Representing history in comic medium: unforeseen challenges and lessons learned

Abstract

This article is an autoethnographic account of two historic comic projects that the author of this paper supervised. Both historic comics’ projects were executed to produce high accuracy depiction of the past and, thus, employed consultations of professional historians. This brought additional and unperceived challenges that the creative team had to adapt to finish the project on time, on budget and without compromising artistic visions. However, both comics’ projects failed to achieve all three of the objectives previously listed. Thus, this paper tries to provide a post-mortem account of how best to approach the historic genre in the comic book medium and, in the end, what exactly means to create artworks of the historical genre. The author chose the autoethnographic approach as the best qualitative method to systematically analyse and gather insights from personal experience in order to understand the challenges of the creative process of the historical genre in the comics medium.