A historic account of comics as an object of academic study and hand-drawing as a way of expresing reality and trauma, that explores the debate of comics as literature and the cases it could be approach from this perspective. Furthermore, having in mind its clear tendency for documentary al reality genres, this work analyses and exposes the potentialities and disadvantages that this genre, discipline, art form or technique can face when it is used for narrating the past and history. At last, it delivers an analysis of Barbarie (2010) form the peruvian author Jesus Cossio, where is evident the way in which the categories exposed in the rest of the thesis can be apply into the study of a documentary comic.