, this depiction immediately thwarts the idea of them as merely “a batch” from which the facts can be “wrenched.” Sacco neither wants to assume the position of a historian, ostensibly satisfied with unclear documentation, nor does he sincerely proclaim to be a straightforward newspaperman—a profession he so empathically chastises throughout the work (cf. Wege 2019, 161–162). In this chapter, he parodies himself in both roles, but also suggests a third option, one that focusses on the witnesses and their stories. Without stating the term explicitly, Sacco substantiates his oral history approach as a way to counteract the shortcomings of both conventional historiography and journalism. Unlike Glidden and Sacco, however, Delisle explicitly states that he does not understand himself as a journalist. During his stay in Jerusalem, the NGO Doctors without Borders approaches him to do a “graphic reportage” for them. He replies, “Uh, no guarantees, but I can try. I’ve never worked that way” (2015, 115). As the narrative follows his reporting efforts, he soon comes to a conclusion: “I feel like I’m not really cutting it as a reporter” (122). Nevertheless, his reporting efforts are integrated into the narrative. Later, when a journalist asks him to come along to the Gaza strip, he opts out after imagining the reporters’ predatory relish photographing an airstrike (166). Moreover, upon visiting the Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives, he simply remarks, “Ah… if I were a journalist, I’d investigate a bit. But where’s the media?” (241). Framing his work as autobiography instead of documentary, Delisle clearly signals that the rules of journalism do not apply to him. Delisle distances himself from journalism in interviews as well. Talking to The Guardian in 2012, he mentions being approached by Doctors without Borders to do the graphic reportage but remains doubtful: “I don’t know. I don’t want to look like… a tourist. I like to go deeper” (Cooke 2012). In a later interview with Paste, Delisle explicitly states, “I don’t see myself as a journalist because I go in a country where I don’t know anything about it, and I just spend a year trying to understand what’s going on.” He determines:

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No, it’s not a documentary for sure. People just walk around with me, and I show them the few things that I have noticed and that I think are interesting or weird or funny to show, and I put all that together in the book, after I have taken notes. (Brown 2017)

Expressing a deep-seated skepticism about journalism, Delisle insists that “autobiography” coincidentally allows him to “go deeper” and also have the autonomy to choose topics without the constrictions of journalism. Even though the self-conception of the author must be acknowledged, Delisle rejecting the label of journalism does not mean the reader does not approach Jerusalem as journalism. Delisle represents the experiences of the people he encounters and the conditions in which they live, educating the reader about actual events and situations. The difference between autobiography and documentary is gradual rather than definitive. While autobiographic aspects are particularly prominent in Delisle’s work, self-proclaimed comics journalists Sacco and Glidden employ autobiographic framing narratives as well. By explicitly rejecting the frame of documentary for Jerusalem, Delisle expresses a different sense of responsibility, stressing his personal experience of the represented encounters. Despite their contrasting self-presentation, there is, however, no characteristic of Delisle’s work that clearly distinguishes it from Sacco’s or Glidden’s. This conundrum affects other media as well. For instance, John Oliver, the host of Last Week Tonight, has denied being a journalist despite the fact that his show not only satirizes the news but educates and raises awareness about specific issues that the news media generally overlooks. Instead, Oliver calls himself a “comedian” (CBS This Morning 2015; see also Declercq 2019). Similarly, Delisle concretely presents himself as a cartoonist, frequently joking about stereotypical comics enthusiasts (see, for instance, 2015, 77). Moreover, in Jerusalem many scenes include a distinct metapictorial quality (see Mitchell 1994, 35), as the process of drawing is continuously represented and commented upon in the narrative discourse (Delisle 2015, 119, 179, 187, 204, 246, 271; see also Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1). Despite Oliver’s protestations, Last Week Tonight can reasonably be considered journalism (Kilby 2018)—and the same can be said of Jerusalem. In fact, Josh Neufeld specifically includes Delisle in a list of comic journalism (2016, x). This ambiguity of genre is also reflected by the praise quotations included in the book’s front matter (see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.2). By framing their efforts as non-journalistic, both Delisle and

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Oliver situate their work outside of conventional genre norms. In doing so, they open up a space to address and re-negotiate the conventionalized frame of journalism, but they also shirk off the associated duties and etiquette. Delisle more overtly distances himself from career journalists who self-­ interestedly chase lucrative stories, presenting himself as a “citizen journalist” who is ultimately more trustworthy than professionally incentivized reporters (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2). Despite his objections, Delisle draws himself “fact-checking” the model of a tank wreck he came across (2015, 304) and includes a moment when he received help from a passer-by to copy down Arabic writing (14). Moreover, Delisle seeks to provide a balanced account by taking bus tours with Jewish settlers (305), as well as the activist group “Breaking the Silence” (281). Hence, framing Jerusalem as non-journalistic can be read as presenting it as nonprofessional journalism that conscientiously adheres to similar ethics without the financial incentive. The rejection of mainstream journalism is a frequent theme of documentary comics beyond explicit metanarrative comments. The pioneer of the genre, Joe Sacco, early on introduced the self-reflexive and metajournalistic aspects that continue to characterize his work. In Goražde, Sacco describes the town upon his arrival as eager for attention and “getting CNNed! NPRed! BBCed! But its 15 minutes of fame were ticking away. Pretty soon no one was gonna remember Gorazde! Gora-wuh? Huhn?” (2007, 6) Such comments immediately frame the story that follows in contrast to conventional practices of news journalism, stressing a more enduring approach as compared to the ephemeral mainstream news cycle. Sacco later returns to this criticism, describing how journalists “blew in with the U.N. convoy in the morning,” did generic reportage work, and “blew out with the U.N. convoy in the evening” (130). These comments by the narrator accompany five panels that in close order depict the individual steps. Metaphorically mirroring Sacco’s point, the panels are crammed into the lower third of the page, stacked over each other so that the represented individuals hardly fit in the frame. As Aryn Bartley writes, “[j]ournalistic economy … here erases all that is not apparent to the eye and all that cannot be encapsulated in a brief sound-byte [sic]” (2008, 54). What comes next is a reflection on journalistic ethics, or the absence thereof, as Sacco pronounces that a few journalists “weren’t above inducing some quickie action themselves.” The narrating-I continues: “Angry townsfolk told stories of photographers throwing candy at kids to capture

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the predictable mad scramble” (2007, 131). The story is also visualized: a photographer tosses candy, aiming his camera at the ensuing commotion as children to the left and right of the panel rush toward it. Although the photographer is drawn naturalistically to the point of individualization, the children are mere silhouettes. Sacco practices metajournalistic criticism by depicting the Western photographer who usually remains unseen but not the photographed, inverting and exposing conventionalized in the photojournalistic process. Making transparent processes of news gathering that conventionally remain opaque is a frequent topic of Sacco’s, especially concerning photography. On the same page, Sacco represents another encounter with “a British photographer and several local children (2007, 131). Even Sacco does not explicitly state that the scene included above refers to this particular British photographer as well, both are represented with  striking similarity. When a boy asks the two journalists for cigarettes, the photographer decides he is too young and gives him candy instead. Sacco comments, “Poor kid. He didn’t want no stinking bon-bon.” On the next page, Sacco contemplates the different policies of journalists concerning handing out sweets. He states his own: “Anyway my bon-bon policy was to give them out to every kid asking so long as they all got one. As to when and how they ought to eat their bon-bons, I couldn’t care less” (132; original emphasis). Sacco emphasizes his point with a panel that fills the lower half of the page of a boy, who is missing various front teeth eagerly, eagerly unwrapping and eating a sweet in the middle of a street. He is alone amongst various destroyed houses and rubble. His sole focus, though, is on the bon-bon. Sacco comments, “I figured the children in Gorazde could make their own bon-bon decisions” (ibid.). The wide-­ angle representation situates the boy within an environment devastated by war, and by extension labels him a survivor of the horrors signified by the ruins. Not only is the sweet a reprieve, but in this context, Western journalists with no comparable experiences of destruction judging decisions about eating sweets and worrying about tooth decay are portrayed as tone-deaf and patronizing. Footnotes includes similar moments, such as an altercation with the Israeli military, during which a Palestinian man shouts at the photographers taking pictures. Sacco first represents a photographer from an angle that shows his lens right in the face of a wailing woman. The attention is short-lived: “his camera whirls in her face for ten seconds… before he turns away without a word to take pictures of something else” (2009,

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189). Perhaps the most conspicuous contrast between Sacco’s own approach and his take on the mainstream press is the chapter “Death” (362–364), which covers the killings both of the American activist Rachel Corrie during an Israeli army house demolition operation in Rafah and of the local man Ahmed El-Najjar on the same day. Sacco bemoans the disparity between the perceived news value of both killings. “The killing of a Palestinian in Gaza is a routine occurrence … The killing of an American, however …,” he writes (363). His own treatment champions equality: on a double-page spread, both receive a text box stating their name, age, place of residence, and cause of death. Reminiscent of newspaper obituaries, both boxes are enclosed in a thick black frame. As they visit the morgue, Sacco depicts Corrie’s body being photographed by three men pointing their lenses over her shrouded corpse. He states, “local photojournalists, stringers for Western wire services, go about the business-as-usual” (364). The next panel contrasts this scene with a close-up from the perspective of the dead body, showing a camera directly aimed at the onlooker, Sacco and Abed looking over the photographer’s shoulder. This direct address of the reader strongly confers a sense of the aggression that Susan Sontag calls “implicit in every use of the camera” (2008, 7). Sacco comments, “Two hours ago Rachel Corrie, an American was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to defend a Palestinian home. She is about to enter the realm of iconography” (2009, 364). Conspicuously absent from Sacco’s account is a depiction of Rachel Corrie. Only the act of photographing her body is shown, reversing the conventional direction of the mediatized gaze. The choice to omit a direct representation constitutes a clear critique of predatory mainstream journalism where an American death is considered more “valuable” than that of a Palestinian. In the visual attention economy, Ahmed El-Najjar’s death would not achieve iconicity. Finally, the lack of ethics in applied journalism is a central theme of Sacco’s The Fixer (2004). The book provides a metajournalistic profile of his former fixer in Sarajevo, Neven, whose dealings reflect upon journalism at large. In the first scene after the prologue, Neven tells Sacco how he arranged prostitutes for journalists multiple times, and how he dismissed the subsequent suicidal thoughts of one woman whom the war had forced into prostitution (7–8). Later, the reader learns that Neven’s fixer career began when he confronted an Australian television crew “filming kids playing in the garbage” (48). This scene highlights the journalists’ dependence on fixers and exposes the willingness to exploit children in the

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absence of a better story. Later, Sacco witnesses another questionable deal between Neven and a journalist. While drinking coffee with a local reporter, he meets Neven and a German photographer by chance (59). Neven has helped the photographer to put together a photo essay titled “Nightlife in Sarajevo.” Along with a picture of a dog fight, the essay includes a nude photo of a prostitute. When Sacco asks whether he had paid for it, the photographer admits, “I know it’s not the best way…” Sacco replies, “I’m not saying anything.” Neven adds, “And we could have fucked her, too, since we paid for it” (60). Sacco’s local friend is so disgusted that he then leaves the table. This confrontation draws a clear distinction between the local journalist’s and his moral integrity, and the Western photographer’s exploitative behavior, which is symbiotically enabled by his codependent relationship with Neven. As these findings show, documentary graphic narratives are predicated upon a critique of mainstream journalism and its alleged lack of ethics. As Birgit Wege demonstrates, metajournalism is an essential method of critique in documentary comics: “Tripping the greater narrative is what [Sacco] does, in part by highlighting over again how the news is made (2019, 184). Mainstream journalism is a foil against which the authors contrast their own approaches and negotiate their own roles as documentarians. Ultimately, documentary comics seeks to differentiate itself from ethical lapses of mainstream journalism but shares its abstract ideals. Inviting the reader through textual framings to consciously reflect upon the genre and its larger social implications addresses this conundrum—and passes on the task of reflecting upon these issues to the reader.

5.3   Interviews and Encounters Interviews are central to the oral history approach of documentary comics and account for a substantial part of the graphic narrative discourse. How a work evaluates the respective conflicts crucially depends on the selection of interview partners, how they represent the events, and how they, themselves, are represented. Commonly, documentary comics aligns the reader with the authoring character as the interlocutor and experiential filter, the visual perspective focusing on conversational communicative elements such as facial expressions and gestures. A crucial aspect of the depicted interviews is the emotional dynamic between interviewer and interviewee in their encounters, as oral history approaches are “predicated on an active human relationship between historians and their sources” (Perks and

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Thompson 1998, ix). Erving Goffman postulates that an encounter involves “a single visual and cognitive focus of attention” and “an eye-to-­ eye ecological huddle that maximizes each participant’s opportunity to perceive the other participants’ monitoring of him.” Therefore, “encounters provide the communication base for a circular flow of feeling among the participants as well as corrective compensations for deviant acts” (1961, 17–18). In oral history approaches, this entails “an affectively charged relationship to the survivor or witness” (LaCapra 2014, 86–87). In contrast, reading a book is generally conceived of as a non-participatory form of communication. Nevertheless, as social psychologists James W.  Polichak and Richard J.  Gerrig argue, “the skills people develop in conversation, in terms of generating expectations and preparing to act, are also used in comprehending narratives.” Most commonly, readers “are cast in the role of side-­ participants” (2002, 75, see also Gerrig 1993, 128) and are prone to experience not only affective but also participatory responses such as the urge to talk to the characters of a story. Representing interview situations allows authors to let readers vicariously share these momentarily focused exchanges. In order to elicit an affective response and emotional engagement with a character, authors invite and frustrate communicative impulses in their readers to make aspects of the scenario especially salient. At the same time, the interviews are commonly narratively framed as “social encounters” (Mickwitz 2016, 68), making transparent this situatedness as an authentication strategy. An essential aspect of making transparent the journalistic process is representing the social context of interviews and encounters. Bill Nichols stresses the peculiarity of the interview situation, “which differ[s] from ordinary conversation and the more coercive process of interrogation by dint of the institutional framework in which they occur and the specific protocols or guidelines that structure them” (2001, 121). In many cases, this “institutional framework” forms an integral part of the primary narrative, as has been discussed in the preceding chapter. Several techniques also highlight the mediating factors in an interview’s representation, first and foremost of which is the presence of the author or the group of reporters, as in Rolling Blackouts. However, the presence of the author alone does not entail that an interview is taking place. Abstaining from the depiction of interviews in the strictest sense, Guy Delisle often represents witness accounts as casual encounters. In contrast, Sarah Glidden invariably includes her recording devices as reminders;

