Documentary comic books (graphic novels) have become more culturally prominent in Europe and the US in the latter stages of the twentieth century. Many author/artists have used the medium to recount their experiences of social crisis and trauma, such as revolution, war, military occupation, racism and homophobia. Some of these graphic novel narratives have been accompanied by a pedagogic impulse, a desire to recount and relay traumatic incidents from the past for a contemporary audience. In this way the novels can be thought of as constituting a visual pedagogy, a means by which the contemporary audience may come to know, or to vicariously experience, past events by means of narratives that are generated by the juxtaposition of image with text.

        The case study graphic novels referred to in this paper are Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, a story of children surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima;Joe Sacco’s Palestine, an account of life under military occupation; Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a Holocaust survival story; the illustrated novels of W. G. Sebald and his narratives of children at school in post-Holocaust Germany, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis tale of her childhood in Iran during revolution and then in Europe as an exile. All of these authors favour the autobiographic narrative approach, and each examines, wholly or in part, the conditions of displaced, dispossessed and traumatised children, offering accounts of the survival of children in the face of overwhelming adversity. Through these seminal works theoretical issues, such as the retention of traumatic memory, are discussed in the technical and conceptual context of the image-text medium.

        The graphic novel/comic book, as a pedagogic medium for recounting societal or collective memory (as defined by the widespread acquisition of knowledge of social events), appears to facilitate the ways of experiencing and knowing traumatic history. Evidence for this can be found in each of these cases, where the social crisis is of such magnitude that it can be thought of as beyond representation, or ‘unutterable’. It is significant that these authors have nonetheless attempted to document these events, and have chosen the graphic novel medium to do so.

The theoretical framework is constructed through examination of key conceptual areas, which include:

·        Memory and history: e.g. Ricoeur’s (2006) theoretical work is applied, to question concepts such as remembering, recalling and imagining. His discussion of testimony explores the idea of the ‘autobiographical certification of a narrative’.

·        Issues of authenticity affect the recounting and retelling of experience, especially that of trauma and crisis. Cooper’s (1983) theories of authenticity and its relation to learning and memory utilises Nietzsche to explain the concept in terms of the narrator’s values.

·        Identity and childhood: the acquisition of community identity of children through ethnicity and gender construction in the trauma of social crisis are explored; the theorist of trauma, gender and identity (e.g. Butler, 2000) are deployed.

·        The visual pedagogical imperative is manifest most commonly through idiosyncratic visual narratives; the recipient/reader/learner is actively encouraged to construct and reconstruct ideas presented by the image/text.

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