Comparing Art Spiegelman's Maus And Miné Okubo

I propose to analyze graphic novels that retell past historical tragedies, specifically Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660. Although Maus was a critical success when it first came out, some Holocaust survivors criticized Spiegelman for making a comic book out of their tragedy. Thus, the central questions that I will be exploring in my research paper include: do graphic novels cheapen or trivialize the meaning of the events that they depict? How valid are graphic novels in these particular instances? Even though the graphic novel medium has been around for decades and have been portraying many historical events, why are academics still mostly reluctant to accept them as a legitimate scholarly source?
My preliminary hypothesis is that graphic novels do not trivialize or warp the true meaning of the historical tragedy that they are depicting. Such statement would only be valid if the artist retold the said event with the intent of profit from it. However, I cannot see how this applies to Maus given that Art Spiegelman had lost a brother in the Holocaust and would therefore be less likely to make a comic
It was quite apparent that there had been minimal academic research on Okubo’s documentation of the Japanese-American intern camps and this is why my topic is important. There is a clear lack of development in Asian-American studies and in particular, on the Japanese-American internment camps, and I believe my final paper will be able to provide further insight into this discipline. Graphic novels are typically considered inappropriate within academia given their childish connotations and as such, my topic would be supplementary to the ongoing debate about whether academics should count historical graphic novels as a scholarly source or