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frequently, the reader is confronted with cameras, microphones, and audio recorders, the front cover being the earliest such instance. Joe Sacco also frequently depicts himself taking notes (2009, 111, 174, 344) or reference photographs (31). Furthermore, when Sacco’s and Glidden’s avatars are included during interviews, their point of observation aligns with that of the reader’s, either through a first-person or through an over-the-­shoulder perspective on the interviewee. Delisle generally depicts both conversation participants in profile (2015, 63, 327). Both techniques prime the reader’s awareness of either the author’s more distant stance or their aim to render a more lifelike experience. A transnational endeavor, documentary comics regularly requires the service of translators. Acknowledging them as mediating factors is an essential aspect of making transparent the framing conditions of an interview: “Rather than glossing over the input of translators, interpreters, and other mediators [Sacco] often puts them center stage” (Maher 2015, 222). The Fixer includes a scene in which Neven translates the words of a local “as a treat” (2004, 17). Here, the man’s utterances are completely absent, and the reader is presented only with Neven’s speech balloons, which contrast with the man’s forlorn expression, as he begs for money to feed his family, while Neven comments, “Now he’s calling you his brother” (18). The third person that Neven chooses, enhances a sense of disconnect, emphasizing the urgent need for a reporter to have a translator who is able to channel a conversation, but it also shows the helplessness of the encountered local. In Rolling Blackouts, the representation of translation takes on a more global function. In a palimpsestic manner, Sarah Glidden presents speech balloons of witness and translator as overlapping layers, simulating the effect of “overdubbing”—an idea she “stole” from documentary film and radio, she reveals (Wertz 2017). While most documentary graphic narratives curtail translators’ roles in representations of dialogue for the sake of narrative flow and coherence, Glidden simulates the succession of untranslated and translated utterances by including the overlapping word balloons. Impeding any sense of access to the original utterances, the role of facial expression and gesture becomes even more important as a form of universal communication. Continually acknowledging the translation process, a constant self-reflexive framing is maintained, reminding the reader to maintain a critical stance. A particularly straightforward way of framing an interview or an interview partner in documentary comics is the author’s explicit commentary,

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for example, directly attached to the representation of the interview via text boxes. When Glidden’s group interviews a senior official at the United Nations Refugee Agency in Turkey, she informs the reader that such experts “are used to being interviewed, at ease with being recorded” (2016, 53). Joe Sacco employs such metajournalistic framing of interviews in Footnotes as well. He describes how the former fedayee fighter as a key witness routinely loses track of his questions, jumps to other historical events, and is often uncooperative: “He overflows with history I cannot use, and I do not bother to sop it up” (2009, 50). Here, Sacco reveals the limitations of his research concerning both his sources and his own patience. To this end, Sacco also makes use of the panel frame as a rhetorical device. In a later interview, Sacco first omits the subject’s mouth in a large portrait and then inserts three close-up panels showing his mouth but omitting his eyes (see Fig. 5.6). According to Rebecca Scherr, the juxtaposition of this repetition and the “bold and almost violent manner” in which Sacco “cuts off the mouth” in the panel above, “speaks to a kind of frustration or impossibility of knowing” (2015, 124). Such framings of interview partners express Sacco’s irritation, but they also make transparent difficulties in the interview process. Sacco points out that historical aspects are excluded, in particular, other aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a point of contention for other interview partners as well (see, for instance, 2009, 20–21). These gestures of transparency are a means of conscientious authentication. However, the verbal narrative instance’s comments may also actively undermine the veracity of a particular witness account, like Sacco’s prologue to Goražde exhibits. Documentary authorship involves an important gatekeeping function toward sources. Including accounts that could not be verified or that have been contradicted therefore poses problems. In the chapter “Total War” (2007, 120–121), Sacco details how a man offers him and his Turkish colleague Serif particularly horrifying amateur video materials of the war; “unspeakable things,” as Sacco puts it (120). As the two journalists recoil in horror, the man insists again and again in a frenzied manner that they look at the footage. His wide-eyed stare and bared teeth are finally shown in extreme close-up. However, Sacco does not represent the video itself; rather, “[t]he reader is required to gauge the level of atrocity through the reactions of Sacco and Serif” (Walker 2010, 85). This way, the reader assumes “partial ownership of that recreated brutality” because they “engage the horror of the event on some of their own terms” (Acheson

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Fig. 5.6  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 63

2015, 297). The chapter ends with the revelation that the price that the man demanded for the footage was “so outrageous that it seemed to disgust Serif as much as those full-color images of the dismembered and the disemboweled” (Sacco 2007, 121). Although Sacco does not call the veracity of the footage into question, he primarily  documents the fact that and the circumstances under which it was offered to him for sale. When including such accounts appears warranted, one strategy is to actively frame them as false or uncertain. In Goražde, Joe Sacco includes a statement by physician Alija Begovic, whose weary face is depicted in a frontal close-up: “I can’t believe such people exist—who would force a grandfather to eat the liver of his grand-son” (2007, 125). The next panel

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depicts the doctor from farther away, slightly slumped behind his desk. Sacco comments in a text box above, “I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, and I didn’t ask. Maybe it was one of those apocryphal stories going around about the enemy, remarkably far-fetched even in a war like this…” Sacco’s thought finishes in a smaller text box inserted directly into the panel, slanted above the man’s head: “or maybe not.” Focalized from Sacco’s perspective, the reader shares his confusion in trying to reconcile the outrageous claim with the shaken but earnest expression on the man’s face. Without graphic visualization, the reader still imagines the horror of the described atrocity—a process that takes place, whether the claim is believed or not. Not attempting to inquire any further, the veracity of the physician’s claim finally appears inconsequential. The scene demonstrates Begovic’s personal instead and the elusiveness nature of truth in war. How a witness is portrayed routinely provides indications toward their reliability. Whereas Sacco offers a sober and head-on view of most witnesses’ faces, The Fixer’s Neven is depicted either from the side or wearing sunglasses during his accounts, frustrating the reader’s desire to get an exact look at his face. However, Sacco complicates this approach in Footnotes. Although he employs a similar technique that pairs serious-­ looking portraits of witnesses with their accounts in a manner that implies corroboration, the book’s focus increasingly shifts to the inconsistencies between different accounts. Nevertheless, Sacco presents even conflicting statements with no visual indication inspiring trust in one source more than the other. This approach is especially salient in the chapter “Announcement” (2009, 205–207). The chapter’s first page presents large portraits identifying six male witnesses. Over the course of six evenly sized and regularly arranged panels, all of the men and their individual utterances are presented as stern, sober, and earnest as each describes the moment in which the Israeli military announced via loudspeaker that all men of military age were to assemble. The witnesses disagree, however, on the age span that was announced. The next page presents Sacco’s verdict: “Despite minor differences in recollection, it’s clear that men of military age were being ordered to assemble” (206). An assessment that underlines the veracity of the main point by admitting inaccuracies in the details. In some cases, Sacco noticeably deviates from this pattern. In a chapter titled suggestively “Memory and the Essential Truth” (2009, 112–116), Sacco represents the witness accounts of several members of a family: a man named Khamis, his elderly mother, and his nephew. Khamis’s account of escaping the massacre is confirmed by the other two witnesses up to his

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return home that night. All three are thus far depicted in the usual earnest manner, directly addressing the reader. Then Khamis vividly and emotionally describes the death of his wounded brother later that night—one panel shows him crying (115). Sacco even includes a rendering of Khamis posing on the floor in the posture of his brother’s body (114). Yet his mother and nephew claim he only returned after several months (115). Sacco refrains from clearly stating whom he believes, speculating that trauma might induce either party to misremember. However, he visualizes the statements of mother and nephew in a sober, matter-of-fact manner, whereas the extent of Khamis’s emotional response calls suspicion to his account. Accompanied by a large extreme close-up of Khamis’s eyes against a striking dark background, Sacco finally speculates about his possible survivor’s guilt (116). Speculations calling the contrasting accounts into question are included in a less salient manner. Implicitly, Sacco frames Khamis’s account as less reliable (cf. Wege 2019, 158–161). Nevertheless, Sacco comes to a significant conclusion: “But all this should not let us forget the essential truth: Khamis’s three brothers were shot by Israeli soldiers on November 3, 1956. They were among what a U.N. report alleges were 275 Palestinians killed in Khan Younis town and camp that day” (2009, 116). This is the part that all three witnesses corroborate, and this is also the part of Sacco’s account that he represents as plain fact. While the narrative problematizes details of Khamis’s account and frames him as unreliable in this detail, this extensive discussion leads Sacco to arrive at a straightforward “truth.” By extensively acknowledging the inconsistencies in the accounts, the reader is primed to perceive of Sacco as a scrupulous investigator, making his concluding presentation of “hard facts” appear especially trustworthy. Additionally, the chapter demonstrates another primary tenet of Sacco’s oral history approach: although he unearths no “new” facts not already present in the official documentation, he represents the collective trauma that permeates this family and shapes their remembrance to this day. The question of whose version is more reliable recedes into the background; it is the ambiguity of remembrance that serves as evidence of the massacre’s ongoing traumatic impact. In Rolling Blackouts, Sarah Glidden extensively represents the interviews with Sam Malkandi, who first immigrated to and was later deported from the United States based on alleged terrorist involvement. He appears on the front cover of the book and is the subject of a documentary film by Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill. Coincidentally, Malkandi also becomes a local guide and translator for the group (see 2016, 169–171). Before he

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is introduced as a character, Stuteville summarizes the history of Malkandi’s case and shows Glidden the related court documents. His biography initially reads like “the refugee American dream we love to hear about,” she states (106). Indeed, his essential “Americanness” is the primary feature that the narrative associates with him. Malkandi’s case is presented as damning, but it is insinuated that the official documents do not represent the full story—Stuteville’s preliminary concludes, “I’m just saying it’s more complicated than it looks” (108). When Malkandi is subsequently introduced, the encounter is represented as casual and friendly. Concerning Malkandi’s affection for American culture, Stuteville comments, “My heart just broke into a million pieces” (111). After this first encounter, Alex Stonehill asserts, “If you read the court documents, you think to yourself, ‘This guy is guilty.’ But then you meet him.” Throwing her hands up in the air, Stuteville agrees: “I mean he’s clearly not a terrorist. Come on!” (117). It soon becomes clear that Malkandi’s case becomes a matter of personal conviction for the group. When the story returns to Malkandi after several shorter encounters, the group films and interviews Malkandi in his home. In the most candid meta-documentary moment of the work, Glidden explains the interview process, inserting comments such as “Sarah starts the interview off lightly. First comes the standard question journalists ask to test their audio levels” (148). Mostly Malkandi is shown in a medium close-up from the side, looking at Stuteville. Often, both characters, and even Stonehill filming them, are shown. When the interview turns to his deportation, Malkandi admits that he falsely claimed he was a member of a political party in his asylum case. Directly addressing the reader, a shrugging Malkandi says, “And as you know, as most of the UN officers know, in almost 99 percent of cases, people misrepresent their case a little” (162). Later, when he applied for citizenship, however, he contradicted himself, telling the truth about his political involvement (163). Even though this discrepancy would eventually lead to his deportation, he smilingly maintains that he made the right decision because it allowed him to bring his daughter to the United States. The narrative discourse then turns to comics adaptations of photographs of Malkandi’s daughter and his second wife, underlining “Sam’s devotion to his daughter” (164). Concerning the terrorism accusation, in a rare display of anger, he insists that he was never formally charged: “Yeah, [they said] that I am connected with al Qaeda or some people working in al Qaeda and this stuff. And I was laughing about this stuff! And they

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didn’t have any proof against me” (166). He provides nor further explanations. While no explicit comments are offered, Glidden includes Stuteville’s sorrowful, pleading expression as an implicit statement of concern. Glidden revisits the court documents, which “DO sound pretty bad” and outlines how “Sam downplayed his embellishment on his asylum claim” (2016, 168). To her, this explains the U.S. government’s distrust of him. The alleged terrorist contact is the subject of the final interview with Malkandi. He maintains that he simply met a man—who claimed to be a Saudi citizen with a Yemeni background—and his daughter by chance in a mall (180). Glidden summarizes: Sam keeps talking, keeps answering Sarah’s questions. He even tells the whole mall story over again when she asks for it, complete with all the details. He doesn’t shy away from any questions, never changes the subject even when the topic is sad or uncomfortable. The one thing that Sarah can’t draw out of him is an acknowledgment that his story could look suspicious on paper. (187)

The interview ends with Stuteville’s final request that Malkandi provide three reasons why he should be allowed back. Directly looking at the reader over a series of panels, Malkandi first takes a moment to think. As his reasons, he lists his wife and kids, then thanking his supporters in person, and finally adds the fact that the accusation was false. His final words are: “And I forgive everybody. Just let me go back to my normal life. That’s it (189).” In this final appeal, the verbal narrative instance remains silent; his words and his bodily expression stand for themselves. Ending on this note allows Malkandi to make his own case and presents his story as believable and generates sympathy for him. Reflecting on Malkandi’s case, the reporters explicitly present their assessment. “I’ve slowly been coming to the conclusion that Sam was a rube in something,” says Stuteville (190). Her judgment as a seasoned reporter becomes the center of attention: “I’ve interviewed people that I’ve felt were hiding stuff or that were avoiding questions. And I don’t feel like he was hiding ANYthing in that interview. You know?” She decides that Malkandi “is a guy who’s kind of ridiculously naïve.” Despite all the addressed contradictions, Malkandi’s account is finally framed as believable: Stuteville says, “Unless I have no powers of observation whatsoever, how can I believe that guy sat there and told me that whole story and it was all a lie? If that’s true, then I don’t know anything” (191). Glidden

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adds another point: “In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether or not Sam was telling us the truth. Alex points out that the chance for anyone to know what actually happened was lost when, instead of giving him a fair trial, the government cut corners to get rid of him.” Hence, the framing of Malkandi’s case shifts from his personal believability to the lack of due process. Like Sacco in Footnotes, Glidden includes an extensive discussion of potential contradictions in Malkandi’s story only to finally fall back on an “essential truth” based on “hard facts.” Nevertheless, over the course of many pages, the reader has become acquainted with Malkandi and his family, contextualizing the “facts” with a backstory the reader can empathize with. While Glidden presents Malkandi’s story as relatable, failure to relate to the struggles of others constitutes a frequent theme as well. Frustrating the reader’s desire to understand and relate to the experiences of a witness can be a powerful device for facilitating narrative and emotional engagement. In Jerusalem, Guy Delisle includes an encounter with his housekeeper Nabila, whose family has received a “demolition notice” for their house (2015, 317–318). Only through the cartoonish, minimal facial expressions does the reader receive indications of her emotions (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1, and Fig. 4.10). Unlike Delisle’s typical style, here the reader is aligned with his point of view, watching Nabila over his shoulder. As she prepares to leave, Delisle tries to apply the logic of the Western rule of law to her situation, saying, “I can’t believe they’d do that… there must be some mistake.” However, in a text box he coincidentally admits, perhaps in hindsight, “I don’t know what to tell her.” In her final appearance in the book, Nabila replies, “The neighbors got a notice too…” (318). Her eyes and mouth are represented by narrow lines, signaling her despair, but also posing an impermeable barrier between Nabila and Delisle and their different experiences. The impossibility to empathize with Nabila’s situation is underlined when Delisle helplessly tells her goodbye and good luck. The chapter’s final panel depicts the apartment door and the darkened room from the inside, metaphorically highlighting how Nabila’s experience is “closed off” by the fact that different rules apply to her living situation. The despair she must feel is only indicated through cartooning, but not represented as such. This way, sympathy for Nabila’s position is elicited, while the powerlessness Delisle feels as the interlocutor is extended to the reader, who is unable to engage at all. As encounters, interviews allow for the interviewee to address the interviewer—and by proxy the reader—with their questions and accusations as

