The second half of the 20th century and beyond: adolescence and maturation

In the 21st century the graphic novel came to occupy an entire section in major bookstores. The term graphic novel was first successfully claimed by Will Eisner for his semi-autobiographical A Contract with God (1978), which offers a melancholy perspective on the author’s Depression-era youth. Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (1986) series, set in the 1970s, illustrates the quotidian working-class life in Cleveland, Ohio. One of the most celebrated graphic novels is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a long tale of the Holocaust told (first in the pioneering Raw magazine anthology) in an austere style and complex narrative layers, featuring the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice. In its sobriety it was about as far as one can imagine from the world of Disney or just about any other ostensible animal comic. Maus was the first comic book or graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism (1992), and the book won universal acclaim from critics who would not normally consider reviewing comic books. Maus and American Splendor are autobiographical (Maus incorporating the experience of the author’s father), as have been many of the best adult comics, notably in the feminist domain. Marisa Acocella’s snazzily drawn Just Who the Hell Is SHE, Anyway? (1993) was the first strip to be featured in a monthly fashion magazine (Mirabella). Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoirs Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004)—both combining two volumes first published in French (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003)—are moving manga-influenced accounts of her childhood in Tehrān and her adolescence and young adulthood in Europe. Also noteworthy is African American Mat Johnson’s Incognegro (2008), with art by Warren Pleece. Set in the 1930s, this graphic novel shows a black journalist who passes as white, using his light skin as a mask in order to solve a crime.

Chris Ware’s ironically titled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), a long, drawn-out, formally innovative, eerily desperate autobiographical mosaic, is designed in a haunting rhythm of differently sized and related panel clusters, with Proustian memorial parentheses. It presents a bleak vision of childhood suffering, the pain of which the rigidly calligraphic drawing and deliberately restrictive camera angles attempt, as it were, to suppress. In 2001 it became the first comic book to win a Guardian First Book Award.

Comics in Latin America

The enormous popularity of the comic book in Mexico, where in one of its staples—the romance-domestic drama—it has a rival in the fotonovela, is noteworthy largely for the work of Rius. In his best-known series, starting in the 1960s, Los supermachos (“The Supermales”), followed by Los agachados (1968–81; “The Crouching”), which was very popular also in English translation, Rius was critical, controversial, and censored. He mocked social inequity and bourgeois values with an instinctive comic exuberance that occasionally lapsed into didacticism. He appealed primarily to students and the professional classes. Most other Mexicans were more attracted to Kalimán, an asexual superhero known throughout Latin America. The story of Kalimán started in 1963 as a radio serial, and two years later it was made into a comic book, reaching 1.5 to 3.5 million copies, or 3 to 7 percent of the Mexican public, and thus exceeding any U.S. equivalent (Captain Marvel at its peak reached 2 million). The Mexican comic book is generally poorly made, predominantly black and white, and ubiquitous and vulgar, but it maintains its hold even on the educated. In 1990, 8 of Mexico’s 10 best-selling periodicals were comic books. There have been, in Mexico as elsewhere, more or less government-connected campaigns against the sex, violence, and luridness of their content.

Argentina has produced at least three internationally recognized cartoon figures. The first, created by Quino (Joaquín Salvador Lavado), was the title character in Mafalda (1964–73), a little girl drawn somewhat in the vein of Schulz’s Peanuts characters, though more topical and more politically astute than they; also like Peanuts, the strip was much commercialized. Roberto Fontanarrosa created the other two famous comics in Las aventuras de Inodoro Pereyra (1970), a parody of the gaucho stereotype, and Boogie el aceitoso (1972; “Boogie [a reference to Bogie, nickname of the actor Humphrey Bogart] the Oily”), a hired assassin for the CIA whose only redeeming quality is his pithy wit. The most radical of this group of Latin American cartoonists was the Argentine journalist and writer Héctor Oesterheld, who provided the stories for a number of artists, including Alberto Breccia and his son Enrique. The government destroyed all copies it could find of Oesterheld’s Che (1968), a tragic life of Che Guevara, and in the mid-1970s Oesterheld became one of the desaparecidos (“disappeared persons”), missing and presumed murdered.

A model of political comic geared toward socialist transformation, still unsurpassed, appeared as La Firme (1970–73; “Steadfast”), in Salvador Allende’s Chile. It presented a graphic explanation of Chileans’ need for socialist transformation, and as a result it was banned and existing copies were destroyed as soon as Augusto Pinochet wrested power in 1973. While La Firme was taking root, another publication appeared, Para leer al Pato Donald (1971; How to Read Donald Duck) by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. This was a highly critical Marxist examination of the ubiquitous Disney comic (in the English-language edition of 1975, the subtitle Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was added). This book was a rare example of comics criticism reaching the wider audience; it became a best seller and was translated into more than a dozen languages. After Pinochet’s accession to power, José Palomo, one of the principal artists involved in La Firme, went into exile in Mexico. There he became known for a strip titled El Cuarto Reich (begun 1977; “The Fourth Reich”) in the newspaper Uno Más Uno. It featured a tiny Wizard-of-Id-like dictator backed by U.S.-trained death squads and notable for his contempt for and exploitation of his people. This gag strip may be the only one of its kind to reflect the miserable lives of many Latin Americans. It was, however, little exported.