Non-fiction comics


Non-fiction comics, also known as graphic non-fiction, is non-fiction in the comics medium, embracing a variety of formats from comic strips to trade paperbacks.

Comic strips and comic books

Traditionally, comic strips have long offered factual material in this category, notably Ripley's Believe It or Not!, John Hix's Strange as It Seems, Ralph Graczak's Our Own Oddities, King Features' Heroes of American History, Gordon Johnston's It Happened in Canada, and others. Dick's Adventures in Dreamland was another attempt by King Features to teach history with comics. Clayton Knight created a strip about aviators, The Hall of Fame of the Air, later collected in a book. Texas History Movies, which began on October 5, 1926, in The Dallas Morning News, received praise from educators, as did America's Best Buy: The Louisiana Purchase, a 1953 daily strip in the New Orleans States, distributed nationally by the Register and Tribune Syndicate, which also handled Will Eisner's The Spirit supplement for Sunday newspapers.
Contemporary nonfiction comic strips include Biographic, Health Capsules, The K Chronicles, and You Can with Beakman and Jax.
Non-fiction was published in numerous comic books in the 1940s, notably Picture News, True Comics and Heroic Comics. A notable scripter of this material for 1940s comic books was novelist Patricia Highsmith, who wrote for Real Fact, Real Heroes, and True Comics.
A notable nonfiction comic from the 1950s was the 1957 one-shot Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 16-page comic book about Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Fitzgerald Publishing Co. produced the Golden Legacy line of educational black history comic books from 1966 to 1976. Golden Legacy produced biographies of such notable figures as Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker, Matthew Henson, Alexandre Dumas, Frederick Douglass, Robert Smalls, Joseph Cinqué, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander Pushkin, Lewis Howard Latimer, and Granville Woods. Golden Legacy was the brainchild of African American accountant Bertram Fitzgerald, who also wrote seven of the volumes. Many of the other contributors to the Golden Legacy series were also black, including Joan Bacchus and Tom Feelings. Other notable contributors included Don Perlin and Tony Tallarico.
Harvey Pekar's originally self-published comic book series American Splendor "helped change the appreciation for, and perceptions of, the graphic novel, the drawn memoir, the autobiographical comic narrative." He was the first author to publicly distribute "memoir comic books."
Larry Gonick produced graphic non-fiction about science and history for more than 30 years.
Joe Sacco's nine-issue series Palestine — about his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1991 and January 1992 — broke new ground in the realm of comics journalism.
Other contemporary nonfiction comic books include the For Beginners series and The Manga Guides.

Books

Since the publication of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986, there have been many non-fiction "graphic novels" published in the realms of history, biography, autobiography, education, and journalism. Francisca Goldsmith, writing in the School Library Journal in 2008, assembled a "list of essential titles for high schoolers" and reviewed graphic nonfiction by a variety of creators, including Rick Geary, Harvey Pekar, Stan Mack, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Osamu Tezuka and Howard Zinn.
Other examples are ' and After 9/11: America’s War on Terror, both by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. Hill & Wang, which published the 9/11 books, has published several other works of graphic non-fiction.
In ', Josh Neufeld documented true stories of survival during Hurricane Katrina as witnessed by the survivors: Denise, a counselor, social worker and sixth-generation New Orleanian; friends Abbas and Darnell, who await the storm in Abbas’s family-run market; pastor's son Kwame, entering his senior year of high school; and the young couple Leo and Michelle, who both grew up in New Orleans. Each confronts the same decision–stay or flee.
In Italian Winter, Davide Toffolo documented a story of two children from Slovenia in Fascist concentration camp in Italy.
In March, U.S. Rep. John Lewis recalled his childhood, his entry into the American civil rights movement and his first encounter with Martin Luther King Jr., and his first experiences with nonviolent resistance. March: Book One was followed by Book Two and Book Three.
In The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes recounted her earlier history of America's Great Depression.
Red Quill Books has published a series of political, non-fiction comics including an illustrated version of the Communist Manifesto, a Manga version of Das Capital and the Last Days of Che Guevara.