Hillary Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016)
In her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as \u201cgraphic novels.\u201d Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman\u2019s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa\u2019s I Saw It, and Joe Sacco\u2019s series Palestine, but she also introduces us to the long history of hand-drawn documentation of war-time trauma dating to Goya and Callot.\n\nChute treats comics as a serious literary form that is especially efficacious for representing the act of witness-to-war and those who witness. It is through the power of graphic illustration combined with the written word\u2013the comics-form\u2013that the otherwise unspeakable atrocities of modern war can be conveyed. The book also serves as a primer to the language of comics\u2013words like \u201cgutter\u201d and \u201ctier\u201d\u2013and the craft of decoding comics as practiced by scholars such as Chute.\n\nIn this interview Chute responded to questions about her path into comics as an academic pursuit, her thoughts on the newest trends in documentary comics, and her views from the college classroom on the pedagogy of comics.\n\nJerry Lembcke can be reached at jlembcke@holycross.edu, Ellis Jones at ejones@holycross.edu.\n\n\xa0\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies