Non-fiction comics, also known as graphic non-fiction, is non-fiction in the comics medium, embracing a variety of formats from comic strips to trade paperbacks.
Non-fiction comics, also known as graphic non-fiction, is non-fiction in the comics medium, embracing a variety of formats from comic strips to trade paperbacks.
Traditionally, comic strips have long offered factual material in this category, notably Ripley's Believe It or Not! , John Hix's Strange as It Seems , Ralph Graczak's Our Own Oddities , King Features' Heroes of American History, Gordon Johnston's It Happened in Canada , and others. Dick's Adventures in Dreamland was another attempt by King Features to teach history with comics. Clayton Knight created a strip about aviators, The Hall of Fame of the Air (1935–40), later collected in a book. Texas History Movies, which began on October 5, 1926, in The Dallas Morning News , received praise from educators, as did America's Best Buy: The Louisiana Purchase, a 1953 daily strip in the New Orleans States, distributed nationally by the Register and Tribune Syndicate, which also handled Will Eisner's The Spirit supplement for Sunday newspapers. [1] [2]
Contemporary nonfiction comic strips include Biographic , Health Capsules , The K Chronicles , and You Can with Beakman and Jax .
Non-fiction was published in numerous comic books in the 1940s, notably Picture News (Lafayette Street Corporation), True Comics (Parents' Magazine Press), Heroic Comics (Eastern Color Printing), It Really Happened and Real Life Comics (both Standard/Better/Nedor). A notable scripter of this material for 1940s comic books was novelist Patricia Highsmith, who wrote for Real Fact (DC Comics), Real Heroes (also Parents' Magazine Press), and True Comics. [3]
A notable nonfiction comic from the 1950s was the 1957 one-shot Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story , a 16-page comic book about Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery bus boycott, published and distributed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. [4] [5]
Ever since the 1950s, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has produced free, educational comic books. The stories feature fictional characters but contain lessons about financial literacy and the work of the Fed. One title, Once Upon a Dime, has been produced a number of times in different iterations, updating its content as society has evolved. [6]
Fitzgerald Publishing Co. produced the Golden Legacy line of educational black history comic books from 1966 to 1976. Golden Legacy produced biographies of such notable figures as Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker, Matthew Henson, Alexandre Dumas, Frederick Douglass, Robert Smalls, Joseph Cinqué, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander Pushkin, Lewis Howard Latimer, and Granville Woods. Golden Legacy was the brainchild of African American accountant Bertram Fitzgerald, who also wrote seven of the volumes. Many of the other contributors to the Golden Legacy series were also black, including Joan Bacchus and Tom Feelings. Other notable contributors included Don Perlin and Tony Tallarico. [7]
Harvey Pekar's originally self-published comic book series American Splendor (published from 1976 to 2008) "helped change the appreciation for, and perceptions of, the graphic novel, the drawn memoir, [and] the autobiographical comic narrative." [8] He was the first author to publicly distribute "memoir comic books." [9]
Larry Gonick ( The Cartoon History of the Universe ) produced graphic non-fiction about science and history for more than 30 years.
Joe Sacco's nine-issue series Palestine (Fantagraphics, 1993–1995) — about his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1991 and January 1992 — broke new ground in the realm of comics journalism.
Other contemporary nonfiction comic books include the For Beginners series and The Manga Guides . A growing number of graphic medicine comics have been written over the past decade by those who revealed their personal experiences with their own or another person’s illness or disability. [10]
Researchers have analyzed the truthfulness or authenticity of graphic non-fiction and graphic biographies. According to Robert V. Bullough Jr, and Stefinee Pinnegar, the reader expects the truth, [11] but comparative studies concluded that graphics are less objective than textual biographies due to the pictorial material. [12] Textual biographies present more information about the subject, while graphic biographies focus more on individual events, statements, and emotions, and present them more appealingly. [12]
Since the publication of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986, [13] there have been many non-fiction "graphic novels" published in the realms of history, biography, autobiography, education, and journalism. Francisca Goldsmith, writing in the School Library Journal in 2008, assembled a "list of essential titles for high schoolers" and reviewed graphic nonfiction by a variety of creators, including Rick Geary (Treasury of Victorian Murder), Harvey Pekar (Students for a Democratic Society), Stan Mack (The Story of the Jews), Joe Sacco ( Palestine ), Marjane Satrapi ( Persepolis ), Osamu Tezuka ( Buddha ) and Howard Zinn (A People’s History of American Empire). [14]
Other examples are The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (2006) and After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2007), both by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. [14] Hill & Wang, which published the 9/11 books, has published several other works of graphic non-fiction, including Ted Rall's After We Kill You We Will Welcome You as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.
In A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2009), Josh Neufeld documented true stories of survival during Hurricane Katrina as witnessed by a diverse group of New Orleanians.
In Italian Winter (2010), Davide Toffolo documented a story of two children from Slovenia in Fascist concentration camp in Italy.
