Mercedes-Benz Lecture

Why Graphic Narratives (Comics) Are No Joke

Through the use of gesture, color, line, text size, pacing, and hue, artists working with graphic narrative can amplify the meaning of a story in unexpected and powerful ways. In this presentation, Ken Krimstein explains graphic narrative by drawing on ideas about the function of story and form by figures such as Hannah Arendt, Ben Shahn, Robert Henri, and Werner Herzog, who coined the term “ecstatic truth”—a kind of truth attained solely through fabrication, imagination, and stylization. Krimstein offers examples of “ecstatic truth” in his own work and explores graphic narratives ranging from Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis to the works of classic literature remade into comic books in the 1940s and ’50s in a series called Classics Illustrated.