Documentary
by
“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...
This essay may be found on page 81 of the printed volume.