With its enticing question splashed across the cover, Hillary Chute's Why Comics? invites the reader to consider the connections among comics, comics creators, and the medium's everexpanding audience. Through ten chapters all prefaced by “Why” (“Disaster,” “Superheroes,” “Sex,” “he Suburbs,” “Cities,” “Punk,” “Illness & Disability,” “Girls,” “War,” and “Queer”), Chute examines why the shape-shifting form of comics continues to serve as the perfect vessel for visual storytellers attempting to capture the complexity of the human condition.

In political thought, there is perhaps no more penetrating scrutiny of the significance of the factual than hannah Arendt's essay “Truth and Politics.” “Facts and events,” Arendt observes, are the “invariable outcome of men living and acting together.” As such, they “constitute the very texture of the political realm” (227). Concerning words and deeds of many actors, factual truth must be the basis for deliberations and opinions in the political space. “Freedom of opinion,” she continues, “is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation” (234). Yet facts are infinitely fragile things, for they occur in the ever-changing field of human affairs, “established through testimony by eyewitnesses—notoriously unreliable—and by records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries” (239). Facts can be manipulated, even denied outright by the powers that be. The lie, opposed to factual truth as error is to rational truth, represents a deliberate political action, since it aims “to change the world” (246).

As one of the many fortunate and grateful subjects of Hillary Chute's writing over the past few years, I feel ethically compelled to recuse myself from any discourse regarding her most recent book simply because it would seem, well, unsightly. (And in comics, where reading and seeing operate at parity, being unsightly is patently undesirable.) Here's what I can tell you, though: She gets it. And she gets it right. There are few, if any, other writers on comics who so minutely and more thoroughly understand the psychological, aesthetic and perceptual complexities of deploying images as words and drawing as writing—but then quickly go beyond all that stuff to get at the human and humane essence of the works considered. Because comics are essentially just another mode of storytelling, stories are almost always Hillary's focus, and I've known her long enough now—about a dozen years—to know she also believes that of all stories, life itself is the most important one. I'm glad she's ended up being a part of mine, and that, in print, she's also a part of yours.

I'm gratified that the most widely circulated journal in literary studies has solicited the skill and attention of nine such erudite interlocutors, including both critics and creators, to formally respond to my book Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. It's also a bit of a surprise, albeit a pleasing one, since Why Comics? is my first single-authored book not aimed at the readership of PMLA.