Graphic Subjects

Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography

willia m l . a nd re ws
General Editor
Graphic Subjects
Critical Essays on Autobiography and
Graphic Novels

Edited by
Michael A . C hane y

the uni ver sit y of wisc onsin pre ss

 Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through the
Walter and Constance Burke Research Initiation Award
for Junior faculty of Dartmouth College.

The University of Wisconsin Press

 Monroe Street, rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin -
uwpress.wisc.edu

 Henrietta Street
London wce lu, England
eurospanbookstore.com

Copyright © 
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or
a Web site without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except
in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

    

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Graphic subjects: critical essays on autobiography and graphic novels / edited by
Michael A. Chaney.
p. cm. — (Wisconsin studies in autobiography)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn ---- (pbk.: alk. paper) — isbn ---- (e-book)
. Graphic novels. . Autobiography in literature. . Autobiography—Authorship.
I. Chaney, Michael A. II. Series: Wisconsin studies in autobiography.
pn.g 
.´—dc

 Contents

Acknowledgments / ix

Introduction / 
mic hael a . c han e y

part i: Art Spiegelman

 Reading Comics: Art Spiegelman on CD-ROM / 
paul john eakin
 Mourning and Postmemory / 
marianne hirsch
 Art Spiegelman and AutobioGRAPHICal Re-Vision / 
erin mcglothlin
 Breakdowns and Breakthroughs: Looking for Art in
Young Spiegelman / 
bella brodzki

part ii: The Global Scope of Autography

 Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis
Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks / 
sidonie smith
 Picturing Oneself as Another / 
linda haverty rugg
  Dominique Goblet: The List Principle and the Meaning
of Form / 
jan baetens
 The Animal Witness of the Rwandan Genocide / 
michael a. chaney
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic / 
stephen e. tabachnick
 Manga and the End of Japan’s s / 
james dorsey

part iii: Visualizing Women’s Life Writing

 Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home / 
julia watson
 Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood
Testimony / 
leigh gilmore
 A Story Told in Flashback: Remediating Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis / 
nima naghibi
 Autobiography: The Process Negates the Term / 
phoebe gloeckner
 Up from Surgery: The Politics of Self-Representation in Women’s
Graphic Memoirs of Illness / 
theresa tensuan
 The Gutter Effect in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue
on Love / 
carolyn williams
 Photau(gyno)graphy: The Work of Joanne Leonard / 
domna c. stanton

part i v : Varieties of the Self

 The Diary Comic / 
isaac cates
 Justin Green: Autobiography Meets the Comics / 
joseph witek
 Narrative Worldmaking in Graphic Life Writing / 
david herman
 In Praise of Joseph Witek’s Comic Books as History / 
ian gordon
 Selective Mutual Reinforcement in the Comics of Chester Brown,
Joe Matt, and Seth / 
bart beaty
 Keeping it (Hyper)Real: Autobiographical Fiction in -D / 
damian duffy
 Fictional Auto/Biography and Graphic Lives in Watchmen / 
victoria a. elmwood
 American Born Chinese: Challenging the Stereotype / 
rocío g. davis
 Materializing Memory: Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons / 
hillary chute
 Reflections on Lynda Barry / 
andrea a. lunsford

Contributors / 
Index / 
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors at the University of Wisconsin Press,

Raphael Kadushin for supporting this project, as well as series editor Wil-
liam L. Andrews, who shepherded it through the publication process from
initial formulations to its present incarnation. Hearty thanks are due to
my tireless research assistants, Presidential Scholars of Dartmouth College
Tien-Tien Jong, Sara Brown, and Martha Gillon. A Burke Award, a Junior
Faculty Fellowship, and the Class of  Dartmouth College Award pro-
vided financial support and a sabbatical year during which this project was
edited. Deep gratitude goes to my intrepid contributors for participating in
this critical venture and for having the courage and patience to speak across
disciplinary registers. And finally I want to acknowledge the scores of stu-
dents who have taken our classes on comics, graphic novels, or autobiogra-
phy, without whom neither the motivation nor the merit of such a collection
would be possible.

ix
Graphic Subjects
 Introduction
mic hael a . c ha ne y

A fundamental distinction for analyzing autobiography usefully separates

the narrating I from the narrated I. The narrating I, or the self that tells the
events of a life and gathers together stray details of experience into the leg-
ible structures of a story, is therefore pried away from the narrated I that
functions as an actor in the story. The confusing resemblance of these two
I’s results from the promise implied in all autobiographies that the life sto-
ries authors tell about are, if not verifiably true, at least emotionally truth-
ful to the way they perceive, remember, and make sense out of their lives.
How readers discern emotional verities or subjective truths depends upon a
range of discourse conventions surrounding narratives of truth telling, from
religious confessionals to legal testimony. As Leigh Gilmore explains, auto-
biography “draws its authority less from its resemblance to real life than
from its proximity to discourses of truth and identity, less from reference or
mimesis than from the cultural power of truth telling” (,  n. ).
Despite their muddied boundaries, autobiography’s truth claims help to
distinguish it from fiction, as does the explicit connection of the author,
teller, and actor of any autobiography. For autobiography theorist Philippe
Lejeune, the consonance of these three agents of life writing entails an
“autobiographical pact” with the reader. According to Sidonie Smith and
Julia Watson, the pact negotiated between the generic clues of a text and a
reader trained by convention to recognize them determines whether a text
will be read as fiction, with a greater “expectation of internal consistency in
the world of verisimilitude” (, ), or as autobiography, whose contract
with the reader depends more on “the ‘vital statistics’ of the author” () and
those “rules of evidence that link the world of the narrative with a historical


 Introduction

world outside the narrative” (). Thus, the question of whether any given
narrative belongs to fiction or autobiography is ultimately one that readers
must negotiate.
But what about autobiographies that require their readers to be viewers
at the same time? Even a cursory review of my opening reveals the pre-
sumption of traditional printed autobiographies. That a nonpictorial text
is often assumed in U.S.-based autobiography criticism should not surprise
us, because the foundational texts of autobiography studies were written
predominantly by faculty members of English and literature departments
obliged to defend a genre once dismissed as mawkish, self-indulgent, or
marginal to the canon. In the present climate of image saturation, however,
pictures no longer seem content with merely being worth their proverbial
thousand words. Some strive for that value in literary words, aspiring to a
narrative currency that would rival the cache once reserved for literature,
and autobiography has not been immune from the narrative ambitions of
the image.
The incursion began with photography. Because of their shared concerns
for exacting revelations of identity, autobiography and photography became
the twinned subjects of Timothy Dow Adams’s Light Writing and Life Writ-
ing and Linda Haverty Rugg’s Picturing Ourselves. As a sort of oppositional
category to the concerns of the present volume, these examinations exploit
autobiographies containing photographs as a means to investigate the shared
and often problematic claims that both photography and autobiography
assume regarding evidentiary transparency. According to Rugg, the intro-
duction of photography in the early twentieth century raised concerns that
complemented those of autobiography: “The mere presence of photography
challenged traditional forms of autobiographical narrative by calling into
question essential assumptions about the nature of referentiality, time, his-
tory, and selfhood” (, ). But if printed autobiographies that include
photographs highlight autobiography’s claims to historical accuracy and self-
reflexivity, autobiographies told in the typically exaggerated visual style of
the comics, by contrast, complicate those claims, juxtaposing them against
autobiography’s other set of authorial promises—to portray experience in
a manner that is emotionally and psychologically true to the unique, often
idiosyncratic perspective of the author-artist.
Perhaps this is why the controversy over the term “graphic novel” has not
dismayed autobiography scholars as much as it has comics scholars, who
complain that the term is commercially rather than aesthetically imposed,
 Introduction 

not to mention misleading. Nearly all of the graphic novels studied in this
volume, for instance, make referential claims to the author’s lived reality and
therefore are not technically novels at all. While generic labels are always a
necessary but imperfect shorthand for naming a textual family resemblance,
the term “graphic novel” adequately locates the family of works under atten-
tion here, which include Art Spiegelman’s Maus (), James Kochalka’s
American Elf (–), Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You (), Phoebe
Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life (), David B.’s Epileptic (–), Lynda
Barry’s One Hundred Demons (), Marjane Satrapi’s Perspolis I & II
(, ), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (). Of course, autobiogra-
phy scholars have also experimented with competing labels for these works,
often referring to them interchangeably as autobiographix, graphic memoir,
and autography. For those who favor the term “autography,” as do Gillian
Whitlock and Jared Gardner, critical emphasis is placed on the tensions such
works manifest, according to Whitlock, “between ‘auto’ [self ] and ‘graph’
[writing] in the rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiogra-
phy” (, v). Indeed, since the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus—
which Spiegelman prefers to categorize as “comix” because of its stress on
the commingling or mixing of verbal and visual modes of expression—a cot-
tage industry of autobiographical graphic novels has rapidly sprung up,
populating in its wake new outgrowths of criticism on the subject.
Maus alone has been a prolific source for numerous critical and theoret-
ical thesis statements, such as on the instabilities in generic classification,
autobiographical authority, and narrative in general; and on the crucial and
material presence of medium in narrating trauma—particularly when this
medium is itself defined by a serial recuperation of trauma on a structural
level. Take, for example, the way gutters (or wounds) separating one picto-
rial panel from another are routinely resolved in order to create mean-
ing and coherence, the process Scott McCloud refers to as “closure” (,
). As a result of this approbation and assessment, a critical consensus
has emerged emphasizing the uniquely supple procedures the comics form
makes possible for the representation of multiple yet simultaneous time-
scapes and competing yet coincident ways of knowing, seeing, and being.
Few of these academic treatments, however, center so insistently on the
questions that organize Graphic Subjects: Why are so many of the most-
lauded graphic novels autobiographical; and how does this congruence force
us to rethink the assumptions of an inherently print-biased study of auto-
biography—its formal modalities, representational practices, and discursive
 Introduction

contexts? How, in short, is the illustrated autobiographer-narrator different

from those in exclusively written texts? How does the comics form produce
new structures for the self to inhabit and through which to be expressed?
What new possibilities for autobiography arise in the comics medium?
Though different in their theoretical and methodological approaches, all
of the chapters in this volume respond to a shared urgency introduced
by these questions to dissect the various ways in which autobiographical
authority is constituted within, against, and sometimes between pictures
and words. While a veritable library of scholarship has risen up around
Spiegelman’s Maus, critical work on the autobiographical potential of graphic
novels as a medium more generally has yet to be collected into one edition.
Graphic Subjects fills this void by examining the various ways graphic nov-
els inscribe autobiographical experience, mediate identity, enter into (and
out of ) autobiographical pacts, and perform memory through visual and
verbal combinations. The stakes of interrogating these practices of self-
representation hinge on the ambivalent nature of autobiographical author-
ity and the possible differences that arise when that authority moves from a
primarily written domain to a primarily visual one in the comics.
As a prominent feature of s underground comics (or comix), the
autobiographical impulse has been a focalizing, though not always focal,
topic in comics scholarship. Two of Charles Hatfield’s six chapters from
his landmark study Alternative Comics () center on autobiography.
Building on Joseph Witek’s analysis of the working-class realism and gritty
confessionals of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Hatfield discovers a
governing paradox in the second generation of autobiographical comics
inspired by Pekar’s documentary naturalism. According to Hatfield, works
by Chester Brown, Seth, Julie Doucet, Mary Fleener, and other artists of this
second generation embody “a collision of mainstream commercial habits
and countercultural sensibility” (, ). For even if the unheroic (and
often deliberately abject) lives celebrated in this subgenre stand in opposi-
tion to the juvenile fictions of superhero comics, the “autobiographer’s car-
toon persona supplies [a] continuity” () similar to the serialized, ongoing
iterations of the superhero. The productive tension that Hatfield goes on to
read in autobiographical comics, as Witek and Ray Zone have before him,
results from the insistent repetition of an explicitly foregrounded autobio-
graphical persona in dialectical relation to the background object of his
or her cultural environment (). Autobiographical comics are energized
aesthetically and ideologically by this tension, as is autobiographical theory
 Introduction 

more generally. Both attempt to reconcile the objective truths of identity

with the ambivalent cultural forms used to express those truths. Extolling
skepticism for the possibility of objective truth (through stylized, exaggera-
tive illustration) is one way that autobiographical graphic novels rescue and
reenvision the genre’s truth claims. As Hatfield rightly observes, the serial
and iconic capacities of the cartoon self both express and complicate self-
reference in autobiographical graphic novels.
As the chapters in this volume variously demonstrate, the pictorial pres-
ence of the autobiographical subject of comics both fortifies and unravels
autobiography’s founding generic claims. Most significantly, the comics form
intervenes on autobiography’s production of an author who operates, as
Leigh Gilmore puts it, “as an agent of self-representation, a figure, textual
to be sure but seemingly substantial, who can claim ‘I was there’ or ‘I am
here’” (, ). The visual presence of this figure is made all the more “sub-
stantial” when transposed in the comics, but so too are those qualities that
give rise to Gilmore’s qualifiers about the textual nature of this figure, which
are all the more intensified in the comics. When the “I” of autobiography is
explicitly stylized as a kind of cartoon, the result is a brazen departure from
the “seemingly substantial” effects of realism that traditional autobiogra-
phies presume. The larger consequences of this tension between objec-
tive and subjective truths in creating realistic fictions of the self prod us to
reconsider what is at stake in telling our life stories in pictures and how it is
that we have come to visualize identity in particular ways and according
to particular sociohistorical contexts. And percolating just beneath these
questions that careful analysis may be able to answer are those that defy
interpretation altogether, personal questions that few critical paradigms dare
to confront, but which the topic of autobiography always calls forth: Why
do life stories told in the pictorial mode of the comics have the power to
trigger in us such a range of emotional reactions so effectively, from pruri-
ent humor to stupefying pathos? These are the underlying motivations of
this volume: to contextualize, historicize, theorize, and at times even to dare
to confront the personal in search of answers to these questions.
In its organization, Graphic Subjects also seeks to reimagine the format
of the typical academic essay collection by counterbalancing conventional,
chapter-length essays of six- to ten-thousand words with brief philosophi-
cal musings on pictorial autobiography or graphic novel representations of
authorial subjectivity, ranging in length from one- to two-thousand words.
Thus organized, the volume works to produce a comprehensive overview of
 Introduction

the types of genre-breaking and genre-fusing responses that the form has
elicited from many of its most distinguished readers. Specifically, the vol-
ume is divided into four sections that retrace the trajectory of scholarship
on autobiographical comics.
The first section is devoted to Spiegelman, a logical starting place for a
volume intended to complicate and enrich those interpretative claims based
on Maus: Volumes I & II (, )—claims about trauma, the fictive yet
recuperative instabilities of memory, and the narrative possibilities for rep-
resenting authorial identity in the comics form. Chapters concluding this
section update scholarship on Spiegelman by considering his latest auto-
biographical comic, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*!
().
The second section widens the context for understanding contemporary
American graphic novels, many autobiographical strains of which emerge
as a result of a market trend in publishing referred to as the “memoir boom”
of the s. Turning to comic traditions outside the United States, chap-
ters in this section focus on the French bande dessinée, Japanese manga, an
African genocide memoir in comic book form, as well as cultural discourses
in African politics and French cinema that rely on visual and verbal combi-
nations to produce autobiographical effects.
The third section is devoted to feminist contributions to autobiography
studies of comics and visual media. Chapters in this section explore the
comics’ potential for visualizing such themes as sexuality and queer identi-
fication, female embodiment in the grip of illness and death, and traumatic
histories of underrepresented bodies that generally disrupt the conventional
hierarchy separating the public and the private. In this section, too, second-
ary concerns of the volume come to the fore having to do with comparisons
between filmic autobiographical representation and autography (autobiog-
raphy that is in part or exclusively illustrated or indexical) and the possibil-
ity for key concepts from comics scholarship (closure, juxtaposition, etc.) to
provide new insights into the relation of visual and verbal modes of expres-
sion in media other than comics.
The volume’s concluding section offers in-depth readings of a range of
popular graphic novel autobiographers—Lynda Barry, James Kochalka, Seth,
Joe Matt, Jeffrey Brown, Justin Green—and examines the work of fictional
graphic novelists (Gene Luen Yang and Alan Moore) in the context of auto-
biography. As the subtitle of this section declares, it is only through a con-
cern for the varieties of self-hood made possible by the formal mechanics of
 Introduction 

the comics and the cultural conventions that render these mechanics intel-
ligible to us as narrative that the recent surge in autobiographical comics
criticism is to flourish.
works cited
Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, .
Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, .
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, .
Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuile, .
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Kitchen Sink, .
Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, .
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life
Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, .
Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti. “Self Regarding Art.” Biography . (): v–xxiii.
 part i

Art Spiegelman
 

Reading Comics
Art Spiegelman on CD-Rom

paul john e a k i n

Learning to Read
“Br—br—brown,” we sound out together. Miss Welsh makes the phonics
seem easy, and soon we are reading about Dick and Jane and their dog Spot.
These nice kids, however, are easily trumped by the good guys and bad
guys I read about at home in my brother’s glorious stash of comics. This is
what I really like: armed men in cowboy hats riding around on horseback in
the desert somewhere out West chasing other men with guns and masks.
The comics cost only a dime, and so too—if you are twelve and under—does
the Saturday afternoon matinee at the local movie theater, where blood-
and-thunder serials grind away for weeks. I am a shrimp, and it looks as
though I can pass for under twelve forever. There are also serials on the
radio, and every weekday afternoon at four or five I listen faithfully with my
friend down the street to the adventures of “Terry and the Pirates,” “Captain
Midnight,” and “Tennessee Jed” (“got ’im, dead center”). On winter nights I
don’t like to listen at my friend’s house, for by six or so, when our programs
are over, it’s already dark, and as I stand on his lighted front porch and look
down the street to my own lighted front porch only a few houses away, my
pulse begins to race. I run as fast as I can—who knows what might be lurk-
ing behind the trees along the way?
A few years later, when these serials and comics can no longer supply
enough of a fix for the page-turner I have become, I move on to Scribner’s
Classics. Here the ratio of picture to text, more or less a fifty-fifty deal in
the comics, shifts: the thrilling N. C. Wyeth illustrations come only every
fifty pages or so. Getting to an illustration—I don’t allow myself to look until
I’ve read my way there—becomes a focal point, a reward. Robert Louis


 paul john e a k i n

Stevenson knows how to give me what I want, and I read Treasure Island,
then Kidnapped, then David Balfour—I can’t get enough. By the time I
reach junior high, though, I leave my illustrated books behind for my par-
ents’ best sellers: The Caine Mutiny crowds out Scott, Cooper, and Dumas.
I don’t know it yet, but I have been hooked by narrative for life. Eventually
I’ll become a professional reader, even a literary critic, but it’s always the pull
of the story that I crave.

Reading Maus
Decades later, when—thanks to Art Spiegelman’s Maus volumes—I returned
to comics as an adult, I didn’t pay much attention at first to the graphic
dimension of his art. Comics may have made me a page-turner early on, but
I was to learn that you could turn the pages of a comic book too fast. It
was Spiegelman who taught me what I was missing when he gave a public
lecture at Indiana University in . He made two eye-opening points: all
the words in the balloons were drawn, and each page had an architecture of
its own. I needed to learn to look at the words, to look at the pages. Then,
two years later, Spiegelman published The Complete Maus on CD-ROM,
offering, in effect, an elaborate tutorial on his art. The table of contents gives
some idea of his ambition for this disk: “Introduction: Making Maus”; “The
Complete Maus (Parts  and )”; “Art on Art” (excerpts from an interview);
“Appendices: A Maus-Related Miscellany”; and “Supplements” (including a
family tree, a series of maps, and the “working transcripts” of Spiegelman’s
interviews with his father, Vladek, from  to ).
There are different ways to explore this huge archive, and one of them is
simply to “open” the complete text of Maus, where Spiegelman has created a
series of links between selected individual panels on each page and various
kinds of background material. Clicking on the appropriate icon in the mar-
gin, you connect with audio (Art or Vladek speaking), video, and still images,
notably Spiegelman’s early drafts of the panel or page in question. “Intro-
duction: Making Maus” offers a second, more concentrated lesson in the
art of reading Spiegelman’s graphic text. Here Spiegelman takes us step by
step through the creation of a single page of Maus, in this instance Vladek’s
arrival at Auschwitz. We are shown preliminary pencil sketches, sample
pages of his journals, photos and videos from his two trips to Auschwitz,
and drawings by prisoners depicting daily life in the camps. Cumulatively,
all these sources bring home the depth of Spiegelman’s commitment to doc-
umentary truth: “I wanted it to be correct,” he comments, “I wanted to be as
 Reading Comics 

accurate as I could” (Spiegelman, “Researching the Page,” ). It was only

when Spiegelman makes the following observation, however, that I began to
see the graphic dimension of the text in a new way: “In drawing the scene
[of Vladek’s arrival at the camp], [I] had to determine not only at which of
the gates Vladek would be arriving, but from which direction” (“Defining
the Page,” –).
Up to this point, I had read Maus as a relational autobiography, which of
course it is, as Spiegelman points out when he introduces the transcripts of
his conversations with his father by saying that these encounters offered him
“a way of establishing common ground in a relationship that had become
distant and strained” (“Interviewing Vladek,” opening screen). And the text
of Maus stresses this relational dimension of the narrative by featuring what
I call “the story of the story”: Vladek’s story of the Holocaust is embedded
in the story of Art’s gathering and working on that story as he makes it into
the books we read.1 What the disk supplies, I discovered, is a second version
of this “story of the story,” one that is much more complete and complex.
The disk reveals just how closely Spiegelman attempted to stand in his
father’s shoes—which direction, which gate. In particular, it becomes clear
that Spiegelman wants us to see him seeing, to see him transforming him-
self into the equivalent of an eyewitness who would have seen—and hence
could draw in graphic images—what his father relates.2 I think that at some
level I had probably regarded the graphic images accompanying the bal-
loons as ancillary to the narrative proper, as packaging for the story rather
than—as I now understood—central to the story’s core.

Unreadable Maus
The Complete Maus may have taught me how to read Spiegelman’s graphic
art, but I recently discovered that I could no longer read the CD-ROM. It
has become technologically obsolete. When I went to our library’s media
center to check it out, I found that the slipcase for the disk now carries this
warning label: “We no longer have system to support format.” The disk was
designed to be launched with a Mac Operating System ., which is no
longer available on any of the library computers. So it just may be that one
must approach Art Spiegelman’s wonderful primer for graphic art armed
with a degree of cyber-savvy literacy that lies beyond the reach of this aging
page-turner.3 For anyone who can crack the code to Spiegelman’s archive,
the heist will be worth it.
 paul john e a k i n

notes
1. For more on Maus as a relational autobiography, see Eakin, How Our Lives
Become Stories, –.
2. For more on Maus as an eyewitness narrative, see Eakin, “Eye and I.”
3. Sean Savage discusses the problems involved in accessing Spiegelman’s CD-
ROM. Anticipating the obsolescence of the CD-ROM format, he comments, “It is easy
to imagine all the material [on the disk] assembled in a similar fashion on a web site”
(“Handling New Media,” ).

works cited
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, .
———. “Eye and I: Negotiating Distance in Eye Witness Narrative.” Partial Answers .
(): –.
Savage, Sean. “Handling New Media: CD-ROM: Maus.” November , . http://
www.docstoc.com/docs//MAUS-via-Classic-in-OS-.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. CD-ROM. Irvington, NY:
Voyager, .
 

Mourning and Postmemory

m aria nne hir sc h

All photographs are memento mori.

—Susan Sontag

All such things of the war, I tried to put out from my mind once for all . . .
until you rebuild me all this from your questions.
—Art Spiegelman

In order to represent himself completely, the son must represent his mother,
his other, without omitting a word.
—Nancy K. Miller

Family Pictures
When my parents and I immigrated to the United States in the early s,
we rented our first apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, from the Jakubow-
iczs, a Polish- and Yiddish-speaking family of Auschwitz survivors. Although
we shared their hard-earned duplex for four years, I felt I never came to
know this tired elderly couple nor their pale and otherworldly daughter
Chana, who was only ten, though her parents were in their late fifties. We
might have been neighbors in distant Eastern Europe—Poland and Roma-
nia did not seem so far apart from the vantage point of Providence—and
were neighbors on Summit Avenue, but worlds separated us. They were
orthodox Jews and kept kosher; they would not even drink a glass of water
in our house. We were eager to furnish our first American apartment with
the latest in what we considered modern and cosmopolitan—Danish walnut
furniture and Rya rugs—while their flat, with its haphazard mixture of
second-hand furniture and Sears Formica, topped with doilies and fringes,
had a distinctly old-world look about it.
I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the numbers tattooed
on their pale arms, and could not stop asking my mother for details of their
survival in Auschwitz, the loss of their spouses and children, how they met


 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

each other after the liberation, how they decided to marry, to have Chana,
to start a new life all on the traces of such inconceivable pain and loss.
I well remember going to their apartment and staring at the few framed
photos on a small, round, doily-covered living room table. These were pic-
tures of Mr. and Mrs. Jakubowicz’s first families—Mrs. Jakubowicz, her first
husband, and three sons; Mr. Jakubowicz, his first wife, and three daughters.
I can’t remember these photos visually—in my memory they have acquired
a generic status of old-looking studio family portraits. Perhaps one was a
wedding photo; others might have depicted the parents and children. I just
don’t know any more. But there was something discomforting about them
that made me both want to keep staring at them and to look away. What I
most remember is how unrecognizable Mr. and Mrs. Jakubowicz seemed
in the photos, and how hard I thought it must be for Chana to live in the
shadow of these legendary “siblings” whom she had already outlived in age;
whom, because she had never known them, she could not mourn; and
whom her parents could never stop mourning. I thought that their ghostly
presence might explain Chana’s pallor, her hushed speech, her decidedly
unchildlike behavior. I spent a lot of time wondering how these photos had
survived. Had the Jakubowiczs left them with Polish neighbors or friends?
Had they perhaps mailed them to family abroad? Had they been able to keep
them through their time in Auschwitz, and, if so, how?
I had forgotten the Jakubowiczs and their photos until I saw another
photo that seemed to me, as much as those, to be hovering between life and
death—a photo of Frieda Wolfinger, my husband Leo’s aunt, a survivor of
the Riga ghetto and concentration camp. Rose, my mother-in-law, who had
survived the war as a refugee in Bolivia, had this picture in her collection,
and later we found another copy among the photos of another aunt, Käthe,
who had survived the war in England. In one of his most vivid childhood
memories, Leo recalls the moment—in —when this photo arrived in a
letter announcing Frieda’s survival and detailing the death of the rest of her
family. I can picture the family sitting around their kitchen table in La Paz,
reading Frieda’s letter, crying and studying the picture that had crossed the
ocean as proof of life and continuity. I can picture Käthe receiving the iden-
tical picture in England, and I can imagine her relief to see Frieda, at least,
alive. How many copies of the picture did Frieda have printed, I wonder, and
to how many relatives did she send it? And how could those relatives just get
up from their kitchen tables, how could they integrate into their lives Frieda’s
image and the knowledge it brought?
 Mourning and Postmemory 

I am fascinated with this multiple dissemination of the same image, by

the weight of its message in relation to its own unassuming character. There
is nothing in the picture that indicates its connection to the Holocaust:
Frieda does not look emaciated or deathlike. On the contrary, she looks
very much alive and “normal.” She is firmly situated in an ordinary domes-
tic setting—seated on a bench in front of a pretty house surrounded by flow-
ering trees, she is holding a newspaper and smiling, a bit sadly it seems to
me, at the camera. Alone, she seems to be asking something of the onlooker,
beckoning to be recognized, to be helped perhaps, although, at the same
time, she wears a distinctly self-sufficient expression. Her posture articu-
lates some of these contradictions: her body is twisted in on itself, uncom-
fortable at the edge of the seat. For me, this picture has become an emblem
of the survivor who is at once set apart from the normalcy of postwar life
and who eagerly waits to rejoin it: in the picture, Frieda remains outside the
garden fence, seems to inhabit neither house nor garden. She is the survivor
who announces that she has literally “sur-vived,” lived too long, outlived her
intended destruction. She is the survivor who has a story to tell, but who has
neither the time to do so in the instant of the photograph nor the audience
to receive it.

Holocaust Photographs
As much as the pictures in the Jakubowicz living room represented death
for me, Frieda’s picture says “I am alive,” or perhaps, “I have survived”—a
message so simple and, at the same time, so overlaid with meaning that it
seems to beg for a narrative and for a listener, for a survivor’s tale. Theorists
of photography have often pointed out this simultaneous presence of death
and life in the photograph: “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnera-
bility of lives heading toward their own destruction and this link between
photography and death haunts all photos of people,” says Susan Sontag in
On Photography.1 Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, agrees but points out
the reverse as well when he connects photography to life: “The photograph
is literally an emanation of the referent. . . . Light, though impalpable, is here
a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”
But it is precisely the indexical nature of the photo, its status as relic, or trace,
or fetish—its “direct” connection with the material presence of the photo-
graphed person—that at once intensifies its status as harbinger of death
and, at the same time and concomitantly, its capacity to signify life. With the
image of the umbilical cord, Barthes connects photography not just to life
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

but also to life giving, to maternity. Life is the presence of the object before
the camera and the “carnal medium” of light that produces its image; death
is the “having-been-there” of the object—the radical break, the finality
introduced by the past tense. For Barthes, it is the mother’s death and the
son’s desire to bring her back. The “ça a été” of the photograph creates the
scene of mourning shared by those who are left to look at the picture. More
than memory is at stake here: Barthes insists that “the photograph does
not call up the past”; photography, he implies, does not facilitate the work
of mourning.2 Going further, Marguerite Duras writes that “photographs
promote forgetting. . . . It’s a confirmation of death.”3 And Barthes agrees:
“Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory . . . but it actually
blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”4 Photography’s rela-
tion to loss and death is not to mediate the process of individual and collec-
tive memory but to bring the past back in the form of a ghostly revenant,
emphasizing, at the same time, its immutable and irreversible pastness and
irretrievability.
Sontag elaborates on what she calls the photograph’s “posthumous irony,”
describing Roman Vishniac’s pictures of the vanished world of Eastern
European Jewish life, which are particularly affecting, she argues, because
as we look at them we know how soon these people are going to die.5 We
also know, I would add, that they will all die (have all died), that their world
will be (has been) destroyed, and that the future’s (our) only access to it
will be (is) through those pictures and through the stories they have left
behind. The Holocaust photograph is uniquely able to bring out this partic-
ular capacity of photographs to hover between life and death, to capture
only that which no longer exists, to suggest the desire and the necessity and,
at the same time, the difficulty, the impossibility, of mourning.
In the broad category of “Holocaust photographs” I include the Jakubow-
icz family portraits, Frieda’s picture, Roman Vishniac’s pictures of Jewish
shtetl life, as well as the many pictures of atrocities from the concentration
and extermination camps. I include those pictures that are connected for us
to total death and to public mourning—pictures of horror and also ordinary
snapshots and portraits, family pictures connected to the Holocaust by their
context and not by their content. I recognize, of course, that there are dif-
ferences between the picture of Frieda and the documentary images of mass
graves, especially in the work of reading that they require. Confronted with
the latter image, we respond with horror, even before reading the caption or
knowing its context. The context, then, increases the horrors we add to the
 Mourning and Postmemory 

bodies, the hair, or the shoes depicted, all those others we know about but
are not pictured. Confronted with the former image—the portrait or family
picture—we need to know its context, but then, I would argue, we respond
with a similar sense of disbelief.
These two photographs are complementary: it is precisely the displace-
ment of the bodies depicted in the pictures of horror from their domestic
settings, along with their disfigurement, that brings home the enormity of
Holocaust destruction. And it is precisely the utter conventionality of the
domestic family picture that makes it impossible for us to comprehend how
the person in the picture was, or could have been, annihilated. In both
cases, the viewer fills in what the picture leaves out: the horror of looking
is not necessarily in the image but in the story the viewer provides to fill in
what has been omitted. For each image, we provide the other complemen-
tary one. “There was no stone that marked their passage,” says Helen Epstein
about her deceased relatives. “All that was left were the fading photographs
that my father kept in a yellow envelope underneath his desk. Those photo-
graphs were not the usual kind of snapshots displayed in albums and shown
to strangers. They were documents, evidence of our part in a history so
powerful that whenever I tried to read about it in the books my father gave
me or see it in the films he took me to, I could not take it in.”6 This statement
defines the process of reading the Holocaust photograph: looking at the
family pictures, placing them in context through reading and seeing films,
being unable to understand or to name that context—note how Epstein
repeats the indeterminate “it.” Epstein’s inability “to take it in” is perhaps the
distinguishing feature of the Holocaust photograph.
I started thinking about the connection between the Jakubowicz family
pictures and the photograph Frieda sent to her relatives—pictures I saw
twenty-five years apart—when I read Maus II, the second volume of Art
Spiegelman’s controversial cartoon representation of his father Vladek’s
survival in Auschwitz. Volume I of Maus contained one photograph of Art
Spiegelman and his mother that, emerging among the drawings of mice and
cats, I had found particularly moving. But Maus II complicates the levels of
representation and mediation of its predecessor. The photo on the first page,
of Artie’s dead brother Richieu, and the one near the end, of the survivor
Vladek Spiegelman in a starched camp uniform, brought to focus for me the
oscillation between life and death that defines the photograph. These pho-
tographs connect the two levels of Spiegelman’s text, the past and the pres-
ent, the story of the father and the story of the son, because these family
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

photographs are documents both of memory (the survivor’s) and of “post-

memory” (that of the child of survivors). As such, the photographs included
in the text of Maus, and, through them, Maus itself, become sites of remem-
brance, what Pierre Nora has termed lieux de mémoire. “Created by a play
of memory and history,” lieux de mémoire are “mixed, hybrid, mutant,
bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity, enveloped in a
Möbius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane,
the immutable and the mobile.” Invested with “a symbolic aura,” lieux de
mémoire can function to “block the work of forgetting.”7 Although I find
Nora’s reified distinction between history and memory and his organistic dis-
tinctions between life and death troubling, his notion of lieux de mémoire
usefully describes the status with which Holocaust photographs are often
invested. The spatiality of memory mapped onto its temporality, its visual
combined with its verbal dimension, makes memory, as W. J. T. Mitchell
suggests, in itself an “imagetext, a double-coded system of mental storage
and retrieval.”8 Images and narratives thus constitute its instruments and
its very medium, extending well into subsequent generations. Photographs,
ghostly revenants, are very particular instruments of remembrance, because
they are perched at the edge between memory and postmemory and also,
though differently, between memory and forgetting.
I propose the term “postmemory” with some hesitation, conscious that
the prefix “post” could imply that we are beyond memory and therefore per-
haps, as Nora fears, purely in history. In my reading, postmemory is dis-
tinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep
personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of
memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated
not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and cre-
ation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more
directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience
of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth,
whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous
generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor
recreated. I have developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust
survivors, but I believe it may usefully describe other second-generation
memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences.9
I prefer the term “postmemory” to “absent memory” or “hole of memory,”
also derived in Nadine Fresco’s illuminating work with children of survi-
vors.10 Postmemory—often obsessive and relentless—need not be absent or
 Mourning and Postmemory 

evacuated: it is as full and as empty, certainly as constructed, as memory

itself. My notion of postmemory is certainly connected to Henri Raczy-
mow’s “mémoire trouée,” his “memory shot through with holes,” defining
also the indirect and fragmentary nature of second-generation memory.11
Photographs in their enduring “umbilical” connection to life are precisely
the medium connecting first- and second-generation remembrance, mem-
ory and postmemory. They are the leftovers, the fragmentary sources and
building blocks, shot through with holes, of the work of postmemory. They
affirm the past’s existence and, in their flat two-dimensionality, they signal
its unbridgeable distance.
Like all pictures, the photos in Maus represent what no longer is. But
they also represent what has been and, in this case, what has been violently
destroyed. And they represent the life that was no longer to be and that,
against all odds, nevertheless continues to be. If anything throws this con-
tradictory and ultimately inassimilable dimension of photography—perched
between life and death—into full relief, it has to be the possibility, the real-
ity, of survival in the face of the complete annihilation that is the Holocaust.
Holocaust photographs, as much as their subjects, are themselves stubborn
survivors of the intended destruction of an entire culture, its people as well
as all their records, documents, and cultural artifacts.12
The photographs in Maus are indeed defined by their inclusion in
Spiegelman’s very particular imagetext, his provocative generic choice of an
animal fable comic book to represent his father’s story of survival and his
own life as a child of survivors. If Holocaust representation has been deter-
mined by Theodor Adorno’s suggestion in his  essay “After Auschwitz,”
that “after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems,” then what can we
say of Spiegelman’s comics and of the photographs embedded in them?
Despite his own careful reconsideration and restatement, Adorno’s radi-
cal suspicion has haunted writing for the last fifty years.13 One of its conse-
quences has been the effort to distinguish between the documentary and the
aesthetic. Most theoretical writing about Holocaust representation, whether
historical or literary, by necessity debates questions such as truth and fact,
reference and representation, realism and modernism, history and fiction,
ethics and politics—questions that may seem dated in theoretical thought,
but that revisionist histories have brought to the fore with great urgency.
Peter Haidu summarized this preoccupation: “Our grasp of the Event must
inevitably be mediated by representations, with their baggage of indetermi-
nacy. But this is a context in which theory is forced to reckon with reference—
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

as unsatisfactory as contemporary accounts of reference may be—as a nec-

essary function of language and all forms of representation.”14 The conse-
quent validation of the documentary makes the archival photograph—along
with the spoken survivor testimony—an especially powerful medium due to
its incontrovertible connection to reference. Julia Kristeva has even argued
that film is the “supreme art of the apocalyptic” and that the profusion of
visual images in which we have been immersed since the Holocaust, in their
extraordinary power to evoke its horror, have silenced us verbally, impairing
the symbolic instruments that might have enabled us to process the apoca-
lyptic events of our century: “For these monstrous and painful spectacles
disturb our mechanisms of perception and representation. Our symbolic
modes are emptied, petrified, nearly annihilated, as if they were overwhelmed
or destroyed by an all too powerful force. . . . That new apocalyptic rhetoric
has been realized in two extremes, which seem to be opposites but which
often complement each other: the profusion of images and the withhold-
ing of the word.”15 John E. Frohmayer, former chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts, goes farther than Kristeva in endowing all docu-
mentary visual representation with awesome power. He has claimed, for
example, that Holocaust photographs are so upsetting that their public dis-
play needs to be strictly controlled: “Likewise, a photograph, for example of
Holocaust victims might be inappropriate for display in the entrance of a
museum where all would have to confront it, whether they chose to or not,
but would be appropriate in a show which was properly labeled and hung so
that only those who chose to confront the photographs would be required
to do so.”16 To Frohmayer, documentary images are a form of evidence. They
affirm the “having-been-there” of the victim and the victimizer, of the hor-
ror. They remove doubt, they can be held up as proof to the revisionists.
In contrast, the aesthetic is said to introduce agency, control, structure and,
therefore, distance from the real, a distance that might leave space for doubt.
Art Spiegelman seems to confirm such a distinction when, contrary to his
earlier ambition to write the “Great American Comic Book Novel,” he sub-
sequently insisted that Maus be classified as nonfiction.17
But some have questioned this distinction between the documentary and
the aesthetic, highlighting the aestheticizing tendencies present in all visual
representation and therefore presumably its diminished power truly to rep-
resent horror. Christina von Braun, for example, decries the way in which
the image—the image in general—can “transform horror into the aesthetic,”
suggesting that “film and the photograph have inserted themselves like a
 Mourning and Postmemory 

protective barrier between us and the real,” becoming what she has aptly
termed a “photo morgana.”18 The immobilizing quality of the still photo-
graph—its deathlike fixing of one moment in time—clearly contributes to
this perceived incapacity of the photo to maintain its initial power. After
looking repeatedly at any image, the viewer builds up sufficient psychologi-
cal resistance to become desensitized, just in order to survive the horror of
looking. In von Braun’s reading, this would be as true of a picture of atroci-
ties as of the family picture of a child who later died in the gas chambers. For
her, the photograph—in itself—can no more evoke horror than it can pro-
mote memory or facilitate the work of mourning. In contrast, Spiegelman’s
text maintains the photographs’ visual power through their sparse use and
through their placement.19
By placing three photographs into his graphic narrative, Art Spiegelman
raises not only the question of how, forty years after Adorno’s dictum, the
Holocaust can be represented, but also the question of how different media—
comics, photographs, narrative, testimony—can interact to produce a more
permeable and multiple text that may recast the problematics of Holocaust
representation and definitively eradicate any clear-cut distinction between
documentary and aesthetic. In moving us from documentary photographs—
perhaps the most referential representational medium—to cartoon draw-
ings of mice and cats, Spiegelman lays bare the levels of mediation that
underlie all visual representational forms. But confronting these visual media
with his father’s spoken testimony adds yet another axis to the oppositions
between documentary and aesthetic, on the one hand, and testimony and
fiction on the other. Considering these two axes in relation to each other
may enable us to come back to the Holocaust photo—and, through it, to
photography more generally—and to look at its particular articulation of life
and death, representation and mourning.