In March (2013), U.S. Rep. John Lewis recalled his childhood, his entry into the American civil rights movement and his first encounter with Martin Luther King Jr., and his first experiences with nonviolent resistance. [15] March: Book One (2013) was followed by Book Two (2015) and Book Three (2016).
In The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression (2014), Amity Shlaes recounted her earlier history of America's Great Depression.
Seven Stories Press has published Ted Rall's comic-format biographies of Edward Snowden (Snowden), Bernie Sanders (Sanders) and Pope Francis (Francis: The People's Pope).
Red Quill Books has published a series of political, non-fiction comics including an illustrated version of the Communist Manifesto (2010-2015), a manga version of Das Capital (2012), and the Last Days of Che Guevara.
A graphic novel is a long-form work of sequential art. The term graphic novel is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comics scholars and industry professionals. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term comic book, which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.
Maus, often published as Maus: A Survivor's Tale, is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs respectively. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic, and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a well-received film adaptation of the same name.
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is an autobiographical comic by American cartoonist Justin Green, published in 1972. Green takes the persona of Binky Brown to tell of the "compulsive neurosis" with which he struggled in his youth and which he blamed on his strict Roman Catholic upbringing. Green was later diagnosed with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and came to see his problems in that light.
Joe Matt was an American cartoonist, best known for his autobiographical work, Peepshow.
Laurent Chabosy, better known as Lewis Trondheim, is a French cartoonist and one of the founders of the independent publisher L'Association. Both his silent comic La Mouche and Kaput and Zösky have been made into animated cartoons.
Stuck Rubber Babyis a 1995 graphic novel by American cartoonist Howard Cruse. He created his debut graphic novel after a decades-long career as an underground cartoonist. It deals with homosexuality and racism in the 1960s in the southern United States, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. While the book is not autobiographical, it draws upon Cruse's experience of growing up in the South during this time period, including his accidental fathering of a child, as referred to in the title.
Gary G. Dumm is an American comic book artist known particularly for his work illustrating the comics of Harvey Pekar.
Frank Huntington Stack is an American underground cartoonist and fine artist. Working under the name Foolbert Sturgeon to avoid persecution for his work while living in the Bible Belt, Stack published what is considered by many to be the first underground comic, The Adventures of Jesus, in 1964.
Dean Edmund Haspiel is an American comic book artist, writer, and playwright. He is known for creating Billy Dogma, The Red Hook, and for his collaborations with writer Harvey Pekar on his American Splendor series as well as the graphic novel The Quitter, and for his collaborations with Jonathan Ames on The Alcoholic and HBO's Bored to Death. He has been nominated for numerous Eisner Awards, and won a 2010 Emmy Award for TV design work.
Joyce Brabner was an American writer of political comics and the widow of Harvey Pekar.
Sidney Jacobson was an American writer who worked in the fields of children's comic books, popular music, fiction, biography, and non-fiction comics. He was managing editor and editor in chief for Harvey Comics. Jacobson was also known for his late-career collaborations with artist Ernie Colón, including such nonfiction graphic novels as The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation and Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography.
Comics journalism is a form of journalism that covers news or nonfiction events using the framework of comics, a combination of words and drawn images. Typically, sources are actual people featured in each story, and word balloons are actual quotes. The term "comics journalism" was coined by one of its most notable practitioners, Joe Sacco. Other terms for the practice include "graphic journalism," "comic strip journalism", "cartoon journalism", "cartoon reporting", "comics reportage", "journalistic comics", "sequential reportage," and "sketchbook reports".
Alias the Cat is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Kim Deitch, published by Pantheon Books in 2007. It originally appeared as a three-issue comic book in 2002 as The Stuff of Dreams from Fantagraphics Books.
Richard Lowell Parker is an American artist, writer, and cartoonist whose humorous artwork has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Life magazine, and various comic books published by Marvel Comics.
Edward R. Piskor Jr. was an American alternative comics cartoonist. Piskor was known primarily for his work on Hip Hop Family Tree, X-Men: Grand Design, and the Red Room trilogy. Piskor also co-hosted the YouTube channel Cartoonist Kayfabe with fellow Pittsburgh native cartoonist Jim Rugg. In March 2024, Piskor was accused via social media of sexual misconduct. Piskor died on April 1, 2024, at the age of 41, hours after posting a suicide note via social media, defending himself against the allegations leveled against him.
Andrew Aydin is an American comics writer, known as the Digital Director & Policy Advisor to Georgia congressman John Lewis, and co-author, with Lewis, of March, Lewis' #1 New York Times bestselling autobiographical graphic novel trilogy.
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story is a 16-page comic book about Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery bus boycott published in 1957 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It advocates the principles of nonviolence and provides a primer on nonviolent resistance.
Golden Legacy was the umbrella title for a line of educational Black history comic books published by Fitzgerald Publishing Co. from 1966 to 1976. Golden Legacy published comic book biographies of such notable figures as Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker, Matthew Henson, Alexandre Dumas, Frederick Douglass, Robert Smalls, Joseph Cinqué, Walter F. White, Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander Pushkin, Lewis Howard Latimer, and Granville Woods.
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