Thread in Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and Ari Kelman’s “Battle Lines”

Ryan Franklin, one of my colleagues, teaches a Graphic History course every year. For the class, Franklin chooses various graphic novels and memoirs that focus on historical events and individuals to teach students about historiography and research. One of the books he uses is Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and Ari Kelman’s Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (2015). When I saw this book on his desk, I flipped through it and knew I wanted to read it, so I asked him if I could borrow it. Each chapter in Battle Lines focuses on a object and uses that object to tell the story of the Civil War.

As I flipped through the book, Fetter-From’s layouts for “Chapter 8: A Photograph” immediately caught my attention. The chapter follows a photographer staging pictures on the battlefield, and each page, apart from a two- page spread, has nine panels in three panel rows and three panel columns. One page depicts rocks a wall where the photographer wants to place a body to stage the photograph. The image is dissected into nine panels, and in the middle panel we see the photographer’s hands framing what he will see when he looks through the camera. Fetter-From’s layout acts as a camera here, and we focus on the middle panel, framing the picture ourselves. In other chapters, Fetter-From follows the flight of a mosquito carrying malaria, the lives of…