This paper deals with a new medium of narrating history: the graphic narrative. Using Art Spiegelman's cult text,Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and Joe Sacco's Safe Area Goražde andPalestine, it studies the strategies through which the graphic narrative delivers historical trauma, such as genocide, war, and oppression, in what it calls a `hypervisible history.' It proposes that the graphic narrative is a constituent of the visual culture of affect that helps render visible what has been censored or hidden. It combines official history with the personal autobiographical mode and subverts the primacy and authority of the former. Finally, through a strategy of self-portraiture and hypostasis, the graphic narrative, as subjective documentary, generates a `graphic history.' The essay argues a case for the graphic narrative as a medium for the transmission of inexpressible trauma.

The comic strip gave readers of the newspaper something to laugh about everyday from the 19^th century. The comic book from the 1930s expanded the medium and gave readers, over a period of time, Asterix, Tintin, the Superhero (Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man), and war tales. In the late 1980s and 1990s, several serialized comics were re-published in book form and led to the rise of what has been called the `graphic novel,' of which the most famous was arguably Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), to which Miller added the less successful Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (serialized in 2001-02, and published in book form in 2002).

The term `graphic novel' refers simply to a novel in graphic form (Roger Sabin, cited in Coughlan, 2006, p. 851). It is also variously termed as `graphic narrative,' `sequential art,' and more often as `comic books' (Wolk, 2007, p. 61), though I argue that the graphic novel is only a subset of the graphic narrative medium. It must be underscored right away that the graphic narrative is a `medium,' within which we have `genres' like graphic fiction, graphic reportage and graphic memoirs.

I prefer the term `graphic narrative' for this essay because I am not dealing with fictional/imaginative writing at all, but memoirs, historical accounts, and reportage. In the memoir genre, Art Spiegelman's (1986 and 1991) Maus, a memoir of Spiegelman's Auschwitz survivor-father, won a special Pulitzer. In this essay, I explore some key features of the graphic narrative, both the fictional and non-fictional genres, while trying to account for its sudden popularity. For my purposes, I use the two Spiegelman works mentioned above, Satrapi Marjane's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003, hereafterPersepolis I) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004, hereafterPersepolis II), Sacco Joe's Safe Area Goražde (first serialized in 2000, and published as a book in 2007, hereafter Goražde) and Palestine (2003).

American Literature Journal, Graphic Novel, Graphic Narrative, Hysterical Accounts, Visual Culture, Traumatic History, Rhetorical Strategy, Compassion Fatigue, Visual Archive, Hypervisible History, Trauma Transmission, Ethnic Demographics, Tyrannical Regime, Visual Representation.