Rendering Absence in the War on Terror: Molly Crabapple’s Sequential Art

To draw is to objectify.” This is what the sequential artist and journalist Molly Crabapple (2015: 7) realized while drawing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as she observed his trial at Guantánamo in 2013.¹ She initially came to this understanding, her memoir implies, through the embodied experience of being female in a patriarchal art world and by financing her early efforts to gain entry into that world through sex work. Working alternately as a sex worker, a nude artist’s model (the art world’s own version of sex work), and a burlesque performer, Crabapple experiments with her lived experience of being objectified, letting it bleed palpably into her art. In Week in Hell, a project in which she spent a week in a hotel room covering all four walls with art, she signed the finished product by drawing herself “as a tiny girl-thing” (243). In her work she perfunctorily...