Negotiating Documentation in Comics

While comics have been established as primary sources in various fields of historical research—as well as in sociology and anthropology—their usability as secondary sources, i.e., as valid arguments that can be incorporated into scholars’ discourse—is much more contested. In this paper, we are looking into how comics with a documentary claim state and handle their sources. For this, we focus on a few current French and German graphic novels and their particular ways of informing readers about research methods that were employed for preparing the story and about the provenience of archival matter that was used to tell the story - or even quoted in text and image.