Drawn to History! Why I Teach Graphic History & Why You Should Too!

By Alan MacEachern

I drew, when I was a kid. I drew goalies and traded them for hockey cards with guys in my class. I drew horses and gave them to girls, no exchange required. But as chapter books replaced pictures books, school drilled into me the hegemony of text. As I got older, because my drawing didn’t improve – and neither teachers nor I tried to improve it – my results seemed more and more childish. Like most people, I eventually stopped drawing altogether.

University’s deification of the written word confirmed the soundness of this decision. My chosen field of history seemed especially dedicated to turning innumerable scraps of text from the past into a single one in the present – ideally, one of 8-10,000 words, written for likeminded scholars, and containing the word “hegemony.” Although we have had movies for more than a century, photographs for two, and images for millennia, these were only occasionally to be used as sources, and generally as colour rather than play-by-play. And even when used as sources, it was assumed that they would not be communicated as such: their meaning was to be transmogrified into text. As was history itself.

Yet as a historian, I kept enjoying the relatively few historically-themed graphic novels that appeared.

It wasn’t just that works as diverse as Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen and Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza and Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage were not bound by the same rules as purely textual history, and so all possessed a refreshingly informal sensibility. It was that their juxtaposition of text and pictures delivered new ways of understanding and communicating the past – and demonstrated how incomplete the strictly textual historical form really was. Most obviously, because a graphic novel’s story progresses visually between panels on a page – so that the reader experiences a “persistence of vision” that not even movies can match – comics offer unique ways of documenting time.

Consider these panels from Rutu Modan’s The Property, as a Holocaust survivor’s Warsaw taxi ride draws her back into her past.

But there didn’t seem to be much to do with my appreciation of historical graphic novels except appreciate them until the 2010s, when a critical mass of what were becoming known as “graphic histories” burst on the scene. Oxford’s Graphic History Series contributed to this, as did the Graphic History Collective here in Canada. For me, the real breakthrough was the 2022 publication of Matthew Barrett and Robert C. Engen’s Through Their Eyes. Not only was it a great graphic history in its own right, it also introduced the genre, including its history, to students and scholars – and it was about a Canadian topic. Its existence was enough for me to imagine developing an introductory course in graphic history.

If I sound confident … I wasn’t. I wasn’t a historian of comics. I wasn’t sure how to deal with what would necessarily be a bunch of histories from across time and across the globe. I didn’t know whether a bunch of history students would be willing or able to draw a graphic history of their own – but what would be the point of such a course if, at the end, all their work was just to be transmogrified into text? And looming behind all this, I would have to confront the fact that my own artistic skills were still those of a twelve-year-old.

Ahh well, imposter syndrome is just part of the job.

I got to work building the syllabus for Graphic History! – exclamation mark and all.[1] Taking a page from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus – I took many a page from this wonderful guide to teaching creativity – we would begin every class with a drawing prompt: “Draw Batman,” “Draw a story in four panels,” etc. It was a way to get students comfortable drawing again; making a virtue of necessity, their professor’s own lack of skill helped. Following a dive into Scott McCloud’s imperfect but useful Understanding Comics, the course was built largely around Through Their Eyes and three “classics” of the genre: Maus, Louis Riel, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. These three twenty-plus-year-old works are not necessarily better than many newer, less familiar ones, but they have the great advantage of having had a lot written about them. (And no student had previously read any of them.)

Teaching what a colleague dismissed as “that comics course” turned out to be one of the most demanding classroom experiences I’ve ever had. Graphic History! necessarily involved dealing with a wide swath of subjects, often almost simultaneously:

• the graphic histories themselves
• the broader, known histories of the events described in those texts
• the history of graphic narrative
• the nature of graphic narrative
• the nature of history itself.

The course made the students and me consider what were the essential characteristics of history and what were merely its conventions. What do merging pictures and text do for history and to history? What’s gained and what’s lost? All this, with first-year students who were also learning university and disciplinary expectations, why Quora isn’t a great source, and where to find a good burrito on campus.[2]

To me, the course’s success or failure was going to be evident in whether students fully engaged with the major assignment of creating their own graphic history. I assured them many, many times that they would not be judged on artistic ability, but I did require that it be at least one step beyond stick figures and I recommended (again, thanks to Lynda Barry) the example of Ivan Brunetti’s work. Overwhelmingly, the students’ graphic histories were first-rate. Most impressively, they did more than just illustrate their words, they considered in advance how images could accompany text in ways that improved both. Here are three sample pages, shared with the students’ permission:

I don’t pretend the course was perfect, and I have a bunch of changes planned for teaching it again this winter (to a doubled enrolment, huzzah). I want to better introduce the discipline of history itself. I want to assign excerpts of more – and more recent – standout graphic histories such as Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke’s Abina and the Important Men, Chris Oliveros’ Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and Ari Kelman’s Battle Lines. I want to counterpose works, such as Louis Riel with Katherena Vermette’s A Girl Called Echo[3] and Persepolis with Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. I want to incorporate the amazing comic book collection at Western’s Weldon Library.

I also want to encourage folks reading this post to consider developing a Graphic History at their own institution.[4] Not because it’s easy: as I hope I’ve demonstrated, there is a lot to be learned and a lot to incorporate in a lot of different directions. Rather, because it allows you and students to examine, in a new way, what history is and can be. And, for some, it has the potential to return us to our childhood, to retrieve something we shouldn’t have lost in the first place.

Alan MacEachern teaches History at Western University! He got into Graphic History for the exclamation marks!

[1] The link is to the draft placeholder for the winter 2025 iteration of the course but, in practice, it shows the form of the winter 2024 iteration.

[2] In all components of the course, the students and I were extraordinarily well-served by PhD student Charan Mandur as course teaching assistant.

[3] Thanks to Sean Carleton for this recommendation.

[4] Feel free to contact me for help if you do so.