A Survivor’s Tale
Maus, the title Spiegelman has chosen for his “survivor’s tale,” illustrates
well the interplay between the visual and aural codes that structure his text.
Maus sounds like the English word “mouse,” but its German spelling echoes
visually the recurring Nazi command “Juden raus” (“Jews out”—come out or
get out) as well as the first three letters of “Auschwitz”—a word that in itself
has become a trope of the Holocaust. Spiegelman reinforces this associa-
tion when, in the second volume, he refers to the camp as “Mauschwitz”
and boldly entitles the first chapter “From Mauschwitz to the Catskills and
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

Beyond.” Similarly, the subtitle of Volume I plays with the visual and aural
dimensions of the word “tale”—when we see it we know it means “story,”
but when we hear it after hearing “mouse” we may think that it is spelled
t-a-i-l. Furthermore, on the cover and title imprint, the author includes his
own name without capitals, thereby making himself a visual construct able
to bring out the tensions between aesthetic and documentary, figural and
mimetic: “art,” on the one hand, and “Spiegelman” or “mirror-man,” on the
other. Spiegelman’s audacious visual/verbal punning not only lays bare the
self-consciousness of his textual production—a self-reflexivity that disarm-
ingly pervades his text—but it also defines from the beginning the two pri-
mary elements of his representational choices, the visual and the aural. These
work together in the text in complex interaction.
On one level, Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, from the
s in Poland to his liberation from Auschwitz in ; on another level,
Maus recounts the story of father and son in s Queens and the Catskills,
the story of the father’s testimony and the son’s attempt to transmit that tes-
timony in the comics genre, which has become his profession, and the story
of Art Spiegelman’s own life dominated by memories that are not his own.
When Art visits Vladek at his home, in his workshop, or on his vacations, as
they sit, or walk, or work, or argue, Vladek talks into a tape recorder and Art
asks him questions, follows up on details, and demands more minute descrip-
tions. The testimony is contained in Vladek’s voice, but we receive both
more and less than that voice: we receive Art’s graphic interpretation of
Vladek’s narrative. This is a “survivor’s tale”—a testimony—mediated by
the survivor’s child through his idiosyncratic representational and aesthetic
choices.20 These choices are based on an almost-obsessive desire for accu-
racy and, at the same time, clearly abandon (or refigure) that desire by set-
ting the story in an animal fable. On the one hand, then, the tape recorder
captures Vladek’s story as he tells it, and the text gives us the impression that
Art has transcribed the testimony verbatim, getting the accent, the rhythm,
the intonation just right. On the other hand, he has not provided the vis-
ual counterpart of the tape recorder—the camera. Instead, he has drawn the
Jews as mice, the Poles as pigs, the Germans as cats, the French as frogs, the
Americans as dogs, and the gypsies as ladybugs. While in the visual realm
Spiegelman chooses multiple mediations, in the aural, by contrast, he seems
to seek absolute unmediated authenticity. But the three family photos that
are reproduced in the text considerably complicate this apparent disjunc-
tion between the visual and aural dimensions of Spiegelman’s imagetext.21
 Mourning and Postmemory 

At first glance, Spiegelman’s animal fable is a literalization of Hitler’s line,

which serves as its epigram: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are
not human.” If indeed, Jews are not human, Spiegelman seems to ask, what
are they, and, more important, what are the Germans? In response, he draws
schematic mice and cat heads resting on human-looking bodies. But these
are mice and cats that perceive themselves as human, who in all respects ex-
cept one—their heads—are human. When Anja Spiegelman discovers a rat
in the basement where she is hiding she is terrified, and Art is amused when
he finds a framed photo of a pet cat on the desk of his survivor psychiatrist.
On the one hand, Spiegelman would like to make it clear throughout his
books that his representational choices are just that—choices—and that
identities are assumed rather than given. When Vladek gets out of hiding to
walk through Sosnowiec, he wears a pig mask, trying to pass for Polish.
Some children call him a Jew but the adults believe the mask and apologize.
Art has trouble deciding how to draw his French wife—should she be a frog
because she is French, or a mouse because she converted to Judaism? On
the other hand, however, Spiegelman seems to come close to duplicating the
Nazis’ racist refusal of the possibility of assimilation or cultural integration
when he represents different nationalities as different animal species. But in
the second volume these oppositions blur as Art often represents himself
not as a mouse but as a human wearing a mouse mask. Eventually, as he
starts to draw and gets into his father’s story, the mouse head becomes his
own head. If Jews are mice and Germans are cats, then, they seem to be
so not immutably but only in relation to each other and in relation to the
Holocaust and its memory. They are human except for the predator-victim
relationships between them. Yet Art and Françoise’s Vermont friends are
dogs, even in the s. Obviously, Spiegelman’s reflections on “race,” eth-
nicity, and nationality, as essential (natural) or as socially and ideologically
constructed, contain a number of contradictions and incongruities, and dur-
ing the years of the two books’ production, they have evolved. That evolution
can be traced by the differences between his original self-portrait and the
one he adopted on the publication of Maus II. In Maus I, the cartoonist is a
hybrid creature, with a schematically drawn man’s body and a mouse’s head,
a lonely artist at his drawing table, with his back to the viewer. In the sec-
ond, the artist is a more fully drawn cartoon man wearing over his own head
a large mouse mask that he anxiously holds in his hands as, facing out, he
contemplates his work (see figure .). No longer isolated, he is surrounded
both by the world of his imagination (a Nazi guard is shooting outside his
figure . Back jacket illustration. From Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale; My Father
Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , , , , ,
,  by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc.
 Mourning and Postmemory 

window) and that of his craft (a picture of Raw and the cover of Maus are
on the wall). For him to enter his book has become more problematic and
overlaid, the access to his mouse identity more mediated. Spiegelman’s ani-
mal fable is both more and less than an analysis of ethnic relations; it is his
aesthetic strategy, his affirmation of identity as construction.
At the same time, readers and viewers raised on Mickey Mouse, Tom and
Jerry, and, Spiegelman’s favorite, Mad Magazine, quickly accept the conven-
tion of the animal fable and learn to discern subtle facial and bodily expres-
sions among the characters of Maus, even though the figures’ faces rarely
vary. Even the breaks in illusion that multiply in Maus II do not interfere. We
appreciate Art’s self-consciousness, his questions about the validity of his
enterprise and his capacity to carry it out, and we sympathize with his dis-
comfort at the success of Maus. Art, drawn as a mouse, or wearing his mouse
mask, is a figure to whom we have become accustomed. Even the incongru-
ity, the uneasy fit (between the characters’ heads and their bodies), the book’s
confusions about the nature of racial and ethnic difference, the monumen-
tal and pervasive dissonance between the past and present levels of the nar-
rative (Vladek describing his deportation while riding his exercise bicycle
in Queens, for example) all ultimately come to be normalized, even erased,
in the reading process.
The truly shocking and disturbing breaks in the visual narrative—the
points that fail to blend in—occur in the section called “Prisoner on the
Hell Planet” in Maus in which an actual photograph appears and in the two
photos in Maus II. These three moments protrude from the narrative like
unassimilated and inassimilable memories. The “Prisoner” section stands
out powerfully not only because of the picture of mother and son but also
because of its different drawing style and the black-bordered pages that
disturb the otherwise uniformly white edging of the closed book. In Maus
II, their difference comes not only from the narrative itself but also from
several pages where “photographs”—schematic representations of framed
mice—are shown and discussed by Vladek: “Anja’s parents, the grandparents,
her big sister Tosha, little Bibi and our Richieu . . . All what is left, it’s the
photos” (–) (see figure .). They emerge also in contrast to the lack
of photos. Vladek, deploring the absent photos of his own side of the fam-
ily, sadly stands in for them, filling up an entire page with his own body: “It’s
nothing left, not even a snapshot” () (see figure .). When we get to the
actual photographs of Richieu and Vladek, they break out of the framework
of Spiegelman’s book as much as the black pages of the “Prisoner” section
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

did, and thus they bring into relief a tension that is present on every level of
the text.
“Breaking the framework” is a term Shoshana Felman uses in her book
Testimony, where she recounts that, in a course on the literature of testi-
mony, the screening of videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors
broke “the very framework of the class” just as all the writers of testimony
ended up breaking through the framework of the books they had initially
set out to write.22 Felman sees what she calls this “dissonance” as essential
to her pedagogical experience in the age of testimony. Breaking through
the framework is a form of dissonance: Visual and verbal images are used
to describe an incongruity necessary to any writing or teaching about the

figure . From Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale; And Here My Trouble Began (p. )
by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , , , , by Art Spiegelman. Used by
permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
 Mourning and Postmemory 

figure . From Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale; And Here My Trouble Began (p. )
by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , , , , by Art Spiegelman. Used by
permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Holocaust. How are we to read the radical breaks in the representational

continuity of Maus? How do Spiegelman’s family pictures mediate his nar-
rative of loss? What alternate story—in the margins of the central narrative
of Maus—is told by the family pictures?

Breaking the Frame

Taken together, the three photographs in Maus I and II reassemble a fam-
ily violently fractured and destroyed by the Shoah: they include, at different
times, in different places, and in different guises, all the Spiegelmans—Art
and his mother, Art’s brother Richieu, and the father, Vladek. Sparsely dis-
tributed over the space of the two volumes, these three pictures tell their
own narrative of loss, mourning, and desire, one that inflects obliquely, that
both supports and undercuts the story of Maus.23
But these three images are not equal. The first, the picture of mother and
son, has a unique generative power in the son’s text, a power that comes
from the “double dying: and the double survival in which it is embedded.”24
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

The photograph clarifies the importance of the mother’s suicide twenty-

three years after her liberation from Auschwitz in the story the father and
son construct, reinforcing the work of memory and postmemory that gen-
erates their text.
The photograph of Artie and his mother, labeled “Trojan Lake, N.Y. ”
(Maus, ) (see figure .), introduces “The Prisoner on the Hell Planet,”
the account of Anja Spiegelman’s suicide. In the picture, the family is obvi-
ously vacationing—the ten-year-old Art is squatting in a field, smiling at the
camera, and Anja is standing above him, wearing a bathing suit, one hand
on his head, staring into space. Presumably the picture is taken by the invis-
ible father, a conventional division of labor in s family pictures. But the
very next frame announces the destruction of this interconnected family
group: “In , when I was , my mother killed herself. She left no note.”
Poignantly, Spiegelman juxtaposes the archival photograph with the mes-
sage of death that, through the presence of the photo’s “having-been-there,”
is strengthened, made even more unbearable. This echoes an earlier moment
in the text when Art, holding his mother’s photograph, tries to engage his
father in the project of testimony: “Start with Mom” (Maus, ).
The drawings in the “Hell Planet” section are completely different from
the rest of the volume: drawings of humans rather than mice and cats, they

figure . Illustration from “Prisoner on the Hell Planet.” From Maus I: A Survivor’s
Tale; My Father Bleeds History (p. ) by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , ,
, , , ,  by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon
Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
 Mourning and Postmemory 

express grief, pain, and mourning in much more direct, melodramatic, ex-
pressionist fashion—tears running down faces, skulls, Vladek lying on top of
the casket, screaming “Anna.” Art, dressed in the striped concentration camp
uniform that has come down to him through his parents’ stories, metaphor-
ically equates his own confinement in his guilt and mourning with their im-
prisonment in the concentration camp. “Hell Planet” is both Auschwitz and
Art’s own psyche. “Left alone with [his] thoughts,” Art connects “MENO-
PAUSAL DEPRESSION, HITLER DID IT, MOMMY, [and] BITCH” (Maus,
)—memory is unbearable and, in his representational choices, Spiegel-
man tries to convey just how unbearable it is. “Hell Planet” demonstrates
how immediately present their war memories have remained for Art and his
parents in their subsequent life, and how unassimilated. But the grieving
Art does not actually remember the concentration camp whose uniform
he wears—mediated through his parents’ memories, his is a postmemory.
Art remains imprisoned in his camp uniform and in the black-bordered
spaces of his psyche. Drawing Maus, it is implied, represents his attempt
both to get deeper into his postmemory and to find a way out. In “Hell
Planet” the two chronological levels of Maus merge, and in this convergence
between past and present, destruction and survival, primary and secondary
trauma—incarnated by Anja’s suicide—lies the root of Art’s (perhaps tem-
porary) insanity. But in this merging, this segment merely exacerbates what
occurs at every level of Maus; Art’s stay at the mental institution in “Hell
Planet” is a more pronounced version of the insanity he lives through every
day of his postmemory.
The other characters attest to the power of “Hell Planet”—Mala, Vladek’s
second wife, insists it is unlike other comics because it is “so personal” but
“very accurate . . . objective” too. Vladek says he only read it because it con-
tained Anja’s picture and he says that he cried when he read it because it
brought back memories of his wife (Maus, ). Vladek keeps his wife’s
memory alive through the pictures of her he has all over his desk, which,
as his second wife complains, is “like a shrine.” The photo of mother and
son sets the stage for the personal, as well as the objective, realistic, and
accurate—it legitimizes “Hell Planet” as a document of life and death, of
death in life. In the photo, mother and son are connected by her hand, which
touches the top of his head; but the photo itself is, in Barthes’s terms, a car-
nal medium, connecting all those who look at it (Art, Mala, and Vladek, as
well as the reader of Maus) with the living Anja who stood in front of the
camera in , touching her son. In each case, hands become the media of
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

interconnection: Anja places her hand on Art’s head, a hand (presumably

Art’s) is holding the photo at an angle at the top of the page, and Art’s hand
is holding the pages of “Hell Planet” as they are represented in Maus. The
reader’s access to Anja and her story is multiply mediated by Art’s hands and
hers—his drawing hand, which stands in stark contrast to her arm where
the photograph does not reveal what, in another text, Spiegelman says she
was always intent on hiding: her tattooed Auschwitz number.25
Anja left no note—all that remains is her picture—her hand on Art’s head,
their visible bodily attachment, and his memories of her transformed into
drawings. It is a picture modulated by other memories, such as the one in
“Hell Planet” of Anja asking Artie, in the only speech of hers he remembers
directly (the others are all reported by his father), whether he still loves her.
He turns away, refuses to look at her, “resentful of the way she tightened the
umbilical cord,” and says, “sure, Ma.” In guilty recollection all Art can say is
“Agh!” (Maus, ).
But Maus is dominated by this absence of Anja’s voice, the destruction
of her diaries, her missing note. Anja is recollected by others; she remains
a visual and not an aural presence. She speaks in sentences imagined by
her son or recollected by her husband. In their memory she is mystified,
objectified, shaped to the needs and desires of the one who remembers—
whether it be Vladek or Art. Her actual voice could have been in the text, but
it isn’t: “These notebooks, and other really nice things of mother,” Vladek
explains to Art, “one time I had a very bad day . . . and all of these things
I destroyed.” “You what?” Art exclaims. And Vladek replies: “After Anja
died I had to make an order with everything. . . . These papers had too
many memories, so I burned them” (Maus, –). Vladek did not read the
papers Anja left behind, he only knows that she said: “I wish my son, when
he grows up, he will be interested by this” (Maus, ). Her legacy was
destroyed, and Maus itself can be seen as an attempt to reconstruct it, an
attempt by father and son to provide the missing perspective of the mother.
Much of the Maus text rests on her absence and the destruction of her
papers, deriving from her silence its momentum and much of its energy.
Through her picture and her missing voice Anja haunts the story told in
both volumes, a ghostly presence shaping familial interaction—the personal
and the collective story of death and survival.
“Prisoner on the Hell Planet” was initially published in an underground
journal, and in Maus Art says he never intended for his father to see it.
“Prisoner” is Art’s own recollection, but Maus is the collaborative narrative
 Mourning and Postmemory 

of father and son: one provides most of the verbal narrative, the other the
visual; one gives testimony while the other receives and transmits it. In the
process of testimony, they establish their own uneasy bonding. In his analy-
sis of the process of testimony, the psychoanalyst Dori Laub says: “For lack
of a better term, I will propose that there is a need for a tremendous libidi-
nal investment in those interview situations: there is so much destruction
recounted, so much death, so much loss, so much hopelessness, that there
has to be an abundance of holding and of emotional investment in the
encounter, to keep alive the witnessing narration.”26 Art and Vladek share
one monumental loss, Anja’s, and on that basis, they build the “libidinal
investment” demanded by the “witnessing narration” they undertake.27 The
absence of the mother, the masculine collaboration between father and son,
are crucial to the power of Maus, and the mother-son photograph, a record
of a “double dying,” reinforces this gendered narration.
Anja’s role in their familial construction makes Art and Vladek’s col-
laboration a process of masculine, Orphic creation, in the terms of Klaus
Theweleit’s Buch der Könige.28 Art and Vladek do indeed sing an Orphic
song—a song about the internal workings of a Hades that few have survived
and even fewer have been able to speak about. In Theweleit’s terms, Orphic
creation—the birth of human art forms, social institutions, and technolog-
ical inventions—results from just such a descent into and a reemergence
from Hades: a masculine process facilitated by the encounter with the beau-
tiful dead woman who may not herself come out or sing her own song.
Orphic creation is thus an artificial “birth” produced by men: by male cou-
ples who can bypass the generativity of women, whose bonding depends on
the tragic absence of women. In this process women are relegated to the role
of “media,” of intermediaries; they are not the primary creators or witnesses.
In Maus father and son together attempt to reconstruct the missing story of
the mother. They do not go to Mala, Vladek’s second wife, for assistance,
even though she too is a survivor. Mala, in fact, is also disturbingly absent as
a voice and even as a listener. When she tries once to tell parts of her own
story of survival, Art interrupts her to go to check on his father. Her role is
only to care for the aging Vladek and to put up with his litany of complaints.
Moreover, Mala brings us face to face with the limitations of the book’s
fairy-tale mode, with its polarization of mice and cats, good guys and bad:
her name “Mala” emphasizes her position as foil to the idealized deceased
Anja and sets her up, at least symbolically, as the evil stepmother. And Art
leaves her in that role even when he seems to consult with her about Vladek.
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

Françoise, Art’s French wife, is at best a sounding board, an enabling pres-

ence, for the confused cartoonist. In his acknowledgments Spiegelman
thanks both women for their roles as “media”: Mala was his translator from
Polish and Françoise his editor. Art’s hostile comments about dating Jewish
women complete the banishment of female voices from his narrative and
show that his story, in Orphic fashion, depends on female absence and death.
Art and Vladek perform the collaboration of the creative male couple: the
difficulties that structure their relationship only serve to strengthen the ties
that bind them to each other and to the labor they have undertaken.
In the Orpheus story, Orpheus may not turn around to look at Eurydice’s
face. In “Hell Planet,” Spiegelman draws Anja and even hands us her photo-
graph—Anja’s face and body, connected to the body of her son, are there
for everyone to see. Seeing her photograph is a memento mori—a sign of
the “having been,” of Anja’s one-time presence and of her subsequent, per-
petual, and devastating absence. The photograph thus becomes the visual
equivalent of the Orphic song, which, through the intermediary of a cultural
artifact—Maus—can bring Eurydice out of Hades, even as it actually needs
to leave her behind. Thus the photograph, the product of both the aesthetic
and the documentary/technological, signals this dual presence and absence,
in Barthes’s terms, this “anterior future of which death is the stake.”29 It fig-
ures the son’s desire for his mother, for her bodily presence, for the touch of
her hand, and for her look of recognition.
This is no simple Orphic or Oedipal conflict echoing classical mythic
patterns. Familial conflict based on gender and generation is there, but is
refocused by those violent historical forces that have rewritten family plots
in the twentieth century. Psychoanalytic and mythic paradigms need to be
qualified by the extreme historical circumstances in which they take shape.
Thus father and son transcend their roles when they become witness and
listener; son and mother become historian and the object of historical quest.
Brothers are divided by war and Holocaust, inhabitants of different worlds
and of different families. The photographs included in Maus, reassembling
a nuclear family violently fractured by circumstance, point both to the power
of the familial mythos in the face of external threat and to the powerless-
ness of the family as an institution to act in any way as a protection. Just
as these photographs are embedded, however uneasily, in the squares of
Spiegelman’s graphics, so the familial gaze of Maus is shaped by these over-
whelming historical circumstances, encircling and refocusing the exchange
of familial looks.
 Mourning and Postmemory 

While “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is the work of memory, Maus itself
is the creation of postmemory. In fact, that is the status of the two photo-
graphs in Maus II. The second volume carries two dedications: “For Richieu
and for Nadja” (see figure .). Richieu is the brother Art never knew
because he died during the war, before Art’s birth; Nadja is Spiegelman’s
daughter. The volume is dedicated to two children, one dead, the other alive,
one who is the object of postmemory, the other who will herself carry on her
father’s postmemory. Whose picture, in fact, illustrates the dedication page?
I have assumed that it is Richieu’s: a serious child about three years old, hair
parted, wearing knit overalls. But on reflection the picture is quite indeter-
minate. Could it be Nadja? Could it be a childhood image of Vladek, I won-
der, noting the resemblance between the two pictures that frame Maus II?
Or could it be Art himself? A few pages into Maus II, Art alludes to a pho-
tograph of his “ghost-brother,” wondering if they would have gotten along:
“He was mainly a large blurry photograph hanging in my parents’ bedroom.”
Françoise is surprised: “I thought that was a picture of you, though it didn’t
look like you” (Maus II, ). Based on appearance alone, the picture could
be Art, Vladek, Nadja, or Richieu, and Spiegelman does not specify. But in
terms of function, the picture in the bedroom and the one on the dedication
page clearly have to be Richieu: “That’s the point. They didn’t need photos of
me in their room, I was alive! The photo never threw tantrums or got in any
kind of trouble. . . . It was an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the ass. I couldn’t
compete” (Maus II, ). This photograph signifies death and loss, even while,
as a kind of “fetish object,” it disavows loss. The parents keep it in their
bedroom to live with; Art competes with it; and we take it as the ultimately
inassimilable fact that it was a child who died unnaturally, before he had
the chance to live. The child who could not survive to live his own life—
especially in his equivalence with Art and Nadja—becomes the emblem of
the incomprehensibility of Holocaust destruction.
In her book Children with a Star, Debórah Dwork provides a chilling
statistic: in Nazi-occupied Europe, only  percent of Jewish children sur-
vived the war years.30 Richieu was poisoned by the aunt who hid him so that
he might be saved; she poisoned him so that he might not suffer in the death
camps. Art reports, “After the war my parents traced down the vaguest
rumors, and went to orphanages all over Europe. They couldn’t believe he
was dead” (Maus II, ). We cannot believe it either: the indeterminacy of
the dedication photograph means that this child could be any of us. Because
of its anonymity, this photograph, and many others like it, refers to the
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

figure . Dedication page.

From Maus II: A Survivor’s
Tale; And Here My Trouble
Began by Art Spiegelman,
copyright © , , ,
, by Art Spiegelman. Used
by permission of Pantheon
Books, a division of Random
House, Inc.

anonymity of the victims and corpses represented in photographs of con-

centration and extermination camps. At the end of the volume, Art becomes
Richieu, and Richieu takes on the role of listener and addressee of Vladek’s
testimony, a testimony addressed to the dead and the living. “So,” Vladek
says as he turns over in his bed, “let’s stop, please, your tape recorder. I’m
tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now” (Maus II, ).
Richieu is both a visual presence and a listener—and, as he and Art merge
to transmit the tale, he is neither. The child’s photograph, visible in other
frames portraying Vladek’s bedroom, itself becomes the ultimate witness to
the survivor’s tale. In this role Richieu, or his photograph, confirms the in-
terminable nature of the mourning in Maus, and the endlessness of Vladek’s
tale, a tale subtitled “And Here My Troubles Began.” This is a phrase Spiegel-
man takes from Vladek’s narrative, an ironic aside about Auschwitz. Read-
ing Maus II we realize not only that his troubles began long before, but that
his troubles (and his son’s) never end.
 Mourning and Postmemory 

If the child’s photograph at the beginning of this volume is the emblem

of incomprehensible and unacceptable death, Vladek’s photograph at the
end works as a sign of life that reconnects Vladek and Anja after the libera-
tion. “Anja! Guess what! A letter from your husband just came!” “He’s in
Germany. . . . He’s had typhus! . . . And here’s a picture of him! My God—
Vladek is really alive!” (Maus II, ). Reproduced in the next frame, but at
a slant, jumping out of the frame, is a photograph of the young Vladek, seri-
ous but pleasant, standing in front of a curtain, wearing a starched, striped
camp uniform and hat (see figure .). He explains the picture: “I passed
once a photo place what had a camp uniform—a new and clean one—to
make souvenir photos.” Just as Vladek keeps pictures of the deceased Anja
on his desk, he asserts that “Anja kept this picture always.” The photograph
that signifies life and survival is as important and as cherished as the one
signaling loss and death. But this photograph is particularly disturbing in
that it stages, performs the identity of the camp inmate. Vladek wears a uni-
form in a souvenir shop in front of what looks like a stage curtain; he is no
longer in the camp but he reenacts his inmate self even as he is trying to
prove—through his ability to pose—that he survived the inmate’s usual fate.

figure . From Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale; And Here My Trouble Began (p. )
by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , , , , by Art Spiegelman. Used by
permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

In Anja’s eyes the uniform would not call into question the picture’s mes-
sage: “I am alive, I have survived.” She last saw Vladek in Auschwitz and
would certainly have noticed the difference between this clean uniform and
the one he actually must have worn. The uniform would signal to her their
common past, their survival, perhaps their hope for a future. It is a picture
Vladek could have sent only to her—someone else might have misunder-
stood its performative aspect. For readers of Maus this picture plays a dif-
ferent role: it situates itself on a continuum of representational choices,
from the authenticity of the photos, to the drawings of humans in “Hell
Planet,” to the mice masks, to the drawings of mice themselves. This photo-
graph both is documentary evidence (Vladek was in Auschwitz) and isn’t
(the picture was taken in a souvenir shop). This picture may look like a doc-
umentary photograph of the inmate—it may have the appearance of authen-
ticity—but it is merely, and admittedly, a simulation, a dress-up game. The
identity of Vladek, the camp survivor, with the man wearing the camp uni-
form in the picture is purely coincidental—anyone could have had this
picture taken in the same souvenir shop—any of us could have, just as per-
haps any of us could be wearing uniforms in our dreams, as Art is. Certainly,
any of us can wear the horizontally striped shirts Françoise seems to favor
(another visual pun?) only further to blur the lines between document and
performance. Yet, like Helen Epstein’s family pictures, Vladek’s photo is
also a very particular kind of document, appropriate to a history we cannot
“take in.”
Breaking the frame, looking intently at the viewer/reader, Vladek’s pic-
ture dangerously relativizes the identity of the survivor. As listeners of his
testimony, as viewers of Art’s translation and transmission of that testimony,
we are invited to imagine ourselves inside that picture. Like Frieda’s picture,
Vladek’s photo, with all its incongruous elements, suggests a story, and Maus
is that story. With Art and with Vladek, but without Anja, the reader is in
what Dori Laub calls “the testimonial chain”:

Because trauma returns in disjointed fragments in the memory of the survivor,

the listener has to let these trauma fragments make their impact both on him
and on the witness. Testimony is the narrative’s address to hearing. . . . As one
comes to know the survivor, one really comes to know oneself; and that is no
simple task. . . . In the center of this massive dedicated effort remains a danger,
a nightmare, a fragility, a woundedness that defies all healing.31
 Mourning and Postmemory 

Maus represents the aesthetic of the trauma fragment, the aesthetic of

the testimonial chain—an aesthetic that is indistinguishable from the docu-
mentary. It is composed of individually framed fragments, each like a still
picture imbricated in a border that is closed off from the others. These
frames are nevertheless connected to one another in the very testimonial
chain that relates the two separate chronological levels, the past and the
present, that structure the narrative of Maus relating teller to listener. But,
once in a while, something breaks out of the rows of frames, or out of the
frames themselves, upsetting and disturbing the structure of the entire
work. The fragments that break out of the frames are details functioning
like Barthes’s “punctum”; they have the power of the “fetish” to signal and
to disavow an essential loss. Anja Spiegelman, because of her missing voice
and her violently destroyed diary, is herself one such point of disturbance,
made more so by the photograph that is included among the stylized draw-
ings. And embedded in those fragments—in spite of the conventional fairy-
tale ending of the second volume, where Vladek and Anja are reunited and
Vladek insists that “we were both very happy and lived happy, happy ever
after,” in spite of the tombstone that enshrines their togetherness in the
book’s last frame and establishes a seemingly normalized closure—the night-
mare, the fragility, the woundedness remain. The power of the photographs
Spiegelman includes in Maus lies not in their evocation of memory, the
connection they can establish between present and past, but in their status
as fragments of a history we cannot assimilate. Utterly familiar, especially in
the context of the defamiliarizing images of mice and cat drawings, these
photographs forge an affiliative look that enables identification: they could
be any of ours. At the same time, this same context—both the story of the
Holocaust and the cartoon drawings in which they are embedded—makes
them strangely unfamiliar, opaque.
Maus I, subtitled “My Father Bleeds History,” shows us that this bleeding,
in Laub’s terms, “defies all healing,” and the subtitle to Volume II, “Here All
My Troubles Began,” shows that they are never absorbed. The three photo-
graphs in Maus, and the complicated marginal narrative of inassimilable loss
that they tell, perpetuate what remains in the two volumes as an incongruity
appropriate to the aesthetic of the child of survivors, the aesthetic of post-
memory. Like those ghostly images of the former Jakubowicz families, of
Chana’s lost siblings, they reinforce at once incomprehensibility and pres-
ence, a past that will neither fade away nor be integrated into the present.
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

notes
1. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Doubleday, ), .
2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, ), –, .
3. Marguerite Duras, Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Michel Beaujour,
trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, ), .
4. Barthes, Camera Lucida, .
5. Sontag, On Photography, .
6. Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daugh-
ters of Survivors (New York: Penguin, ), .
7. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Represen-
tations  (Spring ): .
8. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
9. “Postmemory” is usefully connected to Kaja Silverman’s notion of “heteropathic
recollection”—her elaborate psychoanalytic theorization of the self ’s ability to take on
the memory of others, even culturally devalued others, through a process of hetero-
pathic identification. Silverman’s argument also relies on the visual and considers the
role of photography, though not the notion of family. See Kaja Silverman, The Thresh-
old of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, ), esp. chapter .
10. Nadine Fresco, “Remembering the Unknown,” International Review of Psycho-
analysis  (): –.
11. Henri Raczymow, “Memory Shot Through with Holes,” Yale French Studies 
(): –.
12. In conjunction with a  photographic exhibit in Warsaw, Poland, “And I Still
See Their Faces,” one Zahava Bromberg writes: “I carried this photograph of my mama
through two selections by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. Once I held it in my mouth, the
second time I had it taped with a bandage to the bottom of my foot. I was  years old.”
New York Times, May , , .
13. I have deliberately quoted only that part of Adorno’s sentence that has become so
determinative and familiar. The actual sentence reads: “Perennial suffering has as much
right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to
say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.” Negative Dialectics, trans.
E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, ), . In his essay “Commitment,” written in
, Adorno elaborates: “I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires
committed literature. . . . Yet this suffering . . . also demands the continued existence
of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its
own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.” Andrew Arato and
Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books,
), . But this seeming reversal of his original injunction is subject to further
rethinking in the essay: “The esthetic principle of stylization . . . makes an unthinkable
fate appear to have some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is
removed. . . . Even the sound of despair pays its tribute to a hideous affirmation” ().
14. Peter Haidu, “The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Nar-
ratives of Desubjectification,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
 Mourning and Postmemory 

“Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ),
.
15. Julia Kristeva, “The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Mar-
guerite Duras,” PMLA  (March ): . Clearly, this profusion of images must
be seen in relation to their absence as well. With their massive extermination pro-
gram, Nazis systematically destroyed the very records of Jewish life, documents and
photographs, that could attest to its history. Many survivor families, unlike the Spiegel-
mans and the Jakubowiczs, have no pictures of their prewar life. I am grateful to Lori
Lefkowitz for pointing out this corrective to Kristeva’s argument.
16. Quoted in Andrea Liss, “Trespassing through Shadows: History, Mourning, and
Photography in Representations of Holocaust Memory,” Framework , no.  (): .
17. Art Spiegelman, “Maus & Man,” Voice Literary Supplement, June , , . But
the Pulitzer Prize committee invented a special category for Maus, suggesting the im-
possibility of categorizing it as either fiction or nonfiction. As Lawrence Langer says in
his review of Maus II, “It resists defining labels.” “A Fable of the Holocaust,” New York
Times Book Review, November , , .
18. Christina von Braun, Die schamlose Schönheit des Vergangenen: Zum Verhältnis
von Geschlecht und Geschichte (Frankfurt, Germany: Neue Kritik, ), , , 
(my translation).
19. W. J. T. Mitchell points out that “Maus attenuates visual access to its narrative
by thickening its frame story . . . and by veiling the human body at all levels of the visual
narrative with the figures of animals” (Picture Theory, ). We might add that the few
photos that cut through that veil can thus acquire their particular force through contrast.
20. See Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s comparison of Maus as the text of the child of sur-
vivors to Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies as the text of the child of the perpetrators,
“Theweleit and Spiegelman: Of Men and Mice,” in Remaking History, ed. Barbara
Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Dia Art Foundation, Bay Press, ). See also Ange-
lika Bammer, “Mother Tongues and Other Strangers: Writing ‘Family’ Across Cultural
Divides,” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), : “The formal composition of Maus
creates a structure that bridges, even though it cannot fill in, the spaces of silence cre-
ated by the people whose stories had remained untold.”
21. See Nancy K. Miller’s account of the  “Maus” exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art, where some of Vladek’s tapes could be heard. “Cartoons of the Self: Por-
traits of the Artist as a Young Murderer, Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G 
(): –. Miller analyzes the levels of mediation and transformation that separate
the father’s voice from the son’s text. In Spiegelman’s CD-ROM, The Complete Maus
(New York: Voyager, ), we can hear the oral testimony and can compare the aural
and visual texts; we can assess the transformations and revisions that the son performs
on his father’s words as he tries to fit them into preset cartoon bubbles.
22. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, ), .
23. The CD-ROM edition of Maus features a number of additional photographs
in the appendix that outline the Spiegelmans’ and the Zylberbergs’ family trees. We can
click on some of the names to make the photographs appear. As in the book edition,
the photographs function to reassemble what has been severed. Mostly the photographs
 m a r ian n e h ir sc h

feature pairs, Anja and Vladek, parents, siblings. They are formal pictures, such as
wedding photos. Together they help to rebuild the family tree of a fractured family. In
this version, however, they do not intervene in the narrative, but stand apart. In addi-
tion, any of the pictures’ ambiguity is removed because, in this medium, each image is
clearly labeled. Further citations from Maus will appear in parentheses in the text of
this chapter.
24. I take this phrase from the title of Alvin K. Rosenfeld’s book on the literature of
the Holocaust, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, ).
25. In “Mad Youth,” Life (July ): , Spiegelman describes another snapshot in
which the eleven-year-old Art and his mother sit on their back porch looking at an
issue of Mad: “You can’t see my mother’s left forearm behind the magazine. She usu-
ally wears a broad gold bracelet—Vladek gives them to her as birthday and anniversary
gifts—to cover the blue Auschwitz number tattooed above her wrist. On occasion my
friends have noticed the number and have asked her about it. She explains it’s a phone
number she doesn’t want to forget.”
26. Felman and Laub, Testimony, .
27. See also Miller’s incisive analysis, in “Cartoon of the Self,” of the missing mother’s
story as the basis for the father-son relationship in Maus, and more generally her dis-
cussion of the intergenerational and relational nature of the autobiographical project.
In Miller’s reading in “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,”
Differences , no.  (): –, Anja Spiegelman duplicates the generative power of
St. Augustine’s Monica.
28. Klaus Theweleit, Buch der Könige, : Orpheus und Euridike (Frankfurt: Roter
Stern, ).
29. Barthes, Camera Lucida, .
30. Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, ), xxxiii.
31. Felman and Laub, Testimony, –.
 

Art Spiegelman and

AutobioGRAPHICal Re-Vision
erin mc gl othlin

Art Spiegelman’s newest autobioGRAPHICal text, Breakdowns: Portrait of

the Artist as a Young @&*! (), which includes in its entirety a facsim-
ile of Spiegelman’s earlier volume Breakdowns: From Maus to Now ()
along with nineteen full-sized pages of introductory graphic panels and a
prose afterword, begins with a series of panels organized around a single
visual motif, a figure best described as a backhanded squiggle. This squig-
gle—one of the most simple elements in the artist’s formal toolbox, as it
consists of a single, unbroken line—appears first on the cover of the text and
then immediately on its first page, where it is used in turn to indicate the
disorientation experienced by a figure falling on a banana peel (on the book’s
cover the banana peel is replaced by an image of the  version of Break-
downs), to represent the artist himself as the blank page onto which the
graphic impulse is inscribed, and finally to initiate a series of panels in which
Spiegelman, as a child, develops his artistic skills in a game he plays with his
mother, who then breaks off the game to anxiously await the arrival of his
father (see figures . and .).1
This quick succession of disconnected images, which commences after a
reproduction of the cover image of the  volume depicting Spiegelman
at his drawing table chugging a bottle of ink, slowly coalesces into a discrete
visual narrative that is unmistakably Spiegelmanian in its autobiographical
impulse. In these first panels of the book, Spiegelman packs some of the
most critical themes that dominate his previous full-length autobiographi-
cal texts, which include, in addition to the  Breakdowns text, Maus I: A
Survivor’s Tale; My Father Bleeds History (), Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale;
And Here My Troubles Began (), and In the Shadow of No Towers ():


figures . and . The squiggle, one of
the most simple yet versatile elements in
the artist’s toolbox. From Breakdowns:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*!
(first page) by Art Spiegelman, copyright
© , , , , , , ,
, ,  by Art Spiegelman. Used
by permission of Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc.
 AutobioGRAPHICal Re-Vision 

artistic self-representation, the experience of a sudden traumatic fall and its

long aftermath of shock and disorientation, and a fraught childhood in a
family plagued by anxiety, dysfunction, despair, and profound loss. In Break-
downs: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*!, Spiegelman returns once
again to this familiar autobiographical territory not only to depict new, as
yet unrepresented details of his life (such as a number of episodes from
his childhood and his life as a budding comic artist) but also to once again
sift through experiences portrayed in previous works (such as his difficult
relationship with his parents, especially his father). The newest Breakdowns
is thus neither fully new nor wholly derivative; rather, the correspondence
between Spiegelman’s newest text and his previous autobiographical expres-
sions exists somewhere between the poles of identity and difference. The
longtime Spiegelman reader thus encounters a text that is a hybrid of old
and new, familiar and alien, conventional and novel; in other words, the 
Breakdowns is not a discrete autobiographical expression but rather one iter-
ation in an ongoing autobiographical project. Far from functioning as either
the chronologically latest installment of a linear autobiographical gesture or
the authoritative correction to his previous autobiographical texts, Spiegel-
man’s newest text is the latest in a series of autobiographical performances
that loop back to previously explored experience not in order to revise this
material but instead to re-vision it.2
Spiegelman’s figure of the squiggle, which is repeated throughout the
 Breakdowns text and is moreover reminiscent of similar motifs found
in Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, is the visual embodiment of his
continuing project of autobioGRAPHICal re-vision.3 As an image that vis-
cerally expresses multiple and often contradictory ideas and emotions, such
as concentration, contemplation, obsession, frustration, bewilderment, dis-
orientation, creative insight, inspiration, mystery, ambiguity, incomprehen-
sibility, and the opacity of meaning, the squiggle is an all-purpose tool that
Spiegelman reconstitutes throughout the text to evoke myriad autobiograph-
ical impulses and to provoke disparate reactions in the reader. Its inherent
multivalence allows it to be repeated again and again; however, with each
recapitulation, it manifests itself, in good dialectical manner, in a new way.
Spiegelman’s squiggle is thus a figure of both identity and difference and, as
such, is an apt representation of autobiographical performance, which con-
structs a plural notion of self. Moreover, by visually foregrounding the act of
looping, the squiggle concretizes what is at stake in Spiegelman’s autobio-
graphical project, namely the trajectory of his method of autobioGRAPHICal
 e rin mc gl oth l in

re-vision, which, like the looping squiggle, performatively returns again and
again to the same life moments.
Nowhere is this looping movement of Spiegelman’s autobiographical per-
formance more apparent than on the last page of Breakdowns: Portrait of the
Artist as a Young @&*!, which, following the text’s afterword, depicts a
short narrative titled “Synopsis” (see figure .). In this quick outline, Spiegel-
man gives us a more or less complete (if cursory) narrative of his life, begin-
ning with his infancy and moving through childhood, where he discovers
comics, into adulthood.4 In the last two panels of this six-panel summary
of a life, Spiegelman depicts himself once again as the victim of a pratfall
caused by a banana peel; in this iteration of the fall, however, the accident
appears to have caused his death.5 While some of these panels, each of
which represents Spiegelman at a different stage of his life, are linked by
images of the sun, which rises and sets on his life, and the banana peel,
which appears at the moment in which he discovers comics, only the figure
of the squiggle appears in some guise in every panel, representing concrete

figure . Autobiography

in squiggle form. From
Breakdowns: Portrait of
the Artist as a Young
@&*! (last page) by Art
Spiegelman, copyright
© , , , ,
, , , ,
,  by Art
Spiegelman. Used by
permission of Pantheon
Books, a division of
Random House, Inc.
 AutobioGRAPHICal Re-Vision 

ideas of smoke and a physical tumble alongside abstract themes of inno-

cence and artistic discovery. In this retelling of Spiegelman’s life, the auto-
biographical gesture contained in the squiggle thus predominates, calling
attention to the act of autobiographical performance that constructs this
iteration of the life. By writing (or, more precisely, sketching) this looping fig-
ure so self-consciously into this brief narrative, Spiegelman demonstrates
the ways in which his graphic project is constituted by the principle of auto-
bioGRAPHICal re-vision.

notes
1. I refer here to the “first page” because the book contains no page numbers. As I
note in my book chapter “‘When Time Stands Still’” ( n. ), in many of his works,
Spiegelman either dispenses with page numbers altogether or utilizes a complicated
pagination system, thus making it difficult for critics and scholars to describe and
quote from his work in conformance with traditional citation practice.
2. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*! is an example of what I have
identified as “autobiographical re-vision” in the work of the Holocaust survivor and lit-
erary critic Ruth Klüger, whose  memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remem-
bered is both a translation and an alternate version of her original German text Weiter
leben: Eine Jugend. As I argue in my article “Autobiographical Re-vision,” “by fore-
grounding the correspondence of the German version of her autobiography with the
subsequent English variant, Klüger explicitly connects the two texts together and, at
the same time, insists on their disparity, obliging us, as critical readers of her autobi-
ography, to grapple with both versions. In considering the English version, one cannot
ignore or overlook the German version, as one frequently does with a straightforward
translation, for, as noted above, the English text itself foregrounds its status as a vari-
ant produced for a different audience and not an exact rendering of the same ideas in
a language different from the original. Likewise, when examining the prior German
text, one must now also consider the English counterpart, which functions as an exten-
sion of the autobiographical process. Klüger’s deliberate and conscious linking of her
two autobiographical texts undermines the authority of both the German text as the
Urtext and the English text as the latest, more ‘accurate’ version of her story. By refus-
ing to identify either text as the true, authoritative referent, Klüger designates both
texts as equally valid autobiographical expressions, and thus she implicitly asks her
readers to engage in a dialogical process of reading whereby they move from one text
to the other and back again. Seen in this light, Klüger’s autobiography manifests itself
less as the identifiable object of the text itself and more as the performative connec-
tions that result from the parallel reading of the two texts together” ().
3. I’m thinking here in particular of the plumes of smoke that appear throughout
the two volumes of Maus (and, in a different form, in In the Shadow of No Towers),
most notably on the back cover of Maus II and in representations of the crematoria
at Auschwitz and of Artie smoking (at one point, both Art and a crematorium share a
single plume of smoke [Maus II, ]). Although the figure of the smoke plume, unlike
the squiggle, does not loop back on itself, both are images created from a single,
 e rin mc gl oth l in

continuous line; the resemblance between the two is striking. Moreover, both are ubiq-
uitous throughout Spiegelman’s ongoing autobiographical project.
4. Here Spiegelman chooses to use one of his most common modes of self-
representation, namely the image of himself in a vest. Although, as evident in the 
Breakdowns volume and the  “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” narrative (the latter of
which is contained in both the original Breakdowns and Maus I), Spiegelman, in his
earlier work, did not always depict himself this way, the vest has become at least since
Maus his most ubiquitous signifier of autobiographical self-representation.
5. The reader is left with little doubt here as to whether the figure represented
in the last panel is alive; not only are the figure’s eyes represented by large X’s (a con-
ventional comic signifier of death), but he is surrounded by flies as well. As we know
from Maus, Spiegelman often uses flies to evoke death and decay. In any case, Spiegel-
man’s representation of his own death is certainly a new feature of his autobiographi-
cal project.

works cited
McGlothlin, Erin. “Autobiographical Re-vision: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and Still
Alive.” Gegenwartsliteratur  (): –.
———. “‘When Time Stands Still’: Traumatic Immediacy and Narrative Organization
in Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.” In The Jewish Graphic
Novel, ed. Ranen Omer-Sherman and Samantha Baskind, –. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, .
Spiegelman, Art. Breakdowns: From Maus to Now; An Anthology of Strips. New York:
Belier Press, .
———. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*! New York: Pantheon, .
———. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, .
———. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale; My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, .
———. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale; And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon,
.
 

