Cartoonists have long used their art form to tell stories and illuminate truths in novel and vivid ways. Take artist Eddie Campbell, who teamed up with writer Alan Moore in 1989 to publish a historical cartoon series about the 1888 murders of London sex workers by the notorious Jack the Ripper. The collection, later published in its entirety as the graphic novel From Hell, was more than just a speculative retelling of horrific true crimes. It was also a scathing indictment of the injustices of Victorian society, where the lives of poor and marginalized women barely registered in the minds of Britain’s ruling class.
This week, the third annual Non-Fiction Comics Festival in Burlington celebrates fact-based graphic storytelling, including Campbell’s, through such genres as personal memoirs and diaries, science-based comics, political cartoons, and graphic medicine. The weekend-long event, presented by Vermont Folklife and the Fletcher Free Library, will also feature workshops, panel discussions and exhibitions by more than 40 cartoonists from around the country. Most of the festival’s events, including cartoonist meet and greets, take place on Saturday, November 16, with free admission.
Campbell, who is scheduled to give the keynote address, published a book earlier this year called Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist. He will speak about his research on Carew, a pseudonym for the caricaturist Mary Williams, who drew celebrities for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspapers in the early decades of the 20th century.
“Nonfiction comics are kind of a big thing, and we’re the only show that is really focusing on them,” said Teppi Zuppo, festival cofounder, cartoonist, and adjunct professor in the game art and animation programs at Champlain College. Zuppo noted that attendees are traveling to the event from as far away as Los Angeles.
This year’s festival will also highlight the relationship between comics and other forms of visual storytelling, such as video games, role-playing games and pinball, Zuppo said. One panel discussion will feature Brian “Box” Brown, a cartoonist who produced the 2016 graphic book Tetris: The Games People Play; Vermonter Jon Chad, who penned the 2022 Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball; and Steenz, a St. Louis-based cartoonist and professor who wrote 2024’s Side Quest: A Visual History of Roleplaying Games.
How did Vermont Folklife, a statewide history nonprofit, get involved in an event focused on cartooning?
“Our interest is really in exploring the potential of comics as a medium for documentary work,” said festival cofounder Andy Kolovos, Vermont Folklife’s associate director and archivist.
Vermont Folklife has already published two graphic projects: The Most Costly Journey: Stories of Migrant Farmworkers in Vermont and Turner Family Stories: From Enslavement in Virginia to Freedom in Vermont. The latter is a cartoon account of the life of Daisy Turner, a Grafton woman whose formerly enslaved parents settled in Vermont after the Civil War. The graphic novel was based on more than 60 hours of audio interviews of Turner by Vermont Folklife founder Jane Beck.
“We kind of function like cultural anthropologists in Vermont,” added Kolovos, Vermont Folklife’s self-described “resident comic book nerd.” “Our real interest [in cartooning] is using comics to tell those types of stories and to create a partnership with the people who are represented in them.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Non-Fiction Comics Festival Celebrates the Art of Fact-Based Cartoon Storytelling”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2024.
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