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well. Rolling Blackouts includes several such scenes of role reversal. A former Ba’athist colonel turned fixer forcefully insists that the invasion of Iraq by the United States was a criminal act. He tells the former U.S. Marine Dan, “anyone involved in this war should have a guilty conscience” and that the Iraqi army acted more ethically in their war with Iran—a claim that Glidden does not contradict. The colonel specifically addresses Dan who fought in the war, not the reader, stating, “You are the reason Iraq is corrupted” (237). Dan reacts angrily, but the narrative discourse provides no clear indication as to whether the reader should empathize with Dan as a veteran in this situation or take the side of the accuser. Although Dan is not persuaded of any personal guilt by this confrontation, he later realizes, “He’s accusing me of the same things that we accuse them of doing to Iran and Kuwait” (238). By impartially giving voice to a Ba’athist senior officer, Glidden likewise allocates comparable validity to both the official Iraqi and American narratives of the U.S. invasion. In a later conversation with a former Iraqi diplomat, the question of blame is raised again. When Sarah Stuteville asks the Iraqi diplomat whether she would like to pose a question that hadn’t been asked so far, she says, “Why did you do this? Why did America invade my Country?” (251). Over the course of several panels, Glidden depicts other gathered refugees as the woman describes the personal loss and ruin the war brought to the Iraqi population. None of the refugees address the journalists or the reader directly with their gazes. They look mournfully to the side or to the ground. The diplomat concludes with a statement uttered with eyes closed: “It was a tragedy. Thank you.” This final statement of gratitude, which refrains from blame, humbles not only the reporters but the reader as well. Sarah Stuteville’s reply is depicted from a perspective over the woman’s shoulder: “Thank you. I’m sorry that I don’t have an answer to those questions” (251). By letting the diplomat pose the questions and not even trying to answer, Stuteville empowers the diplomat to frame the debate concerning the American government’s guilt for the Iraq War. In turn, Stuteville’s inability to answer these questions extends to the reader, who, of course, literally cannot talk to the woman, despite potentially wanting to comfort or to disagree with her. This interview is followed by a conversation with Dan during their taxi ride to their quarters (252–254). Unlike the preceding scene, this conversation is framed as a private encounter, though one panel includes Glidden’s audio recorder (254). Having employed a humbler stance, the diplomat has shifted Dan’s position. Dan lays out his reasons for joining

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the military but concludes with a wide-eyed stare: “It’s just so—I really wish we had never invaded Iraq. It’s a terrible thing that we did” (253). The scene is framed by Glidden’s voiceover commentary in which she, remarkably, assumes the right to actively speculate about Dan’s motivations—a boundary rarely crossed with Middle Eastern witnesses: “Maybe Dan didn’t come here to tell his story. Maybe he came here because he wanted to hear something. Something that no one here is going to tell him.” The conversation ends with Dan asking Glidden whether there was no benefit in removing Saddam Hussein in light of his crimes against humanity: “Did you think it’s good that he’s not alive anymore, that he can’t do those things he was doing before? I mean, did you think that? Did that thought go through your head?” (254). The last two panels representing these final questions “zoom in” on Dan’s face looking pleadingly at the reader, but no answer is given, and no redeeming outcomes are mentioned. The silence that follows stands as the final statement concerning the invasion of Iraq. Through these two interviews, Glidden contradicts the “official” framing of the Iraq War perpetuated by the mainstream news, of the U.S. military helping the Iraqi people rid themselves of their brutal dictator, leading them to better lives. Glidden now reframes this dynamic by presenting her group of Americans as having no answers for the Iraqis they encounter. Only justifiable accusations remain. Ultimately, Glidden frames the invasion of Iraq not only as a failure but as a crime.

5.4   Witness Accounts as (Embedded) Graphic Narratives A chief tenet of documentary comics is the ability to visualize witness accounts as graphic narrative stories of their own, embedded within the primary narrative. However, storytelling becomes especially sensitive when addressing the actual experiences of others and the consequences of representing witness accounts as graphic narrative are far-reaching. Aligning the narrative access to the documented events with a particular perspective casts a specific restrictive and evaluative regime over the represented events and generates identification with an actor or a group within the documented crisis. Hence, to “intervene against a culture of invisibility” by translating private experience into a visual likeness, documentary comics involves what Hillary Chute terms “the risk of representation”

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(2016, 5). Whereas authors may readily describe their own mental states, they have no such authority over the accounts of their interview partners. Nevertheless, documentary comics involves the representation of subjective experiences, which entail the attempt “to represent experiences that are necessarily exclusive to the inner realms of a character (or person)” by “medially transform[ing] the complex interactions of subjective intentional states into intersubjectively comprehensible external forms of representation” (Reinerth and Thon 2017, 3; original emphasis). Conventionally, nonfiction is barred from such representations. Gérard Genette considers a text granting access to a character’s mental states to be a definitive marker of fiction (1993, 65), and Edward Branigan states that “classical documentary film” may only include the “public, or intersubjective, aspects” of an event, precluding representations of private mental states and memories” (1992, 204). The underlying reasoning is clear: “No transfusion of consciousness is possible. Words can be exchanged, experiences cannot. Testimony is another’s discourse whose universe of reference diverges from one’s own” (Peters 2009, 26). Therefore, retelling the experiences of others necessarily involves the measure of imagination and, hence, inaccuracy, the reiteration being colored by the author’s inferences. Like docudrama or historical reenactment, fictionalizes actual events to construct a comprehensible story from fragmented information. The comics form precludes that such representations pass as indexical evidence. Instead, documentary comics substitutes a degree of fact-based fiction, or speculative nonfiction, if you will, for an unattainable transfusion of minds. The extent to which a documentary graphic narrative relies on the representation of witness accounts varies greatly. In A.D., Josh Neufeld presents a comprehensive, uninterrupted representation of the accounts he gathered. He tells a chronological and coherent story from the alternating perspectives of the individual witnesses as an “episodic, multi-narrative structure [that] only hints at the vast possibility of Katrina-experiences” (Hoefer 2012, 298). Neufeld addresses the interview process only later in the epilogues and afterword, prioritizing the representation of the characters’ experiences instead, without narrative disruptions. This makes A.D. the least prototypical of the selected works in that it does not demarcate any embedded narratives. The absence of framing devices that disclose the represented events as the product of an interviewing process leaves the believability of the individual stories unchallenged. Moreover, Neufeld provides an egalitarian distribution of authority toward the different focalizing characters. They do not become intradiegetic narrators of

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their own, but Neufeld’s covert narrating-I encompasses all of their accounts equally, regardless of race or gender. This way, A.D. presents counternarratives to the racist media coverage of the hurricane, which further dehumanized People of Color by representing them as looters and “thugs” (cf. Davies 2019, 3–4, 7). To this end, Neufeld represents several key moments from the perspective of the Black character Denise who is “in many ways, the dominant figure in the text” (Hoefer 2012, 297). A particularly striking instance is the moment when the storm hits her home while she sleeps. In a series of four panels, Denise and her cat are awakened by tremors; the time is stated as exactly 5:33 a.m. (2010, 67). Next, Denise is depicted over a whole double-page with a wide-eyed stare trying to hold on to, or even to hold together her crumbling house that is spread out over the entire double page (see Fig. 5.7). Her body, located at the center of the image, is highlighted through its white representation, which contrasts with the black and green background. This moment is succeeded by two close-ups of her face, each filling an entire page. While the first image shows her silent shock, these close-ups contain her screaming as she tries to hold on to a bed: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! I’m gonna die in this bitch! Damn!” (70–71) The third panel narrows down the color-focus even more and presents only her eyes and the speech balloon in white. Such moments present an affective display through implied eye-contact. Here, Neufeld trades

Fig. 5.7  Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (Pantheon Books 2010), 68–69

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documentary accuracy for a lifelike representation of the experience of terror as focalized by the character. Framing the catastrophe through Denise’s experience becomes especially striking in the final part of the narrative proper that depicts her experiences in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. As Dominic Davies emphasizes, Denise’s perspective serves to address the aspect of racial discrimination in the disaster relief efforts (2019, 9). In contrast to the narratives of mainstream news media, blame is not placed on “looters” but on unhelpful authorities. The police are depicted as unable or unwilling to help: as a police car drives by the convention center and demands people line up for buses, a police officer is shown smugly grinning inside the car. While the officer remains in his vehicle, two young Black men take it upon themselves to arrange an orderly evacuation that privileges the elderly and mothers with children. Still, the evacuation does not begin and Denise comments, “Oh, shit—here we go again … What’s this, like the fourth time they told us buses were coming? Twice yesterday, and this is the second time today” (Neufeld 2010, 135). Here, Denise’s experience serves as a concrete testament to the incompetence of the government relief work. This framing continues as an armored vehicle carrying police officers in body armor drives by the crowd (142). While the civilian bystanders ask for water, the officers wordlessly point their rifles at them. These scenes represent the authorities not only as smug and incompetent but downright hostile. No explanation for their behaviors is provided, as the scene exclusively focuses on Denise’s experience within the crowd. In contrast, black civilians courageously help themselves and each other. This point is repeated when the young men return with basic supplies that they took from a Rite Aid store in lack of government-provided relief goods and which they distribute among the people instead of enriching themselves (143–144). One of them exclaims, “Everybody stay straight, now. We ain’t gonna have none o’ that Superdome shit ‘round here!” (144). Neufeld vindicates the supposed “thugs” and “looters” while placing blame on the unhelpful government, which actively forces the survivors, at gunpoint, to stay in the center. Indeed, he represents the “looters” as a source of self-reliance from within the community, the only helpful authority on the scene (cf. Mickwitz 2016, 122). Denise’s experiences are intercut with a scene involving the White characters Leo and Michelle leaving the city in their car. They listen to a radio program during which a caller asks why the people of New Orleans did not simply leave the city before the story, angrily exclaiming, “What is wrong

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with those people?!” (Neufeld 2010, 147). Leo and Michelle then discuss how poverty prevents people from simply leaving, especially at the end of the month before receiving their paychecks. The caller is presented as emblematic of a larger part of the American public, whom Leo calls “idiots,” who, in their entitlement, “forget what it’s like to be a have-not” (148). However, even as they criticize public opinion, White Leo and Michelle are shown leaving the city. Hence, Neufeld frames the effects of Hurricane Katrina not only as a social but notably as a racial crisis. The final page of the chapter and the narrative proper depicts three Black women from the waist up, facing the reader at eye level; included is also Denise, who stares bewildered directly at the reader. A cry of the infant girl on the arm of her mother cuts across all three panels. The narrative proper ends with Denise’s realization that “[t]hey are trying to kill us all” (153). Here, the perspective shifts to an aerial point of view, reducing the represented individuals to stick figures. Although the reader is again invited to sympathize with Denise, the effort to relate to her struggle is ultimately frustrated. The narrative forgoes any sense of closure at this moment and when Denise tells Neufeld how she was able to leave with the help of a friend, it remains a side note and is not portrayed as a dramatic rescue. Rather, Denise’s final realization that the government will not help is the concluding moment of the narrative and of Katrina’s immediate aftermath. The narrative discourse makes a point of abandoning Denise at this vulnerable moment, which ultimately positions the reader with society’s failure to help the survivors. Unlike Neufeld, the other selected authors take the opposite approach and explicitly frame such accounts as embedded narratives. With this device, “a character in a narrative text becomes the narrator of a second narrative text framed by the first one” (Nelles 2008, 134; see also Genette 1983, 231; Bal 2017, 52). The primary narrative sets up and follows the witness accounts; each embedded narrative is read in light of the storyworld derived from the entirety of clues or warning signs the reader has previously received. In turn, the collected stories then serve as an attempt to reconstruct a preceding crisis. In contrast to the primary narrative, these witness accounts are characterized by collaborative authorship, as the author draws the witness’s oral testimony. Author and witness share the authority to represent and also the burden to authenticate: the author concedes some narrative authority to the respective witness, facilitating narrative alignment with the respective interviewee as the experiencing-I of the narrated events. If no other

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indication is provided for an embedded narrative, the reader is by default led to believe that the witness account is as reliably true as the rest of the narrative. Research in social psychology is clear on this issue: as Cordelia Fine points out, “Our natural urge—our default position—is to believe” (2006, 121). In their article “You can’t not believe everything you read,” Daniel T. Gilbert et al. even warn, “[b]elieving what one reads seems so easy and so natural that people must take pains to guard against it” (1993, 221). The more space a story occupies without contradiction, the stronger is the particular account’s case for believability. However, authors may frame such an account with their comments in co-present text boxes or contextualize them with contradicting accounts, and they also exert control by adopting a particular mode of representation. While comics offers the possibility to represent witness accounts by the same means as the primary narrative, authors often take great care to differentiate both in the graphic narrative discourse. An embedded narrative may adopt a different graphic style or be separated by specific panel demarcations (Mikkonen 2013, 114; Kuhn and Veits 2015, 244). In Jerusalem, Guy Delisle employs a different color, reddish-brown to single out his historical illustrations, and the accounts of those he encounters (2015, 17–18, 173, 192). The story may also be visually enclosed by other graphic elements on the page: as mentioned above, Joe Sacco employs thick black frames to demarcate certain witness accounts from the rest of the narrative. To align an account with a particular witness, an embedded narrative is set up by what Markus Kuhn and Andreas Veits call an “anticipatory framing”: this mechanism entails that a character is first shown from the outside and “through devices such as the emphasis on facial features, it is suggested that the character’s attention is focussed not outwards, on the diegetic reality, but inwards, e.g. on a dream, imagination, or memory” (2015, 244). As was discussed earlier, in documentary comics this commonly entails the representation of the interview process. Sarah Glidden rarely depicts witness accounts directly, and never as long, uninterrupted sequences. In some scenes, she draws photographs as illustrations for an account (2016, 36–37, 164); in others, Glidden inserts momentary representations into her interviews for emphasis. Nevertheless, there is never a full page of embedded narrative uninterrupted by depictions of the interview. An especially striking instance is her rendering of Malkandi’s mall encounter with the would-be terrorist he identifies as Ahmed Bawarath (180): as part of the embedded story, Glidden portrays Bawarath unrecognizably, adopting the man’s over-the-shoulder

