However, scholars like Hillary Chute fight against this stigma. Having worked extensively with Art Spiegelman on the archive edition of Maus, collecting the materials that went into putting together his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, she has also written for PMLA and many other publications. Chute is currently a junior fellow in literature in the Harvard Society of Fellows and recently edited, alongside Art Spiegelman, MetaMaus, an archive of his references to Maus. She makes the argument that in the modern study of comics we should focus on non-fiction work. The article, titled “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” calls for a new kind of discourse, with a focus on the form of  “A comics page [which] offers a rich temporal map configured as much by what isn’t drawn as by what is: it is highly conscious of the artificiality of its selective borders.”

Chute is a formalist, referring to the space between the panels—what makes a comic a comic—the gutter. This approach adheres to the principle introduced by Lopes that critical scholarship of comics focus on the form and its practitioners. Chute also believes the best form of literary comics come via non-fiction.

“Some of the most riveting books out there—the ones waking up literary critics—represent often vicious historical realities…For instance, three of today’s most acclaimed cartoonists, Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Marjane Satrapi, work in the nonfiction mode.” (Chute 457) Chute goes on to say that those books are about war and that is what brings legitimacy to the form; Spiegelman on World War II, Sacco on Palestine, and Satrapi on Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

For Chute, in nonfiction comics there is a style that calls for “formal grammar [that] rejects transparency and renders textualization conspicuous, inscribing the context in its graphic presentation.” This means that the style of the comic forces the reader to engage with it on multiple levels; that one cannot just break it down for the text itself, one also must analyze from an artistic perspective. Within this complex perspective,  the comic presents itself as its own medium.