الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Comics is a visual and verbal medium of art that depends on the sequences of images usually combined with text to express ideas. Gradually, comics developed into graphic novels, long comics with serious content. While the graphic novel has widely been recognized as beneficial in the educational process due to its word-image mix, little is known about its potential for tackling traumatic experiences. This study suggests an interesting link between graphic novels and the expression of historical trauma. The purpose of this study is to shed light on graphic novels’ wide visual-textual capacities for representing some of the most important cases of historical trauma. These historical traumas include the Iranian revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (originally published in 2000), the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001), and the American bombing of Iraq in 2003 in Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad (2006).
Since this study deals with historical trauma, the psychoanalytic approach will be adopted in the discussion of the three graphic novels, especially that psychoanalysis is known to be developed from the study of trauma among people who faced tragic historical events. Here, historical trauma is represented through the medium of graphic novel. Thus, this study decodes the medium’s secrets by exploring the different devices that this medium employs to convey meaning in general and to represent historical trauma in particular. This study concludes that the graphic novel with its elements–both visual (e.g., panels, frames, gutters, drawings, colors) and verbal (e.g., typography, captions, speech balloons, sound effects)–provides a fascinating platform for healing traumatic memory in Persepolis, bearing witness to the horrors of historical trauma in Palestine, and generating empathy towards victims of the war in Pride of Baghdad.