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perspective that includes only a generic outline of an adult male from behind. Although Glidden believes Malkandi’s story enough to generally draw his account, in this instance, she leaves a blank. When she represents Malkandi’s perspective in the encounter, the man is depicted merely as a black silhouette (182). Here Glidden’s representation departs from Malkandi’s focalization, which signals that she will not take on the responsibility of identifying this man in any way. Hence, in this case, he becomes an unreliable or at least insufficient narrator. Another example utilizes focalization even more strikingly. To expose the brutality of war, Glidden departs from her usual method and depicts a witness account that assumes the perspective of another person than the witness. In Sulaymaniyah, the American photojournalist Sebastian Meyer tells the group how he was an embedded journalist in Afghanistan when he witnessed an American sniper killing an insurgent. Meyer describes the euphoria of the soldier after taking the shot and how he himself—despite the brutality of the killing—shared this ecstatic response being part of the outfit that the insurgent had attacked (2016, 139–140). Glidden combines his account with depictions of the sniper, including his first-person vision in the mortal moment. Two images show the insurgent through the scope of the soldier’s sniper rifle, first alive and then with a cascade of blood emanating from his neck (see Fig. 5.8). Meyer narrates: “He had been looking through the scope of his sniper rifle… And saw it up close and personal.” After taking the shot, the soldier is shown smiling, gazing directly at the reader, while Meyer continues in speech balloons, “And now he’s bragging about how he shot this guy through the neck and watched his neck explode” (140). The panel includes Meyer in the bottom left corner, looking skeptically at the soldier despite his admission of having shared the soldier’s elation. In representing the experience of a soldier based on the journalist’s account, Glidden takes considerable liberties. She shows the exact moment of the killing as perceived by the soldier—even though she did not interview him. Nevertheless, the representation of his experience allows for a contrast between the brutality of the killing and the soldier’s elation. While Sebastian Meyer explains the dynamics of the situation and confirms that he “would have happily had him shoot everybody else through the neck and celebrated” (2016, 140), his facial expression during the conversation reveals feelings of shame and presents a stark contrast to the soldier’s wide grin in the embedded story. Glidden accepts the risk of representing the experience of a person she did not consult herself to make

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Fig. 5.8  Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 139

a point about the brutality of war, particularly as perpetrated by the U.S. military. The most complex and multifaceted employment of embedded narratives can be found in the works of Joe Sacco. Whereas the other authors this study examines only represent stories they frame as trustworthy, Sacco routinely embeds witness accounts that he later problematizes or refutes. A particularly salient example of this strategy can be found in The Fixer. In the chapter “1992” (2004, 51–58), Neven describes how his infantry unit destroyed four tanks and damaged two more in one battle. This account is first set up with a discussion of lootings by paramilitary units during the

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war, as testified to by the former Bosnian army Colonel Jovan Divjak (51). Sacco also briefly includes the account of an unnamed elderly couple. Sitting at a table in the dark with a cone of light at their back, they state, “We lost everything” (52). Subsequently, the narrative turns to Neven’s account of these incidents, the narration switching to the second person, asking once more to “put yourself in Neven’s shoes” (53). Neven does not deny taking goods from stores but justifies his actions and even claims, “We were preventing them from being looted.” When Sacco questions him explicitly if he enriched himself in the war, he replies evasively: “You saw my apartment. Does it look like I enriched myself?” (54). This panel is juxtaposed by a depiction of Neven’s unit lewdly partying with local girls, drinking whiskey they ostensibly ransacked. Against this background of excess, Sacco presents the battle, one of the work’s key scenes. For three pages, Sacco depicts the battle solely with horizontal panels resembling cinema screens, and a sense of viewing an action film permeates the following scenes. Sacco represents the unfolding events dynamically from angles within the battle, right in front of an approaching tank, for instance, or over the heads of Neven’s unit as shells explode all around. Throughout the scene, text boxes provide comments on the ensuing action, first in the familiar second-person narration and then quoting Neven directly. Neven claims that he ordered six rocket-propelled grenades to be fired at the same time, as a bluff (see Fig. 5.9): “We destroyed four tanks and seriously damaged two.” The final scene shows Neven lying in the trench, nonchalantly smoking, four tanks wrecked behind him. Sacco’s narrating-I states, “The tanks turn tail. The battle is over.” A self-­ satisfied Neven boasts: “They didn’t have enough guts. Everything here is guts.” The shape of panels, the perspective, and the excessive dramatization with particular attention to explosions all indicate action film rather than documentary, and so does the excessive machismo of Neven’s words. This way, Sacco’s representational strategy problematizes Neven’s story immediately. Throughout The Fixer, Sacco provides numerous indications that Neven is not entirely reliable, and the representation of his war story is by no means the only reference to fiction film. Earlier in the book, Neven claims to have shot an enemy soldier through the holster in another skirmish, stating, “It was like in the Doc Hollywood movies” (2004, 43). In the first chapter, Neven exclaims, “CAN YOU IMAGINE THE SORT OF MOVIE THAT COULD BE MADE ABOUT WILD FUCKING BASTARDS LIKE ME?!!” (11). By referencing cinema, Sacco

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Fig. 5.9  Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Jonathan Cape 2004), 56–57

consolidates the idea that Neven’s stories might correspond to a mode of fictional representation. In one of their last encounters, Neven states that he has the idea for the “perfect crime”: murdering a particular journalist who looks like him and assuming his identity. When Sacco points out the difficulty of that plan, he replies: “I’ve seen enough movies and read enough books to handle such a thing” (86). When Sacco later tries to confirm Neven’s war story, the journalist and former soldier D. is furious: “What?! Listen, no way ever in this war did our army knock out four tanks in one day” (2004, 61). As another former soldier joins them; he and D. share a hearty laugh at Sacco’s expense, and D. emphasizes, “Both of us were fighting at the time, and I’m telling you it didn’t happen!” (original emphasis). At this point, Sacco admits his own confusion, and later concludes, “The war used to be about guys like Neven and his buddies, and 43 tanks coming right at them… But the war outgrew Neven … And Neven will tell you that he quit the war… the truth is, the war quit Neven” (76). This insight is accompanied by consecutively shrinking depictions of Neven rambling on about how he has gotten tired of the war. After this, Sacco increasingly turns to other witnesses. Though

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he strongly problematizes the reliability of Neven’s accounts, by including his stories, Sacco insists that some truth can be found in them. However, Sacco’s use of excessive dramatization does not automatically result in a scene’s problematization. Rather, the effect is achieved by a complex interplay of different framing devices, as a similar moment in Goražde exemplifies. In the chapter “The ’94 Offensive,” Edin describes his war experiences (2007, 162–185). Like Neven, he and his unit are attacked by a tank, though, just a single one. The battle is also intensely dramatized in wide panels, alternating between Edin’s horrified face and the tank’s muzzle flashes (see Fig.  5.10). Sacco includes moment-to-­ moment transitions, over several images, focusing both on Edin’s face and on the tank’s constant fire over several minutes (175). In contrast to The Fixer, this scene is almost completely silent, and the focus is on Edin’s fear rather than heroics. Accordingly, the terrifying display of the shooting tank is not included to suggest heroism, but to provide a sense of horror, which is arguably more realistic. The following pages further emphasize the sense of panic (see 177). Sacco employs graphic narrative discourse to transport his readers into the represented world of Edin’s account without any friction from preceding events in the story, or from any boasting comments that coincide with it. Most importantly, throughout the narrative, Edin is consistently presented as trustworthy. This does not mean that Goražde only includes completely substantiated accounts. In the final section of witness accounts “Death and Deliverance” (2007, 196–208), Sacco includes a story of two young men named Nermin and Haso, who describe their escape from Srebrenica (198–199). In Sacco’s own words, both “claimed that Serbs attacked the column with what they called ‘combat gas.’ Perhaps the incapacitating chemical agent BZ, a benzilate compound, ‘combat gas’ rendered its victims disoriented and hallucinatory, among other effects, they said.*” (200) As the asterisk suggests, Sacco qualifies this statement with a footnote at the bottom of the page (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.5); another note after the narrative proper elaborates this qualification further (see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.5). However, Sacco visualizes the account, showing the surrendering Bosnian soldiers crawling on the ground with grimacing faces as Haso narrates, “They were not behaving normally—crazy because of the combat gas.” Moreover, Sacco employs the visual metaphor of meandering waves emanating from Nermin’s head to indicate his state of intoxication, while the verbal narrative instance quotes him saying, “I wasn’t feeling normal… I was suffering from combat gases” (2007, 200). Sacco accepts the risk of

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Fig. 5.10  Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (Jonathan Cape 2007), 174

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representation and takes a stand by drawing the account. Although he acknowledges the lack of clarity, he does so only so in paratextual instances that may easily be overlooked; as part of the graphic narrative discourse, the account is presented as true. As discussed in the preceding chapter, Sacco makes an even more emphatic point of including contradictory witness accounts in Footnotes. In the long chapter “The Screening” (2009, 298–326), he represents the Israeli army first detaining all military-aged males in a Rafah schoolyard and then screening them for fedayee fighters. The chapter is based on various witness accounts mentioned throughout the chapter. However, Sacco, by way of introduction, acknowledges, “This is the part of the story that wobbles and strains” (298). He states, “most of those we interviewed had difficulty reassembling the drawn out events in the schoolyard,” which stretched over eight to ten hours. Even more importantly, “few men saw or experienced precisely the same thing” (299). Nevertheless, the qualifications are placed above a double-page spread of the screening process in which Sacco meticulously details the crowd of detained Palestinians waiting amid barbed wire, and the process of Israeli soldiers singling out some of them. Hence, Sacco points out that it is unclear how exactly the events unfolded, but through his graphic representation, he emphasizes that they share a common thread which is, indeed, true. Accordingly, he begins the next page with the following remark: “But many interviewees agreed on certain component elements of the next few hours” (300). Sacco includes several subchapters that he refers to as “stories.” The first one, vaguely titled “The Officer or Officers” (2009, 300–302), describes the arrival of one or more military officials to the scene. Sacco again includes an extensive amount of interview representations that contradict each other’s details, such as the number of vehicles that arrive (300) or whether the arriving officers were Jewish, British, or from the United Nations (301). On the densely filled pages, Sacco juxtaposes a graphic narrative account of the ensuing events with various directly quoted testimonies. The embedded story unfolds as a multi-authored distillate through which Sacco subjectively assembles an authoritative reconstruction. From the various accounts, Sacco creates a prototype eyewitness character that serves as a focalizer of the represented events. In the second subchapter, however, he includes a dubious moment that several men claim to have witnessed: the appearance of one or more white doves. As depicted, one man testifies that a dove landed on the officer’s shoulder; the next panel shows the claim of another man that three doves flew over

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the crowd (303). Sacco includes these moments without directly commenting on them, safe for the title “The Legend of the Doves,” which creates a mythical association. Drawing the dubious story nonetheless serves as a gesture of respect from Sacco toward his interview partners. Moreover, the acknowledgment of such inconsistencies concerning a minor incident finally reaffirms the parts that are presented as historical facts. It is not always pure facts that Sacco is after. As witnesses describe how some men were forced to point out the fighters, this moment is rendered in a large panel that adopts the first-person perspective (see Fig. 5.11): the scene represents the point of view of a man sitting within the crowd, gazing over more bowed heads before him. With soldiers shouting in the background, the observer’s gaze focuses on a standing man who looks and directly points at the reader, simulating direct address. Through this subjective perspective, the reader is emotionally aligned with the prototypical victim and vicariously shares the horror of being implicated. As the reader’s gaze lingers upon the panel, it wanders toward the dread on the man’s

Fig. 5.11  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books 2009), 305

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face. On the next page, the perspective switches: now the reader looks upon cowering men, trying to duck from a pointing arm that penetrates the bottom left corner of the panel, singling out a victim (306). Subsequently, the man is taken away. Here, the perspective is not aligned with a particular character. The illusion of vicariously sharing the horror is broken; someone else, not the reader, is selected to be killed. Hence, Sacco invites and frustrates the reader’s attempt to relate to the depicted experience. Past and present intermingle throughout the pages of this chapter as the witnesses and their account geometrically align, their speech balloons cutting into representations of the past. This way, Sacco presents his reconstruction as the direct result of his interpretation of a multitude of testimonies and inserts several framings to problematize this account. Conscientiously, Sacco’s acknowledgment of inconsistencies ultimately authenticates the consistent graphic narrative account he chooses to formulate. Later in the chapter, Sacco increasingly integrates panels depicting the interviewed witnesses within larger panels representing the embedded story, often as “faces in the crowd” (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4, and Fig. 4.26). The constructedness of the embedded narrative of Sacco’s composition is constantly emphasized through the pages’ palimpsestic appearance. However, submerged under the mass of witness accounts is a dramatized version of the experienced abuse. By visually framing this narrative with the various different contradictory accounts on the pages, Sacco coincidentally represents the killings while employing the spatiality of the comics page to create a co-presence between an authoritative statement about the past—fictionalized though it may be—and its qualifications. Not all witness accounts are framed in quite such a problematizing manner, the contrast letting such scenes appear all the more believable. In the chapter “The Burials (2009, 344–359), Sacco depicts the massacre’s aftermath, including Owda Abdullah Hejazi’s account of that night. Hejazi describes how he went looking for his relatives among bodies dumped in a nearby field. This scene is represented in a clear page layout. A group of people examining the bodies is represented in dark horizontal panels, which are intercut with white text boxes in which Hejazi narrates the events: “It was horrible… The people were afraid. There was no shouting there. No Screaming. It was slightly like thieving” (347). The scene culminates in a silent double-page spread—the only whole double page in the entire volume to represents the past (348–349).

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This large image provides a distinct change of pace: like pilgrims lost in the desert, in an almost biblical rendering, the searching survivors are cast in shadow under an oppressive darkened sky—by far the largest monochromatic space in the volume. The silence of this nighttime scene starkly contrasts the otherwise omnipresent overabundance of, often contradictory, utterances and accounts. Even though Sacco chooses to depict various intimate moments with a display of emotion, this image provides only ghostly silhouettes in the night. The symbolism of the nighttime scene and the survivors looking for their loved ones provides a surreal sense of trauma. Nothing indicates that this account might be inaccurate or untrue. Whereas the story of the massacre itself “wobbles and strains,” distorted by trauma, its aftermath as it is encapsulated in this picture is quite clear, even as it is steeped in shadows. Sacco authenticates Footnotes by framing his account with ubiquitous layers of qualifications and corroborations, but this moment silently stands for itself, documenting historical actuality.

