Historical "Accuracy"

Note: this post is a lightly edited and updated version of one that appeared in November 2020 on my perpetually neglected Two Generals Research Blog, which hasn't been updated in more than four years. (I'd thought the pandemic was the perfect time to get into a thorough behind-the-scenes look at the making of my 2010 graphic biography about my grandfather Law Chantler's WWII experiences. And it was. But then it ended, and I got busy again with new work and promotional appearances and, you know, life.)

I like this post, though, so I'm moving it here to my main site, in the hope that it might find more eyeballs. I refer people to it often, every time the question of "historical accuracy" in storytelling -- be it books, comics, films, TV, or whatever else -- rears its head, which it often does. It's a question that riles both fans who don't understand history very well, and historians who don't understand art very well.

My answer, as I'll explain at length below, is usually "accurate to whom?"

"TRUTH"

The opening panel of Two Generals takes us into the narrative by declaring "all of this is true." This pronouncement generated a lot of discussion at the script stage between myself and my editor, who thought the line set an awfully high (and likely unattainable) bar regarding historical accuracy.

After much thoughtful and productive back and forth, it was decided that the line was okay, because what it doesn't say is "all of this is FACT." As I've written and discussed elsewhere, facts are facts, but truth often depends on where you're standing.

Juggling the objective and the subjective is a big part of writing any kind of non-fiction. Two Generals was my first attempt at such (my 2007 graphic novel Northwest Passage, which many readers assumed was based on real historical events, was actually fiction, though I took the misassumption as a compliment). I began with the highest hopes that Two Generals would be as accurate as possible; that it would, ideally, read as my grandfather's story and not mine. I discovered very quickly that such authenticity is simply impossible.

For starters, any research you do relies on the accuracy of others. With Two Generals, I was lucky to have a wealth of primary sources at my fingertips: my grandfather's 1943 diary, his friend Jack Chrysler's letters to his wife, the regimental diary of The Highland Light

Infantry of Canada, and my own interviews with Colonel Doug Barrie (a friend of both my grandfather's and Jack's.) But even primary sources, as immediate as they are, are not 100% reliable. The version of Jack that emerges in Law's diary is not exactly the one that appears in Jack's own correspondence. Nor is the straightforward, all-business Law Chantler of the diary the one who sometimes appears in Jack's letters. Details presented as fact in the regiment's records were, I would eventually learn, demonstrated to be incorrect as the decades wore on. And the memories of Col. Barrie, while full of powerful personal insight, were those of an 86-year-old man doing his best to recall events from over sixty years before.

Any police officer will tell you how unreliable eyewitness accounts can be. Any number of people, recalling the same event, will remember it in different ways (Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, one of the greatest films ever made, is about this very idea). The passage of time only compounds the effect. Throw in people's personal and political agendas, not to mention the wild card that is human personality, and you can see how muddy the water becomes.

Obviously, some things can be nailed down as cold, hard facts. For instance, D-Day was June 6th, 1944. Claiming it happened in mid-August would be demonstrably incorrect. But the individual experiences recounted by soldiers on that day are always going to vary, not just because of the variation of the experience from ship to ship, beach to beach, or regiment to regiment, but because of the variation from one man to another, and the lens each of them looked at the world through. Or looks back through.

So what's the writer of non-fiction to do? You do all the research you can, get to know your subject from the inside, and then do your best. Inevitably, though, when dealing with historical material, you'll have to choose between one person's account and another. Hopefully it's an informed choice, but it's a choice nonetheless. And simply in making those judgement calls, you impose your own viewpoint on events. A viewpoint that will be seen as "inaccurate" by those whose own viewpoint or research may differ.

In crafting a story, you also have to choose which events to depict at all, and which to leave out. Again, it's a choice that, one way or the other, imposes an interpretation. Ideally, you end up with something that has a sort of integrity and authenticity, even without being 100% complete. As I write this (in November 2020) season 4 of The Crown, the high-end, high-quality Netflix series by Peter Morgan is getting dragged hard in the media for supposed historical inaccuracy, with some even denouncing it as "pure fiction," which is silly. It's not as if it's about Charles and Diana solving crimes or fighting zombies; it's about them getting married, and not very happily. Royal observers can bicker over the details, but that certainly sounds like a true story to me. The show has historians and advisors on staff (who I'm sure have their own heated debates about what's correct) and all things considered, I'm more inclined to trust them than I am the tabloids, the apologists, or the Royals themselves. Would you believe a show endorsed by any of those camps?