Breakdowns and Breakthroughs

Looking for Art in Young Spiegelman

bell a bro dz k i

In Art Spiegelman’s afterword to Breakdowns: From Maus to Now (),

the creator of Maus invokes the young, brash, skinny, self-declared artist
who authored this reissued collection of short autobiographical and struc-
turally experimental strips that first appeared—as he puts it, “against all
odds”—thirty years ago. Spiegelman uses the third person to refer affec-
tionately and admiringly to that “self-important squirt” who made the strips
between  and  and who needed, for his own personal reasons, to
have them showcased, to have his work and the workings of his mind taken
seriously. It was another era, and the striving artist imaged there seems
very distant. It takes only a few paragraphs, however, for the two people to
merge in the conventional autobiographical “I,” suggesting that the voice
that Spiegelman found then is the one he has been developing ever since.
Looking back at himself, at the work, at his career, and at the medium that
had not yet come into its own on the American cultural landscape, Spiegel-
man explains to the contemporary reader where Breakdowns fits autobio-
graphically and historically and reflects on what it means for him to see the
comix book “get a new spin around the block.”
So, what does it mean to have your earliest work reappear as if it were
your latest work? What does it mean if it already contained, in embryonic
form, your greatest work? Because, arguably, it’s all about Maus. If it were
not for the three-hundred-page, two-volume, visual auto/biography, multi-
media enterprise that we have come to know as Maus I and II, this very
volume on graphic narratives and autobiography would not exist as such.
The virtuosic, radical, transgressive boundary-crossings performed in the
self-visualized intimate epic that is Maus have changed, for the duration,


 bel l a br o dz k i

our notions of where and how the lines between form and subject matter can
be drawn. Indeed, its genre-bending, metatextual exploration into its own
figurative possibilities created a challenging prototype for graphic auto-
biography: when the first order of (self-)representation is indeed visual, then
nothing else about the matter of subjectivity can be taken for granted.
At the end of the afterword, the autobiographer tells us that the indiffer-
ent reception to Breakdowns “led directly” to Maus. At least in terms of his
own career, Spiegelman posits, then, a contiguous—causal and not merely
temporal—relationship between the two; one made the other possible. The
failure of the avant-garde anthology to speak to its generation of ’ers and
intended audience of comix mavens impelled Spiegelman to pursue more
ambitiously his own source material and its rich aesthetic potential. In 
the publication of Maus was a textual event having wide-reaching cultural
implications. That a graphic autobiography about being a child of Holo-
caust survivors had the uncanny power to appeal to so many competing
constituencies, and to garner such critical acclaim, still merits recognition.
Reading Breakdowns from our vantage point makes this abundantly clear.
The three-page “Maus” strip is there, in its earliest incarnation, as a bedtime
story in which Poppa Mouse tells little Artie about the war. “Prisoner on the
Hell Planet: A Case History” (), showcasing Art as psychotic subject,
enraged and abandoned by his mother’s suicide, is there in its entirety. Both
seem shockingly decontextualized.
Even without Spiegelman’s metacritical prompts or the autobiographical
support of Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*!, we would still, however,
read Breakdowns teleologically. And yet, just because the first and third per-
sons do converge verbally, that is, grammatically, doesn’t mean that the artist
we eventually come to recognize as “Art” doesn’t mutate a great deal along the
way. Indeed, the anthology’s provocative, overarching multivalent title Break-
downs suggests formal as well as psychic disintegrations, disarticulations, and
distress, just as it also connotes the very constructive activity of taking some-
thing apart, to examine its discrete, constituent, perhaps interlocking units—
the better to understand how it is made and how it works. The reader feels
charged to engage with the panels even more microanalytically than usual,
sensing that the laying bare of the mechanism is the stuff of this extended
narrative, of the several episodic narrative exploits collected under the ex-
tended banner title of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*!
What first pulled me in and then held my attention throughout Break-
downs and Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*!, across all the various
 Breakdowns and Breakthroughs 

strips, is the multifarious ways Spiegelman visualizes himself. In fact, the

proliferation of psychologically complex, alienating, and alienated autobio-
graphical personae is staggering; many of the images, to the extent that they
invite mimetic interpretation, are physically grotesque or lurid and would
seem to flatter only the author’s evolving capacity for self-awareness. They
strike me as aimed at disidentification in the extreme. Others, though they
are less distancing in their self-presentation than the pervasive, technolog-
ically colored, black ink–swilling, distinctly human, manic draftsman (see
fig. .), remain far from the singular, essentialized, distilled mouse-figure
we have come to associate with Art Spiegelman, author and cartoonist.
Indeed, for the reader familiar only with Artie, the anthropomorphized
mouse from Maus (or, alternatively, the ghoulish expressionist adolescent
prisoner from the Hell Planet), who is, for all intents and purposes, Spiegel-
man’s stand-in for himself, the autobiographer/artist, as well as for ART, all
the Ur-images in Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*! are
psychologically and visually intriguing. But they are also a bit disconcerting.
They compel a re-viewing and reflection on the process by which the many
eventually became the one. Breakdowns does not tell us or show us this tra-
jectory, though the Portrait gallery exhibits various self-representations, in-
cluding the nerdy young boy who is introduced to drawing by his anxious
mother (pre-“Anja”), the precociously lecherous, nerdy man-boy who dis-
covers an escape from his claustrophobic, anachronistic world in MAD mag-
azine, and several embodiments of the developing, brazen, avant-garde artist
who seeks and ultimately finds the ideal union of form and content through
the perfect vehicle of autobiographical expression.
In this resolutely anti-chronological chronicle, Spiegelman provides spe-
cific signature signposts for the reader: a gallery of fifteen faceless, oval, en-
closed but unframed self-portraits of sorts, set against a white background,
each one signifying an emblematic moment, aspect, or stage of conscious-
ness in the young artist’s life. Each one disrupts, even as it refers obliquely
to, the always-fraught narrative sequence in which it is inserted. There is a
figure, mallet in hand, with a lightbulb in place of a head, on which is self-
ironically inscribed “genius” rather than facial features (Rego Park, NYC
[undated]), which appears in a sequence of panels describing his quest for a
vocation as well as a justification for his angst-ridden existence, if not for his
talents. In an apt Freudian analogy, one portrait is of a jam-packed suitcase
spilling out with the stuff of his childhood atop a striped-shirted torso, in-
stead of a head (Soho, NYC, ); its only other identifying, or explanatory,
figure . From Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*! (title page)
by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , , , , , , , ,
,  by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of
Random House, Inc.
figures . and . Spiegelman’s self-representation from the
“Unpacking” and “Packing” panels. From Breakdowns: Portrait of the
Artist as a Young @&*! by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , ,
, , , , , , ,  by Art Spiegelman. Used
by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
 bel l a br o dz k i

characteristic is a luggage tag that says “UNPACKING” (see fig. .). A few
pages later, we find its alter-image, “PACKING” (see fig. .), referring to a
much earlier stage in the artist’s life (Rego Park, NYC, ca. ).
Because the (psycho)analytic process is by definition a retrospective one,
“unpacking” the psyche of its contents precedes “packing” it. Though these
images convey a good deal on their own (with the help of the luggage
tags), it turns out that the artist’s device is more than a conceit. As a young
“misfit,” Spiegelman was surely seeking a way out, a means to escape the
insularity and burdens of his family history; but in fact, his refugee parents
unwittingly furnished him with the existential resources to make the break
and then enabled him to appropriate the American cultural idiom of comix
for himself. What aids the reader in understanding the critical link between
aesthetic technique and the skills of survival is the panel on the same page
in which the young artist’s father explains to his resistant son the funda-
mental rule of packing a suitcase: “You have to use what little space you
have to pack inside everything what you can” (n.p.). In the same panel, the
artist, here depicted as Tubby, the character he has just been learning how
to draw, confides to the reader: “This was the best advice I’ve ever gotten
as a cartoonist.”
The first in another pair of alter-images features a hat and a suited torso;
in place of the head is a blank space inscribed with the words “Memory
Hole” (Soho, NYC, ) (see fig. .). This portrait appears on the same
page as a sequence of panels in which Spiegelman shows himself as a hard-
boiled private eye spying on himself as a child, “trying to locate the moments
that shaped and misshaped him!” (n.p.). What pulls him out of this self-
absorption is the detective’s reminder (i.e., to himself ) that he was “run-
ning out of time” and that “Comics are time, Time turned into space! I
kicked him in the navel, and faded back into the shadows” (n.p.). A few
pages after this, on the last page of Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&*!,
we find the same hatted, suited, and faceless image. This time the words
inscribed are: “FORM AND CONTENT” (see fig. .). The word “FORM”
is highlighted in white letters, and they are twice as large as the black letters
“AND CONTENT,” signifying the privileging of the former over the latter.
This portrait occupies the center of an entire page, consisting of panels in
which memory pictures drawn from childhood are juxtaposed with theo-
retical commentary on the nature, purpose, and technique of art.
Breakdowns depicts, indeed prefigures, how Spiegelman finally arrived at
Maus—through an experimental process that is reflected in the assuming
figures . and . Spiegelman’s self-representation from the “Memory
Hole” and “Form and Content” panels. From Breakdowns: Portrait of the
Artist as a Young @&*! by Art Spiegelman, copyright © , ,
, , , , , , ,  by Art Spiegelman. Used
by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
 bel l a br o dz k i

and subsequent shedding and divesting of numerous personae (masks), each

one an agent in a long quest to find the right material, genre, style, voice,
tone, expression—to compose, render, indeed produce, a life story out of its
many dynamic and destructive dimensions. Portrait of the Artist as a Young
@&*! indicates that for the story to find its form, the autobiographer had
to learn what was retrievable/available/accessible for use, and then he had
to find the best way to use what he had. That’s the breakthrough. If Adolf
Hitler gave Spiegelman the material for Maus, and Walt Disney gave him
the medium, it was Victor Shklovsky who gave him the formalist method,
the concept, and the inspiration for breaking down the deadening effects of
perception by defamiliarizing himself as subject: “And art may exist that one
may recover the sensation of life: it exists to make one feel things” (n.p.).
Again and again, but each time in a critically altered way.
 part ii

The Global Scope of Autography

 

Human Rights and Comics

Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and
Transnational Rescue Networks
si d onie smith

On any given day, graphic narration rides currents traversing the globe. Het-
erogeneous in their communities of origin and unpredictable in their routes
to mass publics dispersed worldwide, diverse genres of graphic narration
sometimes run parallel, sometimes intersect, sometimes swerve in their trav-
els to publics, archives, and markets here and there. There is, for instance,
robust transnational traffic in national genres of comics, such as manga from
Japan and bande dessinée from France and Belgium, including the Tintin
series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi). (An adaptation
of one Tintin comic will hit movie houses in  as a Steven Spielberg
film.1) Such traffic along “the transnational circuitries of images and narra-
tives” becomes a means through which new global identities are constituted,
dispersed communities constellated, and transnational political alliances
and identifications forged.2 Young people across the globe, for instance,
consume styles of comics as they consume friendships on social networking
sites and display celebrity attachments through fashion, thereby producing
strains of global youth culture through consuming habits and the rearrange-
ments of desire those habits release.3 Through these habits, young people
forge an identity for themselves as savants of global mass culture, hip read-
ers of renegade visuality, and in-members of an emergent global sociality.
Graphic narration also rides the currents of the contemporary regime
of human rights: the institutions, protocols, and routes of advocacy that
draw attention to what Paul Farmer describes as the unequal “distribution
of misery” around the globe give form to the management of its attempted
amelioration through discourses that “offer a universal and seemingly uncon-
tested ethics of cross-cultural relation” and enjoin people to become activists


 si d onie smith

in its service.4 Rights advocates target genres of comics as apparatuses of

state suppression of dissident voices and racist representations of marginal-
ized or exploited groups. Equality Now, an NGO addressing the sources of
structural violence against women, is currently engaged in a transnational
campaign against Japanese comics called hentai that activists describe as
celebrating and normalizing rape culture through its depictions of por-
nographic degradation.5 Activists have also critiqued the ways in which
comics reproduce colonialist, racist, and anti-Semitic tropes of difference
through crude visual stereotypes. Hergé’s Tintin series, still popular after
three-quarters of a century, has been analyzed for the way it represents
blacks in “Tintin in America” and black Africans in “Tintin in the Congo,”
for instance.6 Governments too are targeted for employing comic books
to propagandize their version of political events, personages, or groups to
a broad public, and exploiting the mass appeal of the comic book form to
demonize those they consider “enemies of the state.” In August  the
Chinese government released a comic book designed to “educate” the pub-
lic about Falun Gong and its founder Li Hongzhi and to reframe the move-
ment as subversive and Li as an enemy of the people.7 For advocates for the
rights of Falun Gong practitioners, the state in this instance traffics in pro-
pagandistic life writing.
At the same time that rights activists lodge charges against certain kinds
of comics, they also exploit the capacities of the genre to affect transnational
rights literacy and spur activism. As Gillian Whitlock observes so acutely,
in times of crisis, testimony about rights violations and claims for redress
and reparation is negotiated through multilayered processes of producing,
circulating, and reading crisis witnessing.8 Crisis comics are one of these
modes of witness to radical injury and harm. Rights advocates exploit the
apparent simplicity and easy accessibility of the comic form to make rights
discourse and politics legible to large and diverse audiences.9 They edu-
cate readers in rights discourse, naming conditions as violations of univer-
sal rights, identifying the subject positions of “victim,” “perpetrator,” and
“rescuer” managed by the rights regime, and proposing agendas for change.
They make public an archive of marginalization and suffering by visualiz-
ing representative subjects of particular forms of victimization. Arraying
boxes of witnessing, they narrativize and dramatize complex information at
the same time that they intensify the affect of empathetic identification.
Official United Nations (UN) bodies publish material in comic book
format, as did the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN High
 Human Rights and Comics 

Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in comic books titled HIV/AIDS:

Stand Up for Human Rights () and HIV and AIDS: Human Rights for
Everyone (), developed to encourage recognition on the part of mar-
ginalized youth in the global south of their “universal right to health and
dignity.”10 Government offices charged with rights literacy also use the
comic book form. In celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in , the city of Bogota, Columbia, printed
and distributed ,, comic books to educate citizens in rights dis-
course.11 NGOs also use comics to reach audiences. Campaigns to combat
the prison-industrial complex in the United States, for instance, reach a
mass public through a widely available comic titled “The Real Cost of Pris-
ons,” which presents information about the economics of contemporary
punishment and incarceration in an accessible format. Well over one hun-
dred thousand copies of “The Prison Town” (one of three comics included
in “The Real Cost”) have been printed; many of those have been dissemi-
nated to inmates and their families, as well as prison reform activists.12 The
Office of the Americas for the Cause of Justice and Peace raises funds to dis-
tribute a comic book titled “Addicted to War,” chronicling the history of
warfare in the United States, to secondary schools through the “Addicted to
War Books-to-Schools Project.”13 In the Philippines, activists involved in the
Coalition against Trafficking in Women produce comic books that gather,
narrate, and illustrate the stories of women who have been in prostitution.14
The various purposes of these comic books include building awareness,
providing information, raising consciousness, soliciting identification, teach-
ing an ethics of recognition, and garnering financial support.
In crisis comics the site of the autobiographical becomes the reader
himself or herself. The syncopation of personal storytelling across media
(language and image) and space/time (boxes and gutters) in graphic nar-
ration activates, as Jared Gardner argues of comics generally, readerly co-
interpretation: “All comics are necessarily collaborative texts between the
imagination of the author/artist and the imagination of the reader who must
complete the narrative.”15 Some readers in crisis comics are addressed as
those with the need to know their rights. These readers are the projected
audience for such comics as the two previously mentioned, produced and
circulated by the WHO and the UNHCR. Such readers are enjoined to con-
stitute themselves, by virtue of their reading, as subjects of human rights
and individual agents of rights activism. In this way, the act of reading be-
comes a form of self-rescue as it enacts the agency of producing rights
 si d onie smith

knowledge. Other crisis comics address a cosmopolitan readership in devel-

oped countries. These readers are addressed as privileged, safe subjects to
be enlightened about conditions elsewhere, and their reading rehearses a
form of rescue of the other through the invitation to empathetic identifi-
cation and outrage. In both situations, genre can be thought of as social
action, contributing to the “social work” of publicizing rights discourse, dis-
tributing rights identities, and interpellating the reader as a subject of rights
activism.
The personal narration of crisis comics in the context of the regime of
human rights and its management of injustice is constrained by the dis-
courses, subject positions, protocols, institutions, and venues of rights activ-
ism.16 Take as an example the incorporation of personal stories in NGO
materials noted earlier. The NGO Campaign Against Trafficking of Women
uses personal stories to intensify the lived reality of rights violations against
women, to figure women as the victims of the violation of women’s human
rights, to put a human voice to suffering, and to appeal to empathetic read-
ers who are solicited to join in the project of redress through identification
across difference. Consider how the management of such scenes of witness
involves a series of remediations that frame the story, the subject of rights,
and the scenario of rescue. Representative women witness to their experi-
ences in prostitution; their narrated lives are then remediated to become
as-told-to life writing that is then visualized in a “third-person” hand of the
graphic artist. There is an NGO that is functioning as a coaxer seeking
the story, and a story of a particular kind. There may be an interviewer, a
compiler, an editor, perhaps a translator, all of whom coproduce the form
the life story will take and the experiential history that will be included
and excluded. And there is a drawer who visualizes the story, distributing
it in frames and gutters, figuring the avatar, attaching affect to the width of
a line or the design of the page. Collectively, all these actors coproduce
the personal story, reframing it as boxes of victimization. In addition, pub-
lishers and activists may attach paratexts to the life narrative that situate
the stories and authenticate the narrative by providing the imprimatur of
the professional activist and the bona fides of the organization attesting
to the veracity of the witness. These aspects of the incorporation of personal
stories in comic books for rights activism derive from this management of
suffering and social justice and thus raise important questions about the
relationship of boxes of witnessing to the commodification of contemporary
life writing.
 Human Rights and Comics 

The example of the WHO and UNHCR comics about HIV/AIDS aware-
ness among marginalized youth in the global south raises other issues related
to activism comics. In their exploration of educational campaigns designed
to circulate health information transnationally and the kinds of subjectivi-
ties those comics construct for readers, Hsuan L. Hsu and Martha Lincoln
argue that the comic form employed by the WHO and the UNHCR in their
series on HIV/AIDS manages the right to health and well-being in the
global south as a universal right of the individual, and that, as a result of the
focus on the individual as the locus of rights, the comics “neglect . . . the crit-
ical role of economic and social vulnerability in distributing health dispari-
ties unevenly around the globe.”17 In effect, the strategy of personalizing
the experience of living with HIV/AIDS in comic book form occludes the
structural inequalities that impact what the discourse of human rights de-
fines as the universal right to health and well-being. Moreover, they argue,
in the visualization of differences (the figures in the comics are given stereo-
typed racial, gender, and ethnic identities) the pandemic is decontextualized
(the same comic books are translated into several languages and circulated
broadly). Imaging bodily difference, the comics at once erase differences
in local conditions on the ground and “recruit . . . racial and gender stereo-
types to drive the plot and command the identification of readers.”18 Hsuan
and Lincoln then parse the racialized hierarchy of agency in this comic, not-
ing that “readers are allowed to identify with the person who physically
resembles them, yet simultaneously they are encouraged to identify with the
person who speaks for them: the white male character, who dominates the
cartoon’s dialogue.”19 Comics such as the HIV/AIDS comics explored by
Hsu and Lincoln paradoxically reproduce the universality of rights subjec-
tivities through the transnational traffic in stereotype. The hypervisualized,
seemingly unmarked white protagonist and the array of ready-made, stereo-
typed avatars of multicultural others surrounding him enacts the suspect
pedagogical politics of the rights regime: the unmarked expert from the
developed world teaching the “illiterate” subject of rights denied elsewhere
around the globe how to assume the subject position of the universal in-
dividual and to take individual responsibility for making unsympathetic
people better people.20 In reaching for the identification of the reader with
an avatar within the comic, the form reinforces the argument that rights
activism is a matter of managing empathetic identification rather than tar-
geting structural inequalities and formations of exploitation within and
across nations.
 si d onie smith

I raise these issues about the way comics in human rights campaigns
manage subjectivities not to deny the power of crisis comics to reach people
who might not otherwise be informed, come to consciousness, take action,
and claim their experiences and identities as subjects of rights. I do so in
order to provide a cautionary note about the impact of the regime of human
rights, as the successor global regime to the cold war, on broadly accessi-
ble contemporary modes of personal narration and their commodification
in global flows that do the work of rearranging histories, identities, and the
politics of empathy. I do so as well to turn attention to other genres of crisis
comics that, even if caught in the neoliberal politics of commodification,
present alternative engagements with witnessing, memory, loss, and recov-
ery in graphic form. For, at the same time that graphic narration in the mode
of crisis comics circulates in the information economy of contemporary
human rights activism, the genre of graphic memoirs, or “autographics,”
circulates as a register of remembering complex histories of violence—
transnational, national, communal, familial, and personal.21
Joseph Slaughter explores how, over the course of two hundred years,
human rights discourse and the literary bildungsroman have produced
“mutually enabling fictions” that share “a common conceptual vocabulary,
humanist social vision, and narrative grammar of free and full human per-
sonality development.”22 Slaughter reads the bildungsroman as the “novel-
istic wing of human rights,” persuasively arguing that the two share a plot
“for participation in the egalitarian imaginary of the new bourgeois nation-
state, a plot for incorporation of previously marginalized people as demo-
cratic citizen-subjects.”23 We learn how to be subjects of rights through
reading realist novels chronicling the education and development of an
individual who achieves maturity and resolution in incorporation as a nor-
mative subject of the nation. Indeed, in this historical moment, he argues,
“the Bildungsroman remains the primary enabling fiction for and privileged
genre of incorporation into an international ‘reading public.’”24 And writers
across the globe committed to chronicling struggles for history, knowledge,
and the status of the human in decolonizing and postcolonial societies and
states read novels of incorporation and sometimes write novels of education
that are indebted to, haunted by, and in conversation with the bildungs-
roman form. Deploying the form, they test its limits, open its ambiguities,
reject its terms, and intervene in the violence of the state projects it secures
through its fable of incorporation. Slaughter convincingly establishes a found-
ing relationship between human rights discourse and this literary genre of
 Human Rights and Comics 

modern citizenship and nation building, and then analyses the ways in
which contemporary postcolonial bildungsroman “make legible the inequi-
ties of this egalitarian imaginary.”25
As they witness traumatic histories of marginalization and violence,
graphic memoirs invoke, and riff on, conventions of this long-lived form of
the bildungsroman. More particularly, they tell stories of the struggle to find
an artistic practice sufficient for both telling and drawing complex stories
of marginalization, traumatic loss, and remembering, thus working in the
mode of Künstlerroman, a variation of the bildungsroman that tells the story
of coming-of-age as an artist. Adapting this persistent form in often-arresting
ways, they unsettle readers with their combination of “high” subject and
“low” or “mass” form associated with limited literacy, juvenilia, renegade
outsiderness, or fantasy superheroism. Readers confronted a new kind of
graphic memoir with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in , fol-
lowed by Maus II in . Maus dramatically altered the demography of the
readership for “comics” and challenged reader expectations of the relation-
ship of form and function, of the memoir as genre and the narration of sto-
ries of traumatic injury and harm. Ten years later, in , the publication
(and subsequent translation) of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and later Perse-
polis II continued to revolutionize graphic memoir, as it told the trans-
national narrative of coming-of-age during the Iranian Revolution. Then in
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home mined the possibilities of graphic narra-
tion in a doubled coming-out story. Genocide, suicide, and the postmemory
generation; revolution, state repression, and exile; suspected suicide and
closeted sexuality: these are the experiential histories witnessed, histories
that activate the obligation to tell/draw the story of the autobiographical
subject as always entwined in the story of others.
“Graphic memoirs,” writes Whitlock, now do the transnational and inter-
subjective work of “open[ing] up new and troubled spaces.”26 The sequential
art of graphic memoir presents readers with boxes of memory, filled with
images and words, arrayed across the gaps that are gutters, and linked
through the self-referential “voiceover” that presents in turn narration,
description, emotive reaction, meditation, or metacommentary on the pro-
cess of remembering. Their hybridity encodes and routes meaning in mul-
tiple directions; their oscillations between conjunctive and competing modes
of representation and storytelling (visual and textual) prompt new itiner-
aries of “framing,” “listening,” and “feeling” through the visuality of the writ-
ten and the discursivity of the depicted; the complexities and densities of
 si d onie smith

language and pattern across frames and gutters energizes opportunities

for metacommentary and complex recursiveness. Stories that seem to move
forward, visually and narratively, constantly recycle earlier frames, motifs,
incidents, characterizations; repetition abounds as acts of remembering
engage the returns of inadequate modes and idioms of representation.27
Graphic memoirs that witness to histories of injury and harm often traffic
in stereotypes and their unsettlement. But that trafficking eventuates in dif-
ferent politics of aesthetics than in such human rights comics as the HIV/
AIDS ones previously explored. The condensed stylization of the visual
components of graphic memoir, the two-dimensionality of the surface of the
comic form, and the repetitious features of the autobiographical avatar in
crisis comics align autographics with critiques of cultures of stereotype—of
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation—that energize structures of social
marginalization, its scenes of violence, and its complex, inexorable after-
lives. Contemporary graphic memoirs that take on the sometimes hidden,
sometimes hypervisible bodies and histories of those referenced in and
through stereotypes at once put the question of difference in stylized frames
and unsettle the commonplaces of cultural framing: Spiegelman unhinges
readers with his casting of himself, his father, his mother, and other Jews
as mice in Maus (the “vermin” of Nazi propaganda); Satrapi unsettles the
West’s stereotypes of the veil as emblematic of Muslim women’s oppression
and of Islamic nations as universally “backward” in Persepolis; and Bechdel
disarms readers with her burrowing inside the psychic struggles of a father
who would be labeled “pervert” in Fun Home. With all three, graphic mem-
oir occasions an education in how to represent (for the artist) and how
to interpret (for the reader) the taint of otherness attached to those who
become objects against which routine violence is directed—by the West, by
states, by society. These graphic memoirs in the mode of Künstlerroman mix
media and meanings, unpack cultural stereotypes, play to the increasing
visual literacy of global publics, and, refusing to situate their projects and
their readings as calls for rescue, invite readers to collaborate in remember-
ing alternative histories.
Whitlock observes that the accessibility and adaptability of graphic mem-
oir, through its vocabulary and grammar, enables this genre of crisis comics to
travel across cultures, despite the marks of their national origin.28 So, I con-
clude with reference to a new mode of crisis comics incorporating personal
witnessing to catastrophic loss and disaster that may well gain momentum
in riding the currents around the globe. We might call this “documentary
 Human Rights and Comics 

crisis comics.” On August , , the New York Times “Arts” section car-
ried a review by George Gene Gustines of the publication of Josh Neufeld’s
“graphic novel” titled A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge.29 In the weeks
after the disastrous  flood that devastated New Orleans and much of
the southern coast of Mississippi, Neufeld had volunteered with the Amer-
ican Red Cross in the recovery effort. From New Orleans he blogged about
what he encountered, and then self-published his blogs as “Katrina Came
Calling” (). Subsequently, he located and interviewed a number of sur-
vivors about their experiences during and after the disaster. Chronicling the
disaster and its afterlives, Neufeld entwined versions of six “lives” into A.D.
The first iteration of the “novel” was published in serial form on Smith.com
in  through . The online version included video and audiotapes
of the interviews. “Publication” in this context came as an ensemble of
genres—reportage, research, primary archival document, oral history, all
remediated as graphic novel, the “novel form” of witness in which, he tells
us in his Times interview, he took the novelist’s license to edit witness sto-
ries and to combine features and parts of stories of his witnesses.30 Neufeld
also included on his site a message board where readers could offer their
readings of A.D. Asked about the effect of this cowriting for the Amazon
website of A.D., Neufeld responded: “I don’t know if it’s the future of jour-
nalism, but in my case, feedback of any kind is really important to me. And
with a large-scale project like A.D., doing it first on the web made creator–
reader communication easy. Whether it was a New Orleanian reader cor-
recting my pre-hurricane timeline (which I later amended) or one of the
actual characters responding to his or her portrayal, I was grateful for the
feedback. It was like having an entire community as my research and fact-
checking team!”31 For the recently printed version, published by Pantheon
Graphic Novels, Neufeld expanded the story line to the afterlives of the hur-
ricane and its displacements.
In its experimental form, A.D. joins other recent innovations in witness
narrating, including Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (), a fictionalized
memoir of Valentino Achak Deng, survivor of the Sudanese civil war, and
Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains (), a novelistic and quasi-
ethnographic rendering of the story of Deogratias, Burundian survivor of
civil war and the Rwandan genocide.32 But where Eggers and Kidder narrate
the story of the singular individual surviving radical injury and trauma, Neu-
feld innovatively disperses crisis witnessing across an ensemble of subject
positions—primary witness, secondary witness, fictional composite witness,
 si d onie smith

reporter, fact-checker, and reader. And in its multiple sites of witnessing—

blog, online magazine, interactive blog, published text—A.D. locates crisis
witnessing not in the printed book alone as the memoir commodity but in
an ensemble of media through which the process of witnessing is collec-
tively negotiated. To mediate the problematic aspects of his appropriation
of other people’s stories for his graphic novel, Neufeld evolved an inter-
active process of composition that engaged his subjects in editing and
commentary, and he continued that collaboration in the tour marketing the
book—some of the informants appeared with him at book signings when
possible, as they did at the New Orleans launch on August , .33 Shut-
tling across genres, Neufeld drives graphic life writing witnessing to survival
of a catastrophic event and the injustice of its aftermath in yet another
direction, a hybrid mode of witnessing that calls itself a novel and conjoins
journalism, oral history, and blogging.
In Soft Weapons Whitlock remarks that “autobiographical narrative is
an agent in complex global dialogues and encounters and a way of think-
ing through the interdependencies of conceptions of self and other”; she
continues that “this personal and highly engaged way of grasping relations
between the self and others is intrinsic to the transits of life narrative and
the narrative imagination it engenders.”34 Human rights discourse and activ-
ist agendas pervade global dialogues and contemporary encounters across
self-other circuits. In the global currents of rights politics, graphic witness-
ing to crises and to the crises of representing radical violence and harm con-
tributes to the rearrangement of “opinion and emotion” related to histories
of injustice, violent events, projects of remembering, and agendas for re-
dress.35 It is deployed instrumentally in specific campaigns to educate read-
ers and constitute them as subjects of rights. But as previously noted, such
instrumentalist uses of graphic life writing often operate through appara-
tuses of remediation and authentication management and thereby reproduce
asymmetrical power relations across the divide of rescue politics in which
there are those who know, teach, and manage and those who suffer and
respond. These comics are sometimes designed to travel across global sites,
as in the case of the HIV/AIDS comic book campaign, carrying a message
of individualist betterment, but the representative work that drawn avatars
are given to do presents a universalized (stereotyped) difference unattached
to the specificities of local conditions and histories. Other modes of graphic
witnessing enter such dialogues about survival, marginalization, and violent
histories more obliquely, such as the graphic memoirs of Spiegelman, Satrapi,
 Human Rights and Comics 

and Bechdel and the documentary graphic novel of Neufeld. These narratives
exploit the possibilities the comic form provides for unsettling commonplace
frames of difference, and they thematize issues of witnessing, remembering,
and producing art in the time of a global commodification of suffering. Or,
as in the case of Neufeld, they experiment with emergent opportunities for
fracturing witnessing across multiple subjects through collective story-
telling. However implicated such texts are in the “global commodification of
cultural difference—the alterity industry,” they model the hard work of res-
cuing dense, complicated stories of family, ethnic community, and nation
rather than reproducing the rights agenda of rescuing “victims,” or as Binya-
vanga Wainaina has satirically intoned, of “sav[ing] you from yourself.”36

notes
1. See Alison Leigh Cowan, “An Intrepid Cartoon Reporter, Bound for the Big
Screen but Shut in a Library Vault,” New York Times, August , , A.
2. Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, ), .
3. The phrase “rearrangements of desires” comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spi-
vak in “Righting Wrongs,” The South Atlantic Quarterly ./ (): .
4. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on
the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, ),  (italics in original); Whit-
lock, Soft Weapons, .
5. See update on this campaign at http://www.equalitynow.org/english/actions/
action__en.html (accessed August , ).
6. See, for instance, Hsuan L. Hsu and Martha Lincoln, “Health Media and Global
Inequalities,” Daedalus . (Spring ): .
7. See Seth Faison, “If It’s a Comic Book, Why Is Nobody Laughing?” New York
Times, August , , repr. in “Beijing Journal,” http://www.faluninfo.net/article//
?cid= (accessed August , ).
8. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, .
9. In human rights campaigns, comic books are used to reach people who may
have limited literacy and those who may absorb and process information in different
ways than through standardized print venues. This latter point is presented in support
of the work of graphic artists in campaigns for human rights on the Graphic Witness
website: http://www.graphicwitness.org/ (accessed August , ).
10. HIV/AIDS: Stand Up for Human Rights (Geneva, Switzerland: World Health
Organization, ); HIV and AIDS: Human Rights for Everyone (Geneva, Switzer-
land: World Health Organization, ); Hsu and Lincoln, “Health Media and Global
Inequalities,” .
11. See http:/www.unhcr.se/en/Publications/publ_index_en.html, the website for
publications of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (accessed
August , ).
12. See the Graphic Witness website linking people around “visual arts and social
commentary”: http://www.graphicwitness.org/ (accessed August , ).
 si d onie smith

13. See http://www.officeoftheamericas.org/addictedtowar_schools.html (accessed

August , ).
14. See http://www.catwinternational.org/index.php (accessed August , ).
15. Jared Gardner, “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics,”
Modern Fiction Studies . (Winter ): .
16. See Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The
Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave, ), esp. chapter , for a discussion of the
ways in which venues and formats for rights witnessing are constrained by the pur-
poses, contexts, and politics of production and circulation.
17. Hsu and Lincoln, “Health Media and Global Inequalities,” .
18. Ibid., .
19. Hsu and Lincoln argue that “encourag[ing] readers in the global south to iden-
tify with one of the diverse characters who physically resembles them . . . the comic
[can] be exported without rescripting to address factors that shape the local epidemi-
ology of AIDS” (ibid., –).
20. Ibid., .
21. See Gillian Whitlock, “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics,” Modern Fiction
Studies . (Winter ).
22. Joseph Slaughter, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman
and International Human Rights” Publications of the Modern Language Association
. (): . See also Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and
International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, ).
23. Slaughter, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects,” .
24. Ibid., .
25. Ibid.
26. Whitlock, “Autographics,” .
27. For this brief discussion of features of comic narration, I am indebted to Hillary
Chute and Marianne DeKoven, “Introduction: Graphic Narrative,” Modern Fiction Stud-
ies . (Winter ): –; Gardner, “Autography’s Biography”; and Whitlock,
“Autographics.”
28. Whitlock, “Autographics,” .
29. Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (New York: Pantheon ).
30. George Gene Gustines, “Graphic Memoirs of Katrina’s Ordeal,” New York Times,
August , , C.
31. “A Q&A with Josh Neufeld” on Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/D-New-
Orleans-After-Deluge/dp//ref=sr__?ie=UTF&s=books&qid=
&sr=- (accessed August , ).
32. See Dave Eggers, What Is the What (New York: Vintage, ), and Tracy Kid-
der, Strength in What Remains (New York: Random House, ).
33. See schedule for launch at http://antigravitymagazine.com/?p= (accessed
August , ).
34. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, .
35. Ibid., .
36. Ibid., ; Binyavanga Wainaina, “Oxfamming the Whole Black World,” Mail and
Guardian Online, December , , :, http://www.mg.co.za/article/---
oxfamming-the-whole-black-world (accessed August , ).
 

Picturing Oneself as Another

linda havert y rug g

In a photograph by Richard Avedon, François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud,

their heads close together, gaze out at the viewer.1 The two men, despite
their difference in age, seem almost twinned in their coloring, hairstyles,
and clothes. And even the shared shape of their noses, mouths, and chins is
striking. If one did not know their history, one would guess: here are a father
and son, or here are two brothers. But in fact, one of them is avatar to the
other: Jean-Pierre Léaud, in a number of Truffaut’s films, plays Truffaut as a
child, then a young adult, then a grown man. Or more precisely, he plays
Antoine Doinel, a figure who, Truffaut claims, is an amalgam of the director
and the actor.
A cinematic autobiographer, in returning to his or her past life, comes
into conflict with the very thing that grants film its mimetic power: the real-
ism of photography. Certainly a documentary filmmaker can select clips of
films taken in years past and edit them with footage from the present in
order to create a reliable self-representation. In fact, that is the only kind of
autobiography that Philippe Lejeune, author of The Autobiographical Con-
tract, would accept as legitimate under the “rules” of autobiography.2 Any-
thing else is fiction. But this definition of the genre severely limits the degree
to which an autobiographical filmmaker can create representations of what
he or she carries forward from the past: not only the episodes that were cap-
tured by parents or other, often amateur, “filmmakers,” but the images and
sensations stored within the autobiographer’s memory. It is the attempt to
produce cinematic representations of those earlier memories that demands
the employment of another, a person who can play the self. And the cine-
matic autobiographer not only chooses another to represent the self as child;


 l in da h avert y ru g g

adult actors can be chosen to perform certain aspects of the director’s char-
acter or past experiences. The point is one that Elizabeth Bruss makes in
her  article on film and autobiography, “An Eye for I”: in cinema, the
autobiographical “I,” which in a text can stand for both the person writing
and the person represented, is split between the director behind the camera
and the actor before it.3 The cinematic autobiography must always, then, be
about the self as another.
This is true, in fact, even in cases where the director plays himself. To take
one notable instance, the figure played by Woody Allen in Woody Allen’s
films, though given diverse names throughout Allen’s cinematic oeuvre, has
converged inextricably in the audience’s imagination with the persona of the
director. The production of that figure depends on the body of the director,
his voice, his clothing, his bearing and gestures—and so, is this figure not
simply Woody Allen (the man who was born Alan Konigsberg)? Why com-
plicate matters by saying that this self is another? Yet if we watch Allen’s film
Celebrity, it becomes immediately apparent that Kenneth Branagh, an actor
who in most of his work bears little resemblance to the director of Celebrity,
has adopted for this film the mannerisms, gestures, voice, and attitude of the
figure we know as Woody Allen. Branagh is the Woody Allen figure in the
film. It is a funny, yet uncanny, performance, which almost seems to invite
the viewer to understand that “Woody Allen” is not a person, precisely, but
a mask, a role, a guise. Allen and Branagh, unlike Truffaut and Léaud, do not
look like each other, and yet the viewer understands that the one is the other,
or, at least, that the one is the other’s mask.
The intricate play I have described demonstrates the way in which cine-
matic self-projection plays with the impossibility of some form of “true”
self-representation that would enlist photography as its supposedly reliable
agent. Photographs carry a kind of magical cachet of absent presence (pre-
sent absence) that Roland Barthes described in almost devotional terms in
Camera Lucida: the photograph as reality’s analog, the photograph as proof
that the thing “has been there.”4 And, in reading Barthes, one feels that one
should insert a tiny memorial moment of silence for that thing (or that per-
son) that once was here. But how to define that “thing” that was there? And
how much more disappointing when the thing that the photograph finally
represents proves to be a false surface, a deception cloaked in the reputation
of truth? As Mark Twain, an author notably fascinated with photographs
of himself, put it: “The sun never looks through a photographic instrument
 Picturing Oneself as Another 

that does not print a lie.”5 The turn toward graphic representation may in
part reflect disillusionment with photography’s lie.
But it is in fact an integral part of self-representation in cinema that the
photographic representation of a body other than the author’s body insists
that this person, this actor, this representation is both the author and not
the author. The difference inscribed by photography brings the point home:
we are and are not our representations. And who we are, if our essence can
be strictly defined, resides not only in our own bodies, but also through the
agency of embodied others, the actor who performs representation (are we
in our own lives that actor?) and the audience that sees and appreciates that
“the thing” can be indicated but not captured through cinematic means. In
other words, the realization that the image on the screen is both the same as
the director behind the camera and different pushes us toward a revision of
our idea of self, our idea of self in relation to other.
Truffaut and Léaud, so uncannily like one another in Avedon’s photo-
graph, let the image serve as an emblem of cinematic self-representation,
the self and its other. Their pose is certainly precisely that—a performance
of sameness and difference—with clothing, expression, hair, and eyes con-
sciously presenting a near mirror of the other. But neither represents him-
self here. Together they represent a third: Antoine Doinel, a figure who is
both of them, and neither, a fiction that aims to convey the collaborative
nature of selfhood.

notes
1. Although publication strictures make it difficult to reproduce the photograph
here, it can be located on the Internet. Searching Google images, for example, with the
phrase “Truffaut and Leaud,” ought to return several exact matches as well as other
similar photographs featuring the doubling of director and actor that is examined in
this chapter.
2. Philippe Lejeune, “Cinéma et autobiographie: problèmes de vocabulaire,” Revue
belge du cinéma  (Spring ): –.
3. See Elizabeth Bruss, “Eye for Eye: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in
Film,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, ), –. There are of course cases in which
directors play themselves in autobiographical contexts; a significant director of this
type is Woody Allen. But one can easily argue that the character Woody Allen creates
to stand in front of the camera is not the same individual as the person behind the
camera.
4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, ), .
5. Quoted in The Twainian  (January ): .
 

Dominique Goblet
The List Principle and the Meaning of Form

jan baetens

More than Autobiography

French and Francophone bande dessinée, an umbrella term that continues
to label the whole range of comics production, has been faster in exploring
the creative possibilities of the comics medium than the U.S. graphic novel.
Long before Will Eisner coined the term “graphic novel” in the late s,
there existed a rich and diverse production in Europe that has played a dra-
matically important role in the gradual emergence of comics, an emergence
mainly associated with Art Spiegelman in the world of English-language
comics. Yet the bande dessinée has been quite slow in exploring the domains
of documentary and autobiography that have been at the heart of the
graphic novel revolution from the very beginning. Given the very openness
of the bande dessinée to various genres, audiences, and degrees of serious-
ness, the necessity to build a counterworld to the hegemony of “pure fiction”
in comics, either by promoting autobiography or by disclosing the world of
the documentary, has been more of an urgency in the United States than in
Francophone production. The delay with which a term like roman graphique
is penetrating the critical idiom in France is undoubtedly proof of a differ-
ence in chronology. Today, this delay has diminished, although not com-
pletely, for in bande dessinée the role of autobiography or documentary is
still much less visible than in the U.S. graphic novel. The major influence has
not been the model of the American graphic novel but the “local” model of
autofiction—a new way of writing autobiography that purposively blurs the
boundaries between the documentary and the fictional. Coined by French
novelist and theoretician Serge Doubrovsky () and strongly hyped in
the s and s, autofiction became the dominant genre on the French


 Dominique Goblet 

art scene, not only in literature but also in visual arts (think of the work
by conceptual photo artist Sophie Calle, the installation art of Christian
Boltanksi, and, in the domain of bande dessinée, the innovative books by
Jean-Christophe Menu). In this process of fusing the autobiographical and
autofictional tendencies in the graphic novel, two groups have been influen-
tial: the mostly French group of L’Association, which made possible the suc-
cess of David B. and Marjane Satrapi, and the predominantly Belgian group
of Fréon (a.k.a. Frémok or FRMK), which has always been the creative bio-
tope of the author that will be discussed in these pages, Dominique Goblet.1
Goblet, who has published with L’Association, is at first sight an inter-
esting and typical example of contemporary autobiographical writing in
the graphic novel. This typicality however is far from being an advantage,
because more and more critics no longer hide their distaste of what was
once a strong marker of innovation but which is now seen as a stereotype:
autobiography, more precisely autofiction. As Douglas Wolk puts it, in a
somewhat harsh introduction to a sour-sweet review of Craig Thompson’s
successful Blankets ():

Two ideas that have poisoned a cross section of contemporary writing in gen-
eral have also seeped into comics a little bit. One is the sentimental memoir—
the first-person story that explains why the author is in the right and why the
author’s pain and sadness are more sad and painful than yours. The other is the
toxic maxim “write what you know”: the idea that, even in fiction, an author’s
imagination has to be directly limited by his or her personal experience. The
rise of autobiographical or semiautobiographical comic books brought those
ideas into play in comics and opened up the question of how cartoonists might
best represent their own experience. (Wolk , )

In order to attract critical attention, authors are therefore obliged to offer

more than just a new application of the autofictional regime that is now
mainstream, after having revolutionized the practice of autobiography in
the s. What does this mean in the case of Dominique Goblet? How
can an author achieve critical recognition while working almost seamlessly
in the context of autobiography and autofiction? Two approaches toward
response come immediately to mind. The first involves gender: as a female
and even feminist author, Dominique Goblet challenges the gender stereo-
types that the first graphic novels had maintained in more than one re-
gard. The second involves form: as an avant-garde artist, Dominique Goblet
 jan baetens

questions several basic mechanisms of what it means to make a graphic

novel. But are these approaches also correct, and how should one interpret
the importance of gender and formal issues in Goblet’s work?
That Dominique Goblet is a strongly gender-conscious and even feminist
author helps her to make a difference in a comics world that is still male-
dominated and male-oriented, both at the level of production (there are still
far fewer female than male artists, publishers, editors, agents, critics) and at
the level of reception (most readers are male), which is perfectly understand-
able given the often woman-unfriendly character of many bandes dessinées.2
Despite the ground-breaking work of authors such as Trina Robbins ()
and the appearance of best sellers by authors such as Marjane Satrapi, the
world of the graphic novel is still a man’s world.
A significant symptom of this situation is the fact that the index of
Charles Hatfield’s impressive and in many regards exemplary study on what
he calls “alternative comics” () does not include terms like “gender,”
“sex,” or “woman.” It suffices to have a look at the book to notice immediately
that women, sex, and gender are all over the place, which makes their invis-
ibility in the index even more astonishing. In comparison with several other
American or European female artists, such as Claire Brétecher, Julie Doucet,
Posy Simmonds, Anke Feuchtenberger, or Aurélia Aurita, who claim the
right to deal explicitly with subjects that have been traditionally regarded as
“male” (such as power, money, sexuality, tough talk, etc.), Goblet’s work is
less noticeably feminist. Despite the presence of themes such as domestic
violence and rape, it is clear that she emphasizes to the same degree the
technical aspects of her artwork, clearly indebted to modernism and the
avant-garde, in addition to the thematic and ideological aspects of her story-
world. In this sense, she is much closer to the experiments of certain under-
ground authors of the s than to the contemporary fashion Wolk calls
the sentimental memoir. Nevertheless, the reception of her work—mainly
by male critics and colleagues—offers a traditional account of it, for in a
typical move it is the artist “as a woman” more than the woman “as an artist”
that is foregrounded. In his—utterly sympathetic—preface to Goblet’s first
book, Portraits crachés (), her Fréon/FRMK partner in crime Thierry
Van Hasselt presents her work through an (auto)biographical lens; so too
does Jean-Christophe Menu, editor in chief of L’Association and one of the
great promoters of the autobiographical move in bande dessinée, in his post-
face to her most recent book, Faire semblant, c’est mentir (To Pretend Is to
Lie, ). Such a tension between creation and reception is symptomatic of
 Dominique Goblet 

the ambivalent status of Goblet’s work, which cannot be pigeonholed easily:

Is it autobiography, semiautobiography, fiction, gender-oriented (autogyn-
ography), or formalist? In all cases, the answer is “yes and no,” but it should
be clear from the outset that the feminist themes of Goblet’s work do not
alone explain how she has managed to find her own voice within the field of
autobiography.
What defines her originality are the formal and formalist elements of an
idiosyncratic style. Yet before discussing the technical innovations of Gob-
let’s work, it should be stressed that female autobiography and avant-garde
writing are not incompatible in themselves. On the contrary, the notion of
écriture féminine or, in a broader and more contemporary vocabulary, that
of the cross-gender or transgender “queer” may prove valuable tools for
analyzing the meaning of Goblet’s drawing style and narrative techniques.
Goblet’s style illustrates the resistance to the “father’s tongue,” and not just
in a metaphorical way, given the key role played by the theme of domestic
violence in her work.3 We will, moreover, find in her work more than one
feature of queerness.