5.5   Epilogues and Endings While the frames evoked by the opening of a story strongly influence the work’s reception throughout the reading process, the closing chapter or scene asserts a conclusive framing, or reframing, of the preceding narrative. The closing of the narrative amounts to a final assessment or closing statement or the documented crisis. In some cases, the narrative proper ends with an epilogue set chronologically apart from the primary narrative, adding some retrospective insights to the story or making a final point. These sections often include the author’s memoiristic reflections on, and personal conclusions to the reported events after some time has passed—or they point out the lack of a conclusive judgment. An epilogue may also provide an outlook concerning the events that will lie beyond the coverage of the reportage. Goražde includes two epilogues, both detailing Sacco’s return first to Goražde (2007, 222–223) and then to Sarajevo in 1996 (224–227). The chapters outline how the people from his reportage are moving on personally, adapting to the changed situation of peace, and the difficulties they face. The book ends with a portrait of Edin: he is depicted cast in half-shadow, glancing to the side, an anxious and sorrowful look on his face (227). Sacco encourages him to take some time off now that he is safe, which Edin declines, Sacco explains: “He was in his late 20s and looking back on a hole in his life

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almost four years long. This was no time for a break. He wanted to get on with things.” The epilogue emphasizes the war’s lasting impact on personal biography, and the uncertain future of survivors whom the reader has become acquainted with throughout the narrative, complementing the story by providing additional information about the lives of represented characters after the reportage. Likewise, Josh Neufeld employs two epilogues outlining the lasting impact of the documented events on the subsequent lives of those involved after the primary story. However, Neufeld first uses the epilogues to introduce a metanarrative dimension to A.D. The chapter “The Diaspora” (2010, 157–177) opens with a black panel and a text box that reads, “One and a half years later.” Then Neufeld’s authoring character appears, conducting a telephone interview at his home computer (157). The next two chapters alternate between representations of his phone calls with the respective characters and the stories of how they escaped their individual predicaments. These stories are framed by text boxes in which they tell their stories in quotations marks. Now, the reader learns that the continuous narrative that came before were relayed to Neufeld as witness accounts, with Neufeld directly asking the respective characters questions (see also 160). This form of narration is continued in the second and final epilogue, “The Return” (180–187), which jumps forward another year to 2008 and details how the represented individuals have moved on by then. This chapter once more asserts the resilience of the characters and also places blame on the responsible authorities. Again, as Davies observes, the chapter emphasizes how different racial groups, embodied by the respective characters, have felt the impact (2019, 11). The final words belong to Denise: “In spite of it all, even though the place will never be the same—I am home. But it’s not over. We’re not all home yet” (Neufeld 2010, 187). The last sentence frames the final panel, which depicts a trailer with a defiant New Orleanian fleur-de-lis and a raised flag boldly standing on the front lawn of a destroyed house. Moreover, the flag and the whole chapter adopt the colors of the city’s emblematic Mardi Gras-festival, purple, yellow, and green (Davies 2019, 11). This final gesture emphasizes community and resilience, and also the fact that closing the book will conclude the representation but not end the hurricane’s impact on the represented lives. Accordingly, both Sacco in Goražde and Neufeld in A.D. emphasize the lasting impact of the documented crises after the documentary has ended—a fact that is commonly concealed in mainstream journalism by immediately continuing to the next news story.

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Perhaps most importantly, epilogues provide a sense of closure. In The Fixer, the believability and extent of Neven’s heroics remain without a definite resolution, although Sacco, to a degree, redeems him by means of a deus ex machina ending. In the “Epilogue 2001” (2004, 97–105), Sacco closes the circle and returns to the present of the first prologue to outline recent developments in Neven’s biography. Even though he claims to be sober and to have quit gambling (99), he is depicted as aged, unhealthy, and dependent on medication (101; 104). Neven now admits to self-­ medicating his own war trauma with alcohol (99). Although the epilogue also chronicles some of the former fixer’s attempts at generating stories for Sacco, he is depicted mostly as a man out of time. He can no longer remember the names of his fallen comrades (100), he fails to prepare interview partners (102), and “the sites that were prominent in his war” have since been turned into developed areas (101; original emphasis). Sacco finally excuses him from taking him on another tour (104). This epilogue humanizes Neven to a considerable degree and emphasizes the high personal cost that the war had on his own life, despite his tall tales. The question of his reliability, however, initially remains unresolved. The chapter first introduces a man who remembers Neven and exclaims, “Yes, now I remember the one you’re talking about. He had a big imagination” (2004, 97). But the story ends differently: on the final page, Sacco cites the account of “someone who knew Neven well, someone whose opinion I trust” (104). This incognito surprise witness “remembers Neven as a bit of a blowhard,” but tells Sacco further unspecified stories that make him “feel like I didn’t know half of what Neven was about…” (105). Asked about “Neven’s war-time antics,” the witness says, “I heard from very good sources that he was unbelievably courageous. From the very beginning he was throwing himself into action as if he wasn’t aware what could happen to him. He passed through many bad times.” Finally, the witness echoes the sense of Neven being a man out of time: “I didn’t even know he was around anymore.” These comments frame a depiction of Neven from above that pulls farther away into the sky until Neven is just one of many small, unidentifiable figures below. The text boxes lead the reader across the page into the white space of the unframed final panel “to lead to nothing: white space, the end (or not) of narrative” (Chute 2016, 233). According to Hillary Chute, “Sacco lets Neven remain oblique, ambiguous; retains the unknowability of both of his actions and his trauma,” while at the same time suggesting “that he may finally know an answer to

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the open question the text submits, and yet he withholds that information, engaging it as part of the horizon of the unfinished, of the book’s own ethical provisionality” (2016, 233). Nevertheless, Sacco ultimately vouches for Neven’s essential reliability. Sacco does not present concrete evidence, and instead asks the reader to place confidence in his own trust in Neven and the unnamed witness. Sympathetically, The Fixer ultimately presents Neven as a troubled man. His biography, perhaps more so than his stories themselves, is presented as a testament to an immoral war. This way, the epilogue explains and justifies the whole project of the book. Effectively, Sacco reframes his work as a study of how the war shaped Neven’s biography, rather than a documentary of the war itself. Neven’s story appears too important not to tell, yet it is so problematic on various levels that it demands Sacco’s constant metajournalistic framing. The ending may also provide a space for critical self-assessment. In the final chapter of Footnotes, which concludes the story of his investigation (2009, 382–385), Sacco revisits a final witness, Abu Juhish (383). Like the first chapter, which serves as a prologue, “Sea Street” is not separated from the rest of the narrative discourse, and yet in its metanarrative evaluation of the whole project still fulfills the function of an epilogue. The chapter begins in a memoiristic, self-reflexive manner: as they roam the streets and prepare Sacco’s departure to Europe on the next day, the narrator reminisces: “We’re finished with our 1956 story … The historian could keep on digging, but he’s tired now, he wants to get on with his own life, and he knows the reader does, too” (382). Again, Sacco casts himself in the role of “the historian,” this time to acknowledge the limits of his personal endeavor. As they ride down Sea Street where the massacre happened half a century earlier, one last time, Sacco adds, “Abed and I came here to find out what happened on November 12, 1956, and now, arguably, we are the world’s foremost experts” (383). Somberly watching the busy street, he remains absorbed in his thoughts about how they “forced the old men of Rafah back down this road lined with soldiers and strewn with shoes. How often we shoved the old men between the soldiers with sticks through that gate.” By aligning Abed and himself with the perpetrators of the crime, Sacco construes their process of gathering testimony as an act of re-­ traumatization; they alone reap the benefits and have become experts. At this point, he presents his gained expertise, manifested in the narrative discourse, as a poor consolation for the guilt he accumulated in the process.

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In a direct confirmation of this self-revelation, Abu Juhish breaks down crying during the interview, as Sacco narrates, “Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself for losing something along the way as I collected my evidence, disentangled it, dissected it, indexed it, and logged it onto my chart” (2009, 384). The panel depicts Sacco on the right and Abu Juhish on the left, sitting across from and facing each other. Abu Juhish looks down and Sacco frowns, as the narrator’s comment is placed in a text box between them, emphasizing the unavoidable chasm between eyewitness and documentarian. As Birte Wege puts it, “[t]he barrier of words is insurmountable; both figures are experiencing some sense of anguish, but … [i]t seems impossible to do justice to both: the essential pain, and the documenting of why and how it occurred” (2019, 189). Next, the narrative discourse switches back to the taxi ride, where Sacco confesses, “And I remember how often I sat with old men who tried my patience, who rambled on, who got things mixed up, who skipped ahead … how often I sighed and mentally rolled my eyes because I knew more about that day than they did” (385). These are the final words of the narrating-I in the story. On the preceding page, Abu Juhish’s answer as the final spoken words couldn’t be more dissimilar. When asked by his grandson, what the worst thing was that he remembers from that day, he answers: “Fear. Fear.” (384). Sacco’s attempt to logically explain what happened on that day with the historian’s methodological arsenal is contrasted with the affect of the traumatized victim. In the end, Sacco’s desire to provide a “better” account of what happened than the news journalists and other conventional historians is finally reframed by his gesture of admitting defeat—mirrored by the humiliation of his interview partner. This last regular chapter is complemented by another wordless epilogue, distinctly separated from the rest of the narrative by a thick black hyperframe (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4) and presenting a striking contrast to Sacco’s approach in the preceding 385 pages (2009, 386–389). The Sea Street of the present now transforms into the Sea Street of 1956, and the reader is presented with the events of the massacre from a first-person perspective, ostensibly that of Abu Juhish. These pages employ a linear rectangular six-by-two panel grid that presents this one account in a fragmentary and exceedingly dramatized manner. Like Sergei Eisenstein’s famous “Odessa Steps” sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sacco represents the massacre by accumulating fragmented evocative images that each offer momentary glimpses at individual victims and perpetrators, including a metonymical close-up of the feet of one of the fallen. Several

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images adopt Abu Juhish’s perspective from within the crowd, mainly showing heads and upraised hands. In a moment that would be impossible to represent with any means other than fictionalization, the club that hits the witness across the head is shown right before his face. In this manner, the individual witness account of the massacre provides the reader with a sense of what it might have felt like to witness the events from one of the victim’s perspective. However, the epilogue decidedly does not provide a denouement. Even more importantly, the approach of portraying the experience of personal trauma and violence is limited. The last panel on this page and the last page are completely black, simulating the victim’s loss of consciousness. At the same time, Aryn Bartley argues that it “questions the limits of empathic identification” as it “emphasizes a disjunction between the sufferer, who will endure the resonating physical and emotional effects of violence, and the reader, who will not” (2014, 77). But it is not only empathy that is frustrated but knowledge as well. As Hillary Chute points out, this scene drives home the point that Sacco’s attempt to logically understand the fear Abu Juhish feels is bound to fail: “Sacco does not know more than they did, as the effort to understand sensation that concludes the book makes clear; he does not know what cannot be communicated by fact” (2016, 251). As a final statement, this sequence provides a counterapproach that contrasts the immensely thorough archival approach of the preceding volume with a short, affective display of the individual experience of traumatizing violence. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag suggests, “Harrowing photographs … are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us” (2003, 80). This epilogue echoes Sontag’s point; however, while she places her trust in narrative, Sacco demonstrates that almost 400 pages of historical narrative do not much help to truly make sense of the actual experiences of violence that haunt the other (cf. Wege 2019, 190). The epilogue maintains that thoroughness and methodological sophistication cannot make up for the fundamental impasse between the experience of trauma and the attempt to construe a coherent and factual story from it. Still, the frustrated attempt stands as a worthwhile aspiration, and Sacco’s production of particularly haunting end images suggests that these pictures surpass mere historiographical footnotes. Footnotes ends with a non-conclusion, reframing the entire book as a reminder of its limitations. However, despite the retrospective realization of his own failure and

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insensitivity, Sacco’s self-reflexive mode of historical documentary is posited as a means of telling the story, even if it is essentially inconclusive. After all, he did publish the book. Moreover, the succeeding appendices underline the urgency of Sacco’s documentary comics project by juxtaposing it with the rigid and authoritative, but equally inconclusive official documentation. Rolling Blackouts ends on a similar note. Right before returning home, Sarah Glidden represents the rest of the encounter with the Iraqi woman in a Syrian refugee center from the prologue, bringing the story full circle. The reader now learns that the woman was initially more cooperative before she was told by a UNHCR worker that the reporters were American (2016, 285). Afterward, the encounter from the prologue is represented again, now from a wider angle that includes both interlocutors, framing it in a less confrontative manner. In fact, their encounter ends with the woman taking back her initial insult. Now she says, “I like you. I like you. But I hate your government.” Sarah Stuteville agrees, replying, “Understandable” (286). Although the encounter now appears to end amicably, she returns moments later and addresses the reporters more aggressively. At this point, their visibly uncomfortable volunteer translator, Maraj, refuses to pass on her words, but from the woman’s facial expression, the reader may assume that she insults the reporters (see Fig. 5.12). Strikingly, the conversation between Maraj and the woman is left untranslated despite being recorded and represented in Arabic letters within the narrative discourse  (see also Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4).6 Here, two different readings of the same passage are enabled depending on whether the reader understands Arabic. For a prototypical Western reader, the conversation remains incomprehensible, aligning them with the position of Glidden and her friends. Strikingly, readers of Arabic are excluded for this performance of a communicative impasse. This way, Glidden does not entirely omit the woman’s voice, but still represents its unintelligibility to many. Glidden herself comments in discussion with Hillary Chute, “I want you as the reader to kind of identify with the journalist and kind of see what it feels like to be yelled at by an Iraqi woman and to not understand … unless you speak Arabic” (Chute et al. 2016, 29:15). This narrative choice does not only suggest that Glidden wants the reader to share her experience for its own sake. Rather, it points toward a collective guilt of all Western readers as citizens of the nations she frames as the perpetrators in this war. Hence, Glidden inserts her opinion into the story, claiming her readers “deserve” this experience.

