Here’s more evidence that graphic-comic is becoming the contemporary masterpiece genre of the visual arts:

Columbian artist Fernando Botero is known for painting like a cartoonist, creating huge canvases and sculptures of whimsical thick-limbed frolicking people, figures that seem to be pulled from the magic-realist novels of fellow Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Last year Botero completed a series of works on Abu Ghraib now on display at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. The works are based on the transcripts of the torturers and their victims and on newspaper accounts of events at the prison. He looked at no photos while he was doing the paintings, which may be part of the reason they add something new and powerful to the visual record of the torture.

Slate this weekend is running a slide show on the paintings along with an essay by Mia Fineman, critic for Slate as well as for the NY Observer and a researcher at the Met. She goes straight to the heart of the thing when she explains why it makes sense that Botero of all contemporary painters took on the subject:

“By portraying the Iraqi prisoners as stylized Everyman figures, Botero’s pictures do something that even the most vivid photographs of torture don’t do: They encourage us to identify with the victims… Botero has demonstrated that a figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity. It’s no coincidence that one of the most profound and affecting works of Holocaust literature—Spiegelman’s Maus—is a comic book. To some viewers, the chubby figures in Botero’s paintings may appear ridiculous, grotesque—but so are the monstrous abuses of power to which they testify.”