Graphic Histories No. 6: WWII Stories for Young Readers
This post marks the end of my six-week journey through graphic histories and resources for creating them. Maus and The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler, my picks for this week, each present a biographical WWII war story to young readers. Maus, written and drawn in a familiar comic format—panels in which dialogue is supported by panel-by-panel narration—interprets the oral history that author Art Spiegelman’s father told to him decades after the war. The Faithful Spy synthesizes letters and academic research on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian-turned-activist executed for his role in a failed plot to kill Hitler. It doesn’t follow a traditional comic book format, but reads more like an illustrated essay. Both make broader themes of the war interesting and accessible to readers in high school and up through the eyes of a single, relatable character.
By this point in my study of graphic histories, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what drawing (which involves far too many decisions by the artist to ever be objective) has to do with conveying fact. Each of these books takes a different approach to involving visual art in its history-telling.
Both stories lean on prose to tell the story—and bring it to life with conceptual graphics that aren’t as faithful to history than, say, the imagery in Doom Towns that’s based entirely on archival images. Maus, of course, replaces people with creatures in the graphics, making each scene decidedly imaginary. Yet, because the reader doesn’t expect the imagery to be realistic, it doesn’t call the accuracy of the account into question. It’s understood that the mice are not real; what we’re asked to believe is Spiegleman’s father’s story. The Faithful Spy uses mostly conceptual imagery along with some artistic recreations of historical imagery—but the story is overwhelmingly told with hand-written words. These approaches both achieve something I’m also trying to do with my project: Make difficult topics an easy read for young people who are new to the subject.
Two pages from The Faithful Spy that illustrate how text-heavy the book is relative to other graphic histories, and show some of the graphic styles used to accompany the prose.
These stories each use a storytelling approach that might be best described as history-with-an-asterisk. Art Spiegelman never directly addresses the question of how faithful Maus is to history; he simply says this is his father’s story. He lays the foundation for taking his father’s memory of decades-past experiences with a grain of salt by showing a flawed character in the “present” (the time of the interviews)—a kind of nerdy guy who spills his cocktail of vitamins on the floor, wants to chat while on his stationary bike, and is a bit too critical of his wife. Some of those traits echo into the past, reminding the reader that these are one person’s memory, filtered through his perception and the long passage of time—most notably (at least to me, a salty feminist) the way he treats the women in his life. The Faithful Spy’s Hendrix is a bit more explicit: He gives this disclaimer about the accuracy of quotations:
Since my project includes voices history did not consider important enough to document, it’s useful to have some strategies up my sleeve for imagining the lives of people whose experiences have not been well-documented—relying on their oral histories decades after the fact to reconstruct their experiences, as well as inserting a bit of imagination into the storytelling with proper disclosure.
I love both these graphic histories for how tenderly they tackle very difficult stories, making them approachable to the reader without sugar-coating the truth. My first introduction to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story was as an undergrad, reading his biography, and I think I understand more about the context and impact of his life after reading The Faithful Spy than I did reading all those words. Maus presents its own unique perspective of WWII; in all my time learning about the war, it’s the first time I’ve read a Polish perspective (or the perspective of a mouse!).
