Hillary Chute and Richard Dienst will be at Labyrinth Books on Wednesday, December 15 at 6 p.m. to discuss Ms. Chute’s new book Disaster Drawn, about the ways in which graphic narratives document the disasters of war.

Investigating how hand-drawn comics have come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways in which graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document war. Ms. Chute demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness of war.

According to Scott Bukatman, Stanford University, “Disaster Drawn is a necessary book, without question one of the finest scholarly studies of comics that I’ve encountered. To call it a major work in comic studies, though, is setting the bar way too low: this is a book that constitutes a serious intervention in the histories of documentary and reportage.”

An associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, Hillary Chute is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, and of Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists. Richard Dienst, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television as well as The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good.
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