Documenting Trauma recognised with Honourable Mention

Documenting Trauma in Comics has been by the Comics Studies Society with an Honourable Mention. The full list of prize winners is available here.

It won this recognition as a runner up for CSS Edited Book Prize,  which recognizes high-quality, research-oriented, and multi-authored edited collections from the previous year that significantly advance the field of Comics Studies – that is, edited books that greatly add to our understanding of comic art and/or its historical, cultural, critical, or theoretical contexts.

It received this honourable mention alongside Frederick Luis Aldama ed., Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia and Martha Kuhlman and José Alaniz eds., Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. The prize was won by Anna Peppard ed., Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero.

Here is a description of Documenting Trauma and you can also learn more here.

Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts? 

The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generativeforce that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.