My dissertation considers a group of contemporary comics about war by Joe Sacco,
Art Spiegelman, and Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli, as examples of a larger genre I
call the graphic counter-memorial. Graphic counter-memorial comics address history,
memory, and trauma as they depict the political, violent, and collective aspects of war and
social conflict. I argue that the particular comics I study in this dissertation, which mingle
fiction and non-fiction and autobiography as well as journalism, follow the tradition of the
counter-monuments described by James E. Young. Studying commemorative practices and
counter-monuments in the 1980s, Young notes a generation of German artists who resist
traditional forms of memorialization by upending the traditional monument structure in
monument form. Young looks at the methods, aims, and aesthetics these artists use to
investigate and problematize practices that establish singular historical narratives. Like
these works of public art, the graphic counter-memorial asks the reader to question ‘official
history,’ authenticity, and the objectivity typically associated with non-fiction and
reporting. I argue that what these comics offer is an opportunity to re-examine comics that
incorporate real and familiar social and historical events and wars.
Comics allow creators to visually and textually overlap perspectives and time.
Graphic counter-memorials harness the comic medium’s potential to refuse fixed
narratives of history by emphasizing a sense of incompleteness in their representation of
trauma, memory, and war. This makes possible a more complex and rich way to engage
with Western society’s relationship to the past, and in particular, a more complex way of
engaging with collective memory and war. Their modes of mediating history produce
political intervention through both form and content.
To Whom Does History Belong?
