Chute, Hillary

• 
• Alumni Author: Chute, Hillary
• Year: 2006
• Publisher / Date: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2016

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.

Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Modern nonfiction comics emerged from the shattering experience of World War II, developing in the 1970s with Art Spiegelman’s first “Maus” story about his immigrant family’s survival of Nazi death camps and with Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa’s inaugural work of “atomic bomb manga,” the comic book Ore Wa Mita (“I Saw It”)—a title that alludes to Goya’s famous Disasters of War etchings.

Chute explains how the form of comics—its collection of frames—lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness.

• 
• Alumni Author: Chute, Hillary
• Year: 2006
• Publisher / Date: University of Chicago Press, 2014

We are living in a golden age of cartoon art. Never before has graphic storytelling been so prominent or garnered such respect: critics and readers alike agree that contemporary cartoonists are creating some of the most innovative and exciting work in all the arts.

For nearly a decade Hillary L. Chute has been sitting down for extensive interviews with the leading figures in comics, and with Outside the Box she offers fans a chance to share her ringside seat. Chute’s in-depth discussions with twelve of the most prominent and accomplished artists and writers in comics today reveal a creative community that is richly interconnected yet fiercely independent, its members sharing many interests and approaches while working with wildly different styles and themes. Chute’s subjects run the gamut of contemporary comics practice, from underground pioneers like Art Spiegelman and Lynda Barry, to the analytic work of Scott McCloud, the journalism of Joe Sacco, and the extended narratives of Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, and more. They reflect on their experience and innovations, the influence of peers and mentors, the reception of their art and the growth of critical attention, and the crucial place of print amid the encroachment of the digital age.

Beautifully illustrated in full-color, and featuring three never-before-published interviews—including the first published conversation between Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware—Outside the Box will be a landmark volume, a close-up account of the rise of graphic storytelling and a testament to its vibrant creativity.

• 
• Alumni Author: Chute, Hillary
• Year: 2006
• Publisher / Date: University of Chicago Press, 2014

The past decade has seen the medium of comics reach unprecedented heights of critical acclaim and commercial success—and that new prominence has led to increasing interest within the academy as well. Comics and Media, a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry, reflects that, using the successful Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference held at the University of Chicago in 2012 as a springboard for a larger set of scholarly essays on comics, animation, film, digital games, and media ecologies.

Essays from prominent scholars range across such topics as media archaeology, theories of the image, popular forms, the history of aesthetics, and transmedia dynamics in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and early twenty-first-century contexts, all supported by full-color reproductions of the work of the artists under consideration, including such prominent figures as R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Seeking to expand the reach of fields such as media studies and comics studies by seeking out the crossover between different media practices and different disciplines, such as literary theory, art history, film studies, and digital humanities, Comics and Media also highlights the tensions—and connections— between “new” and “old” media throughout.

The most substantial scholarly exploration of comics to date, Comics and Media offers an up-to-date take on a burgeoning field and suggests countless avenues for future inquiry.

• 
• Alumni Author: Chute, Hillary
• Year: 2006
• Publisher / Date: University of Chicago Press, 2011

In the pages of MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize–winning Maus, the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago. He probes the questions that Maus most often evokes—Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics?—and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process.