In recent decades, as graphic novels have exploded in popularity and have increasingly been engaged with by scholarship, there has been a marked increase in comics that deal with traumatic experiences. These experiences arise variously from warfare, genocide, terrorism, racism, sexual violence, domestic violence, illness, disability, migration, natural disasters, or climate-change, among other causes. Indeed, scholars including Hillary Chute and Gillian Whitlock have argued that graphic narratives are particularly well-suited to portraying traumatic experiences through the lens of individual memories.This edited volume builds on the emergent body of work on the representation of trauma in graphic narratives, but focuses exclusively on German-language graphic narratives, whose exploration of trauma has so far received little scholarly attention.
