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Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 376 pp. ISBN: 978-0-6745-0451-6 ($35)
As Hillary Chute notes in the introduction to Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, 'we are now in a kind of golden age of documentary, in which attention to myriad forms of recording and archiving is greater than ever' (5). Establishing this contemporary need for documentary investigation, Chute then continues to trace the origins of the comic as documentary form from the 1600s to the present day. Despite the current popularity of documentary comics, particularly their popularity beyond the realms of the comics fan, these texts have not received the same critical attention within comics scholarship as other genres of comics. Chute seeks to remedy this by concerning herself with how contemporary documentary forms have emerged, specifically in countries such as the United States, Japan and France, which have the longest traditions of comics writing and reception. She focuses on five artists, Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, with a more in-depth focus on the latter three. Chute's main argument situates the more modern narratives as a specific response to the events of the Second World War, and this preoccupation is woven through the argument of her text. Meanwhile, she also seeks to demonstrate how these works are building on a longer tradition and how these earlier origins exist in dialogue with the later texts.
The first chapters of Disaster Drawn are concerned primarily with Chute placing her argument within a wider context of comics studies. She draws comparisons between comics and photography as a record of historically or politically significant events before moving on to explore how comics differ from cinema, requiring as they do active participation on the part of the reader. These assertions help to situate Chute's analysis and prime the reader for a text that addresses not only these accounts of disaster but also the specificity of the form and its ability to address effectively these events being explored. Her initial chapter seeks to establish other examples...