Graphic Memoirs Come of Age

Although more and more nonfiction writers are using sequential art (that is, comics) to explore their lives and ideas, it seems to me that we still lack a common vocabulary to talk about this type of literature. When I first became aware of this form—in the 1990s, when I was in high school and the final volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus was published—such a book was called a graphic novel. The idea was that a work like Maus was more significant and had more literary merit than the “comics” that featured lasagne-craving cats who hate Mondays or people who wear their underwear on the outside and punch each other. While this is certainly true, applying the label “graphic novel” to a work like Maus ignores the fact that it is not, strictly-speaking, a novel. It’s a memoir. Or a work of literary journalism. Or an extended essay. Or some combination of the three. And it probably ought to be distinguished from works like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns—both very accomplished graphic novels created for an adult audience that nonetheless lack, I think, the serious ambition of Spiegelman’s most famous work.

Spiegelman wasn’t the first cartoonist to explore his own life in his work, of course—Justin Green and Harvey Pekar were both on the scene before Maus was conceived—but in many ways, he may have been the most significant up until that point. Maus was a bestseller. It won a Pulitzer Prize. And it inspired an entire generation of cartoonists to publish works based upon their own lives. Seth, Joe Matt, James Kochalka, and others established themselves in the field of what was then known as “autobio comics.” Some of these autobio comics to come out in the ‘90s were quite good; others, less so. At around this time, Milk and Cheese and Dork creator Evan Dorkin skewered the form in one of his “Fun Strips” as well as in a strip titled “Comic Industry Trading Cards!!!” which suggested that autobio cartoonists were often desperate to seem more interesting than other autobio cartoonists (“Look! Look! I’m picking my nose! See?” “No! Look at me! I masturbate over Smurfs” “I’m much more neurotic and interesting! . . . Please find me fascinating!”). Despite his apparent frustration with the form, Dorkin would later write his own autobio comic in which he chronicled his struggles with severe depression and anxiety—issue #7 of Dork, titled “Auto-Biohazard.” And it was really, really good—perhaps some of the best work of his career.

Something about the term “autobio comic” always seemed a bit disparaging to me—maybe it’s just that I internalized Dorkin’s suggestion that the form seemed to encourage the narcissistic and dull. I was glad to see, in the past decade or so, more people adopting the term “graphic memoir” to describe works like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s first book, Fun Home. This term seems more appropriate for this type of writing, as it acknowledges the role that art plays in the work while also emphasizing that we’re talking about a form of nonfiction. Still, part of me wondered if this was the correct label to apply to so many works—particularly Bechdel’s book, which I’ve argued reads, at least in some places, more like an essay than a conventional memoir—at the very least, it seemed like a very essayistic memoir. In Fun Home, Bechdel tells us the story of her life, but she seems at least as concerned with tracing and revealing her thoughts about her life. Phillip Lopate tells us that “Personal essayists are adept at interrogating their ignorance,” and that’s what much of Fun Home felt like to me—an internal interrogation, an attempt to learn what its author knows and what remains obscured by time and, perhaps, some form of deception. Think of the way the book ends, with Bechdel’s attempts to understand her father’s life and sexuality, and what they mean to her. “‘Erotic...