A First Approach to Portraits crachés

Goblet’s production entails a broad variety of genres, publication types, and
formats: sketches, illustrations, drawings, texts, diaries, and paintings.4 Best
known are the three volumes she has published since : Portraits crachés
(), Souvenirs d’une journée parfaite (Memories of a Perfect Day, ),
and Faire semblant, c’est mentir (). It may be a critical novelty to focus
on the first of these books, which is far less popular, less narrative-driven,
and less “finite” than the other two, which are considered masterpieces of
contemporary bande dessinée. Nevertheless, Portraits crachés may very well
be the most exciting and the most challenging of the three. It directly con-
fronts many of our common definitions of what a graphic novel is, and it
links this questioning of the rules of the genre, mainly through the mixing
of styles and genres, with a profound reflection on identity in general and on
sexual identity in particular. Portraits crachés is by far Goblet’s most exper-
imental work, the one in which the écriture feminine is also most directly
queered. As we will see, Goblet achieves an unfixed autobiographical sub-
ject, a subject in flux and in process, an “impersonal” subject. The formal
and thematic features of Portraits crachés that will be scrutinized in this
essay have to be understood as a means toward realizing this subject, which
they both reflect and inform.
 jan baetens

Goblet’s first book resists any conventional technical model of genre.

Although many competing definitions exist of what the notion of a graphic
novel may represent, two elements universally recur. First, there is the idea
that a graphic novel is a narrative, hence a sequence. Second, this sequence
is displayed in multipanel or multiframe arrangements on the page. Most
basically, the notion of the visual “grid,” implying the copresence of various
items within the same global frame, underlies in one way or another all of
these definitions. However, this “tabular” grid has also a strong temporal or
“linear” dimension, for the elements of the grid are supposed to be read in a
certain order.5
Portraits crachés departs radically from the traditional graphic novel.
Most sequences of the book do not follow the sequential gridlike model that
organizes the distribution of the panels and texts. Some pages—or plates—
look like a board game, such as Monopoly (see fig. .). Other plates seem
to originate from sketchbooks or scrapbooks. Still others resemble what
one can find in a diary, a notebook, or an agenda. But most important, the
sequences gathered in Portraits crachés seem closer to the nonnarrative genre
of the portrait rather than to the genre of the autobiographical story (accord-
ing to a distinction suggested by Michel Beaujour [], who opposes the
nonnarrative self-analysis of a state of mind in the autoportrait to the nar-
rative unfolding of the whole life in the autobiography).6 Dominique Goblet
is not the first artist to explore this overlap between narrative and nonnar-
rative modes in the use of the “grid.” The Cobra movement in general and
Pierre Alechinsky in particular have been working with these mixtures since
the s, albeit in the field of painting.7 The resemblances between the
Belgian Goblet and the Belgian Alechinsky are so apparent that it would be
difficult to deny a direct influence. Yet the artistic program of both artists
is fundamentally different: Alechinsky relies on the division of the canvas
in order to introduce new forms of temporality in painting, whereas Goblet
attempts to undo the stereotyped use of the grid in order to reinvent the
spatial structures of the graphic novel’s “sequential grid.”
Goblet’s rejection of the traditional hierarchy of the grid, which divides
the plate into a certain number of units while introducing a reading order
to be followed, aims at unveiling the temporal dimension of the drawing.
The unconventional occupation of the space in Goblet’s work does not help
to “save” something from the dynamic gesture that produced the drawing,
but it tends to win back some of the sequential mobility by emphasizing the
links between each panel and the panels that precede or follow it.8 In other
 Dominique Goblet 

figure . From Dominique Goblet, Portraits crachés (p. ). Courtesy of
Dominique Goblet.

words, what Goblet tries to recover via her critique of the traditional grid
sequence is the fundamental sense of rhythm (i.e., the dynamic relationship
of time and space), which is key to the dynamics of the medium. It is with
this perspective in mind that I will now close read some aspects of Portraits
crachés. The purpose of this reading is to show, first, that the basic feature
of autobiographical writing, namely time, cannot be separated from medium-
specific features, such as—in the case of the graphic novel—space, and, sec-
ond, that this intertwining of time and space is not without consequences
for the issue of identity.

Text + Image = List

Most plates of Portraits crachés disobey two basic rules of frame composi-
tion. Normally, a graphic novel plate is divided in panels, but this division
 jan baetens

does not prevent these panels from being part of one bigger narrative. In
Portraits crachés, however, these rules do not apply. On the one hand, there
is no automatic or semiautomatic division of the page: in many cases plate
and panel coincide, so to speak, because most pages contain just one draw-
ing. On the other hand, the absence of this type of plate division does not
imply a lack of fragmentation. Instead of establishing a dialectic relationship
between plate and panel (first we see the plate, then we read the sequence
of panels that compose it, finally we go back to the plate before jumping to
another one), Goblet calls attention to the notion of the fragment, disrupt-
ing the usual management of time and space relationships in the graphic
novel. As a result she reverses the characteristics of the signs that are usu-
ally marked as spatial—the images of a graphic novel—as well as those signs
that are usually marked as temporal—the words of a graphic novel.
In Goblet’s production, the words are always strongly visualized. Their
visual aspects are foregrounded and their spatial dimension is heavily marked.
In the terminology coined by French theoretician Jean Gérard Lapacherie,
the notion of grammatextuality refers to the various mechanisms that en-
hance the visibility of the material qualities of a text—its intrinsic form as
well as its position on the page—which are in strong contrast with the clas-
sic ideal of “transparent typography” (Lapacherie ). Portraits crachés
abundantly illustrates the possibilities of such a visual enhancing, both at
the level of the signs themselves as well as their arrangement on the page.
What follows is a small survey of the basic techniques featured by Goblet
in her attempts to achieve a visual overrating and upgrading of the letters,
words, and sentences—and, subsequently, an underrating and a downsizing
of their semantic value. A sequence like “Helvétia,” the life story of a female
prize fighting boxer, illustrates all these points in an utterly systematic way
(see figures . and .):

• In place of the dull and aseptic lettering of most comics and graphic novels,
Goblet introduces an awkward form of handwriting. This writing is all the
more visible or grammatextual because the artist refuses all concession to
immediate and unproblematic readability. One must not only make an effort
to decipher the words, but an additional obstacle to comprehension is built in,
perhaps even on purpose, by some aspects of the technical reproduction of the
original plates, which happen to be miniaturized in more than one instance.
• Generally speaking, Goblet does not crave for a straightforward contrast
between figure (letters, words) and ground, between ink and paper. On the
 Dominique Goblet 

figures . and . From Portraits crachés (pp. , ). Courtesy of Dominique Goblet.

contrary, the chromatic contrast that one needs to easily decipher the words
on the page or in the balloons is often insufficiently marked, so that letters and
words morph into dots and blots. Obviously, the imperfections and infelicities
of the printing process destabilize even more the fluent understanding of what
the text may signify.
• Portraits crachés also tends to use unusually long lines, which occupy an
extremely large amount of space on the page, running almost from edge to
edge. In combination with the disappearance of the white spaces between the
words, this extension hinders the technical readability of the sentences. In a
 jan baetens

significant move of autorepresentation, in which the story’s content comes to

reflect and exhibit the story’s formal elements, the ropes of the boxing ring
clearly resemble the lines of a text, such as those found in a notebook. This
autorepresentation suggests that writing and reading are a kind of combat and
that destruction and erasure are paramount aspects of the text.
• Finally, Goblet achieves a blurring of the spheres of the text and the image,
which are no longer neatly separated as in the traditional graphic novel. By
doing so, she invites her reader to fully acknowledge the visual metamorpho-
sis of the text.

All these techniques make the graphiation (the material production of

the drawing) of Goblet’s text visible. Yet Portraits crachés does not only pro-
cess the words and letters as such. The book also multiplies the devices that
accentuate the active role of the host medium, the page, so that the newly
merged text and image converge to achieve what Anne-Marie Christin calls
the “written image,” that is, a regime of writing in which the basic units
and the basic system of comprehension are more visual than verbal—even
where verbal signs and verbal systems are concerned (Christin ; ).
Goblet achieves this effect by routinely forsaking those classic devices
that guarantee the separation of textual and visual spaces: speech balloons,
captions underneath the drawings, the placement of verbal information
in semantically “empty” parts of the image. As a result of this rejection, the
division of the graphic novel in textual and visual zones tends to fade out.
Furthermore, Goblet systematically emphasizes the significance of the “white
spaces” in the image. These spaces, Christin argues (), are never “empty”
but play a crucial role in the production of meaning. In other words, words
and images do not simply “occupy” or “fill up” a neutral or passive host
medium; instead their position is determined by its relationship to the re-
maining “white” spaces. In Goblet’s work white is never a synonym of void.
The combined processing of the writing of words and letters on the one
hand and page layout on the other hand gives rise to what is probably the
most salient feature of Goblet’s innovation in the field of grammatextuality:
the creative reuse of the list principle (see fig. .). The concept of the list is
at the very heart of the debates between language and image or between
time and space. It marks the exact frontier, the zone of transition, the place
of conflict between these various modes of symbolization. As certain sec-
tions of my work demonstrate (Baetens ), a list divides, segments, frac-
tions—in short, it “lexicalizes” or “discriminates,” transforming a continuity
 Dominique Goblet 

into independent units—both the space of that continuity and what can
be seen in it. According to the principle of list, in other words, the continu-
ity of the world becomes the discontinuity of a symbolic system. Moreover,
the list turns over the inevitable consecution of the spoken word and proj-
ects it into a kind of simultaneity that is necessary to the invention of writ-
ing systems.9
Goblet’s treatment of the list is highly sophisticated. Generally speaking,
the list symbolizes the domestication of human language by the power of
an abstract classification system. Here however, this disciplinarization,
which is also a linearization and a rationalization, leads to nothing. This is
so because the list here is mediated, processed in an atypical way, mainly
through the mixture of verbal as well as iconic elements—a technique that
produces a lack of clarity in the list itself. The resulting heterogeneous list
loses the cohesion and simplicity of its linear structure, a confusion that be-
comes even more intense when one takes into account the strong gramma-
textualization of the list itself. It leads to nothing moreover because Goblet’s

figure . From Portraits crachés, (p. ). Courtesy of Dominique Goblet.
 jan baetens

list principle is no longer restricted to the sole domain of language, but

transferred to the image, which is often presented in the form of a list. In
certain cases, there is no longer even an image in the traditional sense of the
word: all that remains is a grammatextualized list.
The dissemination of list effects throughout the book creates a new
spatial logic that exceeds the opposition of linearity and nonlinearity. The list
becomes a kind of textual reservoir or database capable of being activated in
permanently new forms and combinations. As Lev Manovich puts it:

After the novel, and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form
of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its
correlate—the database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they
do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development,
thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a
sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item
possessing the same significance as any other. (Manovich , )

What is typical of Goblet’s book is the simultaneous combination of the list

or database principle on the one hand and the portrait or story logic on the
other. Through such combinations, she demonstrates that the splitting of
these two principles of sequencing—the nonlinear logic of the database and
the linear logic of narrative—can be overcome.10
The result of this conversion of text and image into the heterogeneous
field of written images (Christin ) is clear. In Portraits crachés, the
image tends to be transformed into a line, whereas the text aims at becom-
ing a structure whose elements can be seen simultaneously. This short cir-
cuit of time and space is facilitated by three other perturbations:

• First, Goblet mixes a very adult and a very childish style, to the extent that they
become almost indistinguishable. The overlap of styles leads to a confusion of
past (the child’s experiences) and present (the adult’s reworking of these expe-
riences) in many images.
• Second, the book’s space is organized in a way that is both highly rational and
typical of “art brut” techniques.11 Indeed, the list principle can serve both the
logic of rationalization as well as the “art brut” disruption of this logic (Thévoz
). The pulsions and affects that become visible in the disorganized list
principle reflect the hesitation between the immature and the adult that is key
to Goblet’s representations.
 Dominique Goblet 

• Finally, Goblet also intertwines two types of drawings: finished drawings and
inchoate ones, but not in such a way that the “completed” images refer to the
world of the adult and the latter images to the word of the child. Portraits
crachés manages to avoid the banal antinomy of the finished and the unfin-
ished, just as it succeeds in problematizing the distinction of the naive and the
sophisticated.

In conclusion, one might say that the dominant paradigm is that of becom-
ing, not in the teleological sense of the word, but in the meaning analyzed
by Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, becoming is not the process of the gradual
emergence of something formless into a form, but a thorough critique of
that very process and an attempt to think the permanent questioning of all
things “fixed.”12

Storytelling in Portraits crachés

The following observation will not come as a surprise: in the string of
images, portraits, and short stories gathered in Portraits crachés, time is less
represented than it is manipulated. Three major techniques come here to
the fore. First, several stories are told in reverse order. However, this reverse
unwinding of the chronology never leads to a solid origin or starting point
(as mentioned earlier, various sections are closer to portraits than to stories,
and traditional chronology is even harder to find in these sections). In the
somewhat ten short stories one can find in the book, the characters always
crash against the same anguishes, the same obsessions, the same horrors, as
if a stable orientation or end point was missing, leaving the stories to move
in circles around an event that cannot be disclosed or named.13 In certain
cases, the chronology is even more disrupted, for instance when the reverse
order is replaced by a system of repetitions and variations that exceeds all
recognizable temporality. Finally, images are frequently doubled, so that the
same event appears various times, as if each moment, in the absence of any
stable basis or starting point, could only be told in a blurred way, through an
echo chamber of reduplications.
The second manipulation technique has to do with the previously men-
tioned convergence or superposition of the lines of the text and the cords of
the boxing ring. Something similar affects the visual side of the “Helvétia”
story, where one is invited to scrutinize the relationship between the form
of the boxing ring and that of the panel. Both are triangular, and because
there is only one panel per page, the reader is even more intrigued by the
 jan baetens

choice of this specific format. The unusual triangular framing certainly mat-
ters, but what does it mean in the absence of any overt “aesthetic” motiva-
tion? One has the impression that the image does not “fill” the triangular
frame of the panel, but that it is “cut” by it, as if the frame prevented the
reader from seeing things that are purposely kept off screen. Such an active
use of the frame is not unusual in graphic novels, but it corresponds per-
fectly well to the idea that something is lacking in the stories’ chronology.
However, this particular use of the frame clearly refers to the medium of
photography, in which it is not the image that fills the frame but the frame
that cuts out a fragment of the world to produce an image. This is far from
being a detail, because it tends to transform Goblet’s drawings into a differ-
ent medium: that of the photographic snapshot. This virtual medium shift
allows the reader to better understand how space and time are intertwined
in Portraits crachés. Although it reduces time to snapshot moments, the
refusal of a clear drawing style tends to imbue the image with a strong feel-
ing of its making, a violent sense of the becoming of an image—and it is this
second process that reverses the temporal reduction of the snapshot.
Third, Portraits crachés radicalizes even more the principle of gramma-
textualization by creating a network of correspondences that cuts across
thematic and formal hierarchies. The leitmotif of the square illustrates this
point well (see fig. .). In certain drawings the migration of this theme and
its subsequent becoming almost anything else can be followed quite easily:
the checks of a skirt, the tile structure of the floor, the underlying grid of the
comics layout, the global composition of the page, and so on. These migra-
tions cannot be reduced to the classic exchanges between form and con-
tent (the “squares” representing an implicit feature of the medium, namely
the “grid”), because the relationships that one can discover in Portraits
crachés are simply too diverse and too numerous to pinpoint. One feels that
the notion of the “grid,” which is rejected at the level of the page layout,
returns in various formal and diegetic details, but very soon this dynamic
becomes so overwhelming that the idea of becoming (something else) is all
that remains.

The “Becoming” of Autobiography

Until now, our analysis has demonstrated the crossing of boundaries: between
text and drawing, draft and finished work, portrait and story, graphic novel
and photography, and so on. Let us conclude by examining how these “de-
definitions” (according to the concept coined by Harold Rosenberg) of the
 Dominique Goblet 

figure . From Portraits crachés, (p. ). Courtesy of Dominique Goblet.

traditional novel can be understood. Obviously, the main feature of Portraits

crachés is identity, more particularly identity crisis. For an autobiographical
work, this may sound quite uneventful, yet what makes Goblet’s work so
interesting is the systematic aspect of the unbinding of any fixed identity,
including that of the medium itself (the graphic novel) and of its currently
dominant mode (autobiography or semiautobiography).
After having read how the material autonomy of the medium’s funda-
mental aspects such as the verbal and the visual are being questioned by
Goblet, one might add to it an analogous mechanism at a more thematic
level. In Portraits crachés, the semantic categories of big and small, strong
and weak, victim and tyrant, king and subject, man and woman, straight and
queer can no longer be distinguished. Even if their visual representation
continues to differentiate them visually, the thematic distinctions between
strong and weak, masculine and female, powerful and powerless are gradu-
ally dismantled. It is therefore quite logical that Goblet’s world is populated
with hybrids. Cross-dressing is a recurrent theme, as is the “manly” behavior
 jan baetens

of women or vice versa. The contrast between man and animal is also often
lost, as is the distinction between the living and the dead or between the
living and the ghostlike creatures. In certain cases, Goblet is very near to
queering identities, in the contemporary sense of the word, for the very pos-
sibility of distinguishing between opposite poles is missing, especially when
it comes to the author herself. After all, this is an author, we must note, who
collaborates with other people without always making clear who is doing
what, an author having a queer, bisexual name (Dominique is both male and
female), an author who uses a nickname (“Goblette”) that feminizes her
male-sounding family name (“Goblet”—a word “without meaning” but with
a strong masculine architecture).
To bring the analysis to a final end, it is not absurd, one may hope, to
compare the gesture of Goblet, whose ultimate autobiographical commit-
ment to the graphic novel eventually produces a kind of autobiography that
presents an “impersonal” kind of subject, less a universal subject than the
impossibility to fix any subject whatsoever, to other decisive moments in the
history of modern art, like the one represented by Robert Frank’s mediation
of the extroversion of documentary and the introversion of subjective pho-
tography in The Americans (Frank ; for an analysis of this mediation, see
Stimson ). Of course, Portraits crachés does not have the same iconic
stature as Frank’s masterpiece, but it does belong to the long-term histori-
cal effort of modern art to undo all classic notions of identity.

notes
1. See Baetens  on the institutional position of this collective in the context of
a “minor culture.”
2. For a general discussion of these issues, see Groensteen .
3. “The father tongue is the language of social power, the one that is learnt at uni-
versities and exercised in academic gatherings. It is the public discourse, and one dia-
lect of it is speechmaking, another is much documentary narration. It is generally a
written form; even when spoken dialects are involved, the traces of written speech are
felt. ‘It doesn’t speak itself ’, Ursula le Guin says, ‘It lectures. It began to develop when
printing made written language common rather than rare, five hundred years ago or
so, and with electronic processing and copying it continues to develop and proliferate
so powerfully, so dominatingly, that many believe this dialect—the expository and par-
ticularly the scientific discourse—is the highest form of language, the true language, of
which all other uses of words are primitive vestiges’” (Dermody , ; the quota-
tion is from le Guin , ).
4. See the artist’s personal website: http://www.dominique-goblet.be/dominique_
goblet.html.
5. On this opposition of the “linear” and the “tabular,” see Groensteen .
 Dominique Goblet 

6. The two other books by Goblet in which one finds similar influences from non-
narrative genres belong clearly to the world of storytelling.
7. Cobra (CO = Copenhagen + BR = Brussels + A = Amsterdam) was a post-
Surrealist and revolutionary avant-garde group founded in  whose aesthetic ideas
rely on a mix of experiment and spontaneity and whose style is often indebted to that
of children’s drawings.
8. For a study of these dynamic gestures that produce drawings, see Marion ,
who has coined the term “graphiation” to label the material production of the drawing,
and Baetens .
9. For a historical and anthropological study of the cultural effects of this shift, see
Goody .
10. A similar idea is defended by N. Katherine Hayles in her comments on Mano-
vich’s praise for the database in the computer era; see Hayles .
11. Coined by French artist and theoretician Bernard Dubuffet (–), the
notion of “art brut” is a synonym of “raw art,” oftentimes referred to as outsider art. It
is an umbrella term for art produced by nonprofessionals working outside aesthetic
norms, such as art by mental patients, prisoners, and children. “Art brut” techniques
involve for instance “childish” forms of representation, an obsession with lists, and
“horror vacui.”
12. Deleuze and Guattari ; for an application of this way of thinking to a comics
corpus, see Sterckx .
13. Other books by Goblet delve deeper in this issue and reveal some of the per-
sonal traumas of the author, yet this is also what makes them in a sense more tradi-
tional and more satisfying to a broader readership.

references
Baetens, Jan. . “Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation.” In The
Language of Comics: Word & Image in the Comics, ed. Robin Varnum and Christina
Robbins, –. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
———. . “Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures: The Fréon Collective.” Yale
French Studies :–.
Beaujour, Michel. . Miroirs d’encre: Rhétorique de l’autoportrait. Paris: Seuil.
Christin, Anne-Marie. . L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique. Paris: Flammarion.
———. . Poétiques du blanc. Leuven, Belgium, and Paris: Peeters and Vrin.
———, ed. . History of Writing. Paris: Flammarion.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. . Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dermody, Susan. . “The Pressure of the Unconscious upon the Image: The Sub-
jective Voice in Documentary.” In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual
Anthropology, and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, –
. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Doubrovsky, Serge. . Le fils. Paris: Galilée.
Frank, Robert. . The Americans. New York: Grove Press. Originally published in
 by Les Éditions Delpire.
Goblet, Dominique. . Portraits crachés. Brussels: Fréon.
———. . Souvenirs d’une journée parfaite. Brussels: Fréon.
 jan baetens

———. . Faire semblant, c’est mentir. Paris: L’Association.

Goody, Jack. . The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Groensteen, Thierry. . Un objet culturel non identifié. Angoulême, France: Editions
de l’An .
———. . The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jack-
son: University Press of Mississippi.
Hatfield, Charles. . Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: Univer-
sity of Mississippi Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine. . “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts.” Publications
of the Modern Language Association –: –.
Lapacherie, Jean Gérard. . “Ecriture et lecture du calligramme.” Poétique :–
.
Le Guin, Ursula. . “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address.” In Dancing at the Edge
of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, –. London: Grove Press.
Manovich, Lev. . The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marion, Philippe. . Traces en cases. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Académia.
Robbins, Trina. . A Century of Women Cartoonists. Northampton, MA: Kitchen
Sink Press.
Sterckx, Pierre. . Tintin Schizo. Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles.
Stimson, Blake. . “A Photograph Is Never Alone.” In The Meaning of Photography,
ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, –. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Thévoz, Michel. . Détournement d’écriture. Paris: Minuit.
Thompson, Craig. . Blankets. Portland: Top Shelf.
Wolk, Douglas. . Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.
New York: Da Capo Press.
 

The Animal Witness of the

Rwandan Genocide
mic hael a . c ha ne y

In Maus, Spiegelman’s elevation of the funny animal comic as a means of

reenacting the anguish of bleeding history has provided a somewhat reluc-
tant academy with the occasion to investigate the unique properties of
storytelling in the comics mode. And yet, Maus is not the only genocide
narrative in the comics form, nor is it the only one to thematize the animal
as an integral component of its trauma narrativization. As a survivor of
Rwanda’s  genocide, graphic novelist Rupert Bazambanza highlights
a propensity for violence and mass murder through comic deployments of
the animal in his surprisingly understudied memoir Smile through the Tears
(originally written in French as Sourire malgré tout).
Chronicling the initial familial bliss and eventual massacre of the Rwangas
(Bazambanza’s long-time neighbors), Smile through the Tears represents the
author’s collaborative struggle with Rose Rwanga, the only surviving mem-
ber of the Rwanga family, “to affirm our resolve to overcome our despair and
live normal lives.”1 As Robert Eaglestone has said of other Rwandan geno-
cide literature, that notion of “smothered words” so typical of Holocaust
literature takes on a different cast in African trauma narrative, in which
“there is a real sense that there can be comprehension, that a story must be
told and can and should be grasped by others in the West.”2 Central to this
comprehension is Bazambanza’s careful detailing of the Hutu’s animalizing
rhetoric of Tutsis as snakes and cockroaches—the bestial prologue to that
moment when “individual Rwandans lashed out against a perceived internal
other that threatened in their imaginations both their personal integrity and
the cosmic order of the state.”3
Throughout the graphic novel, Bazambanza risks alienating readers wary
of blurring the boundaries between history and propaganda, memory and


 mic h a el a . c h a n e y

imagination, particularly in a personal account of such historical gravity.

An example of this blurring occurs when words of brazen malice and cal-
culation are put directly—and some would say, unconvincingly—in the
mouth of Hutu President Habyarimana: “If we let Rwandans live in peace
and harmony any longer, they’ll end up united. And we’ll lose our advan-
tage. That’s why we must keep reminding the people that they belong to
different ethnic groups” (). But aesthetic and historiographic barriers are
not the only epistemological frameworks traversed in the graphic novel;
for while Bazambanza indulges in rhetorical strategies that clearly display
an ideological bias, he also works within a transcultural context of post-
coloniality that questions the assumed objects and objectivities of testimony
and witnessing.
After the rise of the Interahamwe (a militia charged solely with the exter-
mination of the Tutsi) and the creation of the inflammatory radio station
RTLM, Hyacinthe Rwanga attracts the violent attentions of a soldier standing
guard before the radio station. “You’re all alike, you sneaking cockroaches!”
he shouts, adding, “And don’t try to seduce me!” (). Eschewing further
explanation for the depthless evil of the Hutu and the interminable sanc-
tity of the Tutsi, Bazambanza next presents a panel of the guard hoisting
Hyacinthe up by her belly while she utters a beatific apostrophe to the heav-
ens: “God! You who made us all into different races, give me the strength
to refuse!” (, panel ). In the following panel, the guard loses interest as
swiftly as he had grown angry before.
Contradictory intentions common to trauma narrative may account for
such oscillations of violence and veneration. But what explains these vio-
lations of verisimilitude? Despite its insistence that it bears an authentic
historical record of the genocide, Smile through the Tears is only partly a tale
of survivorship. Convincing its audience of its fidelity to historiography
is merely of tertiary importance. Rather, these moments of didacticism and
unrealistic emotion disclose the memoir’s primary function as iconographic
hagiography. In Hyacinthe’s apostrophe, the guard is just as beset by evil
intentions as she is by piety: together they make clear an interpellation into
the sacred, and by all means subjective, history that organizes the text and
the impossible universe of human brutality that it portrays. Thus, as each
character undergoes a hailing in which the ethics of thanatology replace the
protocols of narrative realism, the text incurs and disburses its “referential
debt”—Shoshana Felman’s term for testimony’s “‘constant obligation’ to the
‘woes of history,’ and to its dead.”4
 Animal Witness of the Rwandan Genocide 

Indeed, the tone of the narrative conjoins didactic historiography and

somber eulogy, entangling the political corruption and ethnic propaganda
leading up to the massacre with the sanctification of the Tutsi. It is this lat-
ter function that gives pause to Western readers more comfortable with the
realistic dualities of characters in a work like Maus. This is not to say that
Smile through the Tears lacks sophistication. On the contrary, it is this very
Manichaeism of characterization that transforms Bazambanza’s traumatic
solicitation of memory and redress into an object for visual scrutiny. For
example, even though Rwanga family members explicitly negate the discourse
of ethnic essentialism propounded by colonialism and ascribed to villainous
Hutus, the graphic novel dutifully clings to the same strictures of pheno-
typical difference that it earlier historicizes in panels showing Belgians using
anthropometric devices to separate angular-faced Tutsis from broad-nosed
Hutus. More than its invariant assignment of broad noses to Hutu evildoers,
Smile through the Tears retasks the historical device of an incontrovertibly
racist anthropometry as the metonym for the artist’s pen. A related gesture
appears early on in the story as Wilson Rwanga happily reads an issue of
Tintin in Africa, infamous for its primitivization of African embodiment.5 By
recasting himself as colonial authority, however, Bazambanza need not solely
be reflecting a paradigmatic logic of colonial sympathy or acceptance of racial
essentialism. Rather, he repurposes these iconic fragments of the unfinished
business (and metrics) of colonial history for the expression of cosmic, that
is to say, soteriological differences. The replication of these historical instru-
ments of racialization indicates the reiterative logic of trauma, what Mari-
anne Hirsch describes as a traumatic “inability to imagine . . . [the] past other
than by way of repeatedly circulated and already iconic cultural images.”6
Another recurring image evocative of traumatic narration is the animal,
as jungle gorillas and birds of paradise oversee the transpiration of human
events from the perspective of their bottomless gaze (see fig. .). Consid-
ering the way the animal gaze initiates an examination of humanity’s limit,
Jacques Derrida observes, “As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes
of the other, the gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the
human.”7 From vantages of dispassionate supervision, animals mark the space
of witness, invoking the same questions of address and audience that relent-
lessly vex traumatic narratives. What better icon than the animal and its
“abyssal gaze” to figure a killing so vicious that it strains human compre-
hension and the vicissitudes of narrating or indeed receiving the story of
that killing?
 mic h a el a . c h a n e y

figure . Gorilla as audience. From Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile through the Tears
(p. , panel ). Courtesy of Rupert Bazambanza.

Neither Bazambanza nor his readers require reading Theodor Adorno to

understand how the process of animalization precedes and justifies murder.
Still, Adorno’s meticulous examination of the rhetorical transfer inherent to
the process resonates with surprising aptness as a framework for under-
standing the animal receiver of Bazambanza’s narrative:

The possibility of the pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a
fatally wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he
repels this gaze—“after all, it’s only an animal”—reappears irresistibly in cruel-
ties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure
themselves that it is “only an animal,” because they could never fully believe
this even of animals. . . . The mechanism of “pathic projection” determines that
those in power perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of
reflecting back the human as precisely what is different.8

Beyond absolving perpetrators of genocide through animal metaphorization,

scene after scene in this work casts the animal as the impossible witness of
 Animal Witness of the Rwandan Genocide 

the genocide, exacerbating philosophical anxieties regarding the animal’s

obscure gaze, which, for Giorgio Agamben, “always seems to be on the verge
of uttering words.”9 Birds in particular re-metaphorize characters as so much
fallen flesh rising in spiritual flight from the horrors of the massacre. One
significant set of images revises the “pathic projection” by utilizing what we
might call the “meta-gutter” of the spine that divides opposing pages as a
metonym for the barrier of life and death.10 Where the last panel of one page
shows the brutal slaying of Wilson and the performative rescripting of his
own murder as familial eulogy, the first panel of the following page erupts
with doves in flight (see figs. . and .).
Aside from the content of the images, their sequence bears the signifi-
cance of a hailing designed to arrest the gaze in the panel of the doves, situ-
ated at the upper left-hand corner, “one of the places on the page that enjoys
a natural privilege,” according to Thierry Groensteen.11 Adding to this spe-
cial placement is a rarely employed caption having little mimetic correlation
to its accompanying image, which bears out Groensteen’s claim that “the
panel has the power to hail the reader, momentarily frustrating the ‘passion
to read’ that drives the images so as always to be in the lead.”12 And if read-
ers are structurally and thematically hailed to tarry here, a concomitant urge
for retrospective reading arises, provoking in the metonymy of the mass
of flying doves the voyeuristic review of that which precipitates the “mass
grave . . .” Indeed, even the ellipses inhibit our advance beyond this metas-
tasis, refusing to close the moment of death and inviting cyclical return.
In contrast, then, to the notion that African trauma narratives lack the
ambiguities of subjectivity, story, and reception accorded to Holocaust nar-
ratives with their insistence on a comprehensible genocide, a residue of
authorial anxiety lingers in Smile through the Tears. Bazambanza’s play with
verisimilitude, his mimicry of Belgian essentializing, and his instantiation
of the animal as witness intervene on and ultimately estrange foundational
antinomies of colonial consciousness, as Amy Novak says of Nigerian trauma
narratives that “challenge the Manichean organization of the colonial world
by uprooting the symbolic order that structures the Western subject’s sense
of the real.”13
Reminiscent of Shoshana Felman’s approach to film as genocide witness,
Bazambanza posits the animal as a strange and at times estranging receiver
or witness of the genocide, whose presence during the event forecloses his-
tory from that human responsiveness so crucial to its retelling.14 In tragic
consequence, the human text of history for which the animal acts as ideal
figures . and .
Massacre and animal
images side by side.
From Bazambanza’s
Smile through the Tears
(pp. , panel ; ,
panel ). Courtesy of
Rupert Bazambanza.
 Animal Witness of the Rwandan Genocide 

reader tumbles precipitously, along with any expectation of affective re-

sponse, into that infamous abyss of the animal’s gaze.
In Katalin Orbán’s discussion of Maus, the emptiness of the cartoon ani-
mal—and I would add of the animal gaze in general—presents “not only a
connection but also a disconnection . . . that dissociation of sight and compre-
hension that is central to trauma.”15 Although similarly transfixed by animal
topoi as sites for expressing trauma, in Smile through the Tears affect itself
is transported from the scene of the human to that of the clouds, the trees,
or the jungle. With aggressive investments in the verities of the pathetic fal-
lacy, Bazambanza’s graphic novel invests the Rwandan landscape with affect’s
gory remains in cenotaphic tribute to fallen martyrs. The front cover, after
all, depicts Rose Rwanga beside a gorilla; between them a tree bleeds where
a machete has cut it. The jungle is thus history’s feeling mediator, a sacred
place not so much beyond history as immanent within it, and home to the
gorilla, iconic signifier of Rwanda’s global significance prior to the genocide
(think Gorillas in the Mist) and vehicle of an informal discourse of witness-
ing. If, as Dori Laub maintains, genocide comprises “the event that had no
witness to its truth . . . and thus signified its own death . . . any instance of its
survival inevitably implie[s] the presence of some sort of informal discourse,
of some degree of unconscious witnessing that could not find its voice or
its expression during the event,” it follows that Bazambanza’s animals incar-
nate Laub’s “informal discourse,” and yet disrupt the implied condition Laub
attributes to the witness that has a voice under normal circumstances.16
Amy Novak discovers a similar gesture in Nigerian novels that “seek to cre-
ate a voice that is not reliant upon a Western subject for testimony but
instead disputes the objectivity and knowledge of such an addressee.”17 His-
tory’s mute, silent, and witless witness, Bazambanza’s animals are no less
transformational in their mimetic capacities as are Art Spiegelman’s mice.
Andreas Huyssen likens Spiegelman’s aesthetic project in Maus to Adorn-
ian mimesis, wherein animal stand-ins help to overcome mimetic paraly-
sis and permit “escape from the terror of memory—even ‘postmemory’ in
Marianne Hirsch’s sense—while mimetically reenacting it.”18 Without these
images of transmogrification, Bazambanza’s didactic mimesis may wallow in
a “terror of memory” and fall short of producing what Huyssen refers to as a
“becoming or making similar”—which, instead of being “reduced to compas-
sion or empathy . . . requires of us to think identity and non-identity together
as non-identical similitude and in unresolvable tension with each other.”19
This unresolvable tension of identity imbues Bazambanza’s characters, as
 mic h a el a . c h a n e y

well as his readers, with an ethics that everywhere seems to transcend the
human, stretched cosmologically between the sanctity of the angel and the
quietude of the animal.
notes
1. Rupert Bazambanza, Smile through the Tears, trans. Leslie McCubbin (Mon-
treal: Les Edition Images, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
2. Robert Eaglestone, “‘You Would Not Add to My Suffering If You Knew What I
Have Seen’: Holocaust Testimony and Contemporary African Trauma,” Studies in the
Novel . (): .
3. Christopher Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of  (New
York: Berg Publishers, ), .
4. Shoshana Felman, “Camus’ The Plague, or A Monument to Witnessing,” in Tes-
timony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, ), .
5. For more on Tintin and African comics, see Nancy Rose Hunt, “Tintin and the
Interruptions of Congolese Comics,” in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and
Postcolonial Africa, ed. Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ), –. For more on African comics in general, see John A.
Lent, ed., Cartooning in Africa (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, ).
6. Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of
Postmemory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism . (): .
7. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans.
David Wills, Critical Inquiry . (): .
8. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (London: Verso, ), .
9. Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, ), .
10. Will Eisner outlines the storytelling possibilities of the comics page as a “meta
panel” and a “super panel” in “The Frame,” in Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, FL:
Poorhouse Press, ), –.
11. Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), .
12. Ibid., .
13. Amy Novak, “Who Speaks? Who Listens? The Problem of Address in Two
Nigerian Trauma Novels,” Studies in the Novel ./ (): .
14. See Shoshana Felman, “Film as Witness: Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah,’” in Holo-
caust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, ), –.
15. Katalin Orbán, “Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the
Shadow of No Towers,” Representations  (): .
16. Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival,” in
Felman and Laub, Testimony, .
17. Novak, “Who Speaks? Who Listens?” .
18. Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” .
19. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), .
 

