HISTORY IN COMICS 283
Mr. X. In addition to numerous comics produced as off shoots of Love and Rockets ,
in 2006 Jaime’s most popular character was featured in a story, “La Maggie La Loca,”
serialized in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Always prolifi c, Gilbert’s recent
work has included the graphic novels Sloth ( DC /Vertigo, 2006) and Chance in Hell
(Fantagraphics, 2007), as well as the miniseries Speak of the Devil ( Dark Horse , six
issues, collected 2008). With a format change, Love and Rockets was revived in a second
volume (20 issues, 2001–7), and in 2008, Love and Rockets: New Stories appeared as
the fi rst of a planned series of regularly released trade paperbacks.
Selected Bibliography: Hatfi eld, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005; Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How
Graphic Novels Work and What Th ey Mean. New York: Da Capo Press, 2007.
Corey K. Creekmur
HISTORY IN COMICS. Despite the creative freedom comics can achieve, history has
been a persistent source of meaning in many of its genres. Comics use history diversely,
as either fi ction or nonfi ction, to comment on real and imagined worlds: as the sub-
ject matter of educational comics ; as the cultural context for personal biography; as
the real-world background of fantastical or alternate histories; or, as the mythology of
a wholly made-up universe and its denizens. Th ese variations of fact and fi ction tell
both public and private histories, taking forms such as chronicles of real-world events
and social movements, revisionist retellings of the accepted historical record, personal
memoir, and even the classic superhero origin story. Th is fl exible approach to history
gives comics the ability to depict and speculate about multiple versions of reality—
what has been and what might have been—by creatively adapting the methods of tra-
ditional historiography, especially those that relate the story of the individual to the
wider world.
History as Education
Graphic narrative has long been used to educate its readers on a variety of topics,
including history. Realistic historical comics expand the reach of graphic narrative
beyond entertainment and often attempt to revise their readers’ understandings of
accepted history. For example, Art Spiegelman’s two-volume Maus (1986, 1991), per-
haps the genre’s best-known example, is often cited as a groundbreaking contribution to
Holocaust studies. Spiegelman’s story centers on the long-term eff ects of World War II,
alternating between the memories that Vladek, a Holocaust survivor and Spiegelman’s
father, shares with his son and the author’s own present-day attempts to come to terms
with the survivor’s guilt that has devastated his family. Th e story juxtaposes multiple
moments in time, alternating between Vladek’s wartime attempts to survive and the
retelling and processing of that history by father and son, to highlight the creation
of history as a process of storytelling. While the confl icted father-son relationship at
the center of the present-day storyline personalizes the problems of history as one of
