This panel examines the media history of comics in newsprint and nonfiction. The presentations consider how comics have been integral to the representational forms of social reality in various conceptions of the public sphere. To pursue this claim, the panelists consider case studies in the media history of the relation between graphic narratives and the representation of social realities. These case studies include the relation of comics to the news in early twentieth-century, the influence of the “funnies” on a graphic memoir about Japanese internment, and the representational ethics of twenty-first-century comics journalism. These case studies show how comics are a tactical practice for circumventing state surveillance and modulating social controversy in modern print publicity.

This topic is important for understanding the evolving influence of newsprint and visual culture upon literary publics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How have graphic narratives shaped common understandings of the real? How has graphic art influenced the social phenomenon known as the “news”? How have comics been used in strategic ways to engage with political and social controversies? By exploring these questions, the panel positions itself to consider larger questions about the ways in which “reality” has been delimited and observed through visual representations.

In order to examine the relationship between comics and social history, we begin by looking at how the comic strip became a popular and important media format. Joshua Abraham Kopin shows how the comic strip was able to marshal the representational strategies of novel technologies like photography and phonography, which transport images and sounds from the past into the future. Using examples from primary sources such as The Sun, The National Police Gazette, The Daily Graphic, The New York World and The New York Journal, Kopin’s talk traces the influence of photography on the early news image and, in turn, the influence of both on the early comic strip.

Benjamin Mangrum considers the influence of the “funnies” on Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (1946), arguing that Okubo’s use of these artistic techniques animates how information itself is depicted in her graphic memoir. Okubo’s visualization of information infrastructure—including print media like newspapers but also built infrastructure such as telephone and electricity lines—depicts internment as a political regime that extends beyond the displacement, segregation, and racialized control of Asian-American populations. Mangrum connects Okubo’s graphic representation of information culture to contemporaneous representations of Asian and Asian-American communities in the print media of late 1930s and 1940s.

Finally, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins examines the ethical technics of contemporary comics journalism. In a point of contention with Kopin’s argument, Kelp-Stebbins contends that drawing operates as a counter modality to photography by insisting on the singularity of vision and the mendacity of “objective truth” in reporting. As a tactical practice, comics journalism circumvents state surveillance, as exemplified by Victoria Lomasko’s sketches of closed trials of anti-Putin dissidents in Russia for her work Other Russias (2017). As an affective medium, drawing establishes indeterminate and complex relations between artist and subject, such that Dan Archer was able to draw survivors of human trafficking in Nepal as a means of documenting them without retraumatizing them through photography, the medium through which their agency had been stripped upon being forced into pornography. Kelp-Stebbins shows that comics panels not only confront a reader with the information contained therein but force them to encounter another subjectivity, that of the reporter whose documentary words and images are framed, and framed for ethical and political purposes.

Each presenter will take a maximum of twenty minutes to present their research. Visual examples from graphic narratives and comics will be presented during this time. This will allow for at least twenty minutes of discussion time after the presentations.