HISTORY IN COMICS 285
A host of creators have responded to the 9/11 attacks with creative work. In
addition to the graphic narrative version of the 9/11 Commission Report, there are: Art
Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004); Jeff Mason, Will Eisner , and Harvey
Pekar’s 9–11: Emergency Relief (2002); Alissa Torres’s American Widow (2008); and
Marvel’s Heroes: Th e World’s Greatest Superhero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest
Heroes (2001).
Several educational comics series also showcase key historical events or people.
Th e prolifi c Rick Geary is one of the most well-known practitioners in this genre.
In addition to his macabre Library of Victorian Murder series (featuring the likes of
Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden), he has also published J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic
Biography (2008). Geary’s black-and-white artwork illustrates dense amounts of
research about murder investigations, as well as political fi gures, with ease for a
popular audience.
Biography
Biographical history has been a central focus of comics since the advent of
superheroes in the 1930s. Th e importance of biography is evident in the importance
of the origin story to superhero comics. Every hero has an origin—a radioactive spider
bite, interstellar immigration to Earth, untimely loss of one’s parents—that is typically
hidden from public knowledge and inextricably linked to the hero’s abilities. Charac-
ters frequently become heroes by turning a personal tragedy into a power that serves
the public good. Beyond this literary convention, true-to-life biographies have become
increasingly common in comics and graphic novels, perhaps because of an increasingly
older readership and a general fascination with memoir and reality programming in
popular media.
In some cases, social history strongly informs the individual, biographical history.
Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby (1995) explores the problems with which the
book’s main character, Toland Polk, must come to terms as a gay white man living in
the American 1960s. Since his story is set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and
Black Power movements, one of its major concerns becomes his attempts to overcome
the racist attitudes that he internalized while growing up.
Set primarily in Iran, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003) recounts the rise of
Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic during the 1979 Iranian Revolution
and afterward. Satrapi focuses these political developments to personal biography, as
the story depicts her coping with the many social strictures placed on Muslim women
and the constant threat of serious government censure. Th ough she describes various
personal experiences, including a series of relationships with boyfriends, the history
emphasizes issues of political and national identity. Th e two-volume, highly biographical
work follows Satrapi in Tehran and Vienna (vol. 1) before her return to Iran, and her
evaluation of how both she and her country have changed (vol. 2).
Th e division between public history and personal biography is often blurred
for the sake of story. Andrew Helfer and Randy DuBurke’s Malcolm X: A Graphic