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Fig. 5.12  Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly 2016), 287

Like Sacco, Glidden ultimately admits defeat in her attempt to represent “what it was like” for the refugees the group interviews. By presenting untranslated dialogue, she too integrates a representational boundary that the model Western reader cannot traverse. Both readers and reporters must accept the accusations that the woman ostensibly utters without being able to verbally defend themselves. In letting the story cumulate in this encounter, Glidden stages a symbolic concession of the Iraq War’s failure by an American toward an Iraqi. Thus, she ultimately frames the entire conflict as a one-sided transgression shameful to all Americans. Finally, Maraj tells the group that the woman has just one question: “What

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is the benefit of your army coming to Iraq?” Sarah Stuteville answers, “There is none. There is none.” After this answer, they decide that they “should probably go” and thank her for talking to them (2016, 288). This is the final encounter of the trip and presents conclusive framing of the American invasion of Iraq. After this last encounter, the primary narrative concludes with Glidden’s return to the United States. She muses on her privilege: “And just a few hours later I’m … on my way back to a comfortable life in a wealthy city in the wealthy nation that started the war that forced those people to leave their homes” (2016, 289). When her mother asks, “So how as the trip?” upon picking her up at the airport, she does not answer. After months spent questioning other people, the experience of being questioned leaves her speechless, a melancholy look on her face. This moment of her return is followed by the epilogue “Home,” which is set roughly a year later (292). First, Glidden meets Dan again and asks for his reflections about the trip and his life since, especially concerning the article that Sarah Stuteville wrote about him. Dan works at a bar now, “a place where you gotta keep it light.” He does not seem to have found a way to narratively process his experiences; rather, he states, “trying to sum up people’s poverty and despair while keeping it light is impossible. The sad stories, I just keep them to myself” (293). Glidden echoes this sense of disillusionment; still, she ultimately maintains storytelling’s value, as the book’s publication too can attest. The next part of the epilogue is devoted to the recent beginning of the Syrian civil war. Glidden feels disheartened: “The Iraqi refugees we met in overwhelming numbers will soon be eclipsed by their former hosts” (2016, 295). She returns to her initial question: “What is journalism?” However, now she specifically wonders what the point of journalism is (296). While she outlines some publications that stem from the trip, including her own “The Waiting Room” (2011), she confesses that she “was pushed along by the fantasy that [she] was going to make a difference through [her] work” (2016, 297). After this last metanarrative confession, the final page depicts a conversation with Sarah Stuteville, who concludes that it is not the work of journalists to actively facilitate change, but rather to tell stories that they deem important: “The best we can hope for is that the story gets passed along. The way the reader uses that story to understand the world is up to them.” Thus, the story’s final words actively implore the reader to reflect upon their meaning-making process and how it will translate into changed behaviors in the actual world. As the

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concluding point of the epilogue, Glidden’s memoiristic account of her life after the reportage and her reflections on journalism finally turn to a gesture toward the reader to draw their own conclusions for their actions and behavior. All of the discussed epilogues adopt a memoiristic mode, highlighting the position of the authoring character and their motivations and emotions concerning their stories. At the same time, they serve as a final portrait of the primary witnesses. This way, epilogues underline not only the personal connection between author and witnesses, but also their fundamental disconnect. Like the reader, the author finally moves on with their life, while the lives of the people they document will continue to be shaped by the crisis. Acknowledging this fact is a self-reflexive ethical gesture, and it also stresses the moral obligation of the reader and society at large. At the same time, in the face of their expressed moral criticism of mainstream journalism, the authors do not omit that they too remain involved for a limited amount of time only.

Notes 1. As the exception to this rule, abstract and collage-oriented works such as Ting Chak’s Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2017) do not contain identifiable characters or narrative progression. 2. Herman employs the term “people” to refer to “embodied human or human-like individuals invested with felt, conscious awareness of the situations and events recounted in the narrative” (2009, 195). 3. While some authors argue that “story-telling may in many cases prove a more effective way to influence attitudes and behaviors than conventional persuasive efforts” (Slater 2002, 157), empirical research on the effectiveness of narrative messages versus nonnarrative elaborations of an argument does not point toward the superiority of either approach (Bilandzic and Busselle 2013, 202–203; see also Tseng and Altenberg 2019). 4. Multi-authored works complicate this assessment and demand further consideration. Even in the single-author works that this study investigates, it remains debatable whether the character corresponding to the author is also the protagonist of the story, as Genette’s definition requires (1983, 245). However, even though a story may prioritize the accounts of other characters, the represented experiences of the authors provide the narrative ‘backbone’ of these stories, constituting the central conduit through which the represented events are understood.

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5. Hoefer refers to the webcomic; the printed prologue is complemented by the “Hurricane Katrina” paratext (2010, n.p.; see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.4). 6. Translated into English, the dialogue reads as follows: the woman first says, “Once we travel to … America,” to which the translator interjects, “Don’t be upset with ….” The woman continues, “Tell her that when your army entered our country, we had to flee and become destitute. All I want to know is, what did you people get out of this? What did you get out of this? I just want to understand. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, then walk away.” At his point, Sarah Stuteville asks the translator whether the woman is talking about the war, which she confirms. The woman insists, “A question from an Iraqi to an American: Your army and your government destroyed our country, but what did you get out of it?” The translator then tells her, “I understand why you’re upset, but she has nothing to do with it. When has [the American government] ever considered the opinion of citizens?” She then poses the questions to the American journalists and tells the woman Sarah Stuteville’s response: “They did not benefit from it.” I am grateful to Haya Alfarhan for translating these pages of the text and to Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind in whose edited collection Documenting Trauma this translation first appeared (see Schmid 2020).

References Acheson, Charles. 2015. Expanding the Role of the Gutter in Nonfiction Comics: Forged Memories in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde. Studies in the Novel 47 (3, Fall): 291–307. Ahrens, Jörn. 2019. Joe Sacco and the Quest for Documentation in Comics. In Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism, ed. Laura Schlichting and Johannes C.P. Schmid, Special Issue of ImageTexT 11 (1). Appel, Markus, and Tobias Richter. 2010. Transportation and Need for Affect in Narrative Persuasion: A Mediated Moderation Model. Media Psychology 13 (2): 101–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213261003799847. Bal, Mieke. 2017. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 4th ed. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. Bartley, Aryn. 2008. The Hateful Self: Substitution and the Ethics of Representing War. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 54 (1, Spring): 50–71. ———. 2014. Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. In Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, 67–82. London: Bloomsbury. Bilandzic, Helga, and Rick Busselle. 2013. Narrative Persuasion. In The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion: Developments in Theory and Practice, ed. James Price Dillard and Lijiang Shen, 200–219. Los Angeles et al.: SAGE.

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Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Brown, Hillary. 2017. Cartoonist Guy Delisle on Crafting His Masterwork of Captivity and Freedom, Hostage. Interview with Guy Delisle. Paste Magazine, May 2. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/05/cartoonist-­guy-­ delisle-­on-­learning-­to-­empathize-­wi.html. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Carlson, Matt. 2016. Metajournalistic Discourses and the Meanings of Journalism: Definitional Control, Boundary Work, and Legitimation. Communication Theory 26: 349–368. CBS This Morning. 2015. John Oliver: I’m Not a Journalist. Interview with John Oliver. YouTube, October 30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lFoyDOi -­Ww&t=137s. Chak, Tings. 2017. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention. Ottawa: Ad Astra Comix. Chute, Hillary L. 2016. Disaster Drawn. Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chute, Hillary L., Alexander Danner, and Sarah Glidden. 2016. Panel Discussion on Graphic Nonfiction. C-SPAN, October 15. https://www.c-­span.org/ video/?416423-­3/panel-­discussion-­graphic-­nonfiction. Cooke, Rachel. 2012. Guy Delisle: ‘The challenge is not to explain too much.’ Interview with Guy Delisle. The Guardian, May 31. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/31/guy-­delisle-­jerusalem-­review-­interview. Davies, Dominic. 2019. Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism, Tourism Gentrification and the Affect Economy in Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2009). Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. https://doi. org/10.1080/21504857.2019.1575256. Declercq, Dieter. 2019. Drawing Truth Differently: Matt Bors’ Fictional Satire and Non-Fictional Journalism. In Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism, ed. Laura Schlichting and Johannes C.P.  Schmid, Special Issue of ImageTexT 11 (1). Delisle, Guy. 2015. Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Translated by Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Doležel, Lubomír. 1980. Truth and Authenticity in Narrative. Poetics Today 1 (3, Spring): 7–25. Eisenstein, Sergei, dir. 1925. Battleship Potemkin. Mosfilm. Fine, Cordelia. 2006. A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives. New York: Norton. Frow, John. 1982. The Literary Frame. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 16 (2): 25–30. ———. 2006. Genre. London and New York: Routledge.

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Genette, Gérard. 1983. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1993. Fiction & Diction. Translated by Catharine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven and London: Westview. Gilbert, Daniel T., Romin W. Tafarodi, and Patrick S. Malone. 1993. You Can’t Not Believe Everything That You Reed. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (2): 221–233. Glidden, Sarah. 2011. The Waiting Room. Cartoon Movement, April 13. http:// www.cartoonmovement.com/comic/10. ———. 2016. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin University Books. Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock. 2000. The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (5): 701–721. Groth, Gary. 2011. Joe Sacco, Frontline Journalist. Interview with Joe Sacco. In Safe Area Goražde: Special Edition, authored by Joe Sacco, 231–254. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA et  al.: Wiley-Blackwell. Hoefer, Anthony Dyer. 2012. A Revision of the Record: The Demands of Reading Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. In Comics and the American South, ed. Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted, 293–323. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2003. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts. New York and London: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1990. Marginality as a Site of Resistance. In Out There. Marginalizations and Contemporary Culture, ed. Russel Ferguson et al., 341–344. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Hühn, Peter. 1987. The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 33 (3, Autumn): 451–466. Kilby, Allaina. 2018. Provoking the Citizen: Re-Examining the Role of TV Satire in the Trump Era. Journalism Studies 19 (13): 1934–1944. Kuhn, Markus, and Andreas Veits. 2015. Narrative Mediation in Comics: Narratives Instances and Narrative Levels in Paul Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes. In Author and Narrator. Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate, ed. Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe, 235–261. Berlin, München and Boston: De Gruyter. Kukkonen, Karin. 2013. Contemporary Comics Storytelling. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

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LaCapra, Dominick. 2014. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Maher, Brigid. 2015. Graphic Representation of Language, Translation, and Culture in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism. In The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, ed. Daniel Worden, 222–238. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: William Morrow. Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics. Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mikkonen, Kai. 2013. Subjectivity and Style in Graphic Narrative. In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, 101–126. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: The University Press of Chicago. Nelles, William. 2008. Embedding. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 134–135. London and New York: Routledge. Neufeld, Josh. 2007–2008. A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Smith Magazine. http://www.smithmag.net/afterthedeluge/. ———. 2010. A. D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Paperback. New York: Pantheon. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nünning, Ansgar. 2008. Metanarrative Comment. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 304–305. London: Routledge. Oatley, Keith. 2002. Emotion and the Story Worlds of Fiction. In Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C.  Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock, 39–70. Mahwah, NJ, and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thompson. 1998. Introduction. In The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson. London and New  York: Routledge. Peters, John Durham. 2009. Witnessing. In Media Witnessing. Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, ed. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski, 23–41. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Polichak, James W., and Richard R. Gerrig. 2002. ‘Get up and Win!’ Participatory Responses to Narrative. In Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations,

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ed. Melanie C.  Green, Jeffrey J.  Strange, and Timothy C.  Brock, 71–96. Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton. Reinerth, Maike S., and Jan Noël Thon. 2017. Introduction: Subjectivity across Media. In Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives, ed. Maike S. Reinerth and Jan Noël Thon, 1–25. New York and London: Routledge. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014. Story/World/Media: Tuning the Instruments of Media-Conscious Narratology. In Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 25–49. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Sacco, Joe. 2004. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Paperback. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2007. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2009. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan. ———. 2020. Paying the Land. New York: Metropolitan. Scherr, Rebecca. 2015. Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. Textual Practice 29 (1): 111–132. Schmid, Johannes C.P. 2020. Comics as Memoir and Documentary: A Case Study of Sarah Glidden. In Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage, ed. Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 317–333. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shay, Maureen. 2014. Framing Refugee Time: Perpetuated Regression in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50 (2): 202–215. Slater, Michael D. 2002. Entertainment Education and the Persuasive Impact of Narrative. In Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock, 157–182. Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London et al.: Penguin. Thon, Jan-Noël. 2013. Who’s Telling the Tale? Authors and Narrators in Graphic Narrative. In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, 67–100. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2016. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Typology of Detective Fiction. In Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard, 42–52. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

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CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Redrawing Boundaries in the Digital Age

In his guide to framing in political debates, linguist George Lakoff stresses that in order to win over public opinion and change the way people think, political discourses must be reframed: “Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently” (2014, xiii). Documentary comics formulates a new visual language that challenges mainstream reporting and political hegemonies. The works discussed in this study reframe the respective crises through oral history counternarratives, creating a visual documentation of perspectives conventionally barred from public discourse—be they Palestinians, Iraqi refugees, or marginalized groups within the United States. However, documentary graphic narratives specifically draw attention to the act of framing itself. Making transparent underlying processes of mediation, comics challenges both conventional documentary media and particularly new digital media premised on the constant immersive flow of information. Documentary graphic narrative produces a pronounced distancing effect, inviting readers to reflect upon the medial practices of framing. In a 1936 essay, Bertolt Brecht stresses that using techniques of “alienation” serves to “underline the historical nature of a given social condition.” In the new digital era defined by rapid technological upheavals, the social project of Brecht’s media theory is as relevant as ever. He demands, “In bringing forward new artistic principles and in working out new methods of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5_6

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presentation we must proceed from the imperative demands of an age of transition” (1961, 136). In their capacity to break conventionalized frames, documentary graphic narratives connect to this tradition of critical artforms, employing alienation to point to the larger historical chains of causation. They form a much-needed counterapproach to the culturally dominant forms of factual representation in this current age of transition. The point of departure for this study has been the fact that the documentary graphic narrative book stands out as a pointedly non-digital form of knowledge production in the digital age—an era particularly shaped by skepticism toward documentary forms. In their approach to meeting this challenge, documentary graphic narratives differ strikingly from other new, innately digital phenomena. Forms of digital knowledge production are shaped by audience participation and continuous updating, while the hypertextuality of websites offers links to other sources and enables cross-­ checking with a wide variety of sources. Digital texts offer the possibility of constant modification, which entails a certain imperative to constantly keep the provided information up to date—now standard practice for online news media. In a moment in time that is increasingly characterized by the boundlessness and fluidity, and by the anonymity of digital information technologies, documentary graphic narratives take a strikingly different approach. The documentary graphic narrative book exhibits a striking material permanence and restraint, establishing its claim to represent actuality through the integrity of a single author. Even though paratexts show changes with editions and provide spaces for the author to react to evolving situations, graphic narratives materialize documentary as enduring accounts of historical actuality. Therefore, documentary comics involves not only the risk of representation, as Hillary Chute suggests, but specifically the risk of lasting, stable representation. The tenuous process of drawing comics resists the fluidity of digital media even more than verbal literature. In contrast to an online news item which can be altered continuously, the graphic narrative remains materialized, even when a newer edition is published. One may argue that documentary comics therefore constitutes a reactionary phenomenon, born of a mindset stuck in the pre-digital past. Does documentary comics’ insistence on material boundedness and subjectivized limitation cater to a Luddite’s desire for simplification in a world becoming increasingly hard to keep pace with? Certainly, a sense of nostalgia being tied comics in general cannot be disputed; however, such a

