Notes
225 Notes Introduction 1. The term was introduced in the mid-1980s by the publishing industry as part of a large PR campaign aimed at nurturing the concept of a “new breed” of adult comics. The exact origins of the term are somewhat controversial, but it seems to have been around since at least the mid-1960s, when it was used by American comics critic and magazine editor Richard Kyle (Gravett 2005: 8). Other comics scholars (e.g., Saraceni 2003; Weiner 2003) credit Will Eisner, who used it in the late 1970s as a subtitle for a collection of short stories, with the invention of the term. 2. Hillary Chute (2008; 2010) prefers the broader term “graphic narrative.” The epithet “graphic” may be considered particularly apt, since many of the works it is used to describe also involve the “graphic” in the sense of explicit images of bodies involved in violent or sexual acts. 3. Two of the comics creators whose work I consider, Marjane Satrapi and Pasua Bashi, were born in Iran but now live in Western Europe. When discussing comics written originally in French, German, or Spanish, I have always used the English edition whenever available. Otherwise, all translations from the original languages are my own. Chapter 1 1. For a perceptive analysis of reader expectations vis-à-vis the modern memoir, see Miller (2007). 2. Chute (2010: 109) discusses the same example, suggesting that the considerable amount of time that has apparently passed between the first and the second panel highlights the meaning of both fiction and autobiography “as 226 Notes the material process of making.” Other critical commentaries on One! Hundred! Demons! can be found in De Jesus (2004) and Tensuan (2006). 3. Gilmore (2001: 2) suggests that this tradition was, in fact, “never as coherent as it could be made to appear, its canonical texts formally unstable and decidedly multivoiced, and its variety as much a critique, parody, or mimicry of the Western self as evidence of it.” 4. Hartmann (2002: 10) believes that the inflation of autobiographical writing in recent years may be related to the disruptive influences of increased mobility, with many people being inspired to write their life stories by the experience of displacement and Diaspora or of living among strangers: “Facing that strangeness in others, we become more aware of the other in ourselves: of what within remains ambivalent, unintegrated, in between.” See Gilmore (2001: 16–19) for an alternative explanation for the current boom in life writing. 5. According to Kerby (1991: 42) there are limits to the autobiographer’s freedom to (re-)interpret the facts of his or her past. Although a person’s life is itself “quasi-narrative” in the sense that experience is always already caught up in story, it nevertheless serves “as a corrective or guide for the act of narration. One cannot just tell any old story without committing some form of injustice to the content of one’s experience—what Sartre called ‘bad faith.’” The truthfulness of an autobiographical narrative cannot, therefore, be measured against the meaning of pre-narrative experience, but it is possible to compare alternative interpretations of that experience and to judge their relative adequacy and aptness. 6. Although some comics have been described as “wordless,” it is in fact rare to find examples of the medium where language does not play any role at all (Beronä 2001). Catherine Doherty’s (2000) Can of Worms, for instance, does not contain any dialogue or narrative voice, but the pictures contain words that indicate sounds or actions in the storyworld (e.g., the “click” of a key unlocking the door, and the “slap” of a hand switching off the alarm clock; [see Chapter 3, Fig. 3.6]), form part of the landscape of the storyworld (e.g., names on shop fronts and street signs), or make up the carefully transcribed documents Doherty includes in her comic book. 7. Similar taxonomies of possible word-image relations have been developed in relation to children’s picture books (Nikolajeva and Scott 2000; Moya Guijarro and Pinar Sanz 2009). 8. Will Eisner is famous for the spectacular splash pages he created for his Spirit stories, where the titles form an integral part of the pictorial landscape (Harvey 1996: 80–85). 9. Lefèvre (2000) provides an overview of the different comics formats that exist, including temporal aspects such as the frequency of publication in the case of serial publications, and the impact these can have...
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