Autobiography as Discovery
in Epileptic
stephen e. ta b a c hnic k

William Howarth some time ago delineated three kinds of autobiogra-

phies: the oratorical, the dramatic, and the poetic. The oratorical autobiog-
raphy (Howarth gives the examples of The Education of Henry Adams and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, among others) has an ideological point
to make, and makes it from the start, rhetorically shaping the life of the
subject to reinforce that point from beginning to end. The dramatic auto-
biography (for instance, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The
Autobiography of William Carlos Williams) features a role-player who pre-
sents no character development and dons different masks to fit shifting
circumstances. In Franklin’s case, the roles of the industrious printer, in-
ventive discoverer, and graceful diplomat are all covers for the tireless self-
promoter. The poetic kind (for example, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself ) reveals a personality that never finds
itself and constantly shifts in its understanding of self throughout a tenta-
tive inner journey.
Howarth based his theory only on autobiographies by male writers and
did not take account of, for instance, slave narratives and other important
perspectives and subgenres that have attracted increasing attention since
he wrote over thirty years ago. But his basic categories—here reduced to
their essential features—still apply surprisingly well to the new genre of
autobiographical graphic novels as well as to purely textual autobiographies.
I would classify Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, for example, as an oratorical
autobiography, whose purpose is to show how her life has been shaped by
political and religious forces beyond her control. Even her style of black-
and-white drawing and panels rendered in more or less standard sizes and


 ste ph e n e. ta b a c h nic k

the ever-presence of her black veil in the Iranian sequences make this point
by showing the constriction against which she rebels. Harvey Pekar’s Amer-
ican Splendor, on the other hand, strikes me as a dramatic autobiography,
because we see Pekar’s Pekar character thrust into a variety of completely
different roles—VA hospital worker, writer, TV show guest, young man,
college student, divorced man, married man, cancer patient—in which he
must try to prove himself. His work is essentially an exploration of how his
pessimistic, dour, and yet secretly empathetic character fares in a series
of new and usually troublesome roles. The fact that he is drawn differently
by different artists fits the dramatic autobiographical category in that he not
only adopts a new role but also a new look in almost every installment of his
ongoing autobiography. The Crumb character in Robert Crumb’s various
works featuring himself, on the other hand, is so quirky and neurotic—right
down to the tense lines that constitute his face in his self-portrait—that
we never quite learn what makes him tick, despite all of Crumb’s attempts
to show us his dissatisfaction with the world and his sexual obsessions.
Crumb does not understand the reasons for his strange obsessions and so
cannot explain them to us. His is clearly a poetic autobiography.
Still, there is some overlap between Howarth’s three categories, which
are far from mutually exclusive. Like an oratorical autobiographer, Crumb
sometimes takes an ideological position, such as his antifeminist view. And
Pekar and Satrapi both have something of the poetic autobiographer in
them, including Pekar’s unending neuroticism and Satrapi’s temporary loss
of direction while in Vienna as a teenager. But neither Pekar nor Satrapi
projects Crumb’s sense of being permanently lost and in constant search for
himself, despite his occasional semi-ideological vehemence.
While agreeing that David Beauchard’s book Epileptic, too, has some
elements of all three of Howarth’s categories, I believe that it belongs to a
fourth category that I would add to Howarth’s basic three—a category I
would term the autobiography of discovery. This is the autobiography in
which different aspects of belief and of the self are explored in each epi-
sode, but only after enormous travail does the authentic belief (the one most
suitable for the situation of the autobiographer) emerge, along with an
understanding of the self. At each stage of his life, David is stymied by his
inability to find a way to cope with his feelings about his brother, Jean-
Christophe, against whom he constantly and obsessively defines himself.
Because Jean-Christophe’s malady, epilepsy or haut mal in French, is as
mysterious in its origins and course as it is chronic, David’s attempt to find
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic 

a way to deal with his feelings about it is very difficult. Published from 
to  in six volumes in France, Epileptic has as its original title l’Ascension
du haut mal (The ascent of the high malady), and in several places in the
volume—as on page  (see fig. .)—Beauchard portrays himself and his
family attempting to climb up a mountain that seems as vast as an ocean
compared to the tiny size of the human figures struggling to conquer it.
So David struggles on, and until the volume’s seven-page epilogue, the
reader has no inkling as to what the conclusion will be. At every stage of his
life, David must confront powerful feelings and false beliefs imposed in part
by his parents, which derail him from knowing who he really is. Only at the
very end of the book, after discarding the mistaken beliefs, does he find
the authentic belief that suits his struggle and therefore gives him spiritual
direction for the rest of his life. In other words, Beauchard as a discovery
autobiographer recapitulates thirty years of error and struggle without im-
posing a retrospective view, while Satrapi, for instance, as an oratorical
autobiographer, highlights from the beginning to the end of her work the
constrictions against which she rebelled all of her life, as well as the neces-
sity for that rebellion. Her point throughout is that tyranny, if resisted from
the start, can be overcome; Beauchard’s point, seen only at the very end, is
that while psychological and spiritual obstacles can be defeated, such an
outcome is far from certain.
Beauchard does include at least two retrospective moments in his book,
when he shows himself reacting to his mother’s negative comments about
his portrayal of her great-grandmother as an alcoholic (–) and when
he shows his sister agreeing with him about how he has portrayed him-
self and her (–). But these two incidents are included only because
Beauchard wants us to know that he is telling an accurate, honest story by
showing his mother and sister verifying parts of it. The incidents themselves
take place as the story unfolds, and however much they push us back for a
moment from our involvement in the story itself by making us very aware
that we are reading a constructed work, they do not impose a retrospective
view on the book.
Beauchard’s best method of truth confirmation, however, lies not in these
retrospective incidents but in his detailed description of the strange events
in the life of his family caused by his brother’s illness, of how those incidents
were sometimes viewed by onlookers as well as by family members, and of
his own disturbing thoughts about this situation. All of the incidents and
thoughts are so unusual and, at the same time, so precisely rendered in both
figure . Beauchard portrays the
struggle against epilepsy as the ascent
of an impossibly high mountain. From
Epileptic (p. ) by David B., translated
by Kim Thompson, copyright © 
by L’Association, Paris, France. Used by
permission of Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc.
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic 

words and drawings as to convince us of the near-impossibility of his having

invented them. But at the same time that we invoke the convincingly truth-
ful quality of Beauchard’s work, we must also duly note the caveats that apply
to all autobiographies as discussed by, among others, Leigh Gilmore. These
include the possible fallibility of memory, especially with regard to trau-
matic circumstances, and the autobiographer’s need to tell an orderly story
about what might have been, in reality, chaotic life events. In other words,
although Epileptic seems to be as truthful as an autobiography can be and
includes the visual component lacking in a purely textual work and which
ultimately contributes to our feeling of the work’s truthfulness (because see-
ing is believing to some extent), we must always be aware that things might
not be exactly as they are depicted.
The book, after all, is populated with psychological dragons, goblins, and
spirits. As Andrew Arnold puts it, Beauchard “visualizes the invisible.” Most
of these spirits represent epilepsy or the imagined creatures that David asso-
ciates with quack cures for the disease. Though frightening, some are also
benevolent, allowing David to openly discuss his fears, worries, and embar-
rassments concerning his brother. Beauchard also gives us many disturbing
dreams that he never explains to us; they are part of his difficult process of
self-discovery. Although they are sometimes delineated with titles when he
begins to recount them, the dreams are drawn in the same way as the rest of
the text and always fade right back into that text, making it difficult for the
reader to separate dreams and reality (see, for instance, ). This structural
lack of distinction between dreams and reality is also reproduced by what
Andrew Wilson sees as Beauchard’s “quivering, quavering” drawing line,
which captures his shaky psychological world, in which nothing is definite
and the enemy is invisible. Although the book Epileptic itself, at  pages,
is a very solid, physical object, it vibrates with activity inside its covers in the
form of strife-filled, crowded, and dynamic yet shadowy panels. From the
time Jean-Christophe’s illness becomes manifest, when he is eleven years
old and David is nine, David needs to find a way of dealing with his feelings
about it. But in keeping with the structure of the autobiography of discov-
ery—which itself might be called quivering and quavering as it moves back
and forth in psychological waves—he does not find such a perspective until
the epilogue, floundering in the darkness of monsters and dreams for most
of the book and the thirty years of anguish that it encapsulates.
There is no other autobiography quite like Epileptic because of Beauchard’s
ability to meld realism and dream. But Nikolai Maslov’s graphic novel Siberia,
 ste ph e n e. ta b a c h nic k

about the conflicts besetting him as he attempts to move beyond his peas-
ant upbringing to life as an artist in Moscow—an effort that eventually leads
him into a mental institution—demonstrates that an autobiography of dis-
covery can be rendered in a naturalistic style. We follow his struggle with-
out retrospection, until he finally arrives at the understanding that “what
you have to look for in life is truth and kindness. . . . Otherwise, what’s life
for?” (), which says what Beauchard ends up saying in different words.
Craig Thompson’s Blankets, explicating his difficult personal struggle from
rebellion against Christian fundamentalism and a love affair to some recon-
ciliation with Christian principles, stylistically occupies a middle ground
between Maslov’s naturalism and Beauchard’s quivering dreaminess, depict-
ing Thompson’s life struggle over many years. There are more retrospective
moments than in Maslov or Beauchard, but Blankets, too, is an autobiogra-
phy of discovery because as we traverse many twists and turns, we have no
idea until the very end where Thompson will land philosophically.
As Beauchard’s invisible-become-visible monsters and the prevalence of
dreams inform us, the differences between a purely textual prose memoir
and an autobiographical graphic novel become obvious as we read his (as
well as Maslov’s and Thompson’s) work. We do not need long prose descrip-
tions of how a seizure actually looks, because in Epileptic we see seizures
in the form of his brother’s face and posture, beginning with the middle
panel at the top of page . We do not need to be told very much about
the psychological ghosts, goblins, and birdlike creatures who appear to
David throughout the autobiography, because they show themselves and
sometimes speak, as on page , where they look like a cat, a skull, and a
bearded, black-coated man who seems to be the caricature of an anar-
chist in an old political cartoon (see fig. .). Strange and haunting as these
imagined creatures are, they fit seamlessly into David’s woodcut-like black-
and-white depiction of reality, which is, according to Beauchard, largely
inspired by German expressionist artist Georg Grosz (Arnold, “Metaphori-
cally Speaking”). They can be seen, like actors, as dramatic elements within
this autobiography of discovery. They show us how much a part of his life his
brother’s seizures and these creatures became. But while they are portrayed
in black and white and appear in standard square or rectangular panels of
varying size throughout most of the work, the reason for the seizures and
the imaginary creatures is anything but “black and white.” Unlike most char-
acters in a play, they remain disturbing because we can never fully under-
stand them.
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic 

Although Jean-Christophe’s life is recapitulated, the emphasis is clearly

on David’s and his parents’ reactions as Jean-Christophe goes from insti-
tution to institution, each time returning with an even-more-skewed view
of the world and a more difficult relationship with his family than before.
We never see what Jean-Christophe sees when he seems to be transported
to another world during a seizure. Although David does not penetrate
Jean-Christophe’s mind, we do see Jean-Christophe from the outside. Jean-
Christophe deteriorates physically from  when he is a normal-looking
child at the age of seven () to an apple-shaped man thirty-seven years old
in  with a blank stare and a bald spot on his head from the multiple
times he has fallen during his seizures (). David portrays Jean-Christophe’s
disease as a lizardlike dragon, not only enfolding, but penetrating the center
of his body, as on page . Of all of the creatures appearing in Epileptic, this
is the most frightening because this is the monster that not only David’s
parents but also he and his sister must cope with psychologically over a span
of thirty years. David tries to do this in three ways, each of which becomes
a gateway to the ultimate discovery of his true self even as it fails to resolve
his problems with his brother.
First, he tries to cope by drawing battle scenes and withdrawing into him-
self, thus covering himself in psychological armor as a protection against
the difficult truth that his brother’s condition is incurable and that this

figure . Some of Beauchard’s imaginary friends and confidants who help him
cope with his brother’s disease. From Epileptic (p. ) by David B., translated by
Kim Thompson, copyright ©  by L’Association, Paris, France. Used by
permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
 ste ph e n e. ta b a c h nic k

terrible punishment has been inflicted on his family for no reason. On page
, David tells his mother that in trying to fight Jean-Christophe’s disease
she endured a battle just like that of their relatives who went to war. Hence
his obsession with drawing war scenes and himself in armor.
Second, he tries to deal with the situation by becoming a party, however
unwilling, to the false cures and quack, cultish beliefs to which his mother
and father subject the family in a desperate attempt to help his brother.
While the parents’ desire to help their son is admirable, they are so pre-
occupied with that desire that they neglect the often-negative psychological
effect of this “help” on the other two siblings. David and his sister as well as
his brother are expected to put aside their skepticism in the hope that these
cures will work. But all too often, the so-called healers (including the med-
ical doctors) put their own egotism ahead of the patient and have no real
help to offer. Disappointment is always the result, but even these difficult
experiences prove valuable to David the artist. Like the scenes of battle he
draws, they develop his imagination and provide him with complex subjects.
Third, he tries to escape the situation by identifying himself with the Jews,
even changing his first name to David and going with a Jewish girlfriend.
This identification can be likened to a religious conversion. Although it does
not last except for his change of his given name from Pierre-François to
David, it eventually leads him toward an unconditional love of his brother,
a loss of egotism, and acceptance of the world. In contrast to the battles
he used to draw and the egotism of the people in the medical community,
the communes, and the cult organizations, this final direction involves put-
ting the love of another above himself. Thus the book really tells the story of
David’s conversion to a secular religion of selflessness.
Each of these three means of dealing with his brother’s condition has both
negative and positive results in helping him move toward a new philosoph-
ical outlook; each, therefore, is essential to his self-discovery process. Gil-
more’s formulation about autobiographies based on trauma, “the knowing
subject works with dissonant materials, fragmented by trauma, and organ-
izes them into a form of knowledge” (), fits Beauchard’s means of coping
and their final result—knowledge about the self and the other. For him, each
of these coping strategies becomes a way of knowing.
Let’s look at these ways of knowing in more detail, beginning with the
battle drawings. Most boys like to play war games, and David and his
brother are no exceptions. They fight with one another (), have rock fights
with other kids (), and make drawings of war scenes as a logical follow-up
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic 

to these activities (). Moreover, war is an inescapable part of the his-

torical landscape, as David shows by portraying many wars of the past and
present, some of which involved his own relatives. David’s father does not
like war, but he tells stories of biblical battles; David’s mother, similarly
pacific, tells him of the conquest of Mexico by Cortes (), as well as stories
of his great-grandfather’s military service against the Tonkinese (). She
reads the children passages from Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff (), which
produces in David a desire to draw the Tartars at war, while his reading
about Marco Polo leads him to an admiration of Genghis Khan. The 
riots in Paris interest him too (). At first all of this is a relatively innocent,
boyish interest in a world in turmoil as it were. But as early as page , David
admits that he expends his rage over his brother’s illness in war drawings.
That is also around the time when David discovers that his mother’s father
took part in World War I, leading to a brilliant six-page section recounting
his grandfather’s role.
These pages (and others) were influenced, according to Beauchard, by
French artist Jacques Tardi, famous for his World War I comics, and Ital-
ian Hugo Pratt, the creator of the adventure hero Corto Maltese (Arnold,
“Metaphorically Speaking”). Drawn in a relatively realistic style, they lack
the imaginary creatures that ordinarily populate David’s volume. These
pages do not focus on the big battles or hand-to-hand bayonet fighting that
young David wants to hear about. Rather, they center on his grandfather’s
eyewitness account of the unheroic dimension of war. However realistic in
their presentation, these historical episodes are essentially metaphoric rep-
resentations of the family’s war with Jean-Christophe’s disease and the world
that views Jean-Christophe as a monster because of it. Leigh Gilmore states
that autobiographies discussing trauma are often concerned with “the inter-
penetration of the personal and the public” (). In the World War I scenes
in Beauchard’s autobiography, history and personal history come together
in a brilliant whole. Because these scenes occur early in the narrative, they
set up personal themes that will develop in the rest of the book. Here, re-
versing Arnold’s formulation about the scenes depicting David’s thought-
monsters, Beauchard makes the visible invisible by portraying only the war
scenes, leaving it to the reader to make the precise connection between
those scenes and the family’s situation. Yet the connection between the pub-
lic and the personal is always implied; clues to the personal allegory are
David’s statements on pages – that, regardless of the apparent subject
of his work, he was always writing (and drawing) about Jean-Christophe.
 ste ph e n e. ta b a c h nic k

As retold by David’s mother, the stories are unpleasant, each in its own
way, and they imply that life itself is war. At first the trenches were too shal-
low and head wounds were common. David’s drawing shows an average-
looking soldier getting such a wound as he casually smokes a pipe (). A
strictly allegorical reading of David’s situation is made available in this por-
trayal as David too can be seen as a type of casual victim, surprised by the
onset of his brother’s epilepsy. When the soldiers dug the trenches deeper
to avoid head wounds, the depth made the trenches hospitable to rats. The
allegorical association: although David and his family try all kinds of defenses,
such as the cultic cures, most only lead to more trouble. David’s grandfather
was hungry, cold, and scared. He did not like being far away from home, and
the relevant illustration shows the shell-pocked no-man’s-land looking like
the surface of the moon (). David too is adrift in a disorienting psycho-
logical space in the battle against his brother’s illness. His grandfather was
scared to sleep in a “shelter” because early on a shell destroyed such a shel-
ter and from the outside he had to listen to his wounded friends’ cries for
help and screams. To avoid this, he always slept in the open trench (–).
From this incident, the reader, too, learns that there was no safety, espe-
cially in the place that seemed to be particularly safe. That insight applies to
David’s struggle, where his family, instead of being a safe haven, is actually
the site of the disturbances. In another incident, David’s grandfather watches
one of his cousins, whose whole lower body had been blown away by a bomb,
die in the course of a night. David then produces a caring, gentle letter by
the cousin who was killed (–). This shows the arbitrary nature of the
war, which produces casualties among the best as well as the worst human
beings. Similarly, Jean-Christophe’s family must watch helplessly as he dies
little by little owing to his seizures, which they cannot control and which he
has done nothing to deserve.
David’s grandfather was happy when he returned to the front and was
lodged for a short time in an abandoned house where for once he slept in a
bed with sheets. But the other soldiers didn’t care about that at all. They
were more interested in looting the house and passing the time by voiding
themselves in books, snapping them shut, and then wiping their behinds
on bedsheets () (see fig. .). Here we see the gratuitous contempt for
civilization that is often the result of any war. The Hindu soldiers in the next
trench might not have smelled good, according to his grandfather (), but
he does not see them engaging in any such activities, which puts a dent in
the felt cultural superiority of the West. David will soon watch how many
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic 

members of the macrobiotic communes defecate, as it were, all over the

selfless and civilized principles of the community and its curative regimen
by hypocritically practicing a holier-than-thou egotism and a desire to dom-
inate the other members of the commune, attitudes that once again leave
David and his family emotionally defenseless against his brother’s epilepsy.
David’s mother also recounts her father’s unwilling presence during an
ambush of German soldiers by a bunch of French roughnecks, who cut their
throats at night, not to win the war, but to loot their bodies (–). Mur-
der, the lack of honor, contempt for civilization, a brutal and arbitrary death
devoid of any logic, and robbery do not deter David from his war drawings
because these things perfectly suit the rage and helplessness he feels about
his brother’s illness. His drawings are a necessary way station on his path
to the final discovery that war does not, in fact, represent his true self, and
that life need not be a war. At the same time, the reader learns from these
drawings just how much David’s struggle at this point resembles a war, with
more ugly than heroic incidents.
World War II is less rich in stories because only David’s father’s father
took part in it, and he was discharged when the war ended soon after he was
drafted (). The Algerian conflict proves more fruitful for David’s imagina-
tion. David the boy is again looking for bravery and honor but instead learns

figure . French soldiers during World War I engage in a game that shows their
contempt for civilization. From Epileptic (p. ) by David B., translated by Kim
Thompson, copyright ©  by L’Association, Paris, France. Used by permission of
Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
 ste ph e n e. ta b a c h nic k

only of how some of the troops enjoyed torturing people for the pleasure
of it (). Because of these unpleasant stories, war itself may have lost its
childish appeal for David, but he goes on obsessively drawing it nonetheless
as a release for his feelings. David even portrays himself as a samurai in
armor, which indicates his psychological self-protection against all of the
false ideas to which he is exposed in the macrobiotic communes. As Eliza-
beth Rosen perceptively points out (“The Narrative Interaction of Image
and Text,” ), even the panel border in which David appears in armor looks
like a battlement crenellation (), revealing once again Beauchard’s visual
ingenuity and imagination in this book. (And Jean-Christophe suffers a
seizure while visiting the Swiss Castle of Chillon, whose battlements prove
of no effect against the siege of epilepsy.)
But on page  David sees a picture from the Holocaust in a history
of World War II and makes a connection between it and the massacres of
Genghis Khan that he previously loved to draw. He has identified with the
Jews by taking the name David just a while before this, and by pages –
, he writes, “I give up, I relinquish my bow and my arrows, and my armor.
It’s not what I want anymore.” However, although the violence of his draw-
ings may have abated, his strong reaction to his brother has not: he admits
at one point that he would like to kill him (). Their conflict continues
throughout the book until the epilogue.
The family’s second method of coping, or attempting to cope, with Jean-
Christophe’s epilepsy is the false cures: macrobiotics, spiritualism, magnet-
ism, Rosicrucianism, Swedenborgianism, Kabbalah, the tarot, Steinerism,
and the Arica group. Each “cure” proves to be a mistake that does not lead
his brother to health or David and his family to peace, but which none-
theless provokes an advance in David’s skeptical understanding of the
world and in his artistry. Perhaps the most influential of the cures for both
good and bad in terms of its effect on David was macrobiotics. Neither
macrobiotics commune provides him with a belief system to follow and
indeed only provokes hypocrisy in him and the other children who use
every chance they have to eat forbidden foods, but he does produce some
wonderful caricatures of power-hungry and unbalanced individuals, includ-
ing one participant who wants half his head and beard shaven, so people
don’t know what to make of him (, ). Without the communes, David
would not have had the experience of meeting such individuals and later
drawing them. The proof that he has not received any spiritual benefit
from being in the communes is that he wants to do violence to the “apostles
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic 

of inner peace” who criticize his brother () as well as to his brother
himself (–).
From pages  through  he tells us about his experience with spiri-
tualism and the theory of reincarnation. From this experience all David
learns is that he has more to fear from adults (), like Madame B, the wife
of a pastor to whom the mystical writer Raymond Abellio (real name George
Soulès) referred them, than from spirits. David’s sister Florence, however,
is too young and ill-prepared to protect herself against being affected by
the spiritualist’s accounts of the sad lives that she has supposedly previously
led, and she tries to kill herself. David’s picture of her lying on her bed ()
facing a skeleton seems almost normal to the reader, because nearly every
page of the story is populated with skeletons and goblins. But by page ,
David calls the séances “bullshit.” While David’s psychological armor and
skepticism—although criticized by his father ()—fortunately protect him
from belief in the nonsense that the spiritualist is spouting, he becomes a
nihilist. He remains in need of something that he can believe in to get him-
self through life. Hence his attraction to Jews, which is his third attempted
method of coping with his brother’s impact on the family and of trying to
discover another true self.
On page , after David declares that he no longer believes in anything,
he slowly begins to identify with the Jews, although he knows nothing about
them (). His paternal grandfather’s anti-Semitism () and his brother’s
flirtation with Hitler (, , , ) help lead him to this identifica-
tion. The later failure of his father’s Catholicism in the form of Lourdes and
exorcism (, ) to cure his brother also helps spur this unlikely identi-
fication. But his main motivation, as we see on page , is to “stake out a
position.” Instead of admiring his past hero Genghis Khan, who caused suf-
fering (), he realizes that he is more like a victim of Genghis Khan. His
attraction to the Jews does not pretend to be a cure for anything but rather
provides a group of people with whom he feels he can identify for both neg-
ative and positive reasons. Like them during the Holocaust, he feels power-
less, but he finds a positive attraction after his mother’s praise of Marcel
Proust () because he feels himself an artist, too.
Moreover, perhaps as a way of trying to escape from his association with
his brother, he not only changes his name to David () but also begins
a romance with a Jewish girl and lives in a Jewish area of Paris. But his
involvement with this girl, Helene, and their decision to try to have a child,
instead of insulating him from his brother’s problem, actually reinforces
 ste ph e n e. ta b a c h nic k

his feeling of involvement in it. She wants to know if epilepsy is heredi-

tary (), upsetting his parents and other relatives by making them feel that
they are dealing with a family curse. She and David are reassured that the
disease is not hereditary, but David’s sperm it turns out is bifurcated and
unable to produce a baby. Although this has nothing to do with his brother’s
epilepsy, David feels abnormal and ill, and he draws his brother’s face as
the second face on his bifurcated sperm (), revealing a painful sense of
identity with him. He and his girlfriend eventually split up, and his Jewish
identification comes to a dead end. Only David’s hand in the founding of
L’Association, a famous and still-extant association of comics artists, and the
publication of the first volume of Epileptic keep him from feelings of com-
plete despair (–). Yet his flirtation with the Jews has long-lasting effects,
as evidenced by the fact that he retains the name David, and he emerges
from this experience of many years with more sympathy for his brother.
After very difficult and unusual rites of passage including his obsessive
drawing of war, the experiences associated with the false cures, and his
Jewish identification, as well as a series of dreams, all of which reveal David’s
anxiety about his need to be loved by his brother and his family, David even-
tually arrives at the secular religion that works for him. The various cop-
ing strategies have failed to help him resolve his problem with his brother,
but each has successfully moved him forward on his journey toward ever
truer selves. At the very end of the book—or even after the end, if the
epilogue can be considered as coming after the book proper—he arrives at
the understanding that the way to the realization of the true self is by means
of abdication of the self, as Portuguese poet Ferdinand Pessoa, whom he
quotes, puts it—“Abdicate and be your own King” ().
What does this mean? We know from Christian sources that one must
lose oneself to find oneself. In Beauchard’s case, Pessoa’s statement means
that David has been able to find the true self, that is, the inner person who
brings him peace, not by egotistically claiming that he is a genius (), or
by mistakenly thinking that he is a paragon of health, or by rejecting his
epileptic brother as inferior, but by recognizing his own vulnerabilities and
identifying with Jean-Christophe as he in fact is. This also means accepting
the impossibility of ever curing his brother’s illness and acknowledging the
gift, rather than the liability, that his parents, his brother, and his brother’s
situation have bestowed on him by helping him become an artist and a
mature man rather than a petulant child kicking against life’s injustices. He
understands that his brother’s situation has forced him to create this book
 Autobiography as Discovery in Epileptic 

and by means of it to attain love for his sibling and to realize his own true
self in the process.
In these last pages, he talks frankly to his brother, both riding horses as
they did in their imaginary war games when young, and which are now sym-
bolic of their progress as warriors of the spirit. David admits that he fears
war and drew it because he could see life only as a series of confrontations.
He also realizes that when he created literature and art, he was in fact always
discussing his brother’s illness regardless of the apparent subject of his work
(–).
On the final page of the book, David smiles as he shows his own face
becoming identical with that of his brother (). David has grown beyond
his old, egotistical self, which desired the completely exclusive love of his par-
ents and which wanted Jean-Christophe to be exactly as David wanted him to
be, that is, heroic, rather than as he truly was, sick and sedated. David’s final
belief, then, is a belief in unselfish love and acceptance of his situation. He has
discovered that, while he cannot cure his brother’s epilepsy, he can cure him-
self spiritually. He has become what Leigh Gilmore calls the “knowing self,”
who presents us with painfully hard-won and very useful knowledge. Because
this is a graphic autobiography, this is knowledge that we can see—the drag-
ons that David must vanquish throughout the work and his happy, knowing
face at the end, as well as his brother’s bloated and obviously sick shape.
And this growth into love is not David Beauchard’s only triumph. In the
process of writing and drawing Epileptic, Beauchard may also have con-
tributed to the creation of a new autobiographical subgenre, one in which
the autobiographer discovers what he believes in and who he really is over
the course of the autobiography itself, all the while painfully forcing the
reader to see and even feel what he experienced with no inkling of how it all
might end, until it truly does.

works cited
Arnold, Andrew D. “Metaphorically Speaking: TIME.com talks to David B., author of
‘Epileptic.’” Time, January , . http://www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/
article/,,,.html.
B[eauchard], David. Epileptic. New York: Pantheon, .
Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, .
Howarth, William L. “Some Principles of Autobiography.” New Literary History (Win-
ter ): –.
Maslov, Nikolai. Siberia. New York: Soft Skull Press, .
 ste ph e n e. ta b a c h nic k

Rosen, Elizabeth. “The Narrative Interaction of Image and Text: Teaching Panel Frames
in Comics” In Teaching the Graphic Novel, ed. Stephen Tabachnick, –. New
York: Modern Language Association, .
Thompson, Craig. Blankets. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, .
Wilson, Andrew. “My Likeness, My Brother.” Christianity Today: Books and Culture.
March , . http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives//
march/.html.
 

Manga and the End of

Japan’s s
ja me s d o r se y

The year  was a very good one for Japanese manga artist Urasawa Naoki.
It brought not only the publication of the final volume of Pluto, his eight-
part, award-winning manga based on a story arc found in Astro Boy (by the
grandfather of modern manga Tezuka Osamu), but also the release of the
final installment of the film trilogy based on his twenty-four-volume th
Century Boys (–).1 That series represents something of an aberra-
tion in the oeuvre of this manga artist. While much of his work is entirely
fictional, featuring non-Japanese characters adventuring in foreign locales,
th Century Boys is semiautobiographical and intricately intertwined with
the real-world history of postwar Japan and Urasawa’s generation. Born
in , Urasawa witnessed as a child the rise and fall of an ideologically
motivated and politically committed subculture, coming of age just as that
subculture collapsed. By reading this history and its consequences in the
disjunctures and omissions in th Century Boys, one can identify how that
generation’s experience moved Japanese manga in the direction of fantasy
and science fiction and away from gritty realism and sustained autobio-
graphical exploration.
While the narrative time line is complex and the subplots numerous, the
characters and overall theme of th Century Boys are both defined by the
tale’s point of origin in the late s and early s. It is during the sum-
mer of  that protagonist Endō Kenji and his fellow nine-year-olds
playfully imagine in their secret hideout a doomsday scenario in which only
they can save the world. Their innocence and idealism begin to crumble,
however, as neighborhood bullies destroy the hideout and more concrete
concerns such as homework press in on them. The summer of  further


 ja me s d o r se y

distracts them from their dream of saving the world: it is the year of the
Osaka Expo, the first World’s Fair ever held in Asia. Though none of the
friends is able to actually attend, its theme of “progress and harmony for
humankind” fuses national pride with the youngsters’ dreams of a glori-
ous, technologically advanced future. In the year  Kenji, now in middle
school, forcibly occupies the broadcasting room, ties up the girl in charge
of lunchtime music, and replaces her easy-listening music with rock-and-
roll legend T. Rex’s “Twentieth Century Boy.” It is the first time for rock to
resonate in the school corridors, and Kenji is certain that “something will
change.” Much to his chagrin, his classmates are indifferent. Kenji doggedly
continues his pursuit of fame as a rock musician until his late twenties,
when harsh realities set in. He turns the family sake shop into a convenience
store, dons his smock, and puts away his guitar. It is only when the children’s
doomsday scenario begins to play out in the real world under the direc-
tion of a mysterious religious figure known only as “the Friend” that Kenji
retrieves that guitar and, eventually, saves himself and thousands with his
music.
This point of origin for the narrative and its hero Kenji is also the touch-
stone for the artist Urasawa. Kenji’s guerilla tactics to bring rock into the
school are based on Urasawa’s own antics as a student, and, like Kenji, Ura-
sawa played guitar in bands throughout his schooling.2 Even Kenji’s eventual
return to the guitar in middle age has echoes in Urasawa’s life. In 
Urasawa released his first music CD, titled “Half Century Man,” and he has
performed songs from that album live at the famous Shinjuku Loft. Both
Urasawa’s personal history and the manga’s point of origin reflect the cen-
tral role played by music in the idealistic counterculture of the late s
and early s. The name Endō Kenji, in fact, belongs originally to a singer
of that generation. However, while Endō and singers like him (Takaishi
Tomoya and Okabayashi Nobuyasu, for example) inspired a subculture that
grappled with social issues such as day laborer conditions, outcast (buraku-
min) rights, and Japan’s support for the war in Vietnam, the progressive
social agendas they supported collapsed around . The crowds of up to
, people that gathered on Sundays to debate and listen to political folk
in the plaza on the west side of Shinjuku station were deemed a threat to
public order, and in June  the riot police were deployed to clear the area
and ensure that the people no longer gathered there. The massive public
demonstrations opposing the renewal of the U.S.–Japan Joint Security Treaty
(Ampō) were ignored, and in  Japan renewed its commitment to host
 Manga and the End of Japan’s s 

U.S. military bases across the archipelago as well as to settle itself once again
snugly under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The most violent and tragic inci-
dents in the demise of this idealistic campaign to remake Japan were those
involving the Japanese Red Army, which imploded sensationally by first
lynching members deemed ideologically misinformed in February  and
then losing its nationally televised standoff with the authorities at the Asama
Mountain Lodge later that same year.
The swift and tragic collapse of this movement remains a traumatic
memory for that generation. Though born eight or nine years too late to be
fully a part of it, as a child Urasawa witnessed its unraveling. It is not sur-
prising, then, that as the narrative in th Century Boys reaches the years
in which that progressive subculture, driven by its charismatic singers, dis-
sipates, a sort of cultural amnesia takes hold even as the hero remains. The
collapse too painful to explore, Urasawa moves quickly from autobiography
to science fiction inspired by real-world events. His depiction of a religious
cult pursuing germ warfare is surely inspired by the  Aum Shinrikyo
release of deadly sarin gas on five Tokyo subways. His portrayal of Tokyo’s
Shinjuku district as a dystopia plagued by foreign gang warfare bears a strik-
ing resemblance to the picture painted by xenophobic Tokyo Major Ishihara
Shintarō. Urasawa’s tale also conspicuously features the virtual realities of
computer games: the religious cult uses them for brainwashing, and Kenji
employs one to travel back in time to right the wrong that plunged the world
into chaos. The manga’s ambivalence toward the potentials of the media
reflects Japan’s concern that this pillar of the Japanese economy (the game
industry) might ultimately undermine its youth’s ability to deal with the
harsh realities of life.
The cultural amnesia resulting from the trauma of that subculture’s de-
mise has altered the world of Japanese manga. As Japan moved deeper into
the s, it consoled itself by enthusiastically embracing the national iden-
tity offered by the Osaka Expo: a vision of “progress and harmony for
humankind” in which national pride was fused with the glorious technology
on display in those shiny pavilions. In this conception of the nation, there
was little room for that alternative lineage of manga, the gekiga, or “dramatic
drawings.” The label was coined in  by artist Tatsumi Yoshihiro to dis-
tinguish this genre, favoring a gritty realism and dark story lines, from that
inspired by Tezuka Osamu. Its artists included Tsuge Yoshiharu, Tatsumi
Yoshihiro, Ikegami Ryōichi, Mizuki Shigeru, Chiba Tetsuya, Yamagami Tat-
suhiko, and Shirato Sanpei. Though not necessarily in autobiographical
 ja me s d o r se y

modes, these manga artists worked in more realistic modes or grappled with
political and social issues in ways that “Tezuka’s children” did not. Urasawa
and virtually all manga artists today must be counted among those children,
and in th Century Boys we see how the trauma of witnessing the collapse
of the idealism of the s and early s pushed him and his generation
away from the realism and political engagement of that moment and toward
the Tezuka-like vision of the Osaka Expo with its presentation of the future
as a matter of technology.
notes
1. Strictly speaking the series th Century Boys is twenty-two volumes long. The
final two volumes, which serve as a sort of postscript, are titled st Century Boys. Here
I treat both titles as a single entity.
2. For biographical information on Urasawa, see Urasawa Naoki tokuhon, a spe-
cial edition of Casa Brutus (Tokyo: Magazine House, ), particularly Akune Sawako’s
“Urasawa Naoki rongu intabyuu:  seiki wa yume ka kyōki ka?” (A Long Interview
with Urasawa Naoki: Was the Twentieth Century a Dream or a Bout of Madness?),
–.

works cited
Hijiki Tatsuto, ed. Urasawa Naoki tokuhon. Special edition of Casa Brutus. Tokyo:
Magazine House, .
Sharon Kinsella. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, .
Tsuji Shun’ichirō. Fooku songu undō: nenme no sōkatsu. Tokyo: Shinpūsha, .
Urasawa Naoki. th Seiki Shōnen.  vols. Tokyo: Shōgakukan, –.
———. st Seiki Shōnen.  vols. Tokyo: Shōgakukan, .
 part iii

Visualizing Women’s Life Writing

 

Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies

of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
julia watson

Gillian Whitlock has observed the “potential of comics to open up new and
troubled spaces” (“Autographics,” ). Alison Bechdel’s autographic memoir
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic () is such a text, a provocative explo-
ration of sexuality, gendered relations in the American family, and Modern-
ist versions of what she calls “erotic truth” (). It both enacts and reflects
on processes of autobiographical storytelling and exploits the differences of
autographic inscription in the art of cartooning. Bechdel is a well-known
American feminist cartoonist who for over two decades has published the
politically savvy lesbian-feminist syndicated comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out
For.”1 In taking up the graphic memoir form, she composes Fun Home in seven
extended chapters that are beautifully drawn in black line art and gray-green
ink wash. It is a dazzlingly and dauntingly complex set of interconnected life
stories, modes of print text, and panoply of visual styles. A memoir about
memoirs, memory, and acts of storytelling, Fun Home is at all times an ironic
and self-conscious life narrative. It hovers between the genres of tragedy
and comedy, as its subtitle “A Family Tragicomic” asserts, and its project of
affirming the family despite and because of her father’s history avows.
Fun Home’s title refers to the family’s midcentury funeral home in the
small town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, near the Allegheny front, where
Alison is the eldest child and only daughter in a family with three children.
Their father Bruce is the funeral home’s director and mortician; additionally,
both parents teach high school English. “Fun Home” as a concept also evokes
a fun house of mirrors, which the family’s restored Gothic Revival home
proves to be as a psychic incubator for Alison’s story. Fun Home reworks this
experience in an autobiographical act of retrospective interpretation that


 julia watson

is multiply embedded: in the familial network of other lives; in the psychic

pull of deep identifications around gender and sexuality; in the commingling
of literary and popular identity discourses that intersect in particular ways
at a given historical moment; and in the interplay of views on and views of
the artist-maker as a self-construction always in process, in the reflexive
exchange of hand, eye, and thought. As Nancy K. Miller observes, “Autobi-
ography’s story is about the web of entanglement in which we find ourselves,
one that we sometimes choose” (“The Entangled Self,” , my emphasis). By
working on and working through several aspects of the generational, per-
sonal, psychosexual, and political entanglements of family life, Fun Home
maps new ground in life narrative.
Fun Home is, however, fundamentally different from verbal autobiography.
By engaging with and drawing a range of visual forms, Bechdel emphasizes
that cartoon representation, as a genuinely hybrid form or “out-law” genre
of autobiography in Caren Kaplan’s term, is a multimodal form different
from both written life narrative and visual or photographic self-portraiture.2
At the same time it is intertextual, incorporating a wealth of Modernist lit-
erary references into comics that turns the form into a forum on the multi-
textual pastiche of contemporary culture. As a result, Fun Home invites—and
requires—readers to read differently, to attend to disjunctions between the
cartoon panel and the verbal text, to disrupt the seeming forward motion of
the cartoon sequence and adopt a reflexive and recursive reading practice.
As Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven argue, “comics is constituted in
verbal and visual narratives that do not merely synthesize. . . . The medium
of comics is cross-discursive because it is composed of verbal and visual
narratives that . . . remain distinct” (“Introduction: Graphic Narrative,” ).3
Gillian Whitlock has coined the term “autographics” to call attention to the
representational strategies of graphic memoirs and the vocabularies mobi-
lized by the possibilities of cartooning. Whitlock observes, “I mean to draw
attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre
of autobiography, and also to the subject positions that narrators negotiate in
and through comics” (“Autographics,” ). Fun Home’s improvisations upon
the terms of autobiography in its graphic disclosures draw on the hybrid
form of autographics to explore complex formations of gender and sexual-
ity in the modern family.
The practice of composing autobiography implies doubling the self, as
its practitioners, from Michel de Montaigne on, and critics, notably James
Olney in Metaphors of Self, have long observed. That splitting of self into
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

observer and observed is redoubled in autographics, where the dual media

of words and drawing, and their segmentation into boxes, panels, and pages,
offer multiple possibilities for interpreting experience, reworking memory,
and staging self-reflection. Whitlock has proposed the provocative term
“auto-biographical avatars” to characterize the drawn personae of cartoon-
ists in graphic memoirs, noting how their self-reflexive practices use car-
toon drawing not only as a form of self-portraiture but also to “engage with
the conventions of comics” (“Autographics,” ). The term “avatars” recalls
the new popular media of unstructured, virtual role-playing environments
such as SecondLife, where game players choose visual self-representatives
(called avatars), often quite different from themselves, to play roles and
interact in virtual space; as such, the avatar implies new possibilities for
forging identity in autographics.4
The way we read cartoons, as a pleasurable alternative to high serious-
ness, also affords occasions for reader identification with characters and sit-
uations that solicit our autobiographical intimacy. In commenting on Scott
McCloud’s argument about the cartoon as a “vacuum into which our iden-
tity and awareness are pulled,” so that instead of just observing the cartoon
“we become it” (Understanding Comics, ), Whitlock suggests how differ-
ently autobiographical practices work in this verbal-visual medium (Soft
Weapons, ). Representation of the artist’s face in particular, she observes,
may serve as an icon that elicits identifications with our own image, thereby
changing the reader-viewer experience. And this process of recognition in
cartooning assuredly resonates for the artist-autobiographer as well. As
Jared Gardner observes, “comics do open up (inevitably and necessarily) a
space for the reader to pause, between the panels, and make meaning out of
what she sees and reads” (“Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work
of Comics,” ), thereby serving as “collaborative texts between the imagi-
nation of the author/artist and the imagination of the reader who must com-
plete the narrative” (). Fun Home calls upon readers to be literate in many
kinds of texts—not only comics and Modernist literature but also feminist
history and lesbian coming-out stories, as well as many modes of the deco-
rative arts—as a sophisticated and politically impassioned community.

Notes toward a Reading—

Graphing the Split Subject of Fun Home
As a self-reflexive autographic, Fun Home’s narrative world is bisected by
“splits” of several sorts. Some are enabled by two structural principles: the
 julia watson

resonance between the autobiographical avatar Alison and her father Bruce,
as the telling of her life is shadowed by the mysteries of his; and the auto-
graphic play between the graphics of Alison’s and her family’s story inside
the comics’ frame and the ironic detachment of the discursive narrator
Bechdel’s voiceover comments in boxes above. But Bechdel’s elaborately
constructed narrative framework goes beyond notions of what a “relational
autographic” might imply. (Indeed, the notion of relational life narrative
is both too capacious and too vague, as Miller has suggested—a fuzzy con-
cept we might abandon in order to think more precisely and creatively about
how the autobiographical plays out in family stories.5) The narrative setup
of Fun Home depends on both the perception that characters occupy opposed
positions and the eventual dissolution or reversal of these apparent binar-
ies in a process that Bechdel, drawing on Marcel Proust, calls a “network of
[narrative] transversals” (Fun Home, ). To chart a way through the in-
triguing complexity of Fun Home, I want to briefly suggest several sites of
“splitting,” before going on to discuss the autographic interplay between
drawn photographs and cartoons that underwrites Bechdel’s mapping of
sexual legacies over generations. The following series may offer prospects
for further theorizing.

• The narrative is split between a solo story, Bechdel’s child narrator Alison’s
development of an “I,” and the domestic ethnography of the family, punningly
presented as both artistic and autistic (see figs. . and .).6 This “dys-
functional” unhappy family evokes a literary tradition of the modern novel,
alluded to in the copy of Anna Karenina lying on the floor on the first page
of chapter . The family’s oddity is not only experienced by young Alison, who
at age ten develops obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); it is also diagnosed
by her, in her dual role as patient and therapist, trying to parent her parents
via Dr. Spock’s famed manual Baby and Child Care. In a further conflation
of identities and intertexts, she situates her narrative as a reworking of the
Icarus-Daedalus myth, telling a story of her relationship to her father in which
the parental and child positions are complexly reversed, and the inheritor of
the parental legacy—who, in an inversion of Icarus, survives—is a woman.
• In a different sense the narrative acknowledges its origin as split between ver-
bal and visual modes of diary keeping, suggesting Bechdel’s dual aspiration to
become a writer and an artist. After Alison’s father urges her to keep a journal
when she is ten to help manage her OCD (initially on a wall calendar from a
burial vault company [Fun Home, ]), she faithfully keeps a diary for years.
figures . and . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (top: p. 
bottom; bottom: p.  bottom) by Alison Bechdel. Copyright ©  by Alison
Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. All rights reserved.
 julia watson

It is initially a noncommittal record of events, but with puberty it becomes a

site to encode discoveries about her lesbian identity, aided by library books on
coming out that open a new world to her. But the preteen notes she dutifully
jots down are gradually engulfed by the emergence and persistence of a cir-
cumflex, an upside-down “V” that marks moments of subjective doubt, as dis-
cussed in Jared Gardner’s essay “Autography’s Biography.” As Alison’s diary
drawings, like a palimpsest, come to engulf her tentative verbal narrative,
Bechdel’s story of coming to artistic consciousness is visually mapped. Fun
Home, as an autobiographical Künstlerroman, glosses James Joyce’s Portrait of
the Artist, with Stephen Dedalus as one alter ego for Alison, but it also remakes
the genre’s emphasis on forging language in the smithy of the artist’s soul by
emphasizing Alison’s fascination with the image, cartooning, and visual detail
generally as a means of both perceiving and representing her world. We might
ask how the current outpouring of comics about becoming an artist modifies
our assumptions about the Künstlerroman as the story of the growth of artis-
tic consciousness.7 As a narrative form particularly widespread among women
practitioners of the “New Comics,” the artist’s story can be reworked to tell
ethnically specific stories, as Melinda Luisa de Jesús has observed.8
• Furthermore, Fun Home, as an origin story, makes a genealogical connection
between Alison’s efforts at parental management and pleasure in visual record-
keeping and her father’s compulsive personality, shown in his archivist habits—
his elaborately decorated personal library (drawn in exquisite detail with em-
bossed wallpaper and busts of writers), his meticulous attention to personal
records, his artistic bent expressed in fastidious house-decorating and gar-
dening, and his precision as a mortician. The story of “blood” as the legacy of
character and desire, linking the artistic and the psychosexual, is thematized
as an explanatory myth that, when understood, enables Alison to incorporate
a past she initially did not understand and could have feared or despised. And
the genealogical narrative casts back speculatively through generations of her
father’s family to link land, immigration, and childhood experience to the for-
mation of subjectivity.
• Located at the “split” or juncture of disparate media, Fun Home also exploits,
through multilayered visual play, the flatness of the page by introducing three-
dimensional depth into the frame. Its dazzling textual collages of drawn objects
often interact to form a kind of metacommentary on the comic page as a site
of intertexuality. The panels, gutters, and page, as bounded and delimited visual
space, allow texturing of the two-dimensional image through collage, counter-
point, the superimposition of multiple media, and self-referential gestures
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

(such as the drawn hands holding pages that I discuss later in this chapter).
Bechdel’s rich exploitation of visual possibilities places Fun Home at an auto-
biographical interface where disparate modes of self-inscription intersect and
comment on one another.9 For example, at the start of chapter  (the bottom
of page ), a drawn cover of Albert Camus’ A Happy Death, the book her
father was reading when he died, overlaps The Express, the local newspaper
referencing the month of her father’s death. Both lie on his desk with car keys
and letters (see fig. .). A kind of still life memento mori, it refers back
to another copy of The Express at the top of the same page, dated two days
later, whose headline proclaims her father’s death after being hit by a truck.
This texturing situates the memory of the everyday in its lived density and

figure . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (p.  bottom) by Alison
Bechdel. Copyright ©  by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
 julia watson

poignancy and registers it as a visual archive.10 Fun Home is an encyclopedic

display of visual modes, from detailed topological maps and schematic charts
to drawings of notebooks, notably Alison’s diary, incised within the frame on
the page we are reading. Bechdel also adopts the tagging style of other car-
toonists occasionally as a kind of intertextual riff. For example, a frame depict-
ing the “fragrances” of Greenwich Village that the family encounters on a visit
marks the odors with seven rectangular tags, referencing Julie Doucet’s irrev-
erent style of cataloging the urban scene (My Most Secret Desire, ).
• Fun Home also provides a mirror for the reader’s own engagement and com-
plicity in its acts of self-reflection. Twice Bechdel uses near-life-sized drawings
of a hand holding a sheaf of photographs to call the readers’ attention to our
voyeuristic looking at her intimately personal acts of investigating her father’s
hidden history and her own identification with it (, ). In the last part
of this chapter I discuss her graphing of spectatorial sites as a mode of meta-
critical autographics that Whitlock, referencing McCloud, sees as offering
readers a particular kind of autobiographical identification (Soft Weapons,
) (see fig. .).
• The play with mirroring and illusion is also taken up peritextually. There is a
tension in Fun Home between its decorous cover and the graphic disclosures
inside, much as a funeral home’s display galleries mask the work done in its
back rooms—or the placid surface of small-town, middle-class, midcentury
America hid seething tensions around gender and sexuality in the family. The
book is dedicated to Bechdel’s mother (who, she acknowledges, is troubled by
its frank revelations) and two younger brothers, with the caption: “We did
have a lot of fun in spite of everything.”11 The hardback’s front cover, an elegant
color scheme of teal and silver on black, frames themes of the memoir: a close-
up drawing of a tabletop with an embossed silver tray for calling cards at a
funeral home (with cutouts on the tray’s edges revealing the contrasting
orange book binding) holds the book’s title like a card, with an endorsement
from autographic cartoonist Harvey Pekar (“She’s one of the best”) in small
white letters at the top. On the back are other early review endorsements of
the memoir, topped by a drawn photo inside an arch of the mother and three
young children standing in a frame at the other edge of the table, a kind of
funerary photo (which their father is shown taking on the bottom of page ).
The book’s end papers, featuring green-shaded white chrysanthemums on a
silvery teal background, imitate the wallpaper in the funeral home.12 By con-
trast, the book’s binding, in a vivid light orange, is a blowup of the panel
depicting each family member inside a black-edged bubble in different parts
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

of the house, in their paradoxically artistic/autistic self-focus (Fun Home,

). Thus Fun Home’s elegant presentation as an artifact invites readers inside
its decorous exterior for an encounter with its graphic—in both senses—
disclosures about life between the covers.
• Fun Home also maps the splits in cultural views and practices that character-
ized the post–World War II United States, torn between the norm of com-
pulsory heterosexuality that had long coded same-sex desire as “inversion,” a
clinical term connoting perversion and moral decadence, and a repressed,
smoldering consciousness of polymorphous sexuality that erupted in the “gay
revolution” of the late s and early ’s, with the public protests of Stone-
wall () and a flood of manifestoes and coming-out stories that comprise a
counterarchive of Modernist reading in the literary world of Fun Home.13 This
split between generations is marked in the contrast between her father’s clos-
eted homosexuality, with its elaborate denials and displacements, and Alison’s
coming-of-age story of discovering her own sexuality, awakened in early child-
hood by the sight of a “butch” woman and emerging through her experiments
with a range of lesbian identity positions. The father’s and daughter’s contrast-
ing stories anchor the narrative transversals through which Bechdel interprets
the paradoxes of her family, which the form of an extended graphic memoir,
unlike a weekly comic strip, enables her to track in multiple flashbacks and
jagged temporalities. As readers, we are asked to trace the complex narrative
arc of her coming of age and/as coming out, enacted in reverse by her father’s
covert, furtive liaisons and official heterosexuality.14 Finally, at the memoir’s
end the balletic dance of their two narrated stories, in parallels and inversions
of each other, sutures their sexual kinship—as a legacy both genealogical and
chosen.
• Perhaps the most dazzling visual display of Fun Home is its depiction of bod-
ies, staged in the “theater” of the morgue. Bechdel’s drawings of newly dead
bodies in the process of being embalmed or autopsied, in frontal and side
views with cutaway sections, are a virtuoso Vesalian display (see fig. .). In
counterpoint to the focus on bodies in rigor mortis are the drawings of erotic
bodies in action, in scenes of her father’s and her own sexual encounters. This
begins with the originary scene of sexuality in chapter , drawn from vertigi-
nous angles, of a young Alison playing “airplane” hoisted aloft on her father’s
legs and hands—what she punningly refers to, in a circus term, as their acro-
batic “Icarian games” (Fun Home, ). As their bodies mirror each other, the
erotics of the father-daughter relationship are visually suggested, as well as
the reverse of the Icarus-Daedalus myth, because it is Alison who will fly on
 julia watson

the wings of homosexual desire that her father never trusted (–). The depic-
tion of bodily erotics extends to graphic sexual depictions of herself—and, in
drawn photographs, possibly her father—with lovers, as I will discuss. Fun
Home’s interplay between the erotic and the necrotic generates meanings as
incarnate—in bodies of desire, some positioned as “porn bodies” (); bodies
performing gender in costume or drag; bodies in the stillness of a photo or
diagram, or the rigor mortis of death; and, not least, bodies connected to our
own as we touch and turn the pages.

