“True Story”: The Aesthetic Balancing Acts of Documentary Comics

Comics that claim their stories are based on actuality rather than imagination and negotiate particular demands. They must inform but also engage their readers, balance emotional charge and documentary credibility. This article is not concerned with particular truth-claims made by non-fiction comics or their plausibility, but rather considers different operations of factual modes of address in comics, as characterized by distinct sets of demands, constraints, and affordances.

An initial comparison of early and mid-20th century educational and “true crime” comics offers a useful point of departure, and positions comics as vehicles of popular edification as well as diversion. It is nevertheless clear that these non-fiction comics involved little or no critique of the status quo. The kinds of expository intentions often associated with documentary can, however, be observed in the comic-book Brought to Light (Brabner, Yates, Sienkiewicz and Moore, 1989) as it attends to the contentious events of Reagan-era foreign politics.

This publication is made up of two stories that despite being united in purpose, adhere to diametrically opposed genre conventions. One is demarcated as satire by its fictional elements and emotive hyperbole, the other adopts a low key and earnest register in keeping with documentary realism. Setting up a clear contrast between approaches, the dual structure of Brought to Light thus invites attention to aesthetics.

In the context of this article, aesthetics refers to the means by which creators mobilize experiential aspects of subjectivity and tacit knowledge that is emotional and sensory. Such “felt meaning” is not always translatable in explicit and rational terms and tends to be viewed as incompatible with factual discourse, or at least as requiring careful policing. The analysis of Brought to Light highlights dynamic relationships between aesthetics, credibility and affect that apply to documentary comics, and the formative role played by genre expectations.

In the current generation of non-fiction comics, witnessing and first-person accounts feature prominently and have generated substantive academic attention. While this discussion does not include such examples, the analysis of Brought to Light nevertheless prompts the question: is the split approach it represents ameliorated by the witnessing paradigm? The article concludes by considering some of the affordances of the creator-character mechanism and positions this in a wider cultural context.

http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v11_1/mickwitz/