Skip to main content

Can Graphic Novels be Non-Fiction?

By

In school, I was conditioned to believe that non-fiction books were boring, dry, re-tellings of factual events. After reading Will Eisner’s Contract with God and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, however, I have realized that only the last statement is true. Non-fiction’s only requirement is that it has to be factual. Non-fiction can be intriguing, entertaining, funny, and visually appealing. Maus, for example, is a non-fiction graphic novel about a series of interviews the author had with his father regarding his experiences during the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman uses mice, pigs, and cats to represent Jews, the Polish, and the Germans respectively. In my traditional understanding of non-fiction, I would have never imagined reading a non-fiction novel regarding the Holocaust with cats in Nazi uniforms, and yet, it works for Spiegelman. Maus can successfully portray real human characters as animals because of the techniques and possibilities alotted by the comic books medium. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, McCloud explores the comic book medium and its contrast to prose or film. McCloud analyzes the concept of “closure.” He defines closure as “the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” I interpreted this to mean that the reader has the ability to “complete” the picture or fill in the blanks. With Maus, the reader can take the parts of the story and construct a non-fictional Holocaust story regardless of the animal characters, the breaks in the storyline, and the occasional use of humor. The reader can bypass these inconsistencies and still see the “bigger picture” thanks to closure.

Graphic novels depend on closure. They depend on the reader’s ability to fill in the gaps. Besides Spiegelman’s Maus, closure can also be noted in other works like Will Eisner’s Contract with God. Eisner’s graphic novel is similar to Maus in that it is also a re-telling of a person’s life. In this way, I consider both works to be non-fictional. A Contract with God details the life of Erimme Hersh; his Journey to America, his contract with god, and the loss of his daughter Rachel. Erimme Hersh, a Jewish man, was chosen amongst his people to travel to America in order to save himself. Once in America, he made a contract with God where he promised to do good deeds. Hersh became involved in the Jewish community and he even adopted a child that was left at his doorstep. This child, however, passes away and her death infuriates Hersh. He believes God has broken their contract by taking his daughter, Rachel, away from him. And, while this “contract with God” serves as the basis for this story, the reader never gets to actually read this contract Hersh wrote on a stone. The reader just needs to take it on “good faith” that Hersh has lived up to his part of the bargain and that God has violated this agreement. In other words, the reader has to use closure to infer or assume what this contract consisted of and that in fact, God has violated this contract. Thus, regardless of the fact that these two works are graphic novels, that they use animals, or cartoon-like drawings, or humor at times, both Maus and A Contract with God are fictional works because they are based on factual events.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of Aya: Life in Yop City

By
To begin this week's post, I'd like to first address a few things about the author's duty to his/her readers. When we think of reading material from other countries or cultures, what factors are important to us? What information do we need in order to recognize the significance of the author's work? For me, it's important for the author to find some way to connect to me as a reader. Do we share a common experience? Can I relate your story to mine? This is not to say that a writer's work is rendered unimpressive if they choose not to do this. But I do think it goes without saying that most impressionable works hit us emotionally. I also think that an author should be conscious of the world that they are painting for the reader. Is it true what you're writing? Does it provide some sort of insight into the world as you see it? Are you confirming outside opinions of your culture, or are you breaking the stereotypes that have been placed upon you? That being sai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bringing Africa into the Fold

By
The comic Aya: Life in Yop City does a fantastic job of illustrating a culture different from the more popular Western variety. For those reading this, have you ever considered Africa in any way that was not influenced by main stream media? No? Well me either. It is sad to say, but my view of Africa was just - more or less - a vast land of chaos and poverty. Why? Because is that not what the media would have us believe? As a western country ourselves - presuming, of course, that you are reading this from the US or some European country - we do not consider other nations to have much value in comparison to our own. Because we have created a Eurocentric view of what society should be, we have disallowed other countries to feel that their own culture is worth portraying in novels or media. For example, most people are lead to believe that Africa is riddled with disease, famine, and "uneducated" people who are in dire need of help. This just isn't true! There are places ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Two Faces of Anarchy in V for Vendetta

By
As someone who has only seen the movie version of V for Vendetta once many years ago and have never read the graphic novel, I wasn’t exactly sure how similar or different the movie version would be to the graphic novel. I was in for a surprise when I discovered just how vastly different, they are from each other. With that being said, they do have some similarities when strictly looking at the motives of the characters. Let’s dive into those motives and how the author and illustrator of V for Vendetta achieved getting these motives across to their readers. In Scott McCloud’s chapter of Understanding Comics “ Blood in the Gutter ” we are presented with different panel – to – panel transitions, and an introduction to the term “gutter” as being the white space between the panels which is where the audience of reader “takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (McCloud, 66). After finishing reading V for Vendetta , several themes or ideas that were most prevalent...
Post a Comment
Read more