Historical Comics for Understanding Europe

Abstract

Recent decades have brought an upward trend in creation of historical comics in Lithuania. Local illustrators, in collaboration with various authors, historians and museum experts, and drawing from the historical memory of their relatives, have boldly dived in traumatic periods of Lithuanian history conveying them to the general public in an attractive form. One of the examples could be the historical comic book Siberian Haiku (Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki, Sibiro haiku, 2017) which uses the exile of children to examine the repression of the Lithuanian population by the Soviets in the years after World War II. The modern community, especially children, appreciated publication of this comic, although there were doubts whether it is decent to create comics on such a painful topic for the people of Lithuania. Doubts were dispelled after reading the comic book as words and illustrations have revealed a compelling emotional image of the exile carried out by the Soviets, the fate of the exiles in the vastness of Siberia, and their complicated return to Lithuania after the death of Joseph Stalin. The aim of this report is to show the possibilities of using historical comics in studies of Europe at the university. To examine the defined subject, the research methods of document analysis and interview were used, which allowed to uncover the features and peculiarities of Lithuanian historical comic books and identify the ways in which they can be used in the study process. The sources of this report may be classified into two groups. The first includes historical comic books of Lina Itagaki and her co-authors, examining interwar and post-war historical events in Lithuania, Poland, the Soviet Union and Albania. The second group covers articles and interviews with Lina Itagaki, a historical comic book author and illustrator. Those sources have enabled us to distinguish the main motifs of the historical comic book themes chosen by her, and understand their creation process in depicting the image of tragic events. The author of the report has distinguished the following forms of use of historical comics: 1) a historical comic as a historical source, 2) a historical comic as a means to create an image of historical events, 3) a historical comic as a method of learning about people’s daily life, household aspects, and traditions, and 4) a historical comic as a way of preserving the historical memory of a family.