Comic books take on Sept. 11, other tales of suffering

While comic books depicting war have been popular throughout the 20th century, the last few decades have seen the rise of a new kind of graphic novel, depicting first-hand, personal stories of international conflict, told in an almost journalistic manner. The story behind this artistic trend is told in a documentary, "Comic Books Go to War," directed by Mark Daniels. Daniels and cartoonist Ted Rall joined Antonio Mora to discuss the documentary on the Oct. 11, 2013 edition of Consider This.

This journalistic genre of comics gained widespread notice with the publication of "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" (1986-1991), a two-volume memoir by cartoonist Art Spiegelman that depicts both how his father survived the Holocaust, and how Spiegelman learned the story from his aging father. When Spiegelman drew Germans as cats and Jews as mice, the simple visual metaphor drew both praise and criticism.

When Consider This host Antonio Mora asked cartoonist-author Ted Rall whether comics can portray the "enormity" of subjects like the Holocaust, Rall replied, "I don’t think the medium is inherently trivial." He continued, "Comics are very, very easy for most people to understand, to digest. We grew up with them and it's pretty simple. It's just words plus pictures and our minds know how to process them."

Following Sept. 11, cartoonists translated the violence into imagery, portraying both the terrorist attacks as well as Americans’ reactions. As shown in "Comic Books Go to War," while traditional superhero comics like Spider-Man and Marvel's "Call of Duty" included the events of Sept. 11 in their storylines, non-fiction comic books and memoirs, such as Art Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers," may have been more artistically successful.

Mora and Daniels delved further into this on the show.

Mora: "The film talks about the specific example of 9/11, how traditional comics, bringing Superman and Spider-Man to New York in the aftermath of 9/11, that somehow those were not able to capture the substance and the tragedy, the fullness of that moment. Why did fiction in comics not do it and graphic comic books did?"

Daniels: "There's this sort of eyewitness experience, there's a transmission of an experience, not of an idea about the experience. Obviously the fiction characters brought 9/11 into their world, because they can't really enter our world. And so, it was bound to sort of trivialize it in a way, even if the words were grand and noble, the event became trivialized ... Whereas [with] something like Spiegelman's book, which is a witnessing of what happened and of the kind of psychotic result of the unexpected horror of what happened, [there's] an immediacy. There's an eyewitness quality that's really very important and that's something you don't get in the fiction books."

Hear more from Rall and Daniels in this "Consider This" video excerpt.

You can view the gallery below for more examples of cartoon art focusing on Sept. 11. You may also want to check out the following:

• Ted Rall has published two travelogues on his visits to Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks.

• Syndicated comic strip artists made commemorative comics that were published in newspapers on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The original artwork was shown in the traveling exhibit "Cartoonists Remember 9/11."

• In 2006, the 9/11 Report was transformed into a graphic novel by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon.

What do you think of these 9/11-themed comic books? What about cartoons as a medium? Leave your thoughts and comments below.