If we have come to distrust the pretenses of personal memoirs and reporters’ books, and our ability to respond emotionally to photographs has been dulled by what some have aptly called war pornography, then how do we continue to document, to record, to tell stories In the opening pages of Dragonslippers, narrator Rosalind Penfold teases readers with a Pandora’s box of horrors. She approaches the frame, clutching a box labelled “Burn these without looking” and asks “Do you want to see” She proceeds to reveal ten years of spousal abuse. Penfold’s drawings are simultaneously the kindest, most gentle, most powerful, and most brutal way of portraying this form of violence. As she tells us in her foreword, “My brain could rationalize and deny, but my art went straight to the truth.”

The by-turns furious and economical drawings of these artists, coupled with the urgently handwritten text that characterizes graphic non-fiction, restore unpolished, moment-to-moment immediacy to reportage and memoir. In their deft hands, one can almost feel the process of witnessing and remembering at work, with all its inherent anger and uncertainty, irony and humour. Life does not take place in sharp, colour-corrected focus, nor does it have clean edges and neat conclusions.