The rapidly growing area of comics studies has long been dominated by scholars trained in literary studies and, with it,
ALH Online Review, Series X 1 Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 376 pp. Review by Bart Beaty, University of Calgary The rapidly growing area of comics studies has long been dominated by scholars trained in literary studies and, with it, the attendant anxiety over what constitutes plausible texts worthy of analysis. In the US context, the comic that has received the most scholarly attention is Art Spiegelman’s Maus. In the 1980s, groundbreaking works of comics scholarship, like Joseph Witek’s Comic Books as History, provided close readings of Maus to demonstrate the important and, at that time, unexpectedly sophisticated ways that comic books engage with issues of history and identity. Since that first sustained analysis, Maus has taken on an increasingly central role in the field, as so-called graphic narratives have moved into the mainstream of US literary culture. In Hillary L. Chute’s new book, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, scholarly interest in “Spiegelman Studies” is taken to an entirely new level. While the book’s subtitle suggests that her study address comics as a larger social and aesthetic phenomenon, the reality is that its focus remains resolutely on Spiegelman and his influence. As a result, the scope of the book narrows the history of comics in telling ways. Chute suggests that the subject of her book is “the relationship of drawing to history” (25), which was also explicitly the subject of Witek’s 1989 monograph. In the quartercentury between these books it seems that little has changed: while documentary replaces the topic of history, and the concepts of witnessing and trauma are moved to a more central theoretical position, the theories and methods remain uncannily similar. Disaster Drawn opens with an introductory chapter that situates the author’s thinking relative to contemporary theories of trauma and witnessing before moving, in the following chapter, into a discussion of the depiction of war in seventeenth- and nineteenth-century visual arts, focusing on Jacques Callot and Francisco Goya. The third chapter leaps from painting into an idiosyncratic history of comics. This chapter skitters from the innovations of Swiss educator Rodolphe Töpffer in the nineteenth-century to US newspaper strip artist Winsor McCay, to the neo-expressionist painter Philip Guston, with stops along the way to discuss contributions by Lynd Ward, outsider artist Henry Darger, Jules Feiffer, and the artists of the US underground comix period. At first glance, little seems to unite these artists. A closer inspection reveals that most have been published in the pages of RAW, the short-lived anthology edited by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, including McCay, Darger, and most of the major © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
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2 ALH Online Review, Series X underground figures. Spiegelman also supplied the introduction to a collected edition of Ward’s woodcut novels. The historical overview found here is one that helps outline not the history of comics—or even documentary comics as one might expect from a volume with these interests—but the central importance of Spiegelman as an editor, historian, and critic of the comics form. This history is a history of his influence. That Spiegelman quotes are used as the epigraph for each of the historical chapters seems to be an early sign of the disproportionate importance that Chute’s book places on his point of view. Given his centrality to the arguments, it is entirely fitting that the strongest chapter in the book discusses Spiegelman’s Maus. As a longtime collaborator and friend of the artist (she coedited the archival edition of his masterwork, MetaMaus, and has published frequently on his work), Chute is well positioned to add to the already extensive literature about the cartoonist’s comic-book memoir. Building on revelations found in MetaMaus, Disaster Drawn examines visual works that Spiegelman has identified as influences on his own Holocaust memoir, including the Ukrainian booklets Ravensbrück and Paladij Osynkas’s Auschwitz. The attention here to visual cues and codes is impressive, and while the enumeration of the influence of Jewish visual traditions on Maus dates at least to Adam Gopnik’s early writing on the work, this specific terrain remains largely unexplored. The effort to track new snow in relation to such a well-studied book is very welcome. The chapters that sandwich the discussion of Maus suffer somewhat from the glare afforded by Spiegelman’s centrality. Keiji Nakazawa was a Japanese cartoonist bestknown for the ten-volume manga Barefoot Gen, originally published in 1973 and 1974, a memoir of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That work was partially translated into English as early as 1976, and then again the 1980s and 1990s with introductions by Spiegelman. Disaster Drawn actually focuses on Nakazawa’s lesser-known earlier version of the same story, I Saw It, offering a close reading of the US edition of that text. Crucially, the book repeatedly attempts to position I Saw It (alongside the earliest version of Maus published in the underground anthology Funny Aminals) as a turning point in the history of comics production. To this end, Chute repeatedly reads Nakazawa’s contribution through those of the much more celebrated creator of Maus. She compares Nakazawa’s comics to Spiegelman’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! as well as to Maus (seeing both as obituaries for mothers destroyed by World War II), while deferring at times to the cartoonist’s critical judgments about Nakazawa’s work. While Barefoot Gen has been widely studied, the same is not really true of I Saw It, and, as a consequence, the opportunity to advance our understanding of this artist is the central contribution of this chapter.
ALH Online Review, Series X 3 A strong emphasis on Art Spiegelman also runs through Chute’s chapter on the comics of Joe Sacco, the cartoonist, we are told, “whose work most clearly follows Spiegelman’s precedent” (200). To this end, the book dwells on many points of overlap between the cartoonists: “Sacco’s work, like Spiegelman’s . . .” we read at one point (233); “Sacco, as with Spiegelman . . .” we find at another (249). Elsewhere the two visually distinctive cartoonists are conflated as relying on the “plenitude of the visual” (222). Unlike Chute’s other two major cases studies, which focus on single works, the chapter on Sacco is widerranging and considers a larger number of his comic books about the occupation of Palestine and the war in Bosnia. As with the chapters pertaining to Nakazawa and Spiegelman, the analysis places a premium on reading formal elements such as page design in a way that stresses continuities within the documentary comics tradition. Similarly, the book’s conclusion also discusses Sacco in relation to Spiegelman, here detailing their differences vis-à-vis the 2015 attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo (Sacco is a critic of that magazine, while Spiegelman is not). Implicit in the reading of Sacco’s significant body of work is the suggestion that there is no Sacco absent Spiegelman and that the artists should be understood as in dialogue. Moving beyond the case studies, it can be noted that throughout Disaster Drawn there are a number of contentious claims. To take but one example, Chute refers to Robert Crumb as both “the world’s most famous cartoonist” (40) and the “world’s most celebrated cartoonist (121). Both of these are potentially empirically verifiable claims, but here they float through a volume in which personal observations serve as data points. Early on, Chute tells the reader that “comics has peculiar connection to expressing trauma” (33), but the comment is not supported with regard to comics tout court. Rather, it relates to the very narrow niche genre of trauma-informed comics that orbits around a figure like Spiegelman. This narrowing of the definition of comics runs throughout the work. “The most trenchant kind of comics work,” Chute writes, is “nonfiction, and nonfiction specifically expressing the realities of war” (112). Comments like these tell more about the author’s predispositions than they do about the formal operations of comics, or even about the subset of nonfiction comics discussed here. To her credit, Chute is remarkably up front in situating her own biases. She repeatedly writes of her accomplishments in the first person and situates her knowledge as a function of cartoonists that she has met. Nonetheless, the apparent and multiple strengths of Disaster Drawn are sometimes lost in the way that the book relies on a nonreflexive reliance on her own personal and aesthetic networks and interests. Thus, the use of Spiegelman as the unacknowledged organizing system of this book undermines the attempt to deepen our understanding of comics as a literary form and comics studies as a significant and unique field of scholarship. For a scholar like Witek, Spiegelman served
4 ALH Online Review, Series X as an entry point to question assumptions about the changing face of comics production in the 1980s. In Disaster Drawn, by contrast, Maus has become so doxic that it no longer provokes questions about Spiegelman’s role. Instead, it provides the benchmark for other cartoonists’ accomplishments in relation to the presumed master.