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sentiment does not encompass comics as a documentary form. As the selected authors’ involvement in digital projects underlines, they are not motivated by an anti-modern stance. Rather, the documentary graphic narrative book can be understood as a counterproject to the neoliberal ideology of constant competition-driven development that shapes the digital information society, and which suggests that the truth of a matter can be pinned down through ever-increasing effort. Instead, the documentary graphic narrative book emphasizes the transparent acknowledgment of its limitations—and which characterize all medial representations, though they are commonly concealed. To this end, the “slowness” of the medium becomes an asset. In contrast to news journalism, documentary comics does not report the “here and now,” but, by definition, historical actuality. Rather than informing the reader of current events as they develop, documentary graphic narratives reframe conflicts commonly presumed to be well known and also what it means to report them. As bona fide slow journalism, the documentary graphic narrative book serves the larger project of deconstructing the framings perpetuated by government institutions and the corporate media concerning a particular conflict. Even though conventional news media have productively integrated graphic reports, comics does not operate as a substitute or even replacement of conventional news media—if only for the purely practical reason of its drawn-out production cycle. Instead, documentary comics provides a metajournalistic corrective, challenging the reader to reflect upon the practices and ethics of mainstream news media. This approach is most clearly reflected in the thematic scope of Joe Sacco’s The Fixer (2004) and Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts (2016), but also in the explicit comments on journalism and the telling of concrete counternarratives to the cultural mainstream that all of the works engage in. Independence from news value not only allows for complex metajournalistic reflections, but also enables the author to aspire to a deeper understanding of crises and conflicts—and how people experience them. Sarah Glidden explicitly states that her intent for Rolling Blackouts was not to uncover any new facts about the Iraq War, but rather “to understand human beings” (Chute et al. 2016, 37:00). All of the selected works are based on the author’s personal and in-depth encounters with others. A key aspect of this is the generation and eventual frustration of relatability between the reader and the encountered individuals. However, the transnational scope of the documentary graphic narrative book as a particularly American phenomenon is very much predisposed toward assigning the

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position of documentarian authorship to Americans and that of the documented subject to the non-American other.1 Even though this essential dynamic remains, several strategies have been identified through which the selected authors seek to alleviate this imbalance and to humanize and empower their subjects. Often, this involves the generation of empathy: in A.D.  (2010), the fourth wall is broken multiple times and the reader is urged to help. In the works of Sacco and Glidden, the reader constantly faces the interview partners, looking them “in the eye.” However, in their own ways, the respective works clearly demarcate the proposed disconnect between the experiences of the reader—often channeled through experience of the author as a substitute—and the interview partners they encounter. For instance, Guy Delisle emphasizes the limitations of his own capacity to empathize through his minimalistic cartoon style. Joe Sacco ultimately drives home the limits of his documentary work by ending Footnotes in Gaza (2009) by first conceding the inadequacy to do justice to his subjects, and second by contrasting his meticulous investigation spanning almost 400 pages with the subjective and fragmentary four-page epilogue. Indeed, the eventual overarching conclusion of the selected works appears to be what the abstract, subjective, and fragmentary form of comics already suggests: no definite conclusion can be drawn, and yet, addressing the fact-finding process is a worthy end in itself. A mode of representation that inherently involves the exhibition of ambiguities and inconsistencies is perhaps the only way to do justice to the complicated scenarios that these works document. Nevertheless, documentary comics insists on presenting individual and subjective accounts, not to learn the one “objective truth,” but, rather, to document human response to conflicts and crises. Even in cases in which the reliability of a witness is dubious—most strikingly, Neven in Sacco’s The Fixer—comics offers a variety of visual and narrative devices to frame the particular story in a manner that allows the author to represent accounts while coincidentally problematizing them. Through its medial form, documentary comics invites both skepticism and readerly identification with the represented characters. To contrast this identification, the authors go to great lengths in framing their encounters with qualifications and evaluations and making transparent this framing process. Besides the majority of witnesses presented as sincere, this dynamic enables the authors to also include ethically dubious or simply unreliable witnesses. Comics

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provides a way to stage these medial encounters, urging the reader to confront the horrors of war and its aftermaths. Inviting and then frustrating empathy along with presenting witness accounts and problematizing them constitutes a principal strategy of documentary comics. The resistance to conclusive interpretation not only draws attention to framing processes but also generates a prolonged readerly involvement. The moral imperative of documentary translates into representational strategies that do not merely evoke temporary affect in the reader but demand constant attention and reevaluation. This way, a state of cognitive unease is generated, to invert a central concept by Daniel Kahneman (2012; see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.1). This way, documentary graphic narratives coerce the reader to confront unpleasant realities—both in terms of actual events in the world and in terms of the all-too-human tendency to rely on internalized cognitive frames. All of the discussed works frame their respective approaches to documentary and their evaluation of the represented crises in their own ways, yet prominent strategies of the genre emerge. First of all, this concerns the framing of the respective works in terms of their documentary approach. Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts and Joe Sacco’s The Fixer prominently frame their stories in an explicitly metajournalistic manner. In these works, both authors explore and detail the larger journalistic information gathering process, taking it as the point of departure to document the respective conflicts. This framing is present in all of Sacco’s work, prominently serving to critique corporate news journalism—especially its simplifications and superficiality while coincidentally insisting on reporting the objective truth. In Safe Area Goražde (2007) and Footnotes, Sacco particularly emphasizes his intent to reframe the prevalent narratives surrounding the Balkan War and the conflict between Israel and Palestine, respectively. The Fixer, in turn, blends the metajournalistic approach with a memoiristic account of his own research, offering Sacco’s personal experiences as a journalist as an example for exploring its larger mechanism—an approach later adopted and extended by Glidden. This type of memoiristic framing is especially pronounced in Jerusalem  (2015): Guy Delisle makes clear that he is neither bound to the ethics nor to the economic motivations of professional journalists. However, similar to Sacco’s approach in The Fixer, Delisle uses his own experiences in Israel as a conduit to document the underlying conflict that has shaped the region. Even though the insistence on memoir emphasizes the subjectivity of the account, restricting journalistic accountability, this framing nevertheless allows the authors to make a show of their honesty.

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The author’s autobiographical presence as the protagonist of the framing narrative makes transparent subjective evaluations and authorial choices, authenticating the reportage and educating the reader. The author’s own humanity—their flaws, sympathies, and opinions—constitutes the central conduit through which the represented events are filtered. With predominantly single-authored works, documentary comics is fundamentally premised upon framing reportage as the subjective effort of an individual. This framing capacity is central to the authentication strategies of documentary comics: in contrast to the “collective intelligence” ascribed to digital communities that share their accounts for fact-finding purposes, documentary graphic narratives rely pointedly on the journalistic expertise and artistic proficiency of the documentarian. Importantly, framing documentary through this autobiographical lens presents the authoring character as a surrogate for the reader, inviting identification with their experience of the foreign environment. This way, the author can appeal to the reader’s sense of empathy—both toward their own experience and, more importantly, in their encounters with cultural others. In substituting their own experience in these encounters, the autobiographical framing also points toward the limits of empathy and the capacity of Westerners to relate to the experience of others. This way, autobiography serves as a framing strategy for documentary in the studied works, rather than being an end in itself. In contrast to the other works, Josh Neufeld minimizes the autobiographical aspect in the narrative of A.D., relegating it to epilogues and paratexts, instead. Presenting the story chronologically and without metanarrative interruptions, Neufeld focuses on the witnesses whose experiences he documents. Without using the narrative defamiliarization strategies that so prominently characterize the other works, Neufeld presents the story of Katrina’s aftermath coherently in the mode of a novel. Instead of representing otherness, Neufeld stages a relatable American experience, stressing the self-reliance and resilience of his characters in the face of catastrophe. Therefore, A.D. does not problematize the reliability of its witnesses but rather the ways they have been framed by the media. Both through his visual approach and through the choice of characters, Josh Neufeld pointedly reframes Hurricane Katrina. While this natural disaster is presented as global and inevitable, the true catastrophe is government inaction and incompetence. Neufeld shifts the blame away from the supposed “thugs” and “looters” who dominated news media reports and onto the failing relief efforts. A critique of the U.S. government and

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their response to the respective crises is shared by the other authors as well. In Rolling Blackouts, Sarah Glidden, too, shifts the blame away from the refugees such as Sam Malkandi, depicting them as unjustly victimized individuals, and onto official state-level and larger social structures. Effectively, Glidden reframes the refugee crisis as a direct consequence of the Iraq War started by the United States, which she emphatically presents as both failed and unjust. Likewise, Joe Sacco criticizes the United States’ response to  both the war in Bosnia and the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which Sacco frames as unjust in themselves. Through his choice of witnesses and explicit statements, Sacco frames the war in Bosnia as a scenario in which the West failed its humanitarian responsibilities to aid the Bosnian population against the Serbian aggressors’ unjust onslaught. He makes a point of including opposing or contradictory accounts, an approach similar to that of Footnotes. It is Israeli aggression and repression that dominate his documentation The conclusion of his foreword is emblematic; referring to a senior Hamas official’s statement quoted earlier, Sacco suggests that his story is “instructive to those who want to understand why and how … hatred was ‘planted’ in hearts” (2009, xi). Sacco assigns a passive role in the conflict to the Palestinians and an active one to the Israelis—a framing that, notwithstanding his continuous efforts to qualify and problematize his own historical argument, persists throughout the work. Guy Delisle, in contrast, only tentatively evaluates the conflict, commenting only sparingly. Taking a more distant approach, Delisle too frames the conflict as a tale of Palestinian victimhood and Israeli perpetratorship, stressing Israeli repression in both his own experiences and in the accounts he includes. In their documentary approaches, the selected authors all reframe the represented conflicts, taking the side of the socially and politically marginalized. This process of (re)framing is essentially twofold: the authors create counternarratives based on their own personal experiences and on the accounts of the encountered witnesses, stressing the toll that larger political conflicts have on the individual lives affected. Coincidentally, the graphic narrative exposes the framing mechanisms that underlie all reportage. A certain tension arises from these two aspects of framing that define documentary comics. Urging to the reader to reconsider their assessments of crises—or to care about foreign conflicts in the first place—demands narrative persuasion. Exposing how all forms of reportage implicitly frame and let the reader unconsciously evaluate the represented conflicts invites skepticism. However, the authors harness the generated skepticism to

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reframe conventionalized cultural narratives and authenticate their contrasting oral history accounts through conscientious disclosure of their personal opinions and medial limitations. The unique feat of documentary comics is their capacity to unravel and yet patently employ framing practices to challenge the political status quo and medial conventions that perpetuate it. This highly complex approach is diametrically opposed to mainstream journalism’s task to report relevant current events as concise and easily comprehensible. Journalistic framing essentially categorizes reported events already in the way they are transmitted, with no further explanation needed. It is perhaps ironic that of all media it is comics with its rigid visual frames that as a documentary form frustrates the desire of clear categorization to such a considerable degree. Producing news to be consumed as part of everyday life demands simplification, reducing the complexity of current events to communicate them in short segments. Although reduction is a necessary aspect of reportage, mainstream news outlets commonly purport to cover all critical issues, preselecting which events are newsworthy. Frustrating conventional practices of reception, documentary graphic narratives exhibit the complexity of crises and conflicts beyond conventional news frames, serving as an important reminder that medial simplification does not equal historical simplicity. The achievement of documentary comics is not so much its practice of drawing boundaries but drawing attention to boundaries. In other words, the defining characteristic of documentary comics and its most significant contribution to a broader media environment is its simultaneous exhibition and address of framing practices.

Note 1. Josh Neufeld’s A.D. poses the obvious exception here, as it deals with a domestic catastrophe. However, the fact remains that Neufeld, a White man, sought to represent the experiences of cultural others, especially Denise, a Black woman.

References Brecht, Bertold. 1961. On Chinese Acting. Translated by Eric Bentley. The Tulane Drama Review 6 (1, Sep.): 130–136.

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Chute, Hillary L., Alexander Danner, and Sarah Glidden. 2016. Panel Discussion on Graphic Nonfiction. C-SPAN, October 15. https://www.c-­span.org/ video/?416423-­3/panel-­discussion-­graphic-­nonfiction. Delisle, Guy. 2015. Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Translated by Helge Drescher. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Glidden, Sarah. 2016. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Kahneman, Daniel. 2012. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin. Lakoff, George. 2014. The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction: Chelsea Green. Neufeld, Josh. 2010. A.  D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Paperback. New York: Pantheon. Sacco, Joe. 2004. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Paperback. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2007. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ———. 2009. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan.

Index1

A Acheson, Charles, 179, 192, 236 Action film, 252 A.D., 11, 221, 245, 280 afterword, 101, 105, 167 biblical framing, 76, 218 Denise, 150, 188, 246, 260, 282n1 epilogue, 260 Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, 138, 167, 188, 247 metanarrative comments, 260 prologue, 218 title, 76 visual reframing, 167 webcomic, 14, 175, 218 Adams, Jeff, 8, 23n5, 47, 50 Affect, 141, 162, 234, 263, 279 Architecture, 132, 135, 138, 139 Art, 129

Authentication, 20, 107, 184, 223, 280 conscientious authentication, 2, 16, 57, 98, 103, 111, 129, 225, 226, 230, 236, 258, 282 ironic authentication, 57 Author, 8, 55, 220 as character, 151, 204, 206, 280 multiple authors, 268n4 Authorship, 280 Autobiography, 55, 206, 228, 229 B Bal, Mieke, 5, 37, 39, 202 Bateson, Gregory, 34, 68 Bayeux Tapestry, 9 Behavioral economics, 4 Berlatsky, Eric, 38, 69, 70

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63303-5

285

286 

INDEX

Blackness, 190, 246, 248, 282n1 Book, graphic narrative, 2, 15, 23n8, 42, 208 editions, 70, 81, 276 interface, 49 market, 8, 49, 89 materiality, 48, 276 Bors, Matt, 127 Borsuk, Amaranth, 49, 67 Bosnian War, 111, 135, 194, 254, 281 Branigan, Edward, 37, 42, 202, 245 Brecht, Bertolt, 36, 275 Brexit, 17 Brueghel, Pieter, 129, 173 Bruzzi, Stella, 42, 46 Bumf Vol. 1, 16 Burma Chronicles, 85 Bush, George H. W., 17 Bush, George W., 18 Butler, Judith, 36, 42, 124 C Camera, 9, 15, 44, 72, 86 Cartooning, 8, 13, 49, 56, 130, 135, 141, 143–145, 225, 278 Cartoon Movement, 14 Cartoons, editorial, 10 Christianity, 77 Chute, Hillary, 7, 11, 22n1, 23n2, 23n8, 31, 48, 51–53, 57, 86, 88, 124, 127, 140, 141, 158, 265 on The Fixer, 81, 85, 135, 261 on Footnotes in Gaza, 180, 226, 264 on framing, 33 risk of representation, 244, 276 on Safe Area Goražde, 159 Clinton, Bill, 144 Closure, 13, 203 Cognitive ease, 6, 279 Cognitive science, 5 Cohn, Neil, 13, 56, 124, 127, 151, 195n1