I'm reminded of an interview I read with Aaron Sorkin a decade ago, when The Social Network was released and similarly attacked. In its defence, Sorkin asserted that everything in the film was something somebody swore to in a deposition. It stuck in my memory, because it really boils the problem down to its essence: in a story that depicts a contentious lawsuit, you're by nature dealing with people whose versions of events disagree. So who do you believe? As a storyteller, you have to choose, alienating those on the other side. Or you try to average out the differing perspectives, potentially alienating everyone.

And please don't think this only applies to creative non-fiction. "Real" historians do the same thing. In recent years, our culture has finally begun to catch up to the various ways that some voices have been deprioritized in our history, if not erased completely. Two Generals, while popular in schools, is too personal and narrative-driven to have been intended to be used as a history textbook, but even history textbooks are themselves narratives, written by people with their own own personal, cultural, or historical biases. The experience of creating Two Generals has made me forever wary of claims of objectivity.

It's often said that history books (or movies, TV shows, etc.) tell us more about the time in which they were written than the time that they're written about. Indeed, they do. Years after finishing Two Generals, I encountered this quote from American folklorist and anthropologist Henry Glassie, which sums it up nicely, and has informed all of my interactions with historical material since:

"History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from the present to be useful to the modern traveller."

Moments in time are gone forever. Reconstructing them, even when records exist, is complicated and messy work. Two Generals represents my best attempt to recreate some moments my grandfather and others lived through. I learned what I could, and I certainly know more than anybody currently living about this one man's experiences during WWII. But in the end, they aren't my experiences. I tried to draw a map of them that was accurate, useful, and true as I understand them. But the map is not the territory, and never will be.

So give The Crown a break, because it's a damn good show.

UPCOMING APPEARANCES

Saturday, June 28th, I'll be signing in beautiful Stratford, Ontario at Fanfare Books, which is actually my local independent bookstore. Nothing beats a signing you can walk to in under ten minutes! Come hang out...downtown Stratford is always hopping on summer weekends, especially with the Festival in full swing.

No other dates to announce for the moment, but I'm planning a mini driving tour of eastern Canada that's starting to take shape. If you're a retailer in Montreal, Quebec City, Fredericton, St. John, or Charlottetown, reach out and let me know if you want me to pop in during the first week or two of August.

Hope to see you all somewhere out there on the road. Cheers!

Justice League of News Tidbits

It's been about a month since my last post, and while I still can't talk publicly about my current project (which is barrelling along like a runaway train, FYI) there's nonetheless a bunch of other bits of news to share, which I'll assemble here as a sort of news tidbit crossover team-up event:

THE CAPTIVE PRINCE Re-RELEASE DATE

The third Three Thieves book, The Captive Prince, will be back in stores October 28. It continues to be exciting watching this series roll back out into the world, finding new readers and pleasing old ones who could no longer find copies. People continue to email me asking where they can find the books, but now I have something to tell them, which is a relief. My friends at Papercutz deserve all the thanks we can give them for putting out these new editions. Like the first two volumes, this one will contain new supplemental material, including sketches, in-progress art, and a new installment of the ongoing interview between myself and comics editor/journalist/scholar Irene Velentzas, in which I spill all manner of behind-the-scenes secrets.

Speaking of behind-the-scenes, here's a five minute video I recorded for a virtual Library Con event back in November, about the rerelease of Tower of Treasure. I talk about the history of the series and what inspired it, and you'll get a few glimpses of my office/studio/workspace. Forgive the audio volume, which is a bit all over the place (the result of recording some of it on my phone and the rest using a proper microphone.)

Bix anniversary

Want even more videos? April 28th is the fifth anniversary of the release of my experimental graphic biography Bix, about the short life of the doomed jazz pioneer Bix Beiderbecke. Not one of my better-known books, unfortunately (having been released five weeks into the first Covid lockdown) but nonetheless the one I'm most proud of, and that I feel best represents my work.

Here's a 40-minute video I recorded at the time (once again with perennial interviewer/career booster Irene Velentzas) that was meant to replace the spotlight panel that didn't happen at that spring's cancelled Toronto Comic Arts Festival. It's a deep dive into how the book "works" and the mechanics of the comics medium in general, so if you're a process junkie like I am, you've come to the right place.

Beyond The Process

Want a more current interview? I've done a bunch recently, but the best has been with Shane White over at Beyond the Process. It's behind a paywall, so you'll need a prescription to read the whole thing. Lots of good advice there, though, for creative professionals new and old. Here's a taste, answering a question about how long-time creators can stay relevant. (If it's not clear by now, I relish opportunities to have meaningful conversations rather than the usual "when does your book come out and how did you get the idea for it?" type of media interview.)

