Documentary Comics

To read the comics of Joe Sacco, and those by Marjane Satrapi, offers considerably different experiences not least in terms of subject matter. Sacco’s work depicts his travels in conflict ridden areas in the early 1990s Balkans and more recently the Middle East, while Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs tell of growing up in Iran before, during, and after the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in the late 1970s, and of her teenage years in exile in Europe. The former thus relays a journey undertaken in a professional capacity and the latter traces the formation of a diasporic and transcultural subject position. Aesthetically, too, there are clear disparities. Sacco’s style mostly adopts a realist tenor, at least by comics standards. At times, his line drawing exaggerates angles, uses foreshortening, and expressive characterization. But this is countered by naturalistic observation of detail, cross hatching to articulate shadow and form, and use of linear perspective. Satrapi’s work, on the other hand, is highly stylized and selective. It frequently features a flattened picture plane and privileges shape and contrasting blocks of black and white over line as a means of figuration. However, such differing topics and their decidedly aesthetic qualities notwithstanding, it is possible to conceive of a significant link between these texts. This is the link that initially sparked my investigation, and that has prompted the themes articulated and tracks followed through the chapters of this book.

Comics have traditionally been associated with, and generally expected to present, imagined worlds and scenarios. This assumption underpins Martin Barker’s (1989) argument against claims, from various ideological standpoints, of comics’ harmful effects on readers. Barker’s defense of comics is one particular instance of a far broader discussion relating to media effects, a debate returning with cyclical intervals, and one that in more recent incarnations has shifted its focus variously to console games and Internet content. The argument is that critics inscribe and “read into” texts ideology in ways that do not correspond to readers’ experiences and pleasures. He argues that if something is a comic, a tacit understanding between creators and readers is built around the notion that these are imagined narratives, and that their purpose in turn is to allow readers to imagine. For Barker, the point is that the social context of comics instills a particular register that distances the worlds depicted from the one that readers inhabit. This is not simply a question of fiction versus ostensibly real content, but rather a suggestion that, even when the subject matter is based on actuality, its very treatment in comics form invites a particular response of “imaginative projection” (Barker, 1989, 273) rather than a witnessing function. This would suggest a fundamental incompatibility between the form of comics and a documentary mode of address.

The comics in this book extend an invitation to trust their representations as truthful depictions of real events and experiences while using means of representation that deviate from documentary’s conventional methods and the images they produce. That documentary is dependent on, and indeed constituted by, its use of recording technologies unites otherwise plural, and at times competing, positions in documentary studies. But as is the case with animated documentary, the idea of documentary comics undercuts such an assumption.

Recorded documentary, despite often appearing to be preoccupied with contemporaneity, is widely accepted to at the same time function in an archival capacity. It allows us to “participate in historical remembering” (Rabinowitz, 1993, 119). Or, as Laura Mulvey (2006, 25) has put it: “personal and collective memories are prolonged and preserved, extending and expanding the ‘twilight zone,’ merging individual memory with recorded history.” In addition, archival material and testimony function as rich sources for documentary that has past events as its subject. This suggests a two-way relationship between documentary and historiography; documentary as an inscription of history and history as a subject for documentary.

An exclusive focus on visual qualities risks obscuring the importance of narrative models and culturally circulated tropes in documentary’s interaction with the world it represents and produces. If comics can offer new and different possibilities in terms of documentary representation, it begs the question: To what extent does this bring about new ways of understanding the world?

Examples of comics that represent marginalized voices have already figured in the previous chapters, but the aim of this chapter is to specifically bring case studies into dialogue with the longstanding documentary tradition of social critique and advocacy. “Ordinary people” and the “prioritising of the mundane occurrence” (Bruzzi, 2006, 79) have been persistent themes in various forms and styles of documentary (Biressi and Nunn, 2005, 35-36). Linked to this, although not synonymous with it, is the agenda of addressing social injustice, exposing institutional failings and extending visibility and “voice.” At stake here is representation, the relations of power constituted by visibility and practices of looking, “who is authorized to look at whom with what effects” (Pollock, 1994, cited by Taylor, 1998, 4), and the related questions of who speaks, for whom they speak, and to whom such speech is addressed (Ruby, 1991).

This chapter turns to documentary comics that have emerged through digital distribution platforms. The examples I engage with here represent the diversity of short-form documentary comics found in a variety of settings online. While digital networks are far from inclusive, the parts of the global population who are connected in this way have over the past two decades seen the Internet become part of everyday practice—individual and institutional, personal and professional—so pervasively that a world and daily life without it, for many, has become inconceivable. For comics studies, webcomics constitute a rich and, as yet, only partially explored area of research that includes professional networking practices and translocal collaborations, marketing and circulation models, “presencing” (Couldry, 2012, 50-51), and fan practices as much as, though not necessarily distinct from, formal experimentation. Because this project specifically concerns documentary comics, it will highlight a strictly demarcated aspect of webcomics. However, the short-form documentary comics under discussion seem to be a phenomenon innately linked to their particular environment and distribution context, which means that the platforms themselves deserve some attention. I will also consider distinctions between webcomics and hypercomics, and attempt to situate documentary webcomics within a broader, cross-media category of emergent and experimental documentary in the digital and online sphere.