Historiographic Comics and Abina and the Important Men

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Comics have long been praised as a medium ideal for nonfiction, and especially for memoirs of experiences in historic events such as war and persecution. I analyze Liz Clarke and Trevor R. Getz’s Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (first edition 2012), the first and most successful of Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series. This series of collaborations between historians and artists exemplifies comics’ capability for nuanced historical representation. OUP’s Graphic History Series are graphic and prose textbooks aimed at high-school and college-level readers, the goal of which is not merely to relay historical facts, but rather to invite readers into historical inquiry, investigating how history becomes knowable as well as the material factors that limit and distort historical knowledge. Abina illuminates one woman’s quest to claim agency for her own life against the entangled forces of slavery, British colonialism, and West African patriarchy. Like the other titles that follow it in the series, Abina and the Important Men is composed of several parts, parts which combine to articulate “History” as a process rather than a simple object of knowledge. The comics portion of the textbook makes strategic use of the medium’s formal potential to complicate notions of time and space, and to exploit dissonances between individuals’ speeches, as well as between verbal and visual representation. These formal manipulations support Abina and the Important Men ’s interrogation of historical practices and invite inquiry into disciplinary history.