A ri K elman and J onathan F etter -V orm . Battle Lines

Graphic histories of the American Civil War have been published since the Golden Age of Comic Books, most prominently during the early 1950s with the now legendary EC Comics series Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, both of which produced special issues devoted to grim, anti-war-tinged accounts of major battles. The war’s one-hundredth anniversary prompted at least one graphic overview, Classics Illustrated’s The War between the States (1961), its title suggesting how much the comic book reflected the centennial’s aversion to controversy about the conflict’s causes, most egregiously eliding slavery. The landscape of graphic nonfiction has substantially expanded and diversified since the 1960s, and with the war’s sesquicentennial, numerous pictorial histories have appeared, directed toward different age groups and focused on specific events and individuals (usually Abraham Lincoln) and experiences (particularly enslavement). Many have been informed by more than fifty years of social and political historical scholarship that has almost completely reconfigured our understanding about the war. None, however, has been as successful as Ari Kelman and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Battle Lines in presenting the complexity, scope, and drama of that scholarship while rendering the history of the Civil War into a visual and interpretive narrative that embraces the medium’s capacity to succinctly yet profoundly convey ideas and actions.

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