I wish I could express how moving I found the work to those who toiled in its creation. Bravo. There were moments that were extremely well handled, from a formal perspective, which worked to enhance the incisive power of those points at which the plot turned. On this issue, most people are in fact familiar with the historical facts of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—so some major plot points cannot surprise. Their presentation, however, can. People are maybe less familiar with the suffering that occurred at ground zero. That the author-illustrators of Pika Don were able to capture both the generalized horror with which people like me regard those bombings and the acute and personal histories of people who suffered through them is remarkable. The dramatic handling, specifically, of the illustration in this project lends the whole story an uncanny ability to avoid stasis when movement is necessary and yet to reclaim it when the situation calls for it.

I want to talk in more detail about a few of the moments in this work which came off as most dramatic, and to suggest that those moments were the moments I also found to be most cinematic. To begin and to help define the center of what I’m getting at, I want to quote Andre Bazin, in an essay he wrote called “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” I use the English translation. In its concluding paragraph, Bazin writes:

So, photography is clearly the most important event in the history of the plastic arts. Simultaneously a liberation and a fulfillment, it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy. […] [T]he photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence.

When I finished Pika Don, I couldn’t help but to think of the way that graphic non-fiction as a genre acts much like a photographer or filmmaker’s lens, and how groupings of illustrations aligned on a page so as to imply something about the passage of time and the story’s direction of movement through that time seem to make the differences between the camera and the work of graphic non-fiction less terrifyingly large. That is, as genres, the two seem somehow more related and more similarly structured than I had thought before reading Pika Don. And in non-fiction that deals with subject matter of this global and infamous a type, where readers almost always have preconceptions about an event and schemata requisitely structured around those preconceptions, the authoritative-illustrative choices that deal with the presentations of those events become ever more important.

Let’s take, for example, the two most obvious and universal plot points of a narrative about the bombings of Japan at the end of the Second World War. A bomb went off in Hiroshima. Another bomb went off a few days later in Nagasaki. The way that the author-illustrators in the Graphic Novel Project choose to render them—choose to visually inflect them—may be the defining choices of the entire project. If they choose to insert a page flip between two contrasting images, one of two small parachuted objects falling down from the upper right hand corner of a mostly blank white box and one in which all ink is thrown to the perimeters of the page, symbolizing the harrowing “flash” of the “flash-boom,” they would have chosen an incredibly cinematic/photographic strategy for rendering them.

I’m interested to know whether other members of our class have similar impressions of the way that the authors of this work conceived of the visual language they used to express the most dramatic moments of the work—perhaps the way the letters were burned at the end of the novel, or the crossing of the river full of floating corpses. If others think less of this connection between these genres, I’d like to hear the reasons for those. Is the graphic work more like Bazin’s painting—that is, freed by the photographic image to recover its “aesthetic autonomy”—or is it more like the camera, allowing us to admire “in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love.”