Silence in the Quagmire: The Vietnam War in U.S. Comics

In Silence in the Quagmire Harriet E. H. Earle uses silence to construct a narrative of the Vietnam War via U.S. comics. Unlike the vast majority of cultural artifacts and scholarly works about the war, which typically focus on white, working-class American servicemen and their experiences of combat, Earle’s work centers less-visible players: the Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict, women and girls, and returning veterans.

Earle interrogates the ways this conflict is represented in American comic books, with special focus on these missing groups. She discusses how--and more critically why--these groups are represented as they are, if they’re represented at all, and the ways these representations have affected views of the war, during and since. Using Michel Foucault’s understanding of silence as discourse, Earle considers how both silence and silencing are mobilized in the creation of the U.S.-centric war narrative. Innovative in its structure and theoretical scaffolding, Silence in the Quagmire deepens our understanding of how comic books have represented the violence and trauma of conflict.

Harriet E. H. Earle is a senior lecturer of English at Sheffield Hallam University and a research fellow at the Centre for War, Atrocity, and Genocide at Nipissing University in Canada. She is the author of Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War.