Abstract

Within the field of indie comics, politics are most visible–and most closely scrutinized–in the nonfictional genres of graphic journalism, history, and autobiography. Discussion of these tends to foreground questions of representation and identification; apart from them, as in the film criticism of the Screen era, a certain formalism predominates. Here, the unselfconscious narration of concrete facts and experiences supposedly typifying works such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons may be taken as a shortcoming, a failure to "lay bare the devices" and to foreground the medium, whereas a...