Early Holocaust Narratives in Comics
Traditional narratives of Holocaust literature typically begin in the 1950s with the English-language publication of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and, following the Eichmann trial, the outpouring of testimony, fiction, and public discourse. Survivors, such narratives typically suggest, were generally unwilling to talk about their experiences prior to the 1960s and while the fact of the Holocaust was acknowledged in chronicles of World War II, it did not take a central place.

The one area where the Holocaust was being explored long before the Eichmann trail and the ‘Americanisation’ that was to follow, however, was in horror comics. Titles such as Impact, Voodoo, and Witches Tales all feature comics which, either directly or through allusion, reference the Holocaust. This paper seeks to examine representations of the death camps. In many cases these stories anticipate later forms of public discourse of the Holocaust.

All welcome.
Date: 7 May 2019, 17:15 (Tuesday, 2nd week, Trinity 2019)
Venue: Radcliffe Humanities, Woodstock Road OX2 6GG
Venue Details: TORCH Seminar Room
Speaker: Philip Smith (University of The Bahamas)
Organising department: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Part of: TORCH: Oxford Comics Network
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Laura Spence