Comics as Historiography

This paper considers potential ways comics narratives with a documentary claim can participate in the academic discussion of history. Academic historiography constructs (normally literal, mainly text based) arguments about historical events through discussions of (often written) sources, with reference to and in dialog with other relevant positions (Evans, 2012). While comics narration and imagery does not conform to the conventions of academic historiography, we are interested in the possibility of a mutually beneficial dialog between the arguments, and the ways they are manifested, in certain comics narratives and the ones that constitute the academic discourse of history. The following analysis focuses on a precondition for such dialog: the utilization of sources, and the explanation of how these sources are used to the readers, in comics that claim to reliably portray and explicate aspects of historical reality . As case studies, we look into four different approaches to historical comics: two graphic novels, one chapter in a comics anthology, and an archaeological paper in comics format. We will investigate their particular ways of informing readers about research methods that were employed for preparing the story, and about the provenience of archival materials that were, directly or indirectly, quoted in the comics. An integral part of the historical argument that these works make respectively involves reflections on the attempt to understand reality; we will discuss at how these attempts are communicated, to evaluate their adherence to the expectations of academic historiography