Historical comics in Munich

About HistorioGraphics, international conference on historical comics

We were there. Four members of our Research Committee, taking part in an important conference on historical comics, HistorioGraphics, which took place in Munich, Germany from June 15 to June 17. As you will be able to see by visiting the conference website

https://historiographics.com/

it was a huge event, with plenary lectures and parallel sessions, with quite a few participants. Our Research Committee organized one of the panels, "History and the City", with presentations by Alice Balestrino, Umberto Rossi, and Paolo Simonetti, dealing with such comics artists as Nora Krug, Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner and Chris Ware—an (almost) all-American panel by a trio of Italian scholars, which seems to us in tune with the comparative, that is, transnational approach which characterizes the activity of the ICLA. Another member of our RC, Marek Paryż, presented a paper on Hugo Pratt, Milo Manara and Jacek Widor—a genuinely comparative effort, in a panel on "Contact" narratives that deserved attention.

Given the fact that the conference was hosted and supported by the Amerikahaus, a centre for American Studies in Munich, and the Nazionalsozialistische-Dokumentations-Zentrum, a research centre on Nazism, there were several higlights connected with this dramatic period of 20th-Century history: the conversation on But I Live, a collection of graphic intervies of survivors of the Shoah, featuring one of the artists involeved in the project, Barbara yelin, and the mastermind of the project, Charlotte Schallié; a panel specifically devoted to graphic memoirs of the Shoah; a panel on comics dealing with Latin American Dictatorship (a topic with strong connections with the tragic history of Nazism).

But there were also panels on graphic depictions of colonialism, pre-modern warfare (and their ideological implications), Chinese history, Indigenous histories in North-America, race issues in the United States. The only regret we have is that—as it is usual in such conferences—one could not attend two simultaneous panels. However, we could listen to the stimulating plenary lecture by Hillary L. Chute, one of the top experts on Art Spiegelman's Maus, which delivered a rich overview of recent comics on current affairs (from Ukraine to Lebanon) and historical issues (from racial revolts to the history of the American empire), dealing with works from a variety of countries.

Given the focus on a specific territory of the comics continent, one may well consider this conference as a milestone in comics studies; and hope that the organizers will manage to hold another in the next future, something that has been tentatively proposed during the final remarks and enthusiastically welcomed by the audience.