Nonfiction Comics and Documentary

Abstract

Comics have traditionally been associated with, and generally expected to present, imagined worlds and scenarios. This assumption underpins Martin Barker’s (1989) argument against claims, from various ideological standpoints, of comics’ harmful effects on readers. Barker’s defense of comics is one particular instance of a far broader discussion relating to media effects, a debate returning with cyclical intervals, and one that in more recent incarnations has shifted its focus variously to console games and Internet content. The argument is that critics inscribe and “read into” texts ideology in ways that do not correspond to readers’ experiences and pleasures. He argues that if something is a comic, a tacit understanding between creators and readers is built around the notion that these are imagined narratives, and that their purpose in turn is to allow readers to imagine. For Barker, the point is that the social context of comics instills a particular register that distances the worlds depicted from the one that readers inhabit. This is not simply a question of fiction versus ostensibly real content, but rather a suggestion that, even when the subject matter is based on actuality, its very treatment in comics form invites a particular response of “imaginative projection” (Barker, 1989, 273) rather than a witnessing function. This would suggest a fundamental incompatibility between the form of comics and a documentary mode of address.