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This article explores the emergence of graphic nonfiction as a new and accessible form of historical study. It focuses on three publications from the Graphic Mundi series by Penn State University Press, which offer interdisciplinary narratives that highlight global crises and connections to recent world history. The article discusses the unique aspects of reading and analyzing graphic novels, emphasizing their ability to engage with complex and emotional topics while reaching a broad audience. It also traces the historical roots of sequential art and its evolution into more mainstream comics. Additionally, the article discusses the rise of graphic novels and graphic nonfiction in the 20th century, examining their radical tendencies, social critiques, and the influence of censorship. It explores the subjective nature of graphic history and the international influences on the form and function of graphic narratives. The article concludes by discussing the emergence of Graphic Mundi as an academic series of graphic histories and its contribution to the field of nonfiction graphic narratives. [Extracted from the article]

As an existential practice, predicated on human interdependencies and labour, care attains remarkable significance in sustaining the life of the ill/disabled and is an indelible part of families and healthcare. Families, medicine, and institutional caring centres (such as old age homes, hospices among others) justify their commitment to care through emotional and practical/ technical approaches towards illness/disability. COVID-19 pandemic has just made human interdependency and significance of care exceptionally visible through laying bare the inevitable physical and social vulnerabilities. However, in the contemporary neoliberal society that favour autonomy and efficiency, care is overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and often linked with vulnerability and precarity. Graphic caregiving memoirs drawn by caregivers themselves are ideal sites for re-imagining, validating, depicting and reconceptualising experiences of care. In this email interview graphic artists Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins reflect on care, the wide range of issues concerning its practice and suggest an alternative perspective towards caregiving. In Part A titled Of Comics and Care the authors respond to generic questions about their interest in comics, works, life, among others. In Part B titled What was I expecting? Compassion? Validation? The authors respond to questions related to their respective graphic narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author tells about the genrefication of the library collection at a suburban high school in New York City. He describes the process of the renovation of the library that included a survey of teachers and teaching assistants about genrefying the library collection. He discusses the different genres he came up for the library including nonfiction, biographies and memoirs, world languages, out of this world, romance, chills, trills, historical fiction and realistic fiction.

Playing into the master narrative of the US civil rights movement, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell's March trilogy negotiates not only the movement's tactics and achievements, but also its initial mediation through photography and television and its ongoing remediation. Taking the memoir's urge to teach as a starting point, this article assesses its didactic impulses and implications, combining a historiographic approach with an assessment of the narrative's visual construction. The article highlights the trilogy's potentials and shortcomings as an intervention into civil rights memory and outlines a metacritical pedagogy through which March can become potent classroom material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel employs numerous family photographs to authenticate and comment on her complicated family history. Drawing on the use of photography in Fun Home, I examine the manner in which photography functions in Bechdel's other graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (2012). The photographs of Alison and her mother that are carefully selected and incorporated into the structure of Are You My Mother? do not only function as documents. In fact, as I shall argue, they can be regarded as mirrors, or critical reflections on the role and presentation of the self in graphic memoir. In Are You My Mother?, photography often has an interrogative (and not simply referential or authenticating) function. Not so much caught up with discovering the truth about a particular family history, photography is used to expose the complexity of the narrative of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cece Bell’s (El Deafo, Amulet, New York, 2014) is a middle childhood graphic novel memoir that explores the author’s experiences of losing her hearing and growing up with a severe hearing loss. As a graphic novel, the story is able to avoid a medicalized view of disability by combining image and text, a format that allows readers, those with hearing and those without, to step inside the narrative and deeply consider Bell’s experiences. The narrative elements typically found in graphic novel autobiography create a communal reading experience, which does not allow readers to forget who the book is about. After an analysis of the primacy of these narrative graphic novel elements in telling a story about a disability, this article shares the reading experiences of university students in exploring this story, during which students used both the image and text to help them confront misconceptions they had about deafness, broadening their understandings and experiences around disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

