Autobiographical Comics
Life Writing in Pictures
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: University Press of Mississippi
Cover
Title Page, Copyright Page
Contents
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pp. v-vi
Acknowledgments
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pp. vii-viii
It is not possible to mention everyone who has contributed, either directly or indirectly, to the creation of this book, but a few people deserve special thanks. My colleagues at Cardiff University have been unfailingly encouraging. I am especially grateful to Alison Wray and Adam Jaworski for all their support and advice, ...
Introduction
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pp. 3-10
The autobiographical comics genre provides fascinating new opportunities and challenges for both comics artists and autobiographers. On one hand, the creators of autobiographical comics, who come from a wide range of backgrounds, often disregard established norms and conventions and invent new narrative techniques. ...
1. Life Writing from the Colorful Margins
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pp. 11-48
Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) is a first-person account of a young girl growing up in Seattle in a lively household that includes her eccentric Filipina grandmother. Two panels from the introduction (see Fig. 1.1) show a thoughtful-looking woman, who, as a label on the previous page has informed us, should be taken to be the “author.” ...
2. Picturing Embodied Selves
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pp. 49-92
Alison Bechdel’s (2006) graphic memoir Fun Home centers on her complicated relationship with her father, a funeral director, English teacher, obsessive restorer of the family’s Victorian house, and, as it turns out, closeted homosexual, who has secret affairs with his male students. Despite—or perhaps because of—his own sexual preferences, ...
3. Commemorating the Past, Anticipating the Future
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pp. 93-134
Blankets is Craig Thomson’s (2003) autobiographical account of his fundamentalist Christian upbringing in a small town in the American Midwest, where his sensitive nature and creativity are greeted with incomprehension and ridicule. In one sequence Craig is being severely reprimanded by his English teacher for writing a poem about people eating excrement. ...
4. Performing Authenticity
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pp. 135-178
Edmond Baudoin (1995) starts his autobiographical comic L’éloge de la poussière (“In Praise of Dust”) with a picture showing him sitting on the pavement in war-torn Beirut, drawing a beautiful building opposite (see Fig. 4.1). He is so absorbed by this activity that he fails to notice the car pulling up on the opposite side of the road ...
5. Drawing in the Reader
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pp. 179-220
On the first page of the introductory section (pp. 1–9) to Rosalind Penfold’s graphic memoir Dragonslippers, a young woman is shown standing on a wobbly stool and reaching for a box on the shelf above her head (see Fig. 5.1). The only light in the room emanates from a torch, which the woman offers to an unseen addressee: “Here—Would you mind holding this?” ...
Conclusion
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pp. 221-224
The goal of this book has been to identify the key formal properties and narrative techniques of a relatively new and flourishing art form, the graphic memoir. My consideration of eighty-five autobiographical comics from North America and Western Europe has revealed that individual works differ substantially in terms of their subject matter, artistic style, ...
Notes
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pp. 225-236
Autobiographical Comics
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pp. 237-240
References
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pp. 241-262
Index
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pp. 263-273
E-ISBN-13: 9781621036180
E-ISBN-10: 1617036137
Print-ISBN-13: 9781617036132
Page Count: 192
Illustrations: 37 b&w
Publication Year: 2012
