Editor's Introduction: Comics and History

Comics inherently have a complex relationship with history. Popular conceptions of “history” as a line of cause-and-effect relationships culminating inevitably in the present moment are formally challenged by sequential art, which tends to refuse linear conceptions of time. Specifically, and contradicting the usual locating of history in an inaccessible past, comics as a medium depict past and present simultaneously. As Barbara Postema notes, unlike in film, all the images in comics exist at the same time—time is constructed spatially, as the eye moves from one panel to the next throughout the book, but the images themselves remain, regardless of the reader's attention.¹ Readers rarely progress through comics strictly linearly, and the eye is likely to move back and forth both between panels on the page (or, to use Thierry Groensteen's term, within the hyperframe) and between panels that are spread throughout the comic, looking for both narrative and...