A large number of artists with Jewish American backgrounds have been deeply influential to the development of comics (notably of the superhero variety), social and political cartoons, and graphic novels. This chapter examines the recurrence of trauma and grief in the works of several Jewish authors, both as core motifs and as narrative/visual devices. It follows the career of graphic pioneer Will Eisner, who moved from realistically drawn crime and adventure fiction (with The Spirit, an early example of long-form comic appealing to adult readers) to more personal themes such as family history and loss in A Contract with God, the first US publication self-labeled as a “graphic novel.” Art Spiegelman’s work (Maus, 1986 and 1991; In the Shadow of No Towers, 2004) confronts similar themes grounded in trauma, suffering, and transgenerational testimony, where the artist’s memorialization of the past and experience with the present construct a graphic negotiation with grief. The chapter finds echoes of this approach in more recent works from Jewish graphic novelists such as Roz Chast and Ken Krimstein.

Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. The chapter maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows, who some of the pioneers were, and how exhibition standards have developed over time.

This chapter considers the shift towards artisan production in comic books, a process that has led to the elevation of its creators to the status of auteurs. While acknowledging the continued relevance of the term graphic novel, Section 2.1 argues for the adoption of graphic narrative as a scholarly designation. This section also introduces a representative corpus of graphic narratives and reflects on sampling and digitization processes. The author shows how existing scholarship focuses on a remarkably small percentage of an increasingly diverse field, preferring titles created by single authors, published originally in book form, and within the subgenre of the graphic memoir. Section 2.2 argues that the growth of this publishing category has been driven by a complex pattern of appropriation, differentiation, and the reinvention of popular form. Demonstrating how formal features interact with the demands of the literary marketplace, the author traces the evolution of brightness and color – features that have rarely been the focus of sustained consideration.

This chapter focuses on exhibitions of comics history curated by contemporary cartoonists. It maps out the stakes of this curatorial gesture in a context of comics museification and the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural challenges that it raises. Drafting in cartoonists as curators has been a way for some museums to navigate these issues, by commissioning a “cartoonist’s eye” to select and present material from archives. Two specific cartoonist-curated exhibitions are central case studies for this chapter: Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman in 2012 and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History in 2014. The exhibitions frame “their” histories in quite specific ways, relative to their material and institutional contexts. Both cases present visitors with completely different versions of comics history, based not only on the material that is exhibited but on how it is presented, framed, and organized. Based on interviews and archival research, the chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the layout strategies and museological discourses around the two exhibitions, describing how curating shapes a particular visual transmission of comics history.