In sum, Bechdel’s linkage of autographic modes and graphic disclosures

creates a richly embodied subjectivity that is different, in its sustained semi-
otic cross-referencing, from the narrative consecutiveness of verbal auto-
biography. Like other autographic narrators (Art Spiegelman and Marjane
Satrapi), Bechdel brilliantly deploys a wealth of autobiographical genres jux-
taposed as alternative life possibilities. But the use of such templates also
poses questions about life narrative in this autographic moment. How is the
story of coming of age linked to or rewritten in the coming-out story (as a
discovery of what was always already inherent)? How does the solitary story
of the artist’s growth intersect with or disrupt the family’s domestic ethnog-
raphy of reproducing itself ? How is the melancholic process of dying and
death reworked in its literary afterlife by acts of narrative reconstruction (in

figure . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (p.  top) by Alison Bechdel.
Copyright ©  by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

Bechdel’s work, reworking the trauma of a tragic death as a literarily comic

“happy ending”)? How does the autobiographical metastory, reading the
experience of a youthful self against the family’s official and unofficial or
repressed stories, alter or improvise upon—as a chiasmic “network of trans-
versals” or at times a kind of jazz riff—the novel-driven model of literary
modernism celebrated in the canon of Proust, Joyce, Henry James, Oscar
Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Camus, and Colette’s memoirs, all intertexts in Fun
Home? And how is each autobiographical template changed by its transla-
tion into the vocabulary of cartooning? While I don’t propose answers to
these questions, they seem, to me, to signal the potential of this autographic
moment in life narrative studies and to invite new theorizing of subjectivity,
genre, and readers’ engagement with the autobiographical.

Reading between the (Ink) Lines in Fun Home

In its histories both personal and political, visual and narrative, Fun Home
offers an archival mine for new kinds of autographical readings. Gardner’s
essay “Autography’s Biography” productively explores the relationship of Fun
Home to “autography,” particularly in its relationship to the visual vocabu-
lary of self-reference developed in cartooning practices since . Narra-
tive theorists such as David Herman also consider Bechdel’s use of visual
tags or labels in the frame to mark different temporalities of experience for
the narrating I.15 For feminist autobiography critics such as myself, Bechdel
creates a richly complex storytelling world, grounded both in the everyday
experience of mid-twentieth-century American small-town family life and in
the feminist practice of making the personal political through hybrid forms
of personal criticism.16
In the rest of this chapter, I think about autographical practice as a vis-
ual and comparative act: by contrasting Bechdel’s drawings of photographs
(no actual photos are reproduced) as archival documents with the car-
tooned story of a remembered—and fantasized—past, we can observe how
she reinterprets the authority that photos as “official histories” seem to
hold, and opens them to subjective reinterpretation. In her focus on varying
visual versions of her father and her wildly changing impressions of him
(recorded in her diary) at different moments, Bechdel composes a textured
autobiographical reflection that moves by an ongoing process of her own re-
cursive reading. In these examples we also see Bechdel’s contrast of second-
wave feminist concepts of gendered subjectivity and sexuality (from the
s) through which the teenaged Alison interprets her own experience
 julia watson

(at times satirizing the movement’s tendency to jargon-laced, dogmatic

pronouncements), to a view, both performative and genealogical, that she
constructs as an alternative way of reading her own sexuality in relation to—
and against—her father’s.
I focus on a few points in Fun Home—its middle, end, and beginning—
to think about how its temporal sequence is punctuated by introspective
acts that cast back into the past in spirals of reflection; thus the tendency of
the page to impel us forward in reading the comic as a narrative sequence is
repeatedly disrupted, spatialized. This itinerary for reading Fun Home may
seem perverse, moving from the center of the book to its last page, which I
take as an originary point that—in recursive fashion—returns us to a dif-
ferent reading of the drawn photograph with which the book’s first chapter
begins.17 But in this narrative so concerned with transversals (the movement
toward reversing characters’ positions as a story develops) and inversions
(the traditional term coding homosexuals as inverts of normative hetero-
sexual identity), we are asked to read via this to-and-fro movement. Its arc
traces the links Bechdel makes between Alison’s narrative present and the
memories of childhood that intrude and the family’s repressive past and
her own liberatory future. We follow how her narrative sets up the possibil-
ity of both closure—on the traumatic past of her father’s death, probably a
suicide—and opening to her own adult life.

Who’s Looking? Discursive Intersections

at the Centerfold
In Fun Home, drawings of photographs (no actual photo reproductions are
used) play a central role. Photos from her family’s past (some hidden from
the children) serve not only as evocations of memory but also as evidence
of the material reality of what Bechdel investigates as her father’s double life.
But her work depends on photographs in a second, uniquely contemporary
way. As she described to Chute, Bechdel created a reference photograph
with her digital camera for each pose (there are nearly ,) in each panel
of Fun Home, photographing herself as the actor for each subject (parent,
child, etc.). Her acts of impersonation give a new resonance to the auto-
graphical, as she has in a sense literally “tried on” all of the subject positions
she depicts—sometimes wryly, as when she notes on a promotional DVD
that she had to pose for each parent when they had a fight (Chute, “Gothic
Revival”). We cannot know to what extent she also literally “inhabited,” as a
model, the realistically drawn photographs that figure importantly in her
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

chapter heads, or the photos I discuss that document “secret” intimacies.

But her practice suggests ways in which she empathically—and quite liter-
ally—could imagine the positions of her characters. And while using drawn
photos would seem to guarantee the separate existence of others, Bechdel’s
technique unsettles that boundary. In a narrative interested in the perme-
ability of categories of gender and sexuality, the potential for slipping into
“all the poses” in acts of autographical identification is provocative.
Fun Home incorporates photographs in several ways: as the chapter head
image for each chapter and at key moments throughout the narrative, where
the act of rereading them—some only discovered after her father’s death—
is the impetus to her own acts of recognition and autobiographical identifi-
cation with her father’s desire embedded in a complicated history of overt
heterosexuality and closeted transgression with young boys. The chapter
head photos are done in a meticulously drawn realistic style, with much
shading and cross-hatching, that differs from her cartooning style. In using
photos to frame its chapters, Fun Home is allied to the family album but also
marks a distance from its function as official history by reading photos for
their transgressive content. At strategic moments photos also offer Alison
occasions for introspection, as she rereads her past to discover untold fam-
ily stories. And our spectatorial complicity links us, as viewer-readers, with
these acts of looking that raise questions about the nature of visual evidence
and the possibility of viewers’ empathic recognition.
Chapter , “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” the middle of Fun
Home’s seven chapters, is a key one for thinking about this interplay of fam-
ily histories.18 It narrates moments that link Alison’s teenaged declaration
of her lesbian sexuality with “secret”—at least to his family—moments from
her father’s young adulthood that she discovers only after his death in a box
of photographs. And it offers, via linking their stories of transgressive sex-
ual desire to Proust’s novels, a framework for reading the narrative not as
linear but as a recursively spiraling story along a “network of transversals.”
Referencing Proust’s model of convergence as a structure for producing
reader recognition of the desires that bond characters in seemingly opposi-
tional social positions, Bechdel parallels their two lives as a gay father and
daughter. Wittily she observes that they are linked not only as sexual “inverts,”
in the derogatory psychoanalytic term of the early century that Proust used
(Fun Home, ), but also as inverted versions of each other in the family.
That is, she presents Alison’s rejection of femininity as a compensation for
her father’s lack of manliness, and his insistence on her dressing and acting
 julia watson

“feminine” as a projection of his own desire to perform femininity (Fun

Home, ).
This and subsequent chapters depict Alison’s own adolescent coming
of age as always a coming-out story and provide a context for imagining the
story her father did not, could not, tell his family, and that, she suggests,
fueled his artistic obsession with order and design, as well as his authori-
tarian parenting. Recalling the several young men who floated through the
family’s life, culled from her father’s high school classes and cultivated “like
orchids” (Fun Home, ) for future plucking, Alison recognizes an ideal of
masculinity she herself aspires to. Called “Butch” by her cousins for her
tomboy prowess (), the young Alison—Al, she would prefer—is critical of
her father as a “sissy,” a version of the identity he attempts to enforce on
her (). Bechdel thus rereads the surface memoir of her childhood as an
analysis of how gender binaries are sustained within the family. Her father’s
imposing of conventional feminine norms of dress and behavior in the effort
to “make a girl of her” conceals his own story of discovering the feminine
within himself and rejecting the masculine within her. The adult narrator
thus frames the negotiations by which, within the constraints of the family,
father and daughter displaced onto each other versions of conventional
femininity and masculinity as a way of enacting their refusal of conventional
heteronormative gender roles. In this version of the coming-out story, there
is no simple narrative of rebellion against parental strictures by transgres-
sive performance; rather, she and her father are linked in both a contest of
wills and a deep affinity of desires.
The core of Bechdel’s coming-of-age/coming-out story occurs in her
recognition that she and her father could meet only at a phantom middle,
a “slender demilitarized zone,” in the appreciation of the pubescent male
body as an epitome of androgynous beauty (Fun Home, ). At this evanes-
cent point the family legacy of desire materializes across generations and
genders. A double-page literal centerfold at the middle of the chapter, and
the book, stages this insight (–). It shows a large drawing of a photo
recovered from Bruce’s secret stash of photos, dated “AUG ” (the year
blotted out), of their babysitter Roy that her father took in a hotel room
he had arranged for when the boy was traveling with them on vacation with-
out their mother (Alison the eldest was ).19 The photo of Roy’s body as a
vulnerable, yet cheesecake, spectacle is held by the twice-life-sized fingers
of a left hand; it reminds us of our complicity as viewers in this intimate
glimpse, as our hand holding the book overlaps hers. In the photo a single
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

young male body lies asleep on a bed with two pillows, his tousled head
held between his upthrown arms, his torso, clad only in briefs, inclined
toward the viewer (see fig. .). The drawn photo is surrounded by elon-
gated dialogue tags that chronicle Bechdel’s conflicted responses, acknowl-
edging both her identification with her father’s erotic desire for the aesthetic
perfection of the boy’s body, and her distanced critique as a sleuth of this
evidence of his secret life.
These multiple responses are filtered through several autobiographical
discourses: the memory of the occasion and their motel rooms by the Jersey
shore; aesthetic appreciation for the “ethereal, painterly” quality of light with
which Roy is “gilded” in the photograph (Fun Home, ); self-recrimination
that she’s not “properly outraged” at her father’s pederastic desire; acknowl-
edgement of her complicity in his “illicit awe” of the near-naked boy’s beauty

figure . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (pp. –) by Alison Bechdel.
Copyright ©  by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
 julia watson

(); detached assessment of her father’s characteristic attempt to censor

his possible sexual transgression by masking when the shot was taken; and
recognition that her father’s management of the contradictions of his pub-
lic and private lives made him a magician in managing his double life ().
Thus she acts as a kind of detective, hunting the evidence of her father’s
secret life that was hidden in their everyday interactions and rereading fam-
ily photographs for evidence of his covert homosexuality. The apparent
contradictions of his and her mother’s apparently dutiful lives, like those of
Swann and the Guermantes, begin to converge as Bechdel reimagines her
father’s life as a separate subject, rather than a relative, before she was born,
imputing to him an intriguing gay subjectivity that she does not extend to
her mother (Fun Home, ).
Telling the story of his repressed desire and associating it with her own
coming out in  and early experiences as a lesbian subjected to social
humiliations, she bridges their generational divide and different lifestyles by
asking herself, “Would I have had the guts to be one of those Eisenhower-
era bitches? Or would I have married and sought succor from my high
school students?” (). This act of cross-generational empathy contextual-
izes her own coming of age in “a precocious feat of Proustian transposition”
(). Like life in the shadows à la Proust, the confusion occasioned by
Alison’s adolescent sexuality, which impeded her desire to grow up as a
boy, and her active disidentification as a child with the eroticized female
body of “girlie” calendars (), as well as the challenge of a big “phallic”
snake the children encountered on a camping trip and were unable to kill
(–), rewrite the conventional coming-out story. Not willing to appro-
priate either stereotypic position of normative gendered identity, Bechdel’s
fable argues for undoing gender binaries, seeing the serpent as a “vexingly
ambiguous archetype” (). In its place, the narrative proposes a more fluid
understanding of identification and desire, in which seeming oppositions
are revealed to have always been convergent. In refusing a conventional
coming-out narrative of rebellion against strict paternal authority that opts
for a pre-Oedipal fusion with the maternal, Bechdel bonds with her father’s
desire and revises her childhood yearning for erotic connection into a recog-
nition of how she is like him.20 That is, her story of coming to consciousness
rewrites the feminist narrative of maternal bonding as a desire for fusion
(for her the mother remains a shadowy figure) and ventures into the deep
water of identification and desire across what become arbitrary boundaries
of gender.
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

Bechdel’s story about the meaning of Alison’s childhood memories not

only links her sense of her own sexuality to her father’s secret gay side, it
also produces a recognition about how their lives are linked over genera-
tions: “You could say that my father’s end was my beginning. Or more pre-
cisely, that the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth”
(Fun Home, ). In depicting, through visual details of her father’s dress,
hair, gestures, and notebooks—as well as the series of young men in the
house—the coming-out story that he, historically and temperamentally, was
unable to tell, Bechdel interweaves his narrative with her own search for a
partner, linking their desires. The story thus retrospectively offers Bruce
an identity alternative to the one he has lived, based in rigid repression and
fear of being branded as perverse and criminal (he is arrested for buying
beer for a thirteen-year-old boy []). And Bechdel supplements the post-
mortem coming-out narrative she authors for her father with an endearing
origin story of her own sexuality, which tellingly occurs in a moment with
her father.
In retrospect, Bechdel recalls that Alison’s pivotal childhood moment
of recognizing her lesbian identity occurred early, when she was about four
or five. Lunching with her father at a truck stop restaurant while he is on
a business trip, she spots a “truck-driving bulldyke” with close-cropped
hair in a checked flannel shirt (Fun Home,  (see fig. .). Recalling, “I
recognized her with a surge of joy,” the young Alison contrasts her own
identification, presented as innate and “hard-wired,” with her father’s ongo-
ing disapproval of her rejection of femininity (). Her desire to recast her
gender assignment is balanced by his discomfiture with the public exhibit of
what he perceives as transgressive sexuality and is repeated throughout the
chapter in cartoons that contrast his fastidiously dressed and combed pres-
ence with her rakish tomboy looks.
And yet, the chapter concludes, for all their tensions over her childhood
refusal to conform to the stereotypic femininity required by her father’s
need to mask his own closeted homosexual desire and to preserve a pub-
lic image of respectability, telling their story and juxtaposing cartoons of
his feminized presence and her boyish recasting of it shows, in repeated
near-mirror images, their genealogical and psychological bond. In Alison’s
refusal of compulsory heterosexuality as both a coming-of-age and coming-
out story, Bechdel daringly rewrites features of that narrative to insist on
her cross-gender identification with the repressed desire that underlay her
father’s overt heterosexual conformity.
 julia watson

figure . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (p. ) by Alison Bechdel.
Copyright ©  by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Strikingly, late in chapter , appropriately titled “The Antihero’s Journey,”

there is a scene in which father and daughter attempt to reveal their com-
ing-out stories to each other. The moment occurs after Alison has sent her
parents her coming-out letter when she is back from college for the sum-
mer, and shortly before Bruce’s death. The two-page sequence is the only
time that Bechdel uses the square-box style of the traditional comic book,
and she employs it for a tightly framed sequence of headshots depicting the
dialogue between Alison and Bruce as they drive to see a movie (which
she ironically refers to in Joycean terms as their “Ithaca” moment of shared
aesthetic sensitivity [Fun Home, ]). The tightly framed, two-page shots
of their profiles dramatize a moment of intimate disclosure. When Alison
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

attempts to broach the subject of sexuality by noting that it was her father
who gave her Colette’s Earthly Paradise (a compilation of her autobiograph-
ical writings) to read at fourteen—with its passages of lesbian pleasure—he
interrupts and begins to tell her his own story of adolescent homosexual
experience and his childhood desire to dress up as a girl, which she remarks
paralleled her desire to dress as a boy. While the exchange of disclosures is
brief and hardly celebratory (Ulysses, not the Odyssey, she notes wryly), it is
as close as they come to a moment of shared coming-out stories. Might we
see the graphic mode of three-box panels, four per page, as a kind of visual
match for two central aspects of the lesbian coming-out story?21 The focus
on tight-framed, intimate exchange parallels what Biddy Martin has defined
as its parameters: the specific and intimate disclosure of originary experience
to a sympathetic listener; and the circulation and publication of coming-out
stories in activist magazines and journals (“Lesbian Identity and Autobio-
graphical Differences,” –). With its alternation of their “then-time” dia-
logue bubbles on white, and Bechdel’s retrospective reflection in white type
on a black background, the two pages on “our shared predilection” bracket
a kind of breakthrough moment in sexual disclosure shared intergenera-
tionally between father and daughter (rather than the more usual exchange
with the same-sex parent) (). In marking their homosexual bond, how-
ever tentative and brief it is, by creating a graphic analogue to the coming-
out story, Bechdel enacts a complex homage that links Colette, Joyce, and
lesbian coming-out stories while rewriting the analysis of how that desire is
understood.

Photographic “Translation” and Graphic Intimacies

Bechdel’s autographic act of drawing—and reading—family photos, her
father’s and her own, frames her autographic story as a quest to situate her
own desire in a familial line that both “outs” and reclaims her father. Enact-
ing a kind of Freudian “Nachträglichkeit” recognition achieved in reflection
after a traumatic event through reworking the story—Bechdel concludes
Alison’s coming-of-age chapter, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,”
with a meditation on photographic evidence that suggests how her auto-
graphic narration is rooted in acts of looking and seeing differently. On that
chapter’s last page, the story of coming of age as coming out is broken off
as Alison reflects, in a metanarrative, on “what’s lost in translation,” by
constructing an autographic dialogic of recognition and melancholic loss
focused on a set of photos (Fun Home, ). Here, as with the centerfold at
 julia watson

the chapter’s middle, Bechdel presents a set of three drawn photos (one
repeated) (see fig. .). The juxtaposed photos of her own and her father’s
bodies, his photo recovered from a box retrieved after his death, show each
of them posing before a sympathetic photographer who may be the subject’s
lover. Each is cradled in one of Alison’s near-life-sized drawn hands, again
implicating us as viewer-voyeurs of her intimate disclosure. These photo-
graphs expunged from the family album become an occasion for probing the
complex meanings of genealogical attachment as both transmission across
generations and melancholy loss of a primary relationship.
The drawn photo in the top frame, from her father’s college days, depicts
him in a woman’s bathing suit as a convincing spectacle of femininity in drag.
However much the occasion may have been a prank, his impersonation
strikes Bechdel as “lissome, elegant,” a persuasive act of gender-crossing (Fun
Home, ). In the bottom panel, that photograph is behind two others held
in her hands. The left is another drawn photo from her father’s college days.
Sunbathing in sunglasses, open-mouthed and limp-wristed in relaxation,
he leans toward the camera, his bare chest and splayed legs a seeming ges-
ture of invitation to the invisible photographer, whom the narrator specu-
lates may have been his lover. The bottom drawn photo on the right shows
Alison at the same age on a fire escape with a similar open-mouthed look
and relaxed-wrist gesture, in a bathrobe that both “masculinizes” and covers
the naked body beneath. She is also inclining toward the photographer, who
was indeed her lover. The father-daughter affinity is reflected not only in
their shared features but also in their parallel acts of cross-dressing against
conventional norms of sexuality. Of these parallel “invitational” photos of
father and daughter, the narrator observes: “It’s about as close as a transla-
tion can get” ().
Several things are striking here. First, to the casual viewer the resem-
blance of the two subjects may seem merely familial, but by “inhabiting” the
photos through imagining her father’s cross-dressing (with his gestures as
well as bathing suit) and recalling her own body, Alison insists on the mean-
ing of genealogical connection as a transmission of sexuality and desire in
a way that both exceeds and precedes gender-specific binaries of “mascu-
line” and “feminine.” As visual evidence, the photos make the case for their
shared same-sex orientation, and “prove” that he was fundamentally gay,
despite his adult parental life, counteracting his official heterosexual iden-
tity and complicating his motives for committing suicide. But in this photo
documentation of the coming-out script that her father refused to tell, we
figure . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (p. ) by Alison Bechdel.
Copyright ©  by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
 julia watson

also observe Bechdel’s “interested” act of looking at a resemblance that

viewers may find less evident. Calling this genealogical mapping of bodies
and desires a “translation,” a vocabulary of words for a visual act, also recalls
Bechdel’s invocation of Proust as evidence in support of her father’s gay
legacy. Her situating of him as a Modernist artist-intellectual with whom
she can empathically identify, despite their troubled history, creates a nar-
rative afterlife that reclaims and memorializes him, while embedding a posi-
tion for herself in the family story as both its creator and artistic flowering.

Artificer Paradises
The photo on the chapter head for the first chapter of Fun Home, “Old
Father, Old Artificer,” is another drawing from a photo of a much younger
Bruce Bechdel (see fig. .). Although there is no explanatory comment for
the chapter head photos, they invite our close looking. Here the title phrase
is taken from Stephen Dedalus’s entry at the end of Joyce’s Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel of coming to artistic con-
sciousness that plays throughout the memoir.22 Although the photo may not
initially register on readers, after thinking about the stakes of photographic
evidence in chapter , we may return to look at Bruce with a new under-
standing of his vulnerable, bare-chested upper torso, heavy-lidded eyes, and
tousled hair (all of which recall the photo of Roy) as he stands before the
family house. This choice of an actual photo of her father, showing an erotic
rather than conventionally dutiful parental image, has an almost androgy-
nous uncanniness.23 Although Bechdel would not have had to pose for this
drawing, the thin body resembles drawings of Alison, so that it is possi-
ble for viewers to map her body onto his. We begin to see autographically
how the daughter-narrator imaginatively inhabits her father by a cross-
generational act of identification. Not only does she resemble him, but
her drawing traces his photograph and merges his image with her own, in
claiming his artistic and sexual legacy. If for Wordsworth the child is father
to the man, here the daughter links her identity to performing an act of cre-
ative mourning for her dead father. By graphing and authoring the coming-
out narrative he could not tell, Bechdel makes her father’s story of private
shame, “perversion,” and early violent death into a happier story that en-
abled her own embrace of sexuality as their shared “erotic truth.” Finally, this
photo tells a story not of artificiality but of artifactual making, a memorial-
izing disclosure that moves us in Fun Home’s snakelike recursive tale back
to its beginning.
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

figure . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (p. ) by Alison Bechdel.
Copyright ©  by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Spiritual “Paternity” at the Graphic Fault Line

The last page of Fun Home juxtaposes two panels on the page that require
readers to situate ourselves imaginatively as viewers and reflect on our spec-
tatorial positions (see fig. .). The top third is a full-frontal close-up of
a truck (Sunbeam Bread) seen from a low angle. It can only be from the
point of view of a subject about to be struck, annihilated; a terrifying view
of impending death that is anxiety-producing to confront. The dialogue
box superimposed across the grill refers to Icarus’s fall, which Bechdel has
just mused about, as a “what if ” that conjoins her reflection on “spiritual
paternity” (Fun Home, ) in Joyce (Ulysses had a better future than his
children) and Icarus (if he’d had his father’s inventiveness, could he have
survived?) as modes of the antihero whom both her father (in a letter [Fun
figure . From Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (p. ) by Alison Bechdel.
Copyright ©  by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

Home, ]) and Stephen Dedalus proclaim themselves to be. Although I

cannot address the many strands of “erotic truth” that Bechdel brings into
convergence here, clearly the frame of the truck inexorably close and head-
on suggests a brutal finality to life’s creativity.
But that graphic is juxtaposed across a narrow gutter without words to
the frame below it, double its size, in which the implacable finality of death
is reinterpreted. It depicts a young Alison, drawn from behind, on the edge
of a diving board, in midair over a pool, while her father, arms outstretched,
waits to catch her when she jumps. It captures, as well, Alison’s quest to come
of age, come out, and come to truth about the mysteries of her father’s
life. And the graphic act of imagining the moment of her father’s death, with
its question of why he went back into the road after crossing it, is linked for
teenaged Alison to her guilt that a letter to her parents announcing her
coming out as a lesbian may have motivated the act as a suicide, prodding
her to seek closure. Finally, the frame also recalls—and reverses—the Icarus-
Daedalus myth, because Bechdel’s retelling of the story of her father’s life,
for all its duplicities and shame, as intertwined with her own, enables her to
“fly” as an artist and woman.
The conjunction of these opposed “tragic” and “comic” (happy ending)
images is startling and demands that viewers seek some kind of closure
to resolve the paradox. Why does Bechdel reserve this set of frames for
the memoir’s final page, presented out of chronology from the story of her
father’s death (the focus of chapter , “A Happy Death”) and her own devel-
opmental narrative? Bechdel’s ending offers readers an autographic per-
plexity in the sense Whitlock has described: “Comics are not a mere hybrid
of graphic arts and prose fiction, but a unique interpretation that transcends
both, and emerge through the imaginative work of closure that readers are
required to make between the panels on the page” (“Autographics,” –,
referencing McCloud, Understanding Comics, ). In this context we may
also consider to what extent the moment referenced in the bottom panel is
memory or fantasy. Little in the narrative suggests that Bruce, a meticulous,
critical father (whom Alison rarely touched and recalls kissing on the arm
only once—see Fun Home, ), was, in her experience, as supportive as the
drawing depicts.
Reading autographically suggests a possible closure and a way to link
the “tragic” top frame, in which the viewer graphically confronts a moment
of deathly violence, to the bottom frame, in which we are invited to “stand
behind” Alison. This final cartoon is a reversal of the camera’s point of view
 julia watson

on their positions in the drawn photograph that begins chapter , “The

Antihero’s Journey”—the title recalling both Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man and Ulysses, as well as many other novels referenced in Fun Home.
Unlike the photo, it is a close-up, drawn from an angle that places the spec-
tator on the diving board with young Alison, as she hovers before jumping.
The drawing thus revisions the chapter’s opening snapshot. In it, Bechdel’s
reverse-shot focus emphasizes her father’s face and outstretched hands,
perhaps conflating memory and fantasy, to make his paternal act one of
tenderness and “spiritual” nurturance (just as the preceding pages, in which
Bruce is leading Alison in the pool, depict him as a supportive teacher). And
this final frame invites us to imaginatively accompany her leap—into life and
sexuality, reversed and interpreted autographically. The frame’s dialogue
box about “tricky reverse narration” references the switch of both angles
of view and gestural affect from the beginning drawn photo to the final
frame of the book. It also captures the larger reversal of positions in which
Bechdel meshes Bruce’s history with Alison’s as a transmission of sexual sto-
ries that impels her comics and enables her to become the author of their
stories. Thus Bechdel’s final cartoon of the family past is a deeply satisfying
memorialization of her father’s parental legacy. It suggests that the process
of working through her own history, by narratively scripting the coming out
that her father could not enact, and refusing to reject him as either “per-
verted” or failed, rescues him by showing his arms-out gesture of willing-
ness to rescue her.
For Bechdel, as for another autographic self-maker, Charlotte Salomon,
the last page of her narrative functions as a kind of signature.24 This page’s
two graphic images can be related only by inhabiting both imagined spec-
tatorial positions, and observing how their reversals complete the recursive
circuit that repeatedly disrupts our reading of Fun Home “forward” in his-
torical time. The reader’s transversal of the network of the narrative becomes,
if we attend to its autographic connections, an experience of how life is lived
forward but recognized backward, as autobiographical consciousness.25 That
is, in some sense the autobiographical is inevitably a reworking of lived ex-
perience as filtered through memory, fantasy, and reflection across multiple
sites of identity and processes of dis/identification. Thus narrative depends
in a sense on the death of the past, even as the act of narrating revivifies it
for the autobiographer. The narrating I may, in a familiar metaphor, come
to voice, to instantiate, a “new-born” subjectivity, as Bechdel does in the act
of narrating a “dead” past. Such a narrative reminds us of the function of
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

storytelling generally, as a process of retelling life experience of trauma and

disappointment until the teller discovers some form of resolution that can
both acknowledge pain and provide the closure of a happier ending. The
page’s shocking conjunction of a moment of violent finality with one of cre-
ative birth situates their interlocked stories graphically across a narrow gut-
ter that is both gap and suture: “His end was my beginning” (Fun Home, ).

Speaking Autographically
In a graphic memoir as densely intertextual as Fun Home, with its letters,
diaries, maps, and citations from and readings of twentieth-century novels,
how can the difference of the autographical be specified? As Sean Wilsey
observed in “The Things They Buried,” Bechdel’s writing, unlike that of
most cartoon memoirs, is lucid, articulate, and full of “big words,” address-
ing a new cosmopolitan readership able to move between “high” and “pop”
forms. Does that make her text just an illustrated autobiography? If not,
what can Fun Home tell us about the distinctiveness of autographics? My
discussion suggests that Fun Home is narrated not through the linear chro-
nology of a developmental story, but in a recursive pattern of returns and
reversals punctuated by the rhythmic movement of self-questioning and
self-commentary.26 As we have seen, the story ends in its beginning through
visual connections between photos and memory images; it repeatedly casts
back—to past events, to genealogical legacy, to classical myths of artistic
and erotic creation—to interpret and rework the seeming “truth” of events.
In finding an interpretive closure to the two apparently unrelated panels
of the last page, Bechdel locates an autobiographical act of connecting ex-
perience and interpretation at the nexus of cartoons, pictures, and words.
This act of self- and paternal creation through autographical narration is
a story of relationship and legacy that depends on graphically embodying
and enacting, not just telling, the family story.
How do we theorize this difference of autographics? Ariel Schrag, a car-
toonist and writer, observed to Hillary Chute that the connection between
autobiography and comics “has to do with visualizing memory. Every writer
incorporates their past into their work, but that act becomes more specific
when you’re drawing” (“Gothic Revival,” my italics). As I have suggested,
Bechdel, in the many drawn photos that punctuate Fun Home, probes the
interplay between personal memory, a kind of subjectivity imaged in car-
toons, and photography, an indexical form of documentary evidence (that
is, referring to objects of sight, however misleadingly). And in her readings
 julia watson

of photos—through both words and drawings—she undermines the claim

of photographs to one kind of tacit authority, and opens them to interpre-
tation that grants them a different kind of encoded subjectivity, a legacy of
family history. If the autobiographical is a sustained act of reflecting on and
shaping experience to discover and invent the patterned meanings in which
subjectivity is inscribed, Bechdel’s drawings of images render the visual
world—photographs, objects, places, others, and herself—as a set of mem-
ory mirrors that are continuously shaped and refracted by self-engagement.
In Fun Home, the signature or autograph of the autobiographical becomes
an autographic juxtaposition discoverable in acts of looking, drawing, em-
bodying, and comparing, in an ongoing spiral of reflection.
Discussing the importance of recent graphic memoirs such as Satrapi’s
Persepolis and Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Whitlock notes
their use of cartoon drawing to interrogate particular images (such as the
veil or the World Trade Center towers) that are discursively fraught and em-
bedded in complex histories, producing dissonance as readers must reflect
on the otherness they present as such (“Autographics,” especially –).
In thinking about the kinds of closure autographics ask readers to resist, and
to make, Whitlock argues, “The unique vocabulary and grammar of comics
and cartoon drawing might produce an imaginative and ethical engagement
with the proximity of the other” (). While Fun Home is not primarily
engaged with the contemporary global moment, it implicates readers in dis-
cerning its possible closure, and in learning to practice a radical critique of
sexual politics and aesthetics.
Although I have not discussed how Fun Home extensively parallels the
context of Watergate-era Nixonian politics to the climate of repression and
“covert operations” in the Bechdel family home, its politics of the personal,
a foundational feminist perception, is writ large in two ways: its reframing
of homosexuality across the generations and the sexes, and its situating
of sexual desire as a struggle to assert bodies and pleasures in the face of
an American history of pathologizing them. By interpreting her familial
story as a narrative of middle-class American family life filtered through the
social persecution of dissident artists in the later twentieth century, Bechdel
graphs the personal as a site of struggle for liberation that has analogs in
human rights battles being waged around the world, particularly for homo-
sexuals and women. Bechdel uses her “autobiographical avatars” to induce
readers to engage with “othering” practices that have habitually subjected
homosexuals to dismissal and persecution as either perverse or diseased.
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

Readers engaging with Fun Home’s “tricky” narrative sequence and multiple,
disparate modes of self-inscription are brought, by its recursive autographic
strategies, to question the social privileging of normative heterosexuality, as
we take up its invitation to put ourselves empathically in its intimate pic-
ture. Holding Fun Home’s engaging pages in our hands, we may occupy
unfamiliar reading positions and be brought to reinterpret initial assump-
tions, to weigh the apparent authority of archival evidence against the erotic
truth of a repertoire of experiences. Its autographics stirs and persuades us
to approach human histories and bodies in new and provocative ways, as
through the pleasures of humor and cartoons we come to engage affectively
and ethically with the complex, overlapping worlds Fun Home presents.

notes
For illuminating conversations about Fun Home I am indebted to the generous expertise
of Jared Gardner, who steered me to this project and offered rich insights about the prac-
tice of autographics; Gillian Whitlock for her perceptive and generous suggestions;
Robyn Warhol, feminist narratologist par excellence; members of the Queer Studies
Reading Group at Ohio State University, particularly Anne Langendorfer, Mary Thomas,
and Cynthia Burack, who let me join their discussion of Bechdel’s memoir; my Compar-
ative Studies graduate seminar in the winter of  for fruitful discussion; and the Car-
toon Library at Ohio State University for its resources and sponsorship of the academic
conference on cartoons on October , , at which I presented a draft of this chapter.
1. The comic strips have been collected into several books, appearing every two
years, with titles such as Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For. The biweekly syndi-
cated comic is now posted online at Bechdel’s website, http://dykestowatchoutfor.com,
where an archive is also available.
2. Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography,” characterizes a range of combinatory
autobiographical forms as “out-law genre” practices because they transgress the law of
genre and enact hybridized possibilities of narration. Melinda Luisa de Jesús points out
that many contemporary ethnic American women’s graphic narratives develop more
specific versions of a “hybrid new identity” by using cartoons to emphasize the “strik-
ing visual contrast” between mother and daughter in the family, as in Lynda Barry’s
One Hundred Demons (“Of Monsters and Mothers,” ).
3. Chute and DeKoven, editors of the important special issue of Modern Fiction
Studies on graphic narrative, observe that graphic narrative as a form does not yet pos-
sess a critical apparatus; rather, in its “fundamental syntactical operation [of ] the rep-
resentation of time as space on the page,” it is a hybrid form unlike the novel. They
argue that graphic narrative is a multigeneric, mass culture art form in which verbal
and visual narratives exist in tension. That is, the images do not simply illustrate the
text, but move forward differently than the words with which they are interspersed
(“Introduction: Graphic Narrative,” ).
4. SecondLife is an example of “massively multiplayer online games” (MMORPGs).
See the discussion by Tracy V. Wilson in “How MMORPGs Works” exploring the deep
connection between the user and the avatar.
 julia watson

5. Miller trenchantly observes, “The challenge that faces autobiographers is to

invent themselves despite the weight of their family history, and autobiographical sin-
gularity emerges in negotiations with this legacy” (“The Entangled Self,” ). There is
thus a relational aspect to nearly all life narratives. See Smith and Watson, “Introduc-
tion: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” –, –.
6. See Michael Renov’s discussion of domestic ethnography as an autobiographi-
cal practice that “constructs self-knowledge through recourse to the familial other” by
a kind of participant observation that situates subject and practitioner intersubjec-
tively (“Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self,” –).
7. Rocío G. Davis notes that “graphic narratives are highly effective kunstlerroman
[sic] . . . because the subjects of the autobiographical comics are, most often, graphic
artists themselves” (“A Graphic Self,” ). In Persepolis, the autographic Davis dis-
cusses, however, Satrapi does not focus on Marji’s process of learning to draw as self-
expression to the extent that Bechdel does in Fun Home.
8. For example, de Jesús attends to cartoonist Lynda Barry’s narrative “The
Aswang,” in which a mythic Filipino vampire-monster becomes a figure for mother-
daughter alienation and a way to think about her own choice of cartooning (“Of Mon-
sters and Mothers,” ). I am indebted to de Jesús’s concise history of developments in
women’s comics as part of what Bob Callahan, editor of The New Comics Anthology,
called the “New Comics” (–).
9. Sidonie Smith and I have characterized the autobiographical interface as the
space at which diverse media of visual and verbal self-construction intersect to regis-
ter the subjectivity of the maker, whether or not a traditional self-portrait is discern-
able (Watson and Smith, “Introduction: Mapping Women’s Self-Representation at
Visual/Narrative Interfaces,” –).
10. Gardner sees the “archival turn” (“Archives, Collectors, and the New Media
Work of Comics,” ) as distinctive of contemporary comics, noting that “archives are
everywhere in the contemporary graphic novel . . . archives of the forgotten artifacts
and ephemera of American popular culture” (). Part of the pleasure for comic book
readers and collectors, he argues, is this visual assemblage of drawn fragments of old
comics and ephemera. Bechdel is an archiver of both family memorabilia and the larger
history of second-wave feminist texts, sayings, and styles.
11. In an interview with Hillary Chute, Bechdel acknowledged that her mother,
after giving her letters and photos for Fun Home and initially finding the project amus-
ing, changed her view of it: “She felt betrayed—quite justifiably so—that I was using
things she’d told me in confidence about my father” (Chute, “An Interview with Alison
Bechdel,” ). But her mother, a “mixed-message person,” also gave her a further box
of letters between the parents (). She reiterated her mother’s discomfort with the
project at a lecture on October , , at the Ninth Festival of Cartoon Art spon-
sored by the Cartoon Library, Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio. In the Chute
interview Bechdel acknowledged the ethical issue her project raised, stating, “This
memoir is in many ways a huge violation of my family” (). While that sense of
betrayal may remain for the family, I argue that Fun Home also serves as a bequest (to
borrow Miller’s title, Bequest and Betrayal), specifically in memorializing her father
after his death by contextualizing his covert pedophiliac acts, and identifying his desire
with her own and with a long-repressed and persecuted history of homosexuality in
the United States.
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

