Graphic Histories No. 4: Atomic Histories
This week’s readings—Trinity and Doom Towns: The People and Landscapes of Atomic Testing—gave me the opportunity to explore a range of approaches to topics similar to my own research topic. (For my gobs of readers other than Dr. Cebula: My research is related to Hanford Nuclear Site, where the plutonium for the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan was produced.) Trinity is not an academic work. It contains a single page of sources and the author acknowledges that some of the dialogue is imagined. Doom Towns, on the other hand, contains more than 200 pages of introduction, source documents, bibliography, and notes. The illustrator rarely invented scenes; he based nearly every panel on a historical image. Both authors share the goal of making a complex story accessible to more readers, and each does so in his own way: Trinity makes a good popular graphic novel, while Doom Towns might enable college professors to delve into the complexities of Cold War history without leaving students in the dust.
Trinity works well for the broadest audience because it’s a primer on the issue focused on key players—particularly Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who built and directed the Los Alamos, New Mexico laboratory where the world’s first atomic bomb was built. I focused on Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s depiction of Oppenheimer since he seemed like the closest approximation of a protagonist in Fetter-Vorm’s narrative.
From my sketchbook: A few of the visual elements Fetter-Vorm uses to build Oppenheimer’s character: A hat, a wardrobe, and a cigarette (which later becomes a pipe) make him recognizable. A focus on his eyes throughout the book shows a complex personality.
He effectively builds visual recognition and a sympathetic view of Oppenheimer by portraying him consistently throughout the book. From any angle and distance, we know it’s Oppenheimer even if he’s not identified because of his distinctive look and a thread in the dialogue. From beginning to end, Oppenheimer’s dialogue includes him reciting literature, a reference to his academic history and early interests.
From my sketchbook: Oppenheimer’s quote arc in a nutshell.
Fetter-Vorm drops the thread of Oppenheimer’s story before the end of the book, which left me wondering how it ended for him. My initial sense that the story felt too impersonal returns by the end of the book despite some incredibly powerful scenes throughout; if Fetter-Vorm intentionally made Oppenheimer the story’s protagonist, leaving his storyline hanging is a weird choice. Nonetheless, his focus on a few central characters made the “primer” approach engaging to me. Even though I knew much of the story, I felt I was getting it from the perspectives of key players.
Doom Towns offers a wealth of insight into how to use oral histories in telling atomic history—and to create a graphic novel for historians and students of history. (It even includes discussion questions!) Andrew G. Kirk’s original project was to collect oral histories of divergent groups impacted by and involved with Cold War-era nuclear testing. Only later, inspired by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, did he endeavor to turn the research into a graphic novel.
Doom Towns p. xxviii: A sample of Kirk’s outline and the resulting page of artwork.
Using spreadsheets, he mapped out each panel’s image references and text for illustrator Kristian Purcell so that he could understand both the facts and the story arc for that section. He wrote a scholarly introduction detailing his methodology and provided so many notes, and primary source transcripts and images, that it provides a super-clear road map for planning my own work. As can be seen on the page above, there may be a tradeoff between creating evocative visuals and staying true to existing historical images. Even though Doom Towns is much less technical and more reliant on personal oral histories than Trinity, I found it lacking in momentum and a bit harder to follow than the other graphic histories I’ve read. This intersection of an emerging academic genre with a pretty new popular genre has lots of potential for improvement—and despite that I don’t love his final product, Kirk provides a helpful roadmap to those hoping to follow in his footsteps.
Considering my own goal of engaging youngish readers, I’d draw inspiration from the creative visual strategies featured in Trinity while incorporating some of the Doom Towns creators’ strategies for ensuring the work stays true to history. Perhaps transparency about which images and stories are representative or composite can create some room for creative storytelling.
