Comics realism and the Maus event Comics and the dynamics of World War II remembrance

In this thesis, I consider the causes and effects of the success of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) and chart the formal directions in which comics have subsequently moved historical representation. To do so, I conceptualize realism alongside the work of Fredric Jameson, Erich Auerbach, and Ernst Gombrich as a field of struggle in which different representational conventions strive to be perceived as realistic. With this approach to realism at hand, I undertake an academic reception study of Maus in order to show how its success resulted in a conception of historical representation in comics as uniquely suited to a subjective mode of realism. In the three case studies that follow, I challenge this all too narrow view of comics’ capabilities for historical representation by demonstrating that the depiction of the past in comics draws on the medium’s ability to render the past in densely layered combinations of subjective, historiographic and mechanic modes of realism in texts and images. By analyzing the way in which different modes of representing the past are brought together in Peter Pontiac’s Kraut (2001), Greg Pak and Carmine di Giandomenico’s Magneto: Testament (2008-2009), and Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (1971), I not only show that the medium’s affordance for historical representation is much broader than is often assumed, I also uncover World War II comics as reflections of the impact of an ever-widening media landscape on the remembrance of World War II.