“Documentary comics”? That phrase would have struck the earliest comics readers as a category error or an improbable pairing—the nonfiction art of _documentary_, a term developed by film critics, welded to _comics_, a medium popularly associated with the strange and outlandish. Even today, we might hear a dare muffled inside “documentary comics,” as it contests the truth-telling claims of modern media (photography, sound recording, film, video) and finds actuality present instead within comics, those hybrid visual-verbal documents. But today’s readers might find nothing questionable in the phrase “documentary comics.” If they know Art Spiegelman’s _Maus: A Survivor’s Tale_ or Lauren Redniss’s visual nonfiction, Ben Passmore’s viral provocation _Your Black Friend_, or testimonial webcomics uploaded worldwide, they have found some facet of documentary comics today—a flourishing pluralist tradition exploiting, if not expanding, the full promise of the medium. From its original use in the early nineteenth century to its meaning in courts today, the adjective _documentary_ has designated legal evidence in the form of written or recorded documents (as opposed to, say, oral testimony or physical evidence). Only a century later would _documentary_ harden from adjective to noun and take on its contemporary generic sense. The Scottish filmmaker John Grierson introduced...