Non-fiction comics

Traditionally, comic strips have long offered factual material in this category, notably Ripley's Believe It or Not!, John Hix's Strange as It Seems, Ralph Graczak's Our Own Oddities, King Features' Heroes of American History, Gordon Johnston's It Happened in Canada, and others.

Texas History Movies, which began on October 5, 1926, in The Dallas Morning News, received praise from educators, as did America's Best Buy: The Louisiana Purchase, a 1953 daily strip in the New Orleans States, distributed nationally by the Register and Tribune Syndicate, which also handled Will Eisner's The Spirit supplement for Sunday newspapers.

Golden Legacy produced biographies of such notable figures as Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker, Matthew Henson, Alexandre Dumas, Frederick Douglass, Robert Smalls, Joseph Cinqué, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander Pushkin, Lewis Howard Latimer, and Granville Woods.

Joe Sacco's nine-issue series Palestine (Fantagraphics, 1993–1995) — about his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1991 and January 1992 — broke new ground in the realm of comics journalism.

According to Robert V. Bullough Jr, and Stefinee Pinnegar, the reader expects the truth,[11] but comparative studies concluded that graphics are less objective than textual biographies due to the pictorial material.

Francisca Goldsmith, writing in the School Library Journal in 2008, assembled a "list of essential titles for high schoolers" and reviewed graphic nonfiction by a variety of creators, including Rick Geary (Treasury of Victorian Murder), Harvey Pekar (Students for a Democratic Society), Stan Mack (The Story of the Jews), Joe Sacco (Palestine), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Osamu Tezuka (Buddha) and Howard Zinn (A People’s History of American Empire).

In March (2013), U.S. Rep. John Lewis recalled his childhood, his entry into the American civil rights movement and his first encounter with Martin Luther King Jr., and his first experiences with nonviolent resistance.