Wartime Weddings Realism and War Representation in Shigeru Mizuki’s Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths

Historical representations in comics have often been lauded for the subjective view they offer on historical events. In this view, these comics’ subjective approach to history arises partly from their hand drawn graphic style. In this article, I argue that there is no such thing as a unified or singular comics style. Rather, the hand drawn images presented in comics can vary from the schematic to the near photorealistic, each of these styles, or combinations thereof, moreover, have their own connotations with regards to the representations’ veracity. In an analysis of Shigeru Mizuki’s Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths, I demonstrate how this historical war comic depicting the hardships of a Japanese soldier during the Pacific War constructs its own brand of realism by combining the schematic with the near photorealistic in different ways on its pages. Realism in historical war comics, I argue, building on both Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism and Gombrich’s Preference for the Primitive, arises from a juxtaposition of competing graphic styles that are continually combined in different manners to different effects. Only such a conception of realism as a continuous struggle to challenge the conventions of other realisms is able to shed light on how Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths both approximates an experience of war and shows the fundamental impossibility of a representation of the past as it really was.