Revolutionary paratext and critical pedagogy in Nathan Hale’s One Dead Spy

Abstract

Autobiographical accounts of historical violence and trauma in comics form have gained widespread recognition as valuable pedagogical tools, particularly in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus (1980–91). These comics often draw from the conventions of text-based autobiographies to provide first-person, non-fiction narratives of historical events, contributing to their perceived legitimacy as ‘serious’ texts worthy of inclusion in the classroom. However, this narrow focus on autobiographical comics as authentic windows to history has led educators to largely overlook the unique pedagogical possibilities offered by historical fiction comics, which can use both their fictionality and the comics medium to teach young readers to critically engage with history in different and deeper ways than traditional history textbooks and single-narrator autobiographical comics. This article remedies this gap by analysing how Nathan Hale’s middle-grade historical fiction comic One Dead Spy enacts a critical pedagogy approach to teach children to challenge hegemonic historical discourses and ways of thinking. The comic centres on the Revolutionary spy Nathan Hale (no relation to the comics creator) as he attempts to delay his hanging by narrating the American Revolution to his executioners. Nathan’s purportedly true account hinders children’s critical engagement with history by perpetuating dominant historical discourses, providing readers with a whitewashed, male-centric narrative of the Revolution. By contrast, the backmatter complicates Nathan’s one-sided representation of history by featuring a mini-comic narrated by the former slave Crispus Attucks and by attributing the comic’s non-fiction bibliography to fictional Research Babies. This blending of academic citational practices with absurd metafiction, as well as the introduction of marginalized counter-narrators, teaches middle-grade readers to question the authority of history writers and destabilizes all historical narratives as artificial constructs. However, the paratext also reinforces racist and sexist paradigms by displacing black and female voices to the comic’s supplemental endpapers, underwriting the comic’s well-intentioned attempts to educate readers about important voices excluded from white-centric narratives. Thus, while One Dead Spy demonstrates how historical fiction comics can provoke much-needed discussions about the inherent biases and erasures of dominant historical discourses, it also reveals the dangers of relegating opportunities for children to learn about marginalized perspectives in history to the literal margins.