Skip to content
Home/ Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form
Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form

Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form

by Chute, Hillary L
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780674504516

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima's Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.

Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Modern nonfiction comics emerged from the shattering experience of World War II, developing in the 1970s with Art Spiegelman's first "Maus" story about his immigrant family's survival of Nazi death camps and with Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa's inaugural work of "atomic bomb manga," the comic book Ore Wa Mita ("I Saw It")--a title that alludes to Goya's famous Disasters of War etchings.

Chute explains how the form of comics--its collection of frames--lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateJan 12, 2016
ISBN-100674504518
ISBN-139780674504516
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-03-12 21:49
$24.56 $35.00 29% off
You save $10.44 · list price $35.00
In stock soon — order now to reserve your copy
Delivery by Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Comics & Graphic Novels
See all
Comics & Media: A Special Issue of Critical Inquiry
Available
$19.02
Graphic Witness: Five Wordless Graphic Novels by Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri, Erich Gla
Walker, George A
$27.99
"How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?": Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic
Oksman, Tahneer
$150.45
How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic M
Oksman, Tahneer
$37.26
Pathographics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community
<p>Culturally powerful ideas of normalcy and deviation, individual responsibility, and what is medically feasible shape the ways in which we live with illness and disability. The essays in this volume show how illness narratives expressed in a variety of forms--biographical essays, fictional texts, cartoons, graphic novels, and comics--reflect on and grapple with the fact that these human experiences are socially embedded and culturally shaped. </p><p>Works of fiction addressing the impact of an illness or disability&#x3b; autobiographies and memoirs exploring an experience of medical treatment&#x3b; and comics that portray illness or disability from the perspective of patient, family member, or caregiver: all of these narratives forge a specific aesthetic in order to communicate their understanding of the human condition. This collection demonstrates what can emerge when scholars and artists interested in fiction, life-writing, and comics collaborate to explore how various media portray illness, medical treatment, and disability. Rather than stopping at the limits of genre or medium, the essays talk across fields, exploring together how works in these different forms craft narratives and aesthetics to negotiate contention and build community around those experiences and to discover how the knowledge and experiences of illness and disability circulate within the realms of medicine, art, the personal, and the cultural. Ultimately, they demonstrate a common purpose: to examine the ways comics and literary texts build an audience and galvanize not just empathy but also action.</p><p>In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Einat Avrahami, Maureen Burdock, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, Ariela Freedman, Rieke Jordan, stef lenk, Leah Misemer, Tahneer Oksman, Nina Schmidt, and Helen Spandler.</p><p> <i>Chapter 7, "</i> <i>Crafting Psychiatric Contention Through Single-Panel Cartoons," by Helen Spandler, is available as Open Access courtesy of a grant from the Wellcome Trust. A link to the OA version of this chapter is forthcoming.</i> </p>
$130.76
Pathographics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community
Pathographics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community
$38.36