The 1990s “indie” comics scene saw two trends. One reflected an almost neurotic drive to get away from the power fantasies of superhero stories. Using a careless graphic style that emphasized the pathologically normal, authors told stories from the point of view of a “defeatist,” in the words of comics artist Joe Sacco.

On the other hand, this was the era in which American non-superhero comics also started engaging with topics bigger than the middle-class suburbs of their creators. Inspiration came from the sudden acceptance of comics in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, which also built a bridge between the artistic language of the European bande dessinée and its comparatively low-brow American cousin.

Bringing these two trends together, the first issue of Joe Sacco’s Palestine came out in 1993, followed by nine original single comic book issues. Trained as a journalist, Sacco tells the story of the two months he spent in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 1991 and 1992.

Joe Sacco/Fantagraphics Books

Palestine’s visual style descends directly from R. Crumb-style 1960s and ’70s “comix.” Black and white drawings make deliberate use of cartooning techniques, such as the amplification of body parts (noses, ears), adding up to punk-inspired visual noise.

But despite initially sharing the same target audience (and the same publisher) as earlier comix, Sacco’s work differed greatly in what it attempted to do. Sacco consciously tackled the complicated relationship between West and East, subjectivity and neutrality, journalism and fiction. The set eventually appeared as a complete story in a single volume, with an introduction by Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said.

Palestine’s success was followed by a six-page story on the Bosnian war crimes trials in the Netherlands, commissioned by Art Spiegelman for Details magazine. Then came publication of Safe Area Gorazde, the War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995.

In Safe Area’s 240 pages, Sacco applies the same techniques he used for Palestine to explore the conflict in a small, Muslim UN-protected enclave in the midst of the Bosnian conflict. His personal voice asserts itself, presenting events from Sacco’s point of view but also allowing other characters to speak directly. There is no intention to achieve “neutrality” or “objectivity.” Both Palestine and Safe Area narrate from the border between documentary and personal travelogue.

Like Safe Area, the first issue of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis arrived in 2000. Satrapi’s complete narrative, published in France, is also a compilation of instalments published over time. Both feature strong narrative voices, with protagonists representing the actual authors.

Unlike Persepolis, however, Sacco’s works are not primarily autobiographical. Though Sacco tells us about specific moments from his life, and makes no attempt to hide the subjectivity filtering the narrated events, the focus of his stories is not himself, but the people and circumstances of the places he visits.

Persepolis and Maus are personal stories narrating very specific moments in human history—the Shoah and the Iranian Revolution. But in spite of all the political and narrative relevance of the historic events in both books, their main genre is that of memoir. Most of the events happened in the past, sometimes before the authors were born, or happened with them being central to the event.

Sacco’s work, notwithstanding all the delay between lived experience and the final act of graphic narration, recounts situations he witnessed in real time and as an observer whose mission was to depict those events in comics form, bringing comics one step closer to the techniques of literary reportage.

 [Part 3, continuing the shift from survivors’ tales to tales of survival, will appear next week.]

Unlike traditional journalism, literary journalism deals with facts to create a lasting meaning from the narrated events. Its purpose is not only the transmission of information but the telling of a story with an awareness that the how is as important as the what.

Joe Sacco/Fantagraphics Books

Literary journalism’s emphasis on the story and on the ideas and emotions conveyed by it relates directly to what some comics have been doing in recent years. Rising out of the underground and independent comics scene, “comics journalism” combines the structural conventions of the traditional comic book with those of literary journalism.

Like literary journalism, comics journalism has to deal with delay between the time of an event and the time of publication. “News” journalism relies on speed, but creating comics journalism requires even longer than it takes to do literary journalism. Nevertheless, a tradition of non-fiction comics exists, and recent graphic narratives are offering innovative ways of telling stories about real events.

From superheroes to “loserdom”

The “graphic novel” exists as a category in most Western book shops, libraries and web sites, even if the name evokes a vagueness comics scholars have yet to clarify. For now, the graphic novel enjoys more prestige than the comic book, which retains an aura of narrative immaturity and low-brow geekiness. It also has decidedly more status than the comic strips fated to help sell moribund newspapers—gag-structured tales doomed to be read in a flash and forgotten.

Contemporary non-fiction comics reflect the heritage of the underground “comix” of the late 1960s and 1970s.  Born as an alternative to the commercially-driven superhero tales addressed to a teenage audience, the works of Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar helped define the potential of comics to tell stories based on real events.

In the 1980s and early 1990s Art Spiegelman would draw the masterstroke with his two-tome Pulitzer-winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a memoir telling the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with both his father, a Holocaust survivor, and his father’s testimony. Written and drawn over thirteen years, Maus demonstrates comic books’ ability to narrate the most serious of subject matters, marking a kind of coming of age in the cultural sphere.

The 1990s were also the age of the autobiographic comic story, long narratives focusing on the existential angst of the personal lives of their mostly-young authors. Promoted by independent publishers with an awareness of the importance of sophisticated book design, these stories addressed a reader other than the typical superhero “fanboy.”

D.B. Dowd defined these comics of the early and mid 90s as “an illustrated literature of loserdom.” But beyond their self-absorption and fictional self-awareness, the works of Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, Roberta Gregory, and Debbie Drechsler explored comics as a way of narrating real life through the distortion inherent in cartooning.

Roberta Gregory/Fantagraphics Books

In the mainstream popular imagination, comics were a language used to express a fictional reality as impossible as the powers of superheroes. In the hands of these new authors, the examined real life became the main focus of the stories. This tension between real subjects and a highly manipulated form of representing them remains one of the most fascinating aspects of graphic storytelling.

Surely the written word filters “reality” as well. But how is it that cartoons, which evoke such a sense of distance between subjects and their representation, can address real events and people in truthful, thought-provoking ways?

[Part 2 continues the story of comic book news with a look at the turn toward graphic narrative nonfiction.]

Ernesto Priego is researching comics and narrative as a Ph.D. candidate in information studies in the U.K. at University College London.