Can Graphic Novels be Non-Fiction?

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.