Abstract

This paper demonstrates the approach taken to both explicit, and especially unspoken violence, by the AHRC grant team for ‘Comics and the World Wars - a Cultural Record’. Having recuperated and researched some 1500 contemporary titles published by a broad array of organisations, a range of different techniques emerge – that depict, or avoid depicting violence, including the unspoken.
The discussion on unspoken violence will be based on the theorisations of John Berger and Susan Sontag. The inherent self-consciousness of the comic form provides a format in which the ‘distortions’ can become a ‘truthful’ representation. The form communicates the inadequacies of any representational strategy. Susan Sontag identified photos as: ‘miniatures of reality’, not pieces of it.…only that which narrates can make us understand’. Similarly, Berger and Mohr analyse the limitations in the truth photographs can tell: ‘they cannot tell a substantial part of the story behind that which they represent’. In other words meaning is formed by the viewer. This enables comics to use iconic, as opposed to representational depictions and yet still strongly relate to reality.