Truth claims and trace: the autographic witness in the algorithm

Graphic memoir has emerged as a powerful tool of advocacy and journalism, theorised in comics scholarship through notions of graphic witnessing authenticated by the drawn line conveying the subjective experience of the artist.
This paper will consider ideas of witnessing, truth claims and memory in graphic memoir at a moment when AI image generation tools are undermining the connection of drawn traces to their indexical origins in time, space, materiality and the body.
Through a comparison of Joe Sacco’s graphic reportage with recent AI images of conflict and history, and a consideration of computational and algorithmic processes considered broadly, the paper considers how the truth claims of graphic journalism may be affected by generative AI models.
Comics scholarship has been slow to critically respond to the digital nature of contemporary comics practice and the task of disentangling the human/nonhuman in ontologies of trace is now compounded by drawings which represent the outcome of archival reappropriation defined by opaque algorithmic parameters. This paper will explore theoretical assumptions around authenticity and truth claims in analogue, computational, algorithmic and generative drawing practice, and ask what kinds of approaches are appropriate if graphic memoir is to endure as documents of personal and political memory.