Colbert, Stephen, 18 Colonialism, 74, 188, 212, 226 Color, 77, 139, 219, 221, 249 Comics, 7 co-presence, 125, 127 as language, 124, 275 spatiality, 124, 126 tension, 125, 129 Comics, educational, 8 Comics journalism, 8, 12 Comics, true crime, 23n4 Comments metajournalistic, 223 metanarrative, 222 Corner, John, 42, 45, 47 Crises, representation of, 7, 10, 14, 32, 48, 52, 72, 73, 96, 106, 173, 204, 216, 244, 248, 268, 275, 277 D Davies, Davies, 190 Davies, Dominic, 168, 246, 247, 260 Delisle, Guy, 11, 91, 93 paratexts, 66 self-conception, 129, 149, 228 self-depiction, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 54, 69 Destructive sublime, 81, 173 Digital culture, 15, 16, 45, 275 Direct address, 143, 144, 180 The Disasters of War, 9 Doctors without Borders, 145, 169, 228 Docudrama, 50, 52, 245 Documentary, 7, 10, 12, 31, 41, 42, 58, 206, 229 documentary pact, 55 indexicality, 43 post-documentary, 45, 46 technology, 42, 43, 45, 48 tension, 32, 42, 91

 INDEX 

Documentary comics, 7, 10, 11, 47, 51, 277 framing, 282 history of, 7–15 and journalism, 233 and photographs, 157, 158 precursors of, 9 tension, 14, 281 Documentary film, 43, 50, 158, 235, 245 reenactment, 50 Drawing, 15, 51, 56, 57, 128, 136 E eBooks, 23n8 El Refaie, Elisabeth, 55, 130 Eisner, Will, 3, 141, 151, 156, 158, 174 Emotions, 58, 143, 205 Empathy, 146, 205, 215, 223, 278 frustration of, 215, 242 Encounters, 10, 100, 234 Entman, Robert M., 5, 35, 131 Epilogues, 259 reframing, 262 Ethics, 16, 99, 101, 103, 151, 159, 194, 217, 220, 230, 232, 277 Etter, Lukas, 56, 127, 130 Evidence, 18, 31, 42, 53, 125 mechanical, 42 F Fact and fiction, 7, 50, 88, 171, 245 Facts, 6, 16, 18 constructedness of, 17, 19 fact-finding process, 20 qualifications of, 110 Fake news, 18 Fiction, 7, 32, 37, 39, 42, 50, 52, 59n4, 88, 161, 204, 208, 220, 245, 252

Fictionalization, 52, 245 Fillmore, Charles J., 34, 39 Film, 13 Film noir, 171, 209, 214 The Fixer, 11, 71, 161, 202, 221 critique of journalism, 232 epilogues, 261 journalism, 95 Neven, 85, 161, 170, 183, 191, 213, 232, 238, 252, 261 prologues, 212 warlords, 144, 194 The Fixer and Other Stories, 72, 75, 117 cover, 78, 81, 85 Focalization, 206, 250 Footnotes, 76, 193, 254 Footnotes in Gaza, 11, 53, 172 Abed, 173, 224, 225 Abu Juhish, 263 appendices, 114 contradictory accounts, 256 critique of journalism, 231 epilogue, 86, 180, 263, 278 Faris Barbakh, 182 fedayee, 143, 144, 171, 236 final chapter, 262 first chapter, 216 foreword, 103, 104, 106 interviews, 169 Israeli border, 221 Khaled, 144, 171, 180 Khamis, 238 metajournalistic comments, 224 Nasrah Felfel, 162 paratexts, 66 past and present, 171, 179, 203 title, 76 Foucault, Michel, 18, 56, 69 Frames, 5, 32, 33 breaking of, 36 cognitive, 1, 34, 123, 202, 203, 205, 279

287

288 

INDEX

Frames (cont.) comics as methaphor, 38 graphic narrative, 123 in journalism, 35 material, 35 narrative, 203 overflow of, 35 painting, 68 textual, 38 visual, 123, 282 Frame Theory, 5, 34 Framing, 2, 3, 14, 33, 35, 36, 131, 281 autobiographical, 93, 100, 212, 279, 280 autodiegetic, 221 comics, 33 effects, 6, 36 instructional books, 4 metajournalistic, 212, 235 narrative framing, 201 political, 19, 275 visual, 123 Framing narratives, 38, 204, 280 Framings, 38, 39, 123 Framings, textual, 67 Frow, John, 40, 41, 67, 207 Fun Home, 119n12 G Gardner, Jared, 51, 56 Gatekeeping, 16, 236 Genette, Gérard, 21, 65, 67, 71, 73, 97, 99, 104, 110, 206, 245 Genre, 40, 41, 230 Gitlin, Todd, 16, 35 Glidden, Sarah, 11, 58n1, 102, 129, 265 Goffman, Erving, 34, 39, 40, 67, 68, 100, 234 Goya, Francisco, 9, 129

Graphiation, 56, 194 Graphic memoir, 119n12 Graphic narrative, 13 Grierson, John, 42, 46, 47 Groensteen, Thierry, 3, 123, 125, 156, 157, 169, 174, 193 Gutter, 2, 38, 52, 123, 126, 175, 179, 182 Guy Delisle, 74 H Hatfield, Charles, 7, 8, 57, 70, 125, 129 Herman, David, 39, 52, 201 Hill, Gord, 10 Historiography, 37 Hoefer, Anthony Dyer, 138, 150, 167, 190 hooks, bell, 212 Human Rights Watch, 114, 194 Hurricane Katrina, 15, 76, 90, 105, 167, 218, 245, 280 reframing of, 168 Hyperframe, 174 I Interviews, 234, 278 counterquestions, 242 framing of, 238 in ’t Veld, Laurike, 66, 140, 143, 160, 204 Iraq, invasion of, 243, 277 framing of, 244, 265 Irony, 150, 225 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 111, 115, 132, 137, 144, 148, 162, 173, 185, 191, 207, 217, 221, 231, 236, 256 framing of, 106, 281 Rachel Corrie, 232

 INDEX 

J Jerusalem, 11, 148, 165 first chapter, 191 interviews, 169 Israeli border, 137, 165, 221 Jewish settlers, 154, 208 metajournalistic comments, 228 Nabila, 146, 153, 242 narrative framing, 207 sketches, 111, 136 Wailing Wall, 137, 175 Joe Sacco, 251 Journalism, 12, 16, 95, 146, 224, 229, 282 citizen journalism, 46, 230 critique of, 216, 279 K Kahneman, Daniel, 4, 5, 279 Knowledge, 5, 19, 39, 80 genre, 40 Kobane Calling, 148 Kress, Gunther, 33, 44, 68, 78, 80, 130, 143, 157, 158, 169 Kukkonen, Karin, 39, 40, 201 L LaCapra, Dominick, 53, 76, 234 Lakoff, George, 4–6, 19, 34, 275 Landscape, 132 Latour, Bruno, 18, 19 Lefèvre, Pascal, 128, 131, 157 Lejeune, Philippe, 55, 67 Libraries, 87, 88 Ligne claire, 129, 176 M Marketing, 88 Maus, 8, 11, 75, 88, 91, 119n12, 148

289

McCloud, Scott, 13, 23n2, 123, 126, 130, 141, 175, 176, 186, 188, 203 Meaning-making, 2, 34, 35 Mediatedness, 14, 46, 51, 57, 138 Medium, 40 Memoir, graphic, 8 Memory culture, 137 Metajournalism, 277, 279 Metaphor, 69, 73, 74, 76, 91, 92, 106, 213, 214 visual, 216 Metapicture, 86, 149, 229 Mickwitz, Nina, 10, 11, 16, 23n6, 47, 49, 51, 129, 133, 159, 234, 247 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 44 Mise-en-scène, 140 Multiframe, 3, 125 N Narrative, 2, 36, 201 cognition, 202 cognitive frames, 203 embedded narratives, 129 frames of reference, 39 narrative discourse, 202 nonfiction, 37 participatory comprehension, 234 principle of minimal departure, 203 Narrative schemata, 96 adventure story, 92–94 detective story, 96, 204, 213 reportage, 96 Narratives, embedded, 248 anticipatory framing, 249 Narrator autodiegetic, 206, 220 Naturalism, 47, 157 absence of style, 131 for emphasis, 149 photographic, 130 unmediated gaze, 158

290 

INDEX

Neoliberalism, 277 Neufeld, Josh, 11, 14, 57, 105 New Journalism, 50, 75, 78 News, 3, 11, 12, 18, 217, 277, 282 Nichols, Bill, 10, 31, 42, 47, 234 9/11, 7, 18, 81 Nonfiction, 2, 7, 37, 39, 41, 50, 67, 88, 102, 130, 193, 201, 220, 245 O Obama, Barack, 16 Objectivity, 20, 44, 46, 51, 95, 102 Oliver, John, 229 Oppression, 53 Oral history, 52, 233 Orvell, Miles, 81, 173 Otherness, 278, 280 P Page, 125, 174 co-presence, 169 double-page spread, 174 frame regularity, 176 overflow, 126 Page margin, 193 Painting, 9 Palestine, 9, 11, 101 Panel, 128, 156 absence of borders, 172, 188 composition, 157, 158 expressive function, 156 intra-panel framing, 169 meta-panel, 81 perspective, 157, 158 regularity, 156 speech balloons as, 169 visual excess, 170 visual metaphor, 157 Panel, comics, 3 Paratexts, 38, 47, 65, 67, 68, 70, 193

acknowledgments, 98 adressing inconsistencies, 113 authentication, 99, 101, 103 autobiographical, 85, 100, 102, 104, 106, 111 bibliographies, 111 book covers, 71 clarification of names and pronunciation, 112 dedications, 96 descriptions, 91 functions, 65, 66 genre, 67, 74, 87, 88, 90, 95, 99, 101 historical context, 101, 107 illustration, 70 indexing, 87 ISBN, 89 narrative, 116 notes, 102, 110 overflow, 69 praise, 89 prefaces, 95, 100, 107 subtitles, 73 titles, 73 typography, 77 updates, 117 verbal, 66, 70 Paying the Land, 74, 98, 112, 186, 226 cover, 80 title, 76 Pekar, Harvey, 8 Perpetratorship, 143, 161, 262 Persepolis, 90, 119n12 Perspective, narrative, 206 Persuasion, 14 Persuasion, narrative, 205, 268n3 Peters, John, 43, 54, 245 Photography, 9, 13, 43, 50, 86, 107 framing, 19, 124 identification, 142

 INDEX 

myth of photographic truth, 44 photojournalism, 12, 231 post-photography, 45 Populism, 6, 16, 18 Portraits, 142, 183 Post-structuralism, 69 Post-truth, 17, 19, 45, 50 Prologues, 208 Psychology, social, 205, 249 Pyongyang, 74, 137 R Racism, 246, 248 Reading process, 125 Realism, 48, 130 emotional, 151, 167 hyperrealism, 159 Reality, 17, 157 Recording, 9, 42, 58n1, 86, 234 Red Cross, 105 Reframing, 282 Refugees, 14, 113, 139, 151, 172, 176, 178, 183, 211, 224, 240, 243, 265, 275, 281 Representation, crisis of, 7 Ritchin, Fred, 44, 45 Rolling Blackouts, 11, 16, 129 epilogue, 267 final chapter, 265 frame regularity, 176 interviews, 176 journalism, 95, 224, 267 metajournalistic comments, 223 preface, 102 prologue, 151, 178, 211, 265 recording, 72 Sam Malkandi, 85, 155, 239, 249, 281 title, 75, 76 translation, 178, 235, 265 Rosler, Martha, 12, 45 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 37–39, 203, 206

291

S Sacco, Joe, 8, 9, 11, 13, 48, 55, 57, 58n1, 70, 86, 107, 127, 129, 132 black hyperframes, 179, 186, 214 “Christmas with Karadzic”, 99 framing narratives, 204 hyperrealism, 159 individualizing people, 140 naturalism, 131 self-conception, 226, 227 self-depiction, 151 testimonies, 179 Safe Area Goražde, 11, 161 Alija Begovic, 179, 237 critique of journalism, 83, 230 epilogues, 259 possible use of chemical warfare, 114, 194, 254 prologue, 208 publication history, 70 special edition, 71, 73, 78, 107, 118n6 Srebrenica massacre, 159, 169 Suada, 192 title, 73 Satrapi, Marjane, 119n12 Scherr, Rebecca, 9, 142, 159, 183, 236 Science, cognitive, 205 Self-reflexivity, 12, 52, 95, 148, 224, 235 Semantic frames, 39 Shenzhen, 74 Signatures, 194 Sikoryak, R., 10 Silence, 209, 215, 219, 254, 258 Simmel, Georg, 68 Snow, David A., 33, 36 Social media, 14, 15, 45 Sontag, Susan, 44, 45, 264 Speech acts, 97 Spiegelman, Art, 8, 75, 88, 156 Stereotypes, 145, 150

292 

INDEX

Storyworld, 39, 58n3, 202, 205, 206, 220 Style, graphic, 56, 127, 128, 135, 249 framing, 128 Subjectivity, 245 Syria, 176, 267 T Testimony, 52, 55, 201 Theater of the real, 50 Translation, 193, 235, 265 Transparency, 98 Trauma, 54, 159, 172, 180, 182, 192, 263 Trump, Donald J., 10, 17, 18 Truth, 44, 50, 57, 95, 101, 161, 209, 239, 279 Truthiness, 18 U Underground comix, 8 United Nations, 216, 226, 236 United States, 232, 275 Uricchio, William, 12, 16, 45, 65 V van Leeuwen, Theo, 44, 78, 80, 130, 143, 157, 158, 169 Vanderbeke, Dirk, 9, 12, 50

Vectors, 80, 159 Violence, depictions of, 159, 179, 236, 250 Visual culture, 7, 15, 44 Visual perception, 44 Voyeurism, 159 W War’s End, 74, 75, 99, 117 Webcomics, 12, 14 Wege, Birte, 7, 11, 50, 233, 263 White, Hayden, 7, 37, 40 Wirth, Uwe, 5, 67, 68 Witness accounts, 245, 279 contradictions, 253 dramatization, 254 embedded narratives, 248 reliability, 164, 249 representation of, 55 Witnesses, 46 protection of, 148 reliability, 238, 261, 278 speaking for, 212 Witnessing, 8, 46, 52, 143 mechanical, 15, 43 reliability, 53 Wolf, Werner, 5, 33, 38, 39, 66–68, 80, 223 Z Zerocalcare, 148