T his research note examines the authors' graphic history Showdown! Making Modern Unions to build on recent scholarship about the pedagogical use of comics by considering the tools and possibilities this medium opens up to professional historians regarding the treatment of primary sources. We suggest that graphic histories enable strategies for using primary sources that actually enhance and popularize the ways historians can effectively use evidence, particularly in terms of building the critical consciousness of an expanded base of readers. Employing the comics theory concept of closure, we show graphic history to be uniquely situated to allow historians and readers to become actively engaged with and derive meaning from primary sources in a way not possible in other forms of historical writing. Examples from Showdown! are used to show the depth and breadth of these methodological possibilities. C ette note de recherche qui examine l'histoire graphique de Showdown! Making Modern Unions s'appuie sur des études récentes sur l'utilisation pédagogique de la bande dessinée en considérant les outils et les possibilités que ce média ouvre aux historiens professionnels en matière de traitement des sources primaires. Nous suggérons que les histoires graphiques permettent des stratégies d'utilisation de sources primaires qui améliorent et popularisent réellement la maniere dont les historiens peuvent utiliser efficacement les preuves, notamment en termes de conscience critique d'une base élargie de lecteurs. En utilisant le concept de fermeture de la théorie de la bande dessinée, nous montrons que l'histoire graphique est unique pour permettre aux historiens et aux lecteurs de s'engager activement avec des sources primaires et d'en tirer un sens impossible dans d'autres formes d'écriture historique. Des exemples de Showdown! sont utilisés pour montrer la profondeur et l'ampleur de ces possibilités méthodologiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a criticism of the graphic novel travelogues of Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle. Topics include the cosmopolitanism exhibited by a number of the characters, a description of the countries, and the relationships between a cosmopolitan attitude and a sense of locality.

The article reports on the student creation of a graphic novel on the Cleveland, Ohio trolleymen's strike in 1899. It discusses how the students had to gather facts, incorporate varying accounts to understand different perspectives, and assemble the information into a narrative. It also mentions how the students made connections to larger events and develop a sense of historical empathy.

This essay historicizes Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home in the context of the presidency of George W. Bush. Bechdel created Fun Home from 1999 through 2005-dates that corresponded with Bush's campaign, election, and presidency. As Bechdel frequently laments in her serialized comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the Bush presidency posited truth as unknowable, facts as in finitely flexible, and faith as constitutive of reality. Fun Home never mentions the president (nor any historical figure or event after the mid-1980s), but the memoir uses newly available digital technology to resist Bush-era "truthiness." In Fun Home, Bechdel combines digital photography, her body in performance, and hand drawing to create a new form of graphic narrative. This essay draws out Fun Home's political engagement with the Bush administration and simultaneously claims the proliferation of digital photography as a watershed event in the history of graphic narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey," by G. B. Tran is presented. It explores the memories of warfare and the refugees during the Vietnamese diaspora including the hospitality of the U.S. to Vietnamese refugees, the war for the national sovereignty against French, and the implementation of the re-education policies in Vietnam.

The article offers the author's insights on the study regarding the schooling experiences of indigenous and racialized girls through graphic life writing of biographical and autobiographical picturebooks. Topics discussed include the counter-storytelling as the helpful concept of theorizing life writing, the analysis of several biography picturebooks such as "Through My Eyes," by Ruby Bridges, and the aspect of teaching graphic life writing.

The aim of this article is to identify some of the key conventions and narrative patterns that graphic memoirists may use in order to articulate their own sense of identity, and deal with issues of truth, ethics, and representation through visual and verbal combinations. Craig Thompson's Blankets (2003) serves as a poignant example of the semiotic resources that are relevant to an analysis of the autobiographical comics genre: the inscription of subjectivity and the spatial dimension of temporality. Drawing on Charles Hatfield's critical model (2005), this article examines the various ways graphic narratives mediate identity, enter into (and out of) autobiographical pacts, and «perform» authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of the graphic text "A People's History of American Empire" by Howard Zinn in teaching pedagogical techniques and content knowledge to pre-service K-12 teachers in a university setting. Particular focus is given to a unit taught by the author examining the history of public opinion on U.S. foreign policy. It is suggested that teacher educators should more explicitly outline the process for developing critical literacy and a critical stance on an issue.

Purpose - This bibliographic essay examines the scope and variety of nonfiction works in comics form with the intent of expanding librarians' awareness of the diversity of such materials and serving as a resource for librarians. Design/methodology/approach - It provides some theoretical background for understanding what constitutes nonfiction in graphic form and an overview of works available in print. Findings - The article provides a representative (but not comprehensive) survey of graphic nonfiction works in the genres of memoir, travel, journalism, history, biography, science, essays and educational materials. Research limitations/implications - The essay focuses on materials published in books in English; the library world would benefit from subsequent research exploring the richness of materials available in other formats and other languages. Originality/value - The field of graphic nonfiction is expanding, and this article serves as a guide for libraries interested in building or expanding collections in this format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of graphic texts, such as graphic novels and image-rich non-fiction narratives, in high school and undergraduate history education in Canada. Particular emphasis is given to ways in which such texts play a role in forming a collective historical memory within Canadian students. The article also provides a synopsis of the books "Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography," by Chester Brown, and "Portraits from Life," by David Collier, and explores how historical thinking is influenced by each of these non-fiction graphic books.

A literary criticism is presented of the autobiographical graphic memoir entitled "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary," by Justin Green. Subjects considered include how the work depicts Green's alter ego Binky Brown's obsessive-compulsive disorder, tarot cards, divination, and underground literature.