Graphic Novels

摘要

This column includes two examples of excellent graphic nonfiction (a term I prefer to the rather self-contradictory nonfiction graphic novel). Stan Mack's Janet & Me is a partly text, partly cartoon account of his partner's struggle with breast cancer, while Jim Ottaviani & Leland Purvis's Suspended in Language, an account of the life and work of physicist Niels Bohr, is partly biography, partly history, and partly an explanation of 20th-century physics theories. Autobiographical comics, such as Harvey Pekar's American Splendor and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, are not uncommon. But the comics form has also been used to great effect to present other nonfiction work, from Safe Area Gorazde, comics journalist Joe Sacco's report from the Bosnian war, to Rick Geary's true-crime "Treasury of Victorian Murder" series. Historical biographies in comics form range from Chester Brown's Louis Riel (about a 19th-century Canadian revolutionary) to Martin I. Green and Bill Sienkiewicz's Voodoo Child: The Illustrated Legend of Jimi Hendrix (o.p.).