Iraq’s Graphic Future

Though they are now gaining a wider audience, literary or nonfiction graphic novels have a long and celebrated history. Will Eisner's "A Contract With God," which is seen as the first of its kind, was published in 1978 and told the disjointed stories of the inhabitants of a Bronx tenement set in the Depression-era 1930s. Art Spiegelman's "Maus," a memoir of his father's survival of the Holocaust, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, 20 years after he'd started it as a serialized comic strip. Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" series of graphic novels, which depict her childhood in Iran after the Islamic Revolution, have been used as history books in classrooms and adapted into an animated film.

Journalist and illustrator Joe Sacco is perhaps the most prolific graphic novelist when it comes to literary nonfiction subject matter. His book "Palestine," about his time as a reporter in the West Bank during the early '90s, won the American Book Award in 1996. Still, even with the acclaim, Sacco says sales of "Palestine" remained dismal. "The problem is that it was only in comic book stores," says Sacco. Long bastions of the über-geek cult of the superhero-comic-book fan, comic book stores have a unique place in American culture, largely catering to what is the definition of a niche audience: teenage boys and grown men, 35 going on 14, who are more interested in the world of the fantastical and mythic than in current events. They're certainly not looking for a nonfiction piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But as graphic novelists like Sacco have begun to get better book distribution and catch the eye of large, mainstream publishing houses, things have started looking up. "People are beginning to realize that comics can tackle serious issues," says Sacco.

Indeed. In 2006 Hill and Wang, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, published a graphic adaptation of the 600-page 9/11 Commission Report, which in just over a year has sold more than 100,000 copies. According to Thomas LeBien, publisher of Hill and Wang, some of the book's strongest sales have come in the student market, as high-school teachers and college professors have used it as a textbook. Next year "Shooting War" artist Goldman will collaborate with political journalist Michael Crowley on a graphic novel about the 2008 presidential campaign, titled simply "08." "People have always thought of comics as a genre. But it's not; it's a medium all to itself," says Goldman, who in 2006 co-founded Act-i-vate, an online gallery of sorts that features a rotating display of original, serialized works from 25 comic artists. Goldman thinks of it as a group gym, where artists take turns on a rotating stage. "The Internet is changing the world of comics immensely. It's lowered the point of entry, and the beauty of the Web is there's room and bandwidth for everyone."

© 2007