Telling history through comics

Comics have really earned their stripes in recent years and are now a research subject in their own right. Isabelle Delorme, who has just been awarded her PhD from Sciences Po’s Centre for History, is interested in what she calls “historical memory narratives in comics”: works in which authors interweave family history with general history, such as in the immensely popular Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. What does the study of comics contribute to research? We asked Dr Delorme, a researcher who is passionate about her subject.

You have recently completed a PhD in history on what you call “historical memory narratives in comics”. Can you explain what these are?

They're a type of narrative in which authors write their or their relatives’ memoirs in comic book form. These comics are part of the autobiographical genre, but their narratives are constructed around major historical moments rather than important personal dates. For example, Maus, in which Art Spiegelman describes his parents’ experience during WWII, begins during the Holocaust and finishes with the end of his family’s deportation in 1945. In Vietnamerica, author GB Tran chooses to begin his story in 1975, when his family left Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Another feature is that these are often “one shot” narratives that do not become a series. The stories are so intimate and personal that they remain unique.

Why are these comics interesting from a research perspective?

Because they form a genre in its own right which emerged only recently – in the 1990s – and has yet to be extensively studied. The emergence of this type of narrative is associated with a growing interest in remembrance in general. Our societies have become increasingly “memory-focused”, with memory tourism, memory laws and, similarly, memory comics. It's a global phenomenon, with authors in Europe, the United States and Japan. Henry Rousso, a contemporary historian who is an expert on memory issues, refers to a “globalisation of memory”.

What do they contribute in particular compared to other historical accounts?

These narratives provide original and very sharp insights into specific moments in history. They often include migratory journeys, as in Persepolis, in which we follow Satrapi from her childhood during the Iranian Revolution to France. But that is not always the case. In Les mauvaises gens ("Bad People"), Étienne Davodeau recounts the life of his union-worker parents in Maine-et-Loire until Mitterrand came to power in 1981, a date that symbolically marks the end of his story. In all of these stories, the authors are careful not to distort reality, and they do plenty of research to ensure accuracy. It's really history; it's truth-telling.

Which research streams does your work belong to?

You could say that my work is at the intersection of three fields: Memory Studies, of which the historians Henry Rousso and Denis Peschanski are at the forefront in France, Visual Studies and Cultural Studies. My work is also related to micro-history, with an interest in the anonymous and “unnamed”, and observation of how an individual memory can become representative of collective memory. It is interesting to note that most of the authors of historical memory narratives studied in my thesis come from modest backgrounds. Maybe this reflects an unconscious desire to preserve a memory that looks destined to disappear and that they believe should not, because their relatives, though anonymous, also made History.

*Historical memory narratives: individual and collective 20th-century memory in comics, PhD thesis supervised by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac at Sciences Po’s Centre for History.

Photo portrait: Isabelle Delorme.
Insert: extract from comic strip by I. Delorme and S. Ayadi
Credits: Photography: Guillaume Murat / Bibliothèque Nationale de France - Artwork: Sarah Ayadi

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