12. Bechdel’s fastidious attention to detail is evident not only in the careful drawing
and coloring of the wallpaper, but in the concern she expressed to Hillary Chute (and
also in the lecture I heard in Columbus) that her drawing and coloring did not entirely
capture the wallpaper, which she identified as William Morris’s “Chrysanthemums”: “I
didn’t get enough contrast in [the wallpaper]. I’ve since learned that there are eleven
shades of green in the original—and I was only using five different shades” (Chute, “An
Interview with Alison Bechdel,” ).
13. For an extensive and erudite discussion of the climate of twentieth-century
repression of homosexuality, see Jennifer Terry’s An American Obsession, particularly
the chapter titled “The United States of Perversion.”
14. Ken Plummer defines the coming-out story as a “Modernist tale” that prolifer-
ates in the later twentieth century. Its hallmarks are “a frustrated, thwarted and stig-
matized desire for someone of one’s own sex . . . it stumbles around childhood longings
and youthful secrets; it interrogates itself, seeking ‘causes’ and ‘histories’ that might
bring ‘motives’ and ‘memories’ into focus; it finds a crisis, a turning point, an epiphany;
and then it enters a new world—a new identity, born again, metamorphosis, coming
out” (Telling Sexual Stories, ). For a brilliant discussion of genres and examples of
American feminist coming-out stories, see Biddy Martin. For her, the coming-out story
asserts a mimetic relationship between experience and writing and centers its narra-
tive on the declaration of sexuality as both discovered and always already there. Such
narratives are also a quest for a language of feeling and desire that will “name their
experience woman identification” (“Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Differ-
ences,” ). Both Plummer and Martin, in emphasizing the narration of sexual identity,
see it as a positional, rather than fully stable, identity.
15. At the academic “Graphic Narrative” conference at Ohio State University on
October , , narratologist David Herman gave a provocative talk, “Multimodal
Storytelling: Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives,” on identity construction in
graphic narratives that explored Bechdel’s use of graphic tags as a means of disrupting
the bildungsroman’s linear model of self-narration.
16. Sidonie Smith and I discuss “personal criticism” as an important autobiograph-
ical practice of writing the “I” that redirects critical attention to the critic’s praxis as a
form of feminist pedagogy (see Smith and Watson, “Introduction: Situating Subjectiv-
ity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” –, –).
17. Bechdel observed to Chute in the interview that the photographs at the begin-
ning of each chapter “feel particularly mythic to me, [they] carry a lot of meaning” ().
18. Bechdel glosses this chapter title as À l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles in Fleurs, a trans-
lation of the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. And the chapter offers
an extended gloss on Proust’s oeuvre, noting how the apparently opposed paths, literal
and metaphoric, of Swann and the Guermantes are revealed to “have always con-
verged” in the course of the novels as a model of how its “vast network of transversals”
works to undermine apparent binaries (Fun Home, ). Although Bechdel told Chute,
“I never actually read all of Proust; I just skimmed and took bits that I needed,” using
the novel as a metatext gives her a grid within which to map the apparent opposition
and deep connection that she experienced with her father while growing up, and that
forms the basis of their homosexual affinity (“An Interview with Alison Bechdel,” ).
19. In the Chute interview, Bechdel asserts that “photographs really generated the
book,” discussing in particular this snapshot () and calling it literally “the core of
 julia watson

the book, the centerfold” (). She further states, “I felt this sort of posthumous bond
with my father, like I shared this thing with him, like we were comrades” ().
20. On theorizing the matrilineal bond, see especially the work of Carol Gilligan, In
a Different Voice, and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, and the use-
ful discussion of their studies, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves,” by Susan Stanford
Friedman.
21. My thanks to Sarah Carnahan in a graduate seminar at Ohio State University, in
the winter of , for inquiring about the rationale for Bechdel’s use of this highly con-
ventional style of cartooning for this two-page sequence.
22. “[April ] Welcome O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my
race. [April ] Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” ().
Notably, although the words of the Joycean phrase are the first chapter title in Fun
Home, only at the comic’s end do we understand their full implications.
23. Commenting on Bechdel’s extensive use of Joyce’s Ulysses, a book she was
required to read in college but remembers resenting, Chute observes that Alison and
her father “figure various Joycean characters,” each occupying the position of Bloom
and Stephen at various times (“Gothic Revival,” ); and Bechdel’s observations on
Ulysses come just before Fun Home’s final page, in which they also exchange the posi-
tions of Icarus and Daedalus in the myth. Bechdel showed this photo of her father
Bruce during her talk on the book at the Ninth Festival of Cartoon Art at the Cartoon
Library, Ohio State University, on October , .
24. See my discussion of the final painting of Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theater?,
where the title of her work is inscribed across her back, which faces the viewer as the
artist gazes out toward the Mediterranean, where she painted in exile. That visual
inscription embodies her story in the artistic “I” she created as no verbal narrative
could. I argue that “in merging her persona with the artist-autobiographer, making her-
self through the work, Salomon enacts the creation of [her] ‘name’” (Watson, “Charlotte
Salomon’s Memory Work in the ‘Postscript’ to Life or Theater?” ). Like Bechdel,
Salomon narrates a story of becoming the person who could inhabit, tell, and depict
the story viewers have just encountered—in  nonconsecutive pages, in Salomon’s
case.
25. Louis Menand’s remark about biography as a form is suggestive: “All biographies
are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically forward, they
are composed essentially backward” (“Lives of Others,” ). That is, the events that the
subject became renowned for determine what the biographer selects to interpret as
formative. A difference of autobiography from biography may lie in the nature of the
interpreter’s recognition.
26. Hillary Chute also describes Fun Home as “recursive” (“Gothic Revival,” ).

works cited
Barry, Lynda. “The Aswang.” In Barry, One Hundred Demons, –.
———. One Hundred Demons. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, .
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, .
Callahan, Bob, ed. The New Comics Anthology. New York: Colliers, .
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 

Chute, Hillary. “Gothic Revival: Old Father, Old Artificer: Tracing the Roots of Alison
Bechdel’s Exhilarating New ‘Tragicomic,’ Fun Home.” Village Voice, July , .
Online ed., March , , http://www.villagevoice.com/books/,chute,
,.html.
———. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” Modern Fiction Studies . (Winter ):
–.
Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern
Fiction Studies . (Winter ): –.
Davis, Rocío G. “A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Perse-
polis.” Prose Studies . (): –.
de Jesús, Melinda Luisa. “Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and
Maternal Legacies in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons.” Meridians: feminism,
race, transnationalism . (): –.
Doucet, Julie. My Most Secret Desire. Montreal, Canada: Drawn and Quarterly, .
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.”
In The Private Self, ed. Shari Benstock, –. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, .
Gardner, Jared. “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics.” Modern
Fiction Studies . (Winter ): –.
———. “Autography’s Biography, –.” Biography . (): –.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, .
Herman, David. “Multimodal Storytelling: Identity Construction in Graphic Narra-
tives.” Conference paper. Academic conference on “Graphic Narrative.” Blackwell
Conference Center, Ohio State University. Columbus, OH, October , .
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. . Reprint, New York: Viking,
.
Kaplan, Caren. “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Femi-
nist Subjects.” In De/Colonizing the Subject, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson,
–. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, .
Martin, Biddy. “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Differences.” In Life/Lines: The-
orizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, –.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, .
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial,
.
Menand, Louis. “Lives of Others.” The New Yorker, August , , –.
Miller, Nancy K. Bequest and Betrayal: Memoir of a Parent’s Death. Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, .
———. “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir.” PMLA .
(March ): –.
Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, .
Plummer, Ken. Telling Sexual Stories. London: Routledge, .
Renov, Michael. “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self.” In
Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, –. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, .
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon, .
 julia watson

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s

Autobiographical Practices.” In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, –. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
.
Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Mod-
ern American Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .
Watson, Julia. “Charlotte Salomon’s Memory Work in the ‘Postscript’ to Life or The-
ater?” Special issue on gender and memory, Signs . (Autumn ): –.
Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. “Introduction: Mapping Women’s Self-Representa-
tion at Visual/Narrative Interfaces.” In Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image,
Performance, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, –. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, .
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Stud-
ies . (Winter ): –.
———. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
.
Wilsey, Sean. “The Things They Buried.” Review of Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel. The
New York Times Book Review, June , . Online ed., March , , http://
www.nytimes.com/.//books/reviews/wilsey.
Wilson, Tracy V. “How MMORPGs Works.” How Stuff Works, March , . http://
electronics.howstuffworks.com/mmorpg.htm.
 

Witnessing Persepolis
Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony

leigh gil mo re

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood () is a graphic memoir about family

crisis, historical upheaval, and coming of age that features Satrapi’s young
self, Marji, as autobiographical protagonist. The text tracks the Satrapi fam-
ily through the turbulent years following the shah’s overthrow in  and
the establishment of an Islamic theocracy in Iran. It concludes as Satrapi’s
parents send her at the age of fourteen to exile in Austria. Both a chronicle
of personal and political turbulence as well as a careful exercise in educat-
ing Western readers, Persepolis aims not only to teach these readers how to
think about the Middle East, broadly, and Iran specifically, but also how to
feel. Satrapi’s use of comics is part of this affective strategy, as is her choice
of an autobiographical child/adolescent protagonist, whose direct witness-
ing of adult violence encourages sympathetic readings. Yet for all the didac-
tic moralism such a description might scare up, Persepolis presses beyond a
global, neoliberal agenda of asking readers simply to identify with distant
individuals. Satrapi’s autobiographical project suggests that the critical adult
perspective of the text’s framer is ultimately the position of politicized wit-
ness her readers should strive to inhabit. Satrapi uses a narrative of her own
girlhood to urge Western readers to recognize her and her family’s political
difference from what they think they know, and what they feel, about the
Arab world after /. Persepolis aims to play a part in how Western publics
construct political affect, and it does so through an autobiographical rep-
resentation of childhood and trauma created by an adult working in the
politically informed genre of comics. In this essay, I will draw out Satrapi’s
interest in the perils, pleasures, and politics of looking back and explore her
use of the child as a witness to war framed by an adult author who positions


 l eigh gil mo r e

readers as witnesses.1 Witnessing is both theme and critical project in Perse-

polis, ascribing an ethical and pedagogical dimension to the complex plea-
sures of reading comics.
Persepolis concludes on a cautionary note about the risk of looking back,
and the obligation of witnessing trauma underwrites Satrapi’s visually spare
and stylized pen and ink drawings. Anxiety over looking back suffuses the
history of self-representation. Like Lot’s wife fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah
or Orpheus departing Hades with Eurydice, autobiographers who look back
sometimes represent themselves as risking their tenuous hold on the present
and their hope for a future. For those whose lives and stories are ruptured
by violence, narrating traumatic experience is both an unavoidable burden
and a necessary risk. Trauma complicates the burden of memory and nar-
ration inherited by anyone who would write and draw their lives. Trauma
fractures time into past and present. It threatens the survivor’s sense of and
belief in generational continuity and persistence of self. Many of the most
cited authorities of trauma studies, including Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub,
and Cathy Caruth, stipulate that language fails to adequately convey trauma
and thus those who survive it stand outside an experience they cannot fully
claim, in Caruth’s reformulation of Freud, or represent to others. I have
argued elsewhere that although this claim seems to have achieved consensus,
it is nonetheless the case that representations of trauma abound (Gilmore,
The Limits of Autobiography). Any insufficiency in language or representa-
tional forms per se is offset by this abundance and ingenuity. Representations
of trauma, however, make demands on audiences. As new forms emerge, in-
cluding visual autobiography and memoir, new interpretive practices must
develop to address them.
Persepolis was published during the memoir boom of the late twentieth
century, which was characterized by a proliferation of trauma stories. The
majority of these stories were traditional in form. While audiences were
challenged by the content, they were not automatically enabled to shift pre-
viously constituted expectations about whose lives represented an appro-
priate focus of public attention, nor were they prepared to engage differently
with these autobiographical accounts (Gilmore, “Jurisdictions”). New forms,
like the limit-cases I examined, evaded some of the censure that befell scan-
dalous memoirs by adapting forms at the limits of mainstream memoir
while remaining legible within the parameters of self-representational dis-
course. They also attempted to lead readers into altered and more capacious
understandings of trauma and its representation. Satrapi’s choice of visual
 Witnessing Persepolis 

autobiography can be seen as a limit case. Comics present her with an

opportunity to shift the legalistic judgments that await memoir in diverse
global reading publics, offer her a mode in which to represent the interre-
lation of historical violence and personal suffering, and suit her pedagogical
aspirations.
The child witness of Persepolis offers a figure through which to explore
the relationship between historical public events and personal experience.2
In creating a child witness-narrator, Satrapi reenters the scene of gendered
childhood to clarify the relation of private and familial experiences of trauma
to the public upheaval in which they are enmeshed. Although Satrapi’s ado-
lescent exile could be read as a tale of personal trauma, albeit cast against a
backdrop of historical significance, she resists the convention that childhood
is a time of limited capacity. Instead, she asserts the adequacy of Marji’s
agency and presents coming of age as the time of witness. Satrapi’s choice of
an accessible form for a serious subject tests how multiple audiences will
accept her insistence on the interrelation of historical violence and personal
suffering. Art Spiegelman’s Maus () is a precursor for a generation of
artists expanding the subject matter and tone of comics. Following Maus,
the dynamic field of graphic narrative has received increasing critical atten-
tion, including a cluster of essays on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Mar-
jane Satrapi’s Persepolis in a special volume of Women’s Studies Quarterly
on the topic of “Witness.” Often structured as coming-of-age narratives,
graphic memoirs such as Fun Home and Persepolis craft autobiographical
projects in which coming of age entails learning to tell a story in which the
self is at once a mobile and partially aware witness of the events in her own
and others’ lives (Cvetkovich, “Drawing the Archive”).
Persepolis absents the adult Satrapi from its frames; however, the child
witness is offered as an adequate and important witness. Indeed, the child
witness is not unique in her inability to see all, report all, or otherwise wit-
ness trauma fully. Like adults who experience trauma and then struggle to
recall and recount it, there is no adequately authoritative angle of vision.
Ethnographers have persuasively argued that witness narratives and other
human rights reporting must not be constrained by legalistic criteria (Wil-
son, “Representing Human Rights Violations”) but be allowed instead to
supply thick descriptions of local knowledge and cultural context. Literary
scholars, too, have sought to illuminate the constraints trauma imposes on
literary works (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; LaCapra, Writing History,
Writing Trauma), as they approach the edge of communicability that trauma
 l eigh gil mo r e

represents. Literary works, more than legal testimony, have the leeway to
challenge and transform their audience’s expectations. Graphic novels and
memoirs have done this work and, in so doing, have found new audiences
and challenged them to admit the seriousness with which the form can take
up testimony as it draws and draws attention to the act of witnessing.
How does Satrapi draw witness? Satrapi navigates trauma within the
space of visual autobiography by drawing what can and cannot be seen. She
draws both the unrepresentable violence and the challenge of witnessing. To
demonstrate my claim, I offer three examples, in addition to the airport
scene (an example of direct witness), in which Satrapi draws the dynamics
of witnessing. First, what she does not witness firsthand, she memorializes
through indirect witness. Although Marji did not and could not have wit-
nessed the torture endured by political prisoners who were released when
the shah fled, in a section titled “Heroes,” two of them visit her family. They
vividly recount brutal torture and show their scars. One friend who did not
survive was beaten, urinated on, and burned with an electric iron. A frame
depicts each of these acts in documentary fashion: Satrapi illustrates what
the men describe. Beneath the frame, in a short border at the bottom of the
page, Marji is shown retreating from the room, eyeing the family’s iron as
she leaves, startled into a new and terrible imagining: “I did not know you
could use that appliance for torture” (). On the following page a frame
depicts the final act of torture, which Marji overhears on her way out of
the room. The effect is less an illustration of the scene of torture—how-
ever schematically rendered—than the revelation of how Marji imagines it.
In this instance, she goes beyond the documentary form of indirect witness
to achieve a vivid re-creation of what it feels like to imagine the scene. A
male figure lies on a black background; his torso is severed at the shoulders,
waist, and knees, and he has been decapitated. The dismembered figure has
no blood or organs. The text reads: “In the end he was cut to pieces” ().
Marji was not the eyewitness, but the account of torture entered her con-
sciousness and memory, and Satrapi’s drawing testifies to what she heard
and what those who were released from prison knew. Ahmadi, the man who
was assassinated, cannot give testimony, can never witness his own end or
control the record that survives, but Satrapi performs the labor of memori-
alizing through her child’s-eye graphic novel.
Second, as Marji is increasingly exposed to actual violence, Satrapi begins
both to know more and, in a key frame, to show less. Marji directly experi-
ences bombing during the early years of the Iran-Iraq War. In a frame that
 Witnessing Persepolis 

illustrates her development as a witness to trauma, Marji has returned

home to find her street blocked off after it has been bombed. The tremen-
dous relief mother and daughter experience when they are able to find each
other swiftly gives way to horror. Although her mother tries to deflect her
from full understanding, Marji realizes that the family whose house was
hit, the Baba-Levy’s, were probably at home. As her mother attempts to lead
her from the site, Marji looks back into the smoldering ruins at a gleam-
ing object in the rubble. “I saw a turquoise bracelet. It was Neda’s. Her aunt
had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday” (). When Marji sees
the bracelet, she has a direct experience of witnessing a dismembered body.
She is depicted covering her mouth, eyes wide. The text above her face
reads: “The bracelet was still attached to . . . I don’t know what . . .” (). In
the following frame, Marji covers her face with her hands and there are no
words. Satrapi’s drawing registers the impact on the child witness. The final
frame on the page is completely black. At the bottom, the words empha-
size the impact as trauma enters into the witness: “No scream in the world
could have relieved my suffering and my anger” (). Thus Satrapi draws
the child witness, herself, registering an event that she can and does see, but
that is too horrible to bear. She chooses not to draw something she wit-
nessed and thereby expands the repertoire of trauma’s representation to
omission, silence, and a depiction of the void.
Third, Satrapi makes visible and distinctive what the regime tries to ren-
der as group anonymity through its imposition of the hijab. Persepolis opens
with a section titled “The Veil” in which Satrapi offers a portrait of herself at
age ten, one year after the  Islamic Revolution: “This is me when I was
 years old. And this is a class photo. I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t
see me. From left to right: Golnaz, Mahshid, Narine, Minna” (). She begins
with the evocative image of the veiled girl ubiquitous in Western media and
provides names and physical distinctions for each girl. Satrapi represents
Iranian women as diverse, emphasizes the link between gender and state
violence, and captures the complexity of how controlling women is part of
the cultural revolution, and also that some women support it.
Persepolis never attempts to persuade readers that Satrapi or anyone has
full access to the scene of trauma through the image. But Persepolis insists
that trauma contains within it the possibility of bearing witness, even if that
means bearing witness to what was not shared or shareable. Satrapi weighs
the perils and politics of looking back and responds with a series of graphic
memoirs that begins with Persepolis. The venture is not without interpretive
 l eigh gil mo r e

risks. Persepolis’ seeming simplicity—its bold, stylized pen and ink drawings
and child narrator, for example—has been met with complex and sophisti-
cated readings, to be sure, but not exclusively. Given the tension between
reading Persepolis as a universal tale of individual struggle for Western-
style empowerment and agency and as a political intervention in the very
discourses that promote such a reading, it is appropriate that Persepolis con-
cludes on a cautionary note. Satrapi invites her readers to experience strong
emotions like sympathy, but she also frames this identification through her
own distance from her young self. If there is meaning in this additional
framing of an autobiographical, unrepresented but clearly active adult, and
I think we have to say there is for a critical reading of the text’s politics to
emerge, then the question is how it has meaning. Certainly, readers of auto-
biographies of childhood know when those texts are created by adults that
the adult autobiographer knows more now than the child self she represents.
But Satrapi, notably, does not ascribe to the childhood narrator a constitu-
tively limited capacity to frame her experience. Instead, she challenges read-
ers wherever they are to accept the act of witnessing as a dynamic position
within (and beyond) the graphic memoir.

notes
1. For a discussion of how adult women autobiographers use narratives of gen-
dered childhood to elicit political alliance and sympathy, see my article with Elizabeth
Marshall, “Girls in Crisis: The Representational Politics of Rescue and Feminist Auto-
biographical Resistance in Harriet Jacobs, Rigoberta Menchú and Marjane Satrapi,”
Feminist Studies (forthcoming).
2. I use Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood rather than Persepolis II because it fea-
tures a child narrator. Persepolis II treats Satrapi’s exile and features an older narrator.

works cited
Abrams, Kathryn, and Irene Kacandes, eds. Witness. Special issue, Women’s Studies
Quarterly ./ ().
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, .
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, .
Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s
Studies Quarterly ./ (): –.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Stud-
ies Quarterly ./ (): –.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: Norton, .
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psy-
choanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, .
Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, –.” Biography . (): –.
 Witnessing Persepolis 

Gilmore, Leigh. “Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self-
Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma.” Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society . (): –.
———. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, .
Harkins, Gillian. Everybody’s Family Romance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, .
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, .
Love, Heather K. Feeling Backward: Loss and Politics of Queer History. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, .
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, .
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, .
Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale; My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pan-
theon, .
Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s
Fun Home.” Biography . (): –.
Wilson, Richard A. “Representing Human Rights Violations: Social Contexts and
Subjectivities.” In Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Mark Goodale,
–. West Sussex: Blackwell, .
 

A Story Told in Flashback

Remediating Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

nim a na ghibi

Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume (in English, four volumes in French) autobi-

ographical comics about her coming-of-age in revolutionary Iran were pub-
lished to critical acclaim in  and .1 This chapter will focus on the
remediation of the Persepolis books into an animated feature film, written
and directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, released by Sony
Pictures, and awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in . The
chapter focuses on the changes this narrative has undergone in the process
of remediating the comic books into film. Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin have noted that the word remediation “derives ultimately from the
Latin ‘remederi—to heal, to restore to health.’”2 The remediation of one form
of media into another thus implies an improvement on an earlier version, a
notion that I interrogate in my analysis of the movie, Persepolis. I hope to
avoid advancing the facile argument that the Persepolis comics are better
than the film version, as is often posited when print and film versions of a
narrative are compared, although I do suggest that the comics as a form lend
themselves to a more complex and nuanced understanding of life in revolu-
tionary and postrevolutionary Iran than does the film. Both the comics and
the film emphasize the importance of remembering the past and illustrate the
dynamic nature of memory in reconstructions of the past.3 The animated fea-
ture film, however, can be much more readily positioned alongside a recent
wave of diasporic Iranian women’s autobiographical expression that fore-
grounds the rupture of the  revolution in their coming-of-age narratives
and indulges the authors’ nostalgic memories of prerevolutionary Iran.4
Persepolis, as both comic book and animated film, is an autobiographi-
cal retelling of Satrapi’s childhood in revolutionary Iran, and as such, the


 A Story Told in Flashback 

concepts of traumatic memory and history are central to both medium. In

addition to the importance of recognizing the dynamic and protean nature
of how memory works, there are significant structural differences between
the genre of the comic book and that of the feature film that account for
some of the notable differences between the two versions of Persepolis.
Comic books are an interactive medium; the reader has to work to interpret
what Art Spiegelman has called the “co-mixing” of words and images.5 The
fact that comics are “a gutter medium” contributes to an open-endedness
within the text itself that enables multiple and even contradictory interpre-
tations of the narrative.6 The feature film, on the other hand, can be more
prescriptive in terms of how the audience understands the events that take
place on screen. For example, the visual technology of cinematic produc-
tions can steer the audience’s responses to the narrative particularly because
there is only one direction in which the audience can look: at the screen in
front of them; there are no empty spaces, or gutters, where the viewer can
let her eyes travel or her imagination roam. In addition to the images on the
screen, the nondiegetic music further guides the viewer’s affective responses
to the story.7
The Persepolis graphic novel begins with Satrapi’s autobiographical avatar,
Marji, as a ten-year-old child. The story thus begins in the present past, nar-
rating the events of her childhood just before the start of the – rev-
olutionary period. The narrative proceeds chronologically and seamlessly
from the past to the present as public and personal histories are articulated
through Satrapi’s autobiographical child narrator. Satrapi’s and Paronnaud’s
animated feature film, on the other hand, is told almost entirely through the
use of the flashback, a cinematic technique apparently favored by Paron-
naud.8 The flashback technique emphasizes temporal change, marking a
shift from the present time of the story to a revisiting and a retelling of the
past; the concepts of memory, history, and nostalgia are thus integral to
the flashback.9 Although almost entirely in black-and-white animation, the
film is book-ended by two scenes in color, representing Marji as an adult in
the present time. Both scenes transpire in Paris’s Orly airport, so that the
film as extended flashback begins and ends with Marji’s present and pres-
ence in a transitional space.10 Her past lies in Iran, and her future is in Paris,
but in the present time of the cinematic narrative she is caught between the
two temporal moments and two geographical locations while situated in
the transitional space of the airport, looking back at the past, but unable
to move forward into the future. The two elements that mark a significant
 n im a n a gh ibi

difference between the comics and the film, therefore, are the flashback and
the framing device in the animated feature.
The film’s opening scene shows Marji, Satrapi’s autobiographical avatar,
checking the flight information board at Orly, searching for the next flight
to Tehran. In the next scene, we see her adjusting her hijab in the airport
washroom, making sure that her hair is concealed. Standing in front of
the mirror next to Marji is a heavily made-up blonde woman in a sleeveless
dress with a slit down the side; as she reapplies her lipstick, she casts a
derisive glance in Marji’s direction as Marji, dressed in accordance with
the rules of sartorial modesty as legislated by the Islamic Republic, leaves
the washroom. At the Iran Air ticket counter, Marji is unable to produce the
necessary ticket and passport required for travel. However, she seems to
have arrived at the airport without her luggage, ticket, or passport, suggest-
ing perhaps that she is in Orly on a nostalgic impulse, and that she does
not really intend to board a plane to Tehran. In media interviews about the
film, director Paronnaud explains that his idea for the framing device was
inspired by Satrapi’s personal experience of once spending an entire day
weeping in the departures area of Orly, mourning the irretrievability of her
life in Iran. After her exchange with the Iran Air ticket agent in the movie,
Marji slumps down resignedly on an airport bench, lights a cigarette, and
the film begins with her reflecting on the past as the voice-over narration
tells us: “Je me souviens” (I remember). As she exhales a cloud of smoke,
the story shifts to another time, in another airport. The shift in narrative
time is visually represented through stark black-and-white animation: we
see the Satrapi family, including the precocious ten-year-old Marji, gathered
in Tehran’s Mehrabad airport to welcome Marji’s cousin returning from her
studies in Paris. The film thus begins by situating memory squarely in the
realm of nostalgia and the space of exile; Marji recalls her past from a place
of unbelonging and transition par excellence, as the very function of an air-
port is to demarcate the space in-between departures and arrivals.
In classic flashback shots, the screen fades or dissolves to reveal the past
in memory. Traditionally the flashback is used as a way of filling in a miss-
ing piece of history, to explain a heretofore unexplained mystery, or as a
way of accounting for someone’s unusual behavior.11 What distinguishes
this film’s use of the flashback technique from its classic use in Hollywood
film productions is that the narrative story in Persepolis unfolds almost
entirely through flashback with sporadic scenes in the present time inter-
rupting Marji’s recollections of the past. The directors’ choice to tell Marji’s
 A Story Told in Flashback 

story almost entirely through the use of the flashback thus positions the film
in the sphere of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym defines as “a mourning for the
impossibility of mythical return.”12 The present, on the other hand, appears
only in intermittent and brief scenes between memories of the past. Further,
the scenes depicting the present time exist in spaces of transition: in the
Orly airport and in a taxi cab departing Orly at the conclusion of the film. I
will return to this idea of a transient temporal present later in the chapter.
In the film version, Marji’s narrative is conveyed through her recollections
and remembrances. This nostalgic look backward is what Boym terms “re-
flective nostalgia,” which she defines as a “meditation on history and the
passage of time.”13 Theorists of nostalgia have noted that the word entered
our lexicon through a  Swiss medical thesis that identified the nostal-
gic condition as a medical disease. Loosely translating the German word for
homesickness, Heimweh, into Greek, medical doctor Johannes Hofer coined
the word nostalgia. In Greek, nostos means “to return home” and algia means
“a painful feeling.”14 The cure for the disease of nostalgia was generally
understood to be a return to one’s original homeland. The more modern
use of nostalgia, however, has shifted to its recognition as a psychological
state. Although it is no longer pathologized in the same way, it has retained
its association with a lost homeland; further, as Boym points out, the word
nostalgia carries within it a heightened awareness of the irretrievability of
time. What nostalgics long for—perhaps unconsciously—is a retrieval or re-
visitation of a past memory in order to fix its place in time. Throughout the
film, Marji’s nostalgia is bound up with the figure of her grandmother. The
scene depicting the night before Marji’s first departure from Iran illustrates
their touching relationship. Their figures are shaded black but outlined in
bright, translucent white lines, recalling some of the full-page panels in the
Persepolis comics.15 The white jasmine flowers that tumble slowly from her
grandmother’s brassiere and fall gently over Marji as she lies in bed waiting
for her creates a magical atmosphere; the extradiegetic music in this scene
contributes further to the overall atmosphere of longing and loss. Marji’s
memories of her grandmother intertwined with her memories of revolu-
tion open up the definition of nostalgia, inviting us to understand this affec-
tive relationship to the past as defined by Carrie Hamilton: “as a form of
bittersweet memory and emotion, [which] incorporates both mourning and
happiness.”16
The way the flashback is used in Persepolis suggests the interlacing of
the past and the present, and the continual reemergence of the past into the
 n im a n a gh ibi

present, suggesting the impossibility of keeping the past at bay. Similarly,

trauma theorists have remarked that a feature of the traumatic experience
is the inability to keep trauma safely in the past; traumatic memories con-
stantly encroach on the present.17 Understanding Persepolis as part of a
growing number of autobiographical texts by diasporic Iranian women that
narrate the trauma of the  revolution facilitates our understanding of
the prominent use of the flashback technique in this film, pointing to the
convergence of traumatic memory with the cinematic technique of the flash-
back.18 The scenes depicting Marji in the Orly airport, filmed in the present
time and in color, coexist with her memories of the past. But in the Per-
sepolis movie, not only does the past exist alongside the present, under-
scoring the fact that the past is always retold through our knowledge of the
present, but the past actually intrudes on the present, interrupting the nar-
rative as it unfolds. The first transition to the flashback mode in the film
begins with Marji’s ten-year-old self running into the same shot as the one
occupied by the adult Marji in the Orly airport. The adult Marji looks on
cynically as the image of her younger self rushes into the frame, bounding
with excitement and optimism.
This first flashback segment concludes with Marji’s first departure from
Iran. The scene ends with her turning to wave a final goodbye to her parents
only to witness her mother collapsing into her father’s arms. Her parents’
figures are entirely blackened and the rest of the screen closes in on them,
swallowing their images and shrouding the screen in darkness. The film
then shifts back to color, in the present time, where we see Satrapi sitting on
a bench in Orly. She removes her hijab and lights another cigarette, much
to the displeasure of the woman occupying the same bench with her small
child. The film moves back into flashback mode for the next segment of nar-
rative memory: Marji’s arrival in Austria. Again in this instance, the flashback
occupies the same visual space as the present. We see Marji in the present,
in color, to the far left of the screen, and the rest of the screen is a black-and-
white representation of the events of her arrival in Austria. If memory, as
James Olney describes it, is “both recollective and anticipatory” so that our
present moment is always inflected by the ways in which we remember the
past and how we anticipate our future selves, in the Persepolis movie Marji’s
recollections of the past threaten to overwhelm her, hindering her move-
ment into the future.19 As she situates herself in the airport, she becomes an
observer, a spectator of her past from the margins of the present as images of
her present and past self compete for dominance of the screen. Eventually,
 A Story Told in Flashback 

the past overwhelms the present, reinforcing in stark visual terms the recur-
rence of traumatic memories and of the persistent incursion of the past into
the present.
The flashback segment depicting Marji’s European sojourn ends with her
arrival back at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. A humbled Marji (after a trying
few years in Austria that end with her becoming homeless) faces a sinister-
looking official of the Islamic Republic who looks through her bags for
illegal items and gruffly commands her to adjust her headscarf. The scene
concludes with a tearful embrace with her parents who at first fail to recog-
nize her. The next scene shifts back to the present time, filmed in color, with
a shot of descending escalators in the Orly airport and a long shot of a jani-
tor mopping the airport floor; the camera then pans to the airport bar where
Marji sits on a stool with her back to the camera as it moves in for a medium
shot of her at the bar, drinking espresso and reflecting on her first morning
back in Tehran. Here, the flashback folds into the present in a more con-
ventional way, as the present image dissolves in order to allow for the emer-
gence of the past.
The Persepolis comics as well as the film, like all autobiographical texts,
are preoccupied with narrating the events of the past; this process of nar-
rative recall involves, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have described, “a
reinterpretation of the past in the present.”20 However, as previously men-
tioned, there are important structural differences between the film and the
comics. The comics follow a more conventionally linear narrative, beginning
with Marji as a young child and ending, in Persepolis II, with her second and
final departure from Iran as a young woman. Thus, the autobiographical
comics follow a chronological development and conclude on a more-or-less
positive and forward-looking note.21 The film, however, is structured in such
a way as to suggest stasis and loss as the entire story is narrated through
flashback. Satrapi’s and Paronnaud’s decision to tell Marji’s story almost
entirely through flashback, and Marji’s location in the transitional space of
the airport throughout the film, suggest that the temporal moment of the
present is continuously eclipsed by memories of the past. José van Dijck’s
observation that “there is a constant productive tension between our incli-
nation to mark significant events and the cultural frameworks through
which we recall them” is useful to bear in mind as we reflect on the differ-
ences between the two versions of Persepolis.22 Not only are there discrete
generic differences between autobiographical comics and the feature film
that account for the differences between the two narratives, but the fact that
 n im a n a gh ibi

Satrapi’s revisitation of her childhood memories are funneled through her

knowledge of a constantly changing present should make us mindful of the
fact that “as an activity taking place in the present, the past is continuously
modified and revised.”23

The Transient Present

As previously discussed, the film begins and ends in the Orly airport. The
four brief scenes, representing the present time, all of them in color, take
place in various spaces of transition: at the airport ticket counter, in the
airport waiting area, in the airport restaurant, and finally in a taxicab leav-
ing the airport. If the airport can be understood as the quintessential site of
unbelonging, then it is also important to consider how it operates as a space
in the film, as Marji is seemingly (and paradoxically) fixed in transition,
rooted in flux, and overcome by stories of her past. This transitional, fluid
space of unbelonging can be understood in a negative light as Marji appears
unable to move forward into the future. The entire film is a flashback, sug-
gesting movement backward, and we watch as her present (and presence) is
consistently overshadowed by her memories of the past. The flashback scenes
repeatedly interrupt her location in the temporal present, literally and visu-
ally pushing her to one side of the screen, rendering her a passive observer
of her own life. The constant infringement of the past onto the present fur-
ther marks her narrative as emerging out of a place of trauma, illustrating
the ways in which nostalgic memory and traumatic memory intersect in
autobiographical narrative.24
The film, however, seems to be suggesting a kind of failure of the asser-
tion of the present (and of the future) through its privileging of the past. Fol-
lowing this line of inquiry regarding the privileging of one temporal moment
over another, or of one spatial location over another, it is further neces-
sary to consider why the scenes in the present are all filmed in color. Do the
vibrant colors used to depict the present versus the starkness of the black
and white representing the past suggest a privileging of the present or a
celebration of transience? The film appears to favor a certain mobility and
freedom that emerges out of a transient state or an in-between position that
can only occur by occluding the realities of class privilege. The film ends with
Marji’s arrival in Orly; we see her on the escalator, at the baggage carousel,
and finally exiting the sliding doors of the airport. The shot then pans out
to reveal the outside of the airport; the left side of the screen is still black
and white, but the right side where the street lamps are lit suggests a hint of
 A Story Told in Flashback 

color; soon the shades change and the screen turns to color. We see Marji
in a taxicab leaving the airport with her head turned to look wistfully back
at Orly. The cab driver asks her where she has come from, to which she
replies, “From Iran,” and the scene ends with a long shot of the back of the
taxicab as it drives away from the airport. The film concludes, then, with
the black-and-white scenes of the past dissolving into the present as Marji
moves out of the transitional space of the airport, away from the past and
into the future; the viewer experiences a certain relief that Marji has been
able to move out of stasis and move forward, but we also experience relief
that she will now be “safe” and live the life of an “emancipated” woman, a
desire expressed by her mother several times in the film. On her second and
final departure from Iran, her mother instructs her to leave and never to
return. “The Iran of today is not for you,” she tells her as they say goodbye
at the airport. In her response to the cab driver at the end of the film,
Marji reclaims her Iranian past with a pride that she did not have the first
time she left home for Europe. This sense of pride comes, however, at the
expense of the possibility of an Iranian present or future; the film thus ends
by retaining a sense of loss and mourning. If this story locates itself, as I
am suggesting it does, in a privileged space of transience and mobility, can
it simultaneously claim to narrate the cultural memory of a nation and a
people scarred by revolution and war? Can it portray, as Satrapi maintains
it does, a universal story of life under dictatorial rule?

Persepolis: (Not) a Universal Story

In the introduction to Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (), Satrapi
claims that one of her motivations for writing the book was to humanize a
culture and a people vilified as terrorists and religious fanatics in popular
media representations, particularly since September , . After watch-
ing the animated film, we are left with the question of whether she has
succeeded at what she claims to be doing in her comic book. A strong indi-
cation that the film does not achieve what she hopes is the tempered class
critique in the film, a critique that had significantly more bite in the Perse-
polis comics.25
In media interviews about the film, Satrapi repeatedly emphasizes that
this is a universal story about the debilitating effects of oppression and dic-
tatorship and the universal desire for freedom. Satrapi has claimed that she
wanted to make an animated feature film based on the graphic novel precisely
because of what she understands to be the universal appeal of animation. An
 n im a n a gh ibi

animated feature, claims Satrapi, would be able to tell the story of the effects
of the Iranian Revolution as the story of what might happen in any country
governed by a dictatorial government. A live action film, on the other hand,
would make the narrative about “a bunch of Arabs in a distant land who are
religious fanatics.”26 Satrapi’s statement demonstrates the common assump-
tion that animation is a children’s genre and therefore universal in its appeal,
and that animated characters can stand in for universal characters, free from
racial, gendered, and class hierarchies.27 The film of Persepolis is, I believe,
a good example of how this is not at all the case.
Satrapi’s resolute decision to work in animation because of its so-called
universal appeal is useful to explore particularly through the film’s visual rep-
resentations of Iranians. The film depicts Satrapi’s family members as very
European; their visual aesthetic, their cultural attitudes, and their manner
of speech reflects a kind of positioning of themselves on the globe as cos-
mopolitan subjects. In fact, what the Persepolis animated feature manages
to do is to particularize rather than to universalize; the film particularizes
by representing Satrapi’s Iranian family through an emulation of a European
(specifically, French) family. This roots Satrapi squarely in her class: upper-
class Iranians of Satrapi’s and of her parents’ generations tend to signal their
class status through a partial adoption of French tastes and cultural prac-
tices; this recognizable “type” of Europeanized Iranian is evoked in Satrapi’s
filmic depiction of her family.
Representatives of the revolutionary regime, on the other hand, are more
noticeably racialized with thick black eyebrows, dark beards, and angry ex-
pressions suggestive of violence. The scenes depicting revolutionary protests
are often in stark black and white, with very heavy emphasis on dark shad-
ows, accompanied by ominous and foreboding music. The audience thus has
the sense that something terrible is taking place and that the crowd is irra-
tional and out of control. In Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the panels
representing the early days of the Iranian Revolution are filled with images
of a celebratory (albeit mostly secular looking) crowd, underscoring Satrapi’s
point in the comics that the  revolution was an Iranian, not an Islamic,
one. For example, the full-page panel depicting the day of the shah’s depar-
ture portrays large numbers of smiling, joyous people, and the caption reads:
“The day he left, the country had the biggest celebration of its entire his-
tory” (). The comics illustrate the eventual co-optation of the revolution
by Islamists and the increasing dissatisfaction and disillusionment of many
Iranians with the new regime. The film, on the other hand, does not offer a
 A Story Told in Flashback 

similarly nuanced representation of events as it sidesteps the opportunity to

trace the trajectory of what began as a popular revolution and culminated
in an oppressive theocracy. In the film, the revolution is visually represented
as something fearful and ominous from its inception.
The question we are left to ponder, then, is whether there is a difference
between the animated representation of revolutionaries as menacing and
the representations of fanatic and threatening Muslims in the mainstream
Western media. From this perspective, the film version of Persepolis does
not offer noticeably alternative visual representations of Muslim Others to
those found in mainstream news media, for example. While the comics share
similar racialized representations of supporters of the Islamic regime, Perse-
polis: The Story of a Childhood in particular makes efforts to acknowledge
political, cultural, and social differences among Iranians.
Further, while the Persepolis comics offer a self-reflexive critique of class
inequities and social hierarchies and hypocrisies in Iranian society by cast-
ing a critical eye at Marji’s immediate family, this type of critique is decid-
edly muted in the film. For example, in Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood,
Marji reflects on the contradictions of her parents driving a Cadillac and
employing a live-in maid while at the same time espousing Marxist politi-
cal leanings.28 The comics offer a more nuanced and complex perspective
on the reasons for the revolution and, for the most part, manage to avoid
predictable and easy representations of Iranian women’s oppressed status.
An example of easy and problematic representations of women’s subjugated
status in postrevolutionary Iran is the film’s treatment of the issue of veil-
ing. The history and the significance of the veil in Iran are extremely com-
plicated, and although Satrapi gestures to this complexity in the comics, this
recognition is absent from the film.29 The film simply equates the wearing of
the veil with oppression; there are numerous references to the veil as con-
strictive and wholly negative, conveyed through Marji’s mother and grand-
mother. In one of the last scenes in the film, shortly before Marji leaves Iran
for Paris, she visits her grandmother, who immediately tells her to remove
her veil because looking at it makes her feel claustrophobic. Marji removes
it, saying that she has grown so used to wearing it that she forgot to take
it off, to which her grandmother responds with force that she should never
get used to wearing it. Although her grandmother’s indignation emerges in
response to state-legislated and enforced dress codes on women, it remains
worth noting that the practice of veiling is one that is marked by class and
religious differences.
 n im a n a gh ibi

Marji’s mother, for example, repeatedly emphasizes that she has always
wanted her daughter to grow up to be “emancipated,” a state of being she
appears to associate only with (unveiled) European women. In one scene
that illustrates the class tensions around the practice of veiling, the family’s
housekeeper, Madame Nassrine, hurriedly covers her hair when Marji’s father
steps into the kitchen, but is immediately admonished by Marji’s mother, who
demands to know why she is covering herself. Madame Nassrine responds
with obvious discomfort: “I don’t know. It’s how I was brought up.” Although
there is opportunity here for some discussion of the cultural gaps between
Satrapi’s obviously privileged family and Madame Nassrine’s working-class
background, the film glosses over these tensions. As a result, the Western
audience is left with an impression of Madame Nassrine’s ignorance, while
Satrapi’s mother is lauded for her progressive feminism, exemplified by her
position against veiling, a position that (falsely) comes to represent a uni-
versal position.
As the adult Marji remembers her younger self seeking solace in her
grandmother’s embrace, she also recalls her grandmother’s counsel that she
always retain her personal history. Her father repeats this advice to her on
the day of her first departure from Iran: “Never forget who you are or where
you come from.” This reminder of her family heritage echoes the urgent
pleas her Uncle Anoosh makes early in the film that she always preserve
the family’s memory. As she narrates her family’s personal history, Marji
lays claim to the public history of the nation and to her (elite) family’s place
within it. The overlapping of private with public history is a shared feature
of both the comics and the film. However, while the Persepolis comics open
the door to a discussion of the history of Iran, including Western involve-
ment in its domestic affairs, and attempts to challenge Western representa-
tions of Iranians as religious fanatics, the Persepolis film reconsolidates the
very stereotypes Satrapi tries to contest in her comics.
Furthermore, autobiographical recall in the film through the prism of nos-
talgia lends itself to a romanticization of the past that is not as evident in the
comics. The remediated Persepolis, with its new, flashback-based structure,
posits a nostalgic recollection of Iran that confirms a decidedly particular—
not universal—privileged past, placing it as irretrievably lost. This tension
between the country’s (Westernized and secular) past and (insular and theo-
cratic) present, exemplified by her mother’s staunch belief that “the Iran of
today” is not appropriate for Marji, fuels the nostalgic impulse in the film.
This glorified filmic representation of the Iran of the past thus opens the door
 A Story Told in Flashback 

to a rejection of Iran in the present; in other words, the regret expressed for
a better (prerevolutionary) past is mobilized toward the damning of a pres-
ent reality (modern-day Iran).
notes
I would like to thank Andrew O’Malley, who I first began to think with and write about
the Persepolis comics; his feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter has been invaluable.
My work in this field has benefitted enormously from Gillian Whitlock’s important
scholarship on life narratives and on Satrapi’s graphic novels in particular.
1. See Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, ), and Perse-
polis II: The Story of a Return (New York: Pantheon, ).
2. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . According to Bolter and Grusin, a remediated
text consciously incorporates one medium into another; in the case of Persepolis, the
medium of comics is incorporated into that of the feature film by maintaining the
comics’ visual aesthetic through its commitment to black-and-white animation and its
use of hand-drawn cells.
3. For insightful analyses of memory and history in the Persepolis comics, see
Hillary Chute, “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” Women’s
Studies Quarterly ./ (Spring/Summer ): –; and Kimberly Wedeven
Segall, “Melancholy Ties: Intergenerational Loss and Exile in Persepolis,” Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East . (): –.
4. A handful of examples include the following books: Davar Ardalan, My Name Is
Iran: A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt, ); Gelareh Asayesh, Saffron Sky: A Life
between Iran and America (Boston: Beacon Press, ); Tara Bahrampour, To See and
See Again: A Life in Iran and America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, );
Farideh Goldin, Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman (Lebanon, NH:
University Press of New England [for Brandeis Press], ); Roya Hakakian, Journey
from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (New York: Crown Pub-
lishers, ); Afschineh Latifi, Even after All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution,
and Leaving Iran (New York: HarperCollins, ); Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in
Tehran (New York: Random House, ).
5. Spiegelman quoted in Michael Levine, “Necessary Stains: Spiegelman’s MAUS
and the Bleeding of History,” American Imago . (Fall ): – ().
6. Ibid., . The gutter is the space between panels in a graphic narrative; because
there are no words or images to read, the reader is invited to interpret the events that
take place between panels.
7. The interactive medium of the comic book as opposed to the more passive rela-
tionship between the spectator and the movie screen is a distinction on which Satrapi
remarks in an interview in one of the DVD extras. It is also important to note that the
nondiegetic music in the film is somber and even threatening during the scenes depict-
ing the revolutionaries demonstrating in the streets; the viewer is left with the impres-
sion that something ominous is in the offing. The music thus cues us to view what
comes after the revolution with suspicion and caution.
8. In one of the DVD extras, Vincent Paronnaud shares his proclivity for the flash-
back technique in cinema. According to Paronnaud, one of the reasons he and Satrapi
 n im a n a gh ibi

decided to tell Marji’s story through flashback was in order to make a clear distinction
between the comics and the film version.
9. See Maureen Turim’s detailed study of the use of the flashback technique and its
relationship to memory in cinema in Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New
York: Routledge, ).
10. There are two other short color scenes, depicting the present time, that inter-
rupt the flashback. I will discuss these later in this chapter.
11. See Turim’s section “Functions of Early Flashbacks,” in chapter  of her book
Flashbacks in Film.
12. Sveltana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, ), .
13. Ibid., .
14. See Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, and Andrea Deciu Ritivoi, Yesterday’s Self:
Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, ), for
in-depth studies on nostalgia.
15. Satrapi’s dramatic technique of drawing black images outlined in white can be
found in the full-page panel of Marji and her school friends beating their chests to
mourn the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war (). Another example of her use of black-and-
white contrast includes the powerful final panel in the book where Marji is shown
pressed up against the glass at the departures gate in Tehran airport, looking at her
mother, immobile from grief in her father’s arms; her parents’ black figures are outlined
in white (). The scene depicting her grandmother shaking out the jasmine flowers
from her bra appears in a smaller panel in the comic book, but here, too, the grand-
mother’s figure is black outlined in white, with the star-shaped white jasmine flowers
sparkling in the dark, creating a dreamlike effect.
16. Carrie Hamilton, “Happy Memories,” New Formations . (): – ().
17. See Cathy Caruth, Ruth Frey, and Leigh Gilmore, among others, for their work
on the recurrence of the traumatic past into the present.
18. See Nima Naghibi, “Revolution, Trauma, and Memory in Diasporic Iranian
Women’s Autobiographies” Radical History Review  (): –, for a discussion
of trauma and memory in contemporary Iranian women’s autobiographies.
19. James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, ), .
20. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpret-
ing Life Narratives (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, ), .
21. This is not to suggest that the comics present a seamless narrative. Critics such
as Gillian Whitlock and Rocío G. Davis have observed that the autobiographical nature
of the comics is complicated by the use of a child avatar in Persepolis: The Story of a
Childhood whose memories of a traumatic personal and public past are mediated
through Satrapi’s adult perspective articulated in the captions. For more on the tem-
poral complexity of the Persepolis comics, see Rocío G. Davis, “A Graphic Self: Comics
as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” Prose Studies . (December ):
–; and Gillian Whitlock, “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics,” Modern
Fiction Studies . (Winter ): –.
22. José van Dijck, “Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of
Cultural Analysis,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies , no.  (June
): – ().
 A Story Told in Flashback 

23. Ibid., .

24. For an informative analysis of the overlapping of traumatic memory with nos-
talgic memory, see Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “‘We Would Not Have Come
without You’: Generations of Nostalgia,” American Imago . (Fall ): –.
25. See the following paragraphs for a lengthier consideration of her treatment of
class.
26. This is my translation of her interview in one of the extra features on the Perse-
polis DVD.
27. In Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, ), Paul Wells urges us to
work against the dominant tendencies to equate animation with a kind of childlike rep-
resentational innocence. See also Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley’s discussion of the
tension between the universal and the particular in “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East and
West in Satrapi’s Persepolis,” English Studies in Canada .– (): –.
28. Some examples of Marji’s struggle to make sense of her own privileged position
within Iran’s highly stratified social milieu can be found on pages , , and  of
Persepolis.
29. See Naghibi and O’Malley, “Estranging the Familiar,” for a discussion of repre-
sentation of veiling in the Persepolis comics.
 