Upcoming Appearances

I don't get invited to that many events in the U.S. even at the best of times, but as mentioned elsewhere, I've cancelled the few appearances I had scheduled there for 2025 and won't be accepting more for the foreseeable future. I'm sure you understand why.

That said, I'll still be signing or speaking anywhere that will have me in Canada or elsewhere around the world. You can always keep up with where I'll be over at my website's "tour" page, which I try to make sure gets updated with new stuff as it gets firmed up.

I've got a unique one coming up: Guelph, Ontario's The Bookshelf, a very cool indie cinema/bookstore, is hosting a screening of the film adaptation of Chester Brown's graphic memoir Paying for It, with director Sook-Yin Lee and Brown himself in attendance for a Q&A. In collaboration with The Dragon, it will also include a sort of mini-con with an impressive line-up of Ontario comics creators (including your truly) on hand. Come out on April 26th, see the film, buy a book or two, get them signed, and chat with some terrific cartoonists.

See you there?

Thank You for Coming to My TED(x) Talk

Thirteen years ago this week, I gave a talk called "Drawing Stories" at TEDx Waterloo, becoming only the third comics creator to speak at a TED or TEDx event (following Scott McCloud at TED proper in 2009 and Kyle Baker at TEDx Hunter CCS, also in 2012.)

Photo by James Bastow

Though honoured to be invited, I wasn't happy with the talk itself. An error on the organizers' part resulted in my slides coming up out of order, which really threw me off my game in front of a crowd of about 1300 people (at Centre in the Square in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada) and who knows how many watching online. I'm not linking it here, but it's definitely online if you're looking for it. I've never been able to bring myself to watch it back, but hopefully they've done some editing to make me look good. In any case, lower your expectations.

Photo by Darin White

The better part of the event was that after my talk (I spoke first) I did live drawings of the rest of the speakers, in the form of panels on a giant comics page. It was a fun piece of performative art that framed the day nicely and was unique (as far as I know) in the history of TED or TEDx. Among the other speakers were Taylor Jones of Dear Photograph fame, musician Peter Katz, a smokin' performance by jazz pianist Roberta Hunt, Columbia University professor Sarah Williams, and Canadian-Palestinian doctor and peace advocate Izzeldin Abuelaish. It was the real deal.

Photo by Darin White

Photo by Darin White

THUMBNAILS

The subject of my TEDx talk was, of course, visual storytelling (about the only thing I'd ever be asked to speak on with any sort of authority.) Been a lot of that going on here the last little while. There always is, of course, but I've been working on rough page layouts for two new graphic novels, and for my money that's where the real heavy lifting for comics storytelling happens. Written comics scripts aren't fundamentally different from movie or TV scripts; they're mostly a blueprint for a work of art you're going to make later. And the finished art stages are simply refining the surface of images you've (hopefully) already thoroughly thought out. For me, while they aren't always much to look at, the quick, rough thumbnail layout sketches in between are where the rubber really meets the road. Because 85% of what makes comics meaningful is composition.

For example:

Composition can mean the arrangement of elements within the panels, such as choreographing action...

..Or making sure the details of characters' "performances" read clearly.

"About yea big."

It might mean coming up with meaningful tableaus that invoke a particular emotion...

...Or that claustrophobically trap your characters in boxes within boxes.

Of course, you might simply be working out the delicate choreography of a face-to-face confrontation between two characters in domed space helmets.

Because this is comics and not "just" illustration, you've also got to compose the arrangement of the panels themselves. For instance, you might use multiple panels to create a sense of place...

I would absolutely hang out in this joint.

...Or use the panel border itself as a compositional element, creating a sense of physical separation between two characters who are at odds.

You might use repetition -- or the lack thereof -- to create a sense of timing and pace, either fast or slow. (I'm a well-known purveyor of slow comics.)

Whatever rhythm you create, you can then break it in meaningful ways. Preferably with ominous headstones.

These drawings will all improve later on, but they already "read," even in this unfinished state, because the ideas are clear. At least I hope they are, because while they look fast (and are) each is the end result of a bunch of other, less effective ideas that were scrapped -- which is why you don't waste too much time on finished drawings at this stage.

It's an art form with a lot of moving parts, and there are a thousand decisions to make on every page. There are all sorts of ways to tell a story with pictures, and while there are certainly principles, there aren't a lot of hard and fast rules. It's thrilling and intimidating all at once.

Shhh...

And no, I can't tell you what either project is because neither has been announced. You can guess, but I ain't sayin'. The good news is there's a lot of new material in the pipeline. I've got a busy few years ahead.

Which is exactly how I like it.