In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.

Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Modern nonfiction comics emerged from the shattering experience of World War II, developing in the 1970s with Art Spiegelman’s first “Maus” story about his immigrant family’s survival of Nazi death camps and with Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa’s inaugural work of “atomic bomb manga,” the comic book Ore Wa Mita (“I Saw It”)—a title that alludes to Goya’s famous Disasters of War etchings.

Chute explains how the form of comics—its collection of frames—lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness.

"The provocative idea at the heart of Hillary Chute’s Disaster Drawn is that comics should be accepted as a true testament of war in the same way historical writings, documentary films and still photographs have been. She traces the lineage of the artist-reporterback to printmaker Jacques Callot in the 17th century and ends with Coco Wang’s web comics from China, which document catastrophic earthquakes almost before the ground beneath the artist’s feet has stopped reverberating. Meticulously researched and handsomely illustrated with full-color examples of the work under discussion, Chute makes a compelling case…The great strength of comics is the ability to tell in simple, intimate terms what it is to bear witness. Chute has given us a great resource on this history." - Chicago Tribune

"In Disaster Drawn, Chute offers an elegant aesthetic and theoretical argument for how ‘made-up pictures’ allow us to enter into traumatic historical events, ‘inviting one to look while signaling the difficulty of looking,’ making them not only an accurate form of witness, but an ethical one." - Boston Review

"Compelling." - New Statesman

"An illuminating analysis of graphic narrative’s documentary power… [The medium] turns the reader as well as the artist into a witness of the unspeakable in a manner that often transcends polemics and partisanship." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Chute’s work is a magnificently insightful and meticulously researched analysis of the powerful role comics play in witnessing war and trauma…What emerges is a particularly impressive sense of the sustained power of comics and drawing." - PopMatters

"Hillary Chute puts forward a convincing and comprehensive argument that comics as a medium are perfectly positioned to act as documentary, as a form of witnessing, as a means of engaging and prodding history (particularly war-generated and traumatic histories)." - The Spokesman