Autobiography
The Process Negates the Term

ph o e be gl o e c k n e r

Dear Reader,
In moments of silence, I’m sure that I hear you asking me, “What is it like
to live?” Do you know how deliriously happy your question makes me? I
yearn for a connection with you that dissolves the boundaries of subjective
perception, allowing us a universal understanding of all aspects of life.
This impulse to connect with you has driven me to write books, to draw
pictures, and, at times, even to sing. It has become an irresistible and creative
compulsion, so strong that I have no choice but to pursue its satisfaction. It is
a pursuit so important that stopping, even for a moment, feels like death. I
hope you don’t suspect that I’m exaggerating—but if you haven’t felt as I do,
it will be nearly impossible to convince you of the urgency and reality of my
feelings. But still, it is my hope that you will, one day, understand completely.
However, in the silent moments before sleep, I am reminded of my
solitude. I don’t know you and never will. You will never know me. The
creation is not the creator. What a sad negation of my sweetest dreams! If I
were prone to assign importance to rational thought, I would surely have
died long ago. I comfort myself with the idea that truth is an abstract concept
at best, easily disengaged from fact.
Love,
Minnie

I have been told that I have, on occasion, achieved a semblance of intimacy

with my readers through works where I seem to imbue a central character
with physical and personality traits similar to my own. This is a wonderful
result, but the implications are complex.


 Autobiography 

When a character in a novel seems to strongly resemble the author, it

would make sense to assume that such works must be autobiographical.
When pictures are combined with text, as in a graphic novel, this resem-
blance may be further reinforced and even be offered as “proof ” that the
book is, without a doubt, an “autobiography.” However, although the corre-
lation between author and character may seem blatantly clear, it is unwise
to jump to the conclusion that the work is the “story of the author’s life,” in
full or in part.

Dear Reader,
I am not Minnie Goetze.
Please don’t take offense—your confusion is no surprise. She does look
like I did at one time, and has had many of the same experiences. To declare
that she and I are not the same must seem to make me a prevaricator or,
worse yet, an out-and-out liar. But I am neither.
I’m not terribly prolific, even though I’m working all the time. It’s painful
and draining for me to create a finished book. My process involves the slow
eradication of self (without the death, so far, of the physical body). It’s the
distilling of soul, of externalizing its essence and giving it a different life as a
character in a world that is something like a place I once knew.
I am not writing about myself—I am delivering myself of myself, and that
is not what I’d call autobiography—it is, rather, a form of suicide.
I aspire to create characters who can be universally understood despite
being constructed with details so numerous that they could only refer to a
particular situation. The process is destructive—I must die so that Minnie
can live. I don’t want her to be me—she must be all girls, anyone. I am the
source of Minnie, but I am depleted in creating her. This is not history or
documentary or a confession, and memories will be altered or sacrificed, for
factual truth has little significance in the pursuit of emotional truth.
It’s not my story. It’s our story.
Love,
Minnie

I AM AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CARTOONIST.
No I’m not.
 

Up from Surgery
The Politics of Self-Representation in
Women’s Graphic Memoirs of Illness
there sa tensuan

Phoebe Gloeckner’s  illustration “The Breast,” which is included in her

 collection A Child’s Life, invites viewers to reconsider what passes as
a normal body as well as what constitutes a normative vision of the world.
In the illustration a medical chart showing pre- and postoperative illustra-
tions of breast-augmentation surgery is anchored by a large panel of a side
view of an “ideal” breast. The chart duly notes that the “ideal . . . angle of
intramammary fold to nipple is – degrees” and illustrates how this
effect can be reached for breasts designated as “tuberous,” “saggy,” and, sim-
ply, “small.”1 The diagram generates a deadpan humor as over a half dozen
pairs of “before” and “after” images of breasts labeled undesirable are refig-
ured through implants or other surgical interventions, such as the “lower-
ing of the intramammary fold” or the “elevation and reduction of the nipple.”
These profiles in cartilage frame the large panel that illustrates the location
of fat deposits, milk glands, and lactiferous ducts in a seemingly “normal”
breast. Gloeckner’s jarring juxtaposition provides a point of orientation from
which a viewer may reconsider how supposedly detached, clinical observa-
tions of female physiognomy shape—and are shaped by—social investments
in a feminine ideal rarely (if ever) embodied by women who have not been
artificially enhanced or literally cut down to size.
As would befit the work of a cartoonist with a master’s degree in medical
illustration, Gloeckner’s image is a sly commentary on the presumptions
encoded in images meant to manifest scientific authority and objectivity, as
well as on the representations of remarkably buxom women in such comics
as newspaper strips like Blondie (–present), or superhero sagas that
feature characters such as Ms. Marvel or DC Comics’ Powergirl, or the work


 Up from Surgery 

of auteurs such as Robert Crumb and the Hernandez brothers whose ful-
some females abound in the pages of Zap Comics (–) and in the
ongoing series Love and Rockets (–present).2 In the main panel of
Gloeckner’s illustration, the vision of smooth, pale skin stretched taut over
a breast displaying what appears to be an ideal angle of intramammary
fold cuts to a view of the viscera beneath, becoming an image that fore-
grounds anatomical function over aesthetic form. But in both turning to
and tweaking the conventions of anatomical illustrations, Gloeckner’s work
critiques a tradition that stretches back to the Brussels-born anatomist
Andreas Vesalius, whose masterwork De humani corporis fabrica (On the
Structure of the Body) was first published in .3 Vesalius established a
visual idiom for anatomical representations of the body through illustra-
tions that were revisited (and occasionally simply ripped off) by figures such
as Vesalius’s student Gabriele Falloppio, whose anatomical observations
published in  extended his mentor’s work through investigations of the
structures of the skull and female genitalia; the Dutch anatomist Govard
Bidloo, whose influential anatomical atlas appeared in ; and Scottish
physician and anatomist William Hunter, who secured his reputation through
the  publication of Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus. As James
Robert Allard suggests in an essay on the aesthetics of Henry Gray and
Henry Vandyke Carter’s Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical (), “beauty,
in the end, may be less in the eye of the beholder than in the scalpel and
pen of the anatomist and the medical establishment” (), arguing that
“the verbal and visual elements of Gray’s Anatomy work by making the
body a strange and alien object that only highly trained professionals, such
as physicians, surgeons, and anatomists . . . can interpret and understand”
(). Given an illustration such as “The Breast,” a viewer may push back
against this cultural discourse to ponder whether what is cast as elective
surgery could from another point of view be seen as systemic mutilation.
In their study of scientific atlases from the eighteenth to the twentieth
century, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison note that the notion of scien-
tific objectivity was constructed in part through the creation and circula-
tion of images. One such image was Jan Wandelaar’s engraving of an upright
and animate skeleton shown against a young rhinoceros in a lush, outdoor
background in Bernhard Albinus’s Tabulae scelecti et muscularum corporis
humani (Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body, first published
in ). Another appeared in Hunter’s Anatomy of a half-clothed, headless
female torso with arms and legs neatly amputated and abdomen sliced open
 there sa tensuan

to reveal a uterus encasing a nine-month-old fetus. Daston and Galison

argue that such texts “became manifestoes for [a] new brand of scientific
objectivity.”4 They present visions that derive from the nineteenth-century
“idea of objectivity [that] attempts to eliminate the mediating presence of
the observer” (). This discursive framework could be challenged by any
viewer who might see in the background of Wandelaar’s image evidence of
eighteenth-century Dutch and English imperialist ambitions, or in Hunter’s
plates an emphasis on visceral corporeality that challenges the Madonna
tradition of Christian iconography.5 Even Carter’s illustration of the femi-
nine reproductive system in the highly influential and seemingly straight-
forward Gray’s Anatomy shows the cross-section of the vagina with labia
and vaginal canal wide open, as if occupied by an invisible phallus.6
Gloeckner makes visible the ideological underpinnings of supposedly
objective illustrations in such works as her  “Self portrait with pem-
phigus vulgaris.” This image literally foregrounds the hand of the artist as
Gloeckner presents herself with her right arm, throat, and face covered with
the sores and suppurating skin characteristic of a rare autoimmune disease.
A reader of A Child’s Life would flip to this image immediately after perus-
ing Robert Crumb’s introduction. Crumb opens with a profession of his
admiration for Gloeckner’s work before confessing his long-held and frus-
trated desire for her. Looking back over the span of time he has known
Gloeckner, he kvetches, in quintessential Crumb-speak: “Did I get a blow job
offa her? Not even once! I got nothing!”(). Crumb’s libidinous introduction
is paired with his  drawing titled “Phoebe,” depicting a young, wide-eyed
artist with pencil in hand and eyes focused on a blank page and sitting on a
flowered couch with legs splayed. Crumb’s image is emblematic of women’s
routine function in comics as the tabula rasa onto which male authorial
desires are projected. In tension with this paradigm are Gloeckner’s critical
illustrations, “The Direction of Impact,” of a woman inserting a diaphragm
juxtaposed against a framing motif of disjointed and fractured tibia, and her
untitled  painting showing the muscles of a woman’s neck being pushed
aside by a fist that has been jammed down her throat. These works deploy
the seemingly dispassionate visual idiom of scientific illustration to illumi-
nate—with discomfiting detail—the ways in which systems of representation
ranging from comics to medical illustration simultaneously reveal and re-
inscribe the metaphorical and material violence enacted on women’s bodies.
Through acts of radical revision, therefore, Gloeckner challenges viewers
to literally see how social conventions and medical discourses construct
 Up from Surgery 

normativity. A similar demand for revision is at the center of Audre Lorde’s

The Cancer Journals (). For Lorde, breast cancer prompts a critique of
the treatments of the disease, which are underwritten by a feminine ideal.
Such an ideal is emblematized in programs that emphasize how recon-
structive surgery or the use of prostheses can enable a patient to “get back
to normal”:

This emphasis upon the cosmetic after surgery reinforces this society’s stereo-
type of women, that we are only what we look or appear [sic], so that is what
we need to address. . . . It encourages a woman to focus her energies upon the
mastectomy as a cosmetic occurrence, to the exclusion of other factors in a
constellation that could include her own death. It removes her from what that
constellation means in terms of her living, and from developing priorities of
usage for whatever time she has before her.7

Lorde argues that the pressure placed upon postmastectomy women to

wear a prosthesis literally as well as figuratively covers up the ravaging
effects of the disease, effectively making them individual victims rather than
a constituency poised to advocate for inquiries into the environmental trig-
gers of the disease or to ensure health care for women of all economic back-
grounds. By reviewing what passes as normative practice or upheld as an
ideal vision, Gloeckner and Lorde urge us to disinter the ideologies that
sustain such patterns and practices.
In his reading of works such as The Cancer Journals, Musa Mayer’s
Examining Myself: One Woman’s Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and
Recovery (), and Gayle Feldman’s You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother
(), autobiography theorist Thomas Couser suggests that

more than the narratives of many other diseases . . . narratives of breast cancer
generally have a public mission, an agenda that is in some sense political. . . .
Breast cancer narratives are written primarily for an audience at risk. . . . Thus
two focuses emerge: the personal (addressing the illness as an individual con-
cern) and the political (addressing the disease as a women’s health issue).8

Couser notes that such narratives generally follow a specific narrative arc,
beginning with the initial detection of the disease through the discovery of
a lump or a shadow on a mammogram, followed by the narrator’s course of
treatment that (at least temporarily) ensures her survival.
 there sa tensuan

Told from the perspective of the survivor, such narratives are “inherently
comic in their plots” (), which, according to Couser, distinguishes them
from works that dramatize a subject’s tragic end.9 Miriam Engelberg’s col-
lection of cartoons, Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, plays both with
the serial form of the comic strip and with the triumphal themes accorded
to narratives of disease and recovery.10 In a vignette titled “Spirituality,” the
narrator gives the following counsel to a young woman who sits on a yoga
mat in the lotus position and whose smooth scalp codes her as a chemo-
therapy patient:

“Listen, kid—prayer, meditation, worship, -step meetings—I’ve been there,

done that. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be!
I know it seems fun and exciting right now, but think of your future! Some-
day you’ll need a spiritual awakening . . . don’t use it up too soon!” (n.p.)

“Spirituality” thus plays with the trope that illness and disability narra-
tives borrow from conversion narratives in which catastrophic debilitation
occasions the profound reenvisioning of one’s place in the cosmos. This
trajectory shapes popular works such as Joni (), Joni Eareckson’s best-
selling account of how her quadriplegic paralysis resulting from a diving
accident leads to a renewal of her Christian faith. More recently, we see this
trajectory in the memoir My Stroke of Insight () by Jill Bolte Taylor, the
Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, who credits the stroke that was the result
of severe hemorrhaging in the left hemisphere of her brain with a new
understanding of how to tap into the peace-making potential of the right
side of the brain, the hemisphere that discerns patterns and connection.
Indeed, Taylor’s presentation to the  Technology, Entertainment, and
Design (TED) conference had all the earmarks of an old-fashioned tent re-
vival meeting. Given the power and popularity of such narratives, Engelberg’s
vignette speaks to the desire for spiritual enlightenment even as it questions
narrative frameworks that causally link enlightenment and despair.
Several of Engelberg’s vignettes demonstrate the divergences between
her experience of breast cancer and others’ expectations of the disease. Her
vignette “The Undead” limns the awkwardness of social encounters with
acquaintances who had literally given the narrator up for dead on hear-
ing her diagnosis. A droll narrative device, the frame of the vignette pro-
claims, “we interrupt this cartoon with breaking news” to reveal that the
narrator’s cancer has returned. The narrator then embarks on an intensive
 Up from Surgery 

investigation of cable TV, accessing the palliative effects of watching epi-

sodes of “Celebrity Poker.” Throughout Cancer Made Me a Shallower Per-
son, Engelberg’s vignettes illustrate her reflections from the introduction to
the collection that, “when I was first diagnosed, I felt pressure to become
someone different—someone nobler and more courageous than I was” (xiii).
Engelberg actively works against such expectations through vignettes such
as “Hair,” in which the narrator responds to her oncologist’s statement that
“you’ll be doing  rounds of AC chemotherapy[;] It will make your hair
fall out” with distress partially borne out of the fact that she had “just found
the right shampoo and conditioner combo” for her unruly head of hair.
Engelberg’s sardonic celebration of shallowness—the joys of celebrity gossip
magazines, the pleasures of the attention she receives when wearing the
electric blue wig that she purchases to cover up her hair loss—works against
the social scripts encoded in patient education booklets, a genre Engelberg
describes as “something unpleasant. . . . and you.” Noting that the covers usu-
ally feature “insanely cheerful patients” or “an illustration of a nature scene,”
such as the image that she provides of a dolphin leaping over the surf of a
tropical seashore, Engelberg declares that she would “like to introduce more
realism into the illustration” in a panel of a chemotherapy patient on the
same tropical beach throwing up into a toilet bowl as sharks glide offshore.
In her introduction to the  edition of The Best American Comics,
Lynda Barry hails Engelberg’s aesthetic as “the saddest kind of funny in a
go-for-it drawing style that can’t be faked.”11 Although appearing in the
same year as Engelberg’s, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s autobiography, Can-
cer Vixen, presents a sharp contrast.12 Marchetto’s glossy style is pure eye
candy, from its crisp images of hip New Yorkers with chiseled features and
freshly blown-out hair to its color palette that calls to mind the full tonal
range of the ninety-six-count box of Crayola crayons. Yet both Cancer Vixen
and Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person offer acerbic critiques of the stan-
dard narrative of “the cancer victim.” In Cancer Vixen, Marchetto—a fre-
quent contributor to the New Yorker and, for a time, the resident cartoonist
for Glamour magazine—plays with those commercial and stylistic conven-
tions of women’s fashion magazines that place editorial exhortations decry-
ing starvation in Darfur cheek-to-jowl with seductive photographic spreads
of emaciated models. In Marchetto’s hands, these conventions become a
means of exploring the political and economic landscapes in which endow-
ments for foundations dedicated to the eradication of breast cancer are fed
by the profits of carcinogenic products.
 there sa tensuan

Cancer Vixen traces out the interrelations between the practices and
preoccupations that construct gendered identities as well as the forces that
converge around the “cause” of breast cancer. The work explores the dynam-
ics that have propelled breast cancer awareness to a state of hypervisibility,
while at the same time rendering invisible the causes and casualties of the
disease. Read in relation to Gloeckner’s interrogation of the cultural and
institutional practices that fetishize women’s bodies, Cancer Vixen can be
seen as another critical take on the fetishization of female stereotypes. This
visual fetish is disseminated not only in the realm of textbook illustrations
that shape the supposed objectivity of American Medical Association–
certified physicians, but throughout the vast terrain of consumer culture
and, most prominently, on the covers of glossy magazines that the average
consumer can pick up for less than the cost of a tall soy chai latte at Star-
bucks, or around . percent of the cost of an average saline breast aug-
mentation surgery.
The first version of Cancer Vixen appeared in the May  issue of
Glamour magazine, the cover featuring Mischa Barton in a beaded party
dress that frames her ample cleavage. The starlet’s smiling countenance is
juxtaposed with a series of headlines that promise to reveal “ Ways to
Dress Your Body Better,” “The  Secret Sex Fantasies Every Guy Has,” and
quick fixes for acne (and the dreaded “back-ne”). Inside the magazine, arti-
cles range from a feature about how to negotiate with one’s credit card com-
pany and a story that warns of the “Attack of the Momzillas” to Marchetto’s
“Cancer Vixen.” In its magazine debut, Marchetto’s comic is glossed in the
table of contents by the italicized question: “what happens when a girl car-
toonist with a fabulous life finds . . . a lump in her breast? She writes a car-
toon about it, of course! Exclusive to Glamour: a story you’ll never forget”
(). A reader who takes issue with this breathless introduction, scripting a
malignant tumor as the premise for a thrilling tale, might choose to skip
over Marchetto’s six-page cartoon, but she would be hard pressed to ignore
the pages of “Cancer Vixen” after seeing the opening. Here, a miniskirted,
stiletto-heeled, long-haired blonde in a full-flying ninja pose declares, “Can-
cer, I am going to KICK YOUR BUTT! And I’m going to do it in KILLER
FOUR-INCH HEELS” (). After informing her parents and her fiancé
that the cells that aspirated from the lump in her breast were malignant,
Marchetto translates her finely honed sense of Glamour’s editorial tone into
the satirical, text-boxed declaration: “I phoned my gal pals and gave them
the sensational scoop” ().
 Up from Surgery 

“Cancer Vixen” works both within and against the magazine’s commer-
cial discourse, in which articles about the search for perfect bangs and a
good self-tanner are interspersed with editorials about the difficulties faced
by rape survivors in securing support for counseling and an interview with
a woman who has battled leukemia. The narrator of “Cancer Vixen” details
how her choice of oncologist is inflected by her approval of the doctor’s
fabulous collection of slingbacks, and draws out the fact that her decision
on her postsurgical course of treatment is inflected not only by the fact that
the excised tumor was “stage , node negative” (), but also by the con-
cern that her hair loss will negatively affect her husband’s business, as he
is the proprietor of a restaurant frequented by A-list celebrities (where he is
mobbed and occasionally manhandled by beautiful women).
The Glamour version of “Cancer Vixen” follows the general plot develop-
ment of the romantic comedy. The narrator’s diagnosis and treatment unfold
against the backdrop of a love story. Our heroine marries her beloved right
after her surgery and goes on a tour of Italy for her honeymoon, a move that,
we learn, startles her friends who expect her to stay at home to start a course
of treatment but which may satisfy readers trained to expect the wedding
at the end of the narrative. The narrator’s course of chemotherapy is related
in one long panel that exquisitely details the Giuseppe Zanotti stilettos,
the Pucci boots, and the ankle-strap, peek-a-boo toe, Casadei fuchsia faux
crocodile heels that she wears to each of her treatments. Such images of
shoes effectively stand in for the treatments themselves. The last frame of
the Glamour version of “Cancer Vixen” has her dancing in her bare feet
with her husband, suggesting that she has been able to relinquish a bit of her
fashion armor in what is represented as both the triumph of true love and
the vanquishing of the disease.
In the  book-length version of Cancer Vixen published by Knopf,
Marchetto satirizes her own happy ending by offering an illustration of her-
self bounding over an open, grassy field proclaiming, “I only think positive
thoughts! . . . I go to each checkup with complete joy and abandon! . . . I’m
only going to create peace and love in my life and just have a fear-free bliss-
ful existence for the rest of my days” (). All of this appears on the page that
immediately precedes the revelation that in the wake of her treatment for
breast cancer she was diagnosed with melanoma. This revelation leads to a
second ending that shows her and her husband driving through a danger-
ous storm into a stretch of highway that cautions “road work ahead” ().
The sense of foreboding encrypted in such details is offset by the fact that
 there sa tensuan

narrator and spouse are comfortably ensconced in a Maserati, headed back

from a weekend at the Montreal Grand Prix. While Cancer Vixen amplifies
its protagonist’s delight in the simple pleasures of four-hundred-dollar Ital-
ian shoes and membership in the innermost circle of the New York in-crowd,
the work also highlights the fact that she is able to start and sustain her
course of treatments because of the economic support of her parents and
her wealthy fiancé. Her access to the advice and care of professionals asso-
ciated with the wealthiest medical institutions in the city is enabled by her
well-connected circuit of friends who have connections to top oncologists
and the power to open up space on these doctors’ fully booked schedules.
The story of a cancer vixen, rather than victim, the text actively works
against those moments of doubt and self-denigration that engulf the nar-
rator when she receives the diagnosis:

Was it something I said?

Was it something I ate, drank, smoke, inhaled,
put on, put inside my body?
Why? Why? Why? Why is this happening
now, just when I’m about to go to City Hall in  weeks to get married
for the first time at  . . .
AT  . . . HELLO UP THERE . . .
THIS IS KIND OF A BIG MOMENT FOR ME . . . ()

By staging the diagnosis of breast cancer as an interruption of an other-

wise fabulous life, the narrator seems to be setting the stage for a story line
in which the well-accessorized heroine will triumph over adversity because
of her positive attitude and sheer determination, a move that would align
Cancer Vixen with narratives of individual triumph over the disease. After
recounting the initial discovery of a lump in her breast and the ensuing diag-
nosis of breast cancer on May , , the narrator announces, “you know,
I wasn’t always the self-aware narcissist I am today,” and takes the reader
back to August , when she was on assignment to do a story on the
cosmetic procedures, consumer purchases, and surgical interventions that
fashion a mere mortal into an “it” girl. When a friend asks about the nar-
rator’s progress on the story, she confesses:

The pursuit of “it” is driving me nuts! I haven’t found the “it” bag, the “it” watch,
or the “it” phone, but I do have the “it” collagen, liposuction, fat injections, lip
 Up from Surgery 

augmentations, exfoliations, dermabrasions, botox, electroshock facials, string

facials, laser facials, foot facials, laser collagen soft pillows in the balls of your
feet, medipeels, medipedis, medimanis, eyebrows tinted, individual false eye-
lashes applied  at a time, eyelash tinting, eyelash perming, laser hair removal,
tit job, nose job, but you need it because in this town you’re either a nobody
or a great body and it already costs , and I’m not even done with it.
You get  thing done and then another thing done. This is an endless slippery
slope chasing the unattainable “it” and as soon as you have “it”—it’s gone! It’s
crazy! ()

The narrator’s rant speaks directly to the social pressures, investments,

and ideals that create a never-ending spiral of dissatisfaction and desire.
The price quoted by the narrator in the interminable search for “it” comes
close to the sum consumed by her surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation
treatments. One could argue that the work shows that the price of beauty is
tantamount to the price of living in a carcinogenic society. In The Cancer
Journals, Lorde writes in the wake of her mastectomy that

for many women including myself, there is a feeling of wanting to go back,

of not wanting to persevere through this experience to whatever enlighten-
ment might be at the core of it. And it is this feeling, this nostalgia which is
encouraged by most of the post-surgical counseling of women with breast
cancer. This regressive tie to the past is emphasized by the concentration upon
breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic
procedure. ()

The narrator’s various fixations with her physical appearance in Cancer

Vixen—her ongoing obsession with how her body compares to those of the
models who frequent her husband’s restaurant, her concern that she can’t
get highlights put in while she’s undergoing chemotherapy, her umpteen
discussions with friends about whether she should get her nasal labials filled
in—function as a case study for Lorde’s critique.
But Cancer Vixen also establishes an internal critique of these obsessions,
in part through the representation of a chance encounter with a cab driver
who shares the story of his wife’s degeneration as a result of delays in her
treatment for breast cancer. The insurance company, he informs her, waited
six months before enrolling her based on her “pre-existing condition” ().
This story leaves our tart-tongued and quick-witted narrator speechless,
 there sa tensuan

but affords Marchetto the opportunity to convey to her audience that

“women without insurance have a  greater risk of dying from breast
cancer,” a fact documented by the National Breast Cancer Foundation and
augmented by the narrator’s assertion that it is precisely when “it’s needed,
the most . . . it’s the hardest to get” ().
The text box containing this information is set against an image of a
heap of hundred-dollar bills, a vision that illustrates Lorde’s insights about
“the function of cancer in a profit economy” (The Cancer Journals, –). In
Pink Ribbons, Inc. Samantha King illustrates the complex web of corporate
investment and interest in philanthropic activities centered on breast can-
cer, noting that National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) was
in fact founded in  by the multinational pharmaceutical corporation
Zeneca (now known as AstroZeneca), which manufactures the best-selling
cancer drug tamoxifen.13 King argues that the emphasis on early detection
through mammogram screenings; treatment with the established regimen
of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation; and funding for research all serve
the interests of the pharmaceutical companies—many of which would come
under much greater scrutiny if the emphasis were placed on the environ-
mental factors that cause cancer or the astronomical cost of treatments
prohibitively expensive for women who do not have insurance. Marchetto
figures out that the cost of her own treatment came to ,. ();
the narrative’s marriage plot thus resolves the subplot of Marchetto’s status
as an uninsured freelancer, because with marriage comes her husband’s
insurance coverage.
Cancer Vixen thus speaks to the conflicting discourses surrounding
breast cancer, manifest most explicitly in a two-page spread that features
“The Cancer Guessing Game.” The game poses questions about the effects
of potentially carcinogenic chemicals in Teflon pans and take-out contain-
ers, about the lingering effects of hormones ingested through contraceptive
pills, hormone replacement therapies, or commercially raised chicken, and
about the risks of living near a nuclear reactor. A player following the direc-
tives in these frames to “move back  spaces” or to “move ahead  spaces”
is led onto spaces occupied by “research heads” and “corporate heads,”
whose authoritative claims directly contradict one another. The welter of
conflicting perspectives and claims leads the narrator, caught in a contem-
plative moment at her drawing board, to reflect on “all the supposed factors
that contributed to my breast cancer diagnosis . . . the pill, hormones in beef,
dairy, and poultry, radiation, overeating, this list could go on into infinity . . .
 Up from Surgery 

It struck me that  of the reasons are created by human beings . . . WHAT
THE HELL ARE WE DOING TO OURSELVES?” (). This moment of out-
rage is underscored by a speech bubble that breaks into the frame, a call to
“remember us” originating from a woman depicted in the following panel
with three compatriots, all of whom are seated on a cloud that hovers in a
starry sky above the narrator whose own figure (and office furniture) demar-
cates the earth and the heavens. The women announce themselves as part
of a cancer cluster in a town twenty miles from the shore home of the nar-
rator’s parents and share their suspicions that their cancers were caused by
the power lines that ran near their school, a situation kept quiet by “our ritzy
town. . . . They didn’t want their real etate price to drop” ().
The image on the following page reveals that this quartet is part of a much
larger group of folks who have passed on from cancer clusters in Nevada,
New York, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Their
tales of jet fuel–polluted water, radioactive dust from a nuclear plant acci-
dent, pesticide-laced landscapes, and homes built on toxic waste dumps
create a vision of a carcinogenic nation. One woman announces that “there
was a cancer cluster in my neighborhood in New Jersey too. . . . But it was
never proven. . . . Aren’t we enough evidence???” (), an angry declaration
that speaks to the power of the corporate chemical, industrial, and pharma-
ceutical complex to contest and effectively efface the ramifications of their
practices. In turning the page, the reader is presented with a vision of stars
against an indigo sky and a line that asks for “a moment of silence” (),
which is followed on the next page with an image of a candle being lit, the
flame illuminating the declaration that “when you light a candle, you illu-
minate a soul” ().
Cancer Vixen’s move to memorialize these cancer victims works against
the trend King identifies in mainstream breast cancer philanthropy and
“awareness” raising to concentrate on a heroic image of “cancer survivors”
rather than “cancer victims” or “cancer patients,” a linguistic move that King
suggests “was . . . surely shaped by the feminist movement against sexual
abuse and domestic violence, which had undertaken to challenge the image
of the passive battered woman” (Pink Ribbons, Inc., ). King argues that
this discourse of empowerment has been divorced from a collective move-
ment for structural social change, which would be based on an understand-
ing of the ways in which manifestations of breast cancer are symptomatic of
systemic social ills, such as the industrial degradation of the environment,
the lack of access to good health care, and the institutionalized support of
 there sa tensuan

regimes of treatment that are highly profitable for particular corporate in-
terests and potentially carcinogenic for the patient. The narrator’s depiction
of herself as a member of the vast masses of the uninsured counterbalances
the move to read the work as a story of individual triumph.
Throughout Cancer Vixen, the narrator parlays her point of view as a
self-proclaimed “shoe-crazy, lipstick obsessed, wine-swilling, pasta slurping,
fashion fanatic . . . big-city girl cartoonist” into a perspective that illuminates
the fissures in the social discourse of beauty and the medical discourse of
health. From this perspective, these beauty discourses are shown to valor-
ize physical appearance and narratives of an individual’s heroic recovery in
order to deflect attention from the fundamentals of a sustainable life. For
example, Cancer Vixen parlays the insider’s information that she received
from her oncologist—that before undergoing chemotherapy, one should “cut
and highlight your hair . . . because pulling, tugging, and dyeing makes it
more vulnerable”—and adds her own insight: if one is facing the prospect
of losing “ to  of your hair, you can consider a clip on, a sewn-in,
or a fusion” (), helpfully illustrating each option. This beauty tip leads
the narrator to her local salon, where she interviews a fellow patron with a
bandaged right arm who says, “I had breast cancer. . . . Did anyone tell you
about it? . . . I touched hot metal and my arm plumped up. Now I have to
wear this sleeve for the rest of my life to avoid elephantiasis, losing my arm,
or death. This is what made me cry” (). The woman goes on to caution
the narrator (and in turn, the reader) about the dangers of even minor
cuts, strains, or extreme shifts in temperature, warning that she is never to
“let anyone cut your cuticles because infection can trigger lymphedema,
too” (). Setting this exchange against the Pepto-Bismol pink of the salon’s
walls, with key information dramatized through a deepened tone in the
palette, locates the circulation of life-saving information in a realm more
often associated with the frivolities of primping hair and lacquering nails.
In her construction of this scene, Marchetto delivers a subtle critique of a
medical system that puts patients at risk when critical knowledge is either
withheld or inadequately conveyed.
Such silences have material and political consequences: Lorde argues
that the practice of compelling women to wear prostheses in the wake of
radical mastectomies effectively erases both the incidence and effects of
breast cancer, circumventing the formation of political movements that
could address the environmental and economic factors that exacerbate the
disease. The ubiquitous pink ribbon—a visual icon borrowed from the
 Up from Surgery 

support of AIDS research and prevention—has become a symbol for a breast

cancer industry in which the consumption of items ranging from rhinestone
jewelry (created from a compound that can cause granular nodules on the
skin and lungs) to blush wines (despite evidence linking alcohol consump-
tion to an increased risk for breast cancer) has enabled individuals to imag-
ine themselves as part of a movement. But members of this imaginary
movement do not have to participate in the grassroots organizing, political
lobbying, or collective actions that guided the success of advocacy groups
such as Breast Cancer Action (BCA). Rather than participate in a complicit
culture of consumption, BCA refuses to take funding from pharmaceutical
companies when advocating for less toxic treatments, organizing to decrease
involuntary environmental exposure to breast cancer causing agents, and
training focus on the political, economic, and racial inequalities that not only
impact the incidence of breast cancer but also affect the survival rates for
women with the disease.14 Cancer Vixen and Cancer Made Me a Shallower
Person deconstruct the heroic narratives that subtend particular visions of
medical authority as well as those of “survivor” tales through close atten-
tion—and comic responses—to the corporate investments, social expecta-
tions, and formal frameworks that purport to offer the ideal response to
breast cancer. These texts offer instead what Eric Michaels has marvelously
defined as the “unbecoming” elements of experience, revealing the untidy
corners of consciousness and the messy elements of corporeality that com-
prise the sharpest vision of our individual and collective movements through
the world.

notes
1. Phoebe Gloeckner, A Child’s Life (Berkeley: Frog Ltd., ), .
2. Gloeckner notes in a  interview with Gary Groth in The Comics Journal that
for her master’s degree she “did a semiotic analysis of medical illustration. It actually
had a whole lot about the narrative quality of medical illustration, which are often mul-
tiple illustrations depicting surgery or explaining some physiological process” (Groth,
“The Phoebe Gloeckner Interview,” The Comics Journal  [June/July ]: ).
3. Vesalius’s work challenged many of the foundational claims—such as the misap-
prehension that arteries originate in the liver—made by Galen, whose own claims were
often abstracted from the corporeal forms of animals (human dissections were ver-
boten in Galen’s time and considered highly suspect in Vesalius’s own era).
4. Loraine Daston and Peter Galiston, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations
 (Summer ): .
5. As Ludmilla Jordanova suggests in an essay on Hunter’s obstetrical atlas, “the
plates in the Gravid Uterus show the extent to which Hunter was concerned with the
topography of the body, the spatial relationships between parts, their surface features
 there sa tensuan

and particularly their texture” (“Gender, Generation, and Science: William Hunter’s
Obstetrical Atlas,” in William Hunter and the th-century Medical World, ed. W. F.
Bynam and Roy Porter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ], ); Jor-
danova contrasts this aesthetic with the then-prevailing conventions of anatomical
illustrations in which “male and female figures were commonly represented as Adam
and Eve, female figures with children as madonnas. . . . These were part of icono-
graphical traditions, and are best understood in the same terms as art historians or his-
torians of culture developed” ().
6. Martin Kemp, who offers an excellent assessment of the ideological underpin-
nings of anatomical atlases from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century in his essay
“The Mark of Truth” (in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ]), argues in a short essay published in
the September , , issue of Nature that Gray’s Anatomy exemplifies “the progres-
sive dominance of a style of representation that deliberately eschews stylishness . . . in
sober, matter-of-fact line illustrations” (). Bill Hayes counters this in his  study,
The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy (New York: Ballantine Books), which
foregrounds the erotics of Carter’s male figures.
7. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinster’s Ink, ), .
8. G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), .
9. Couser notes that works like Christina Middlebrook’s Seeing the Crab: A Mem-
oir of Dying and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and
Place () resist such narrative conventions, by foregrounding the impending death
of the author in Middlebrook’s memoir and in highlighting the generational effects of
environmental pollution in Williams’s work (Recovering Bodies, –).
10. Miriam Engelberg, Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (New York: Harper-
Perennial, ).
11. Lynda Barry, “Intro: The Best North American Comics I Happened to See in
,” in The Best American Comics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), xix.
12. Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Cancer Vixen (New York: Knopf, ).
13. According to King, “until corporate reorganization in ,” AstroZeneca “was
under the auspices of Imperial Chemical, a leading producer of the carcinogenic her-
bicide acetochlor, as well as numerous chlorine- and petroleum-based products that
have been linked to breast cancer.” Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer
and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ),
xx–xxi.
14. Breast Cancer Action’s work can be seen in the context of histories and tradi-
tions of progressive organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of groups
such as Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida, whose work focused not only on issues related
to HIV transmission but also on the culture of homophobia that exacerbated the
devastation of the disease. See Juana Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices,
Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press), .
 

The Gutter Effect in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s

A Dialogue on Love
c aro lyn willia ms

Graphic autobiography comes in many forms—not all of them the familiar

form of serial illustration characteristic of the comic strip and its offshoots.
This fact is well known in the field of graphic narrative, especially in works
that consider the history of the gutter in its broadest sense. For example,
the spaces between Hogarth’s series of paintings, The Rake’s Progress and
The Harlot’s Progress, force the spectator to bridge the gaps and to imagine
a narrative continuity that does not—and, theoretically speaking, cannot—
exist in pictorial form.1 Or, for example, the ability of painting or sculp-
ture to condense narrative into “pregnant” dramatic moments is a crux in
the work of both Denis Diderot and G. E. Lessing. In other words, the comic
strip employs an already historically dense form of composition, one that
emerges at about the same time as its cognate, the film strip.2
Expanding our view of the gutter to include print narrative without illus-
trations will also expand our sense of what blank space can signify and per-
form. My example is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, which
self-consciously uses open space to represent and convey moments of sudden
access to emotion or affect during ongoing subjective processes in general
and during her analytical struggle to deal with life-threatening metastatic
disease in particular.3 The inversive, duck-rabbit effect of open space sud-
denly appearing on the printed page of usually boxy narrative prose offers
what we might call a “gutter effect,” formalized around radically condensed
moments of insight and feeling, moments of “fat, buttery condensation,”
as Sedgwick calls them (). Written with the knowledge that her disease
will kill her, A Dialogue on Love develops its particular form to express the
fluctuations of thought and feeling during the years of psychoanalysis with
Shannon Van Wey, who, late in their dialogue, agreed to give her his notes


 c a r o ly n w il l ia ms

for use in the book. Thus the two perspectives forming their exchange are
also visible on the page—his notes reproduced in small capital letters, her
thoughts and feelings represented in a typeface that is itself interrupted, from
time to time, by lineated, compressed, short-line free verse (roughly haiku-
like), that marks the sudden access to affect-laden moments of insight, com-
prehension, or flooding or focused feeling.
This particular verse form comes to her from a friend: “Josh [Wilner] says
it’s a seventeenth-century Japanese form called haibun. He’s meanwhile
been reading Basho’s haibun—the form, he says, classically used for narra-
tives of travel” (). As Sedgwick explains, the form was further attractive
to her because of James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure,” a beautiful sequence
of prose paragraphs interspersed with haiku, narrating the poet’s travel in
Japan while fully conscious of a friend dying of AIDS back home.4 Sedgwick
describes the effect of the poetry on Merrill’s prose this way: “Spangled with
haiku is . . . what it feels like, his very sentences fraying

into implosions
of starlike density or
radiance, then out

into a prose that’s never quite not the poetry” (–). Thus moving in and
out of lyric, she imitates his use of the form in her description of it, per-
forming its “arias, silent impasses, the fat, buttery condensations and inky
dribbles of the mind’s laden brush” to evoke a graphic, painterly image for
her work of thought and feeling. “In the middle of the evening” with Josh,
she recalls, haibun “comes to me as a possible form for the writing of Shan-
non and me” ().
Like graphic images framed by white space, the lyrics punctuate the nar-
rative with moments of “starlike density or / radiance,” representing, con-
veying, and performing the swell or precipitation of affect in the present
moment.5 The ability to see and feel the play of affect—not on a face or body
but in print—is one gift she gives to her readers. Using this graphic form of
self-interruption, Sedgwick manages to reach beyond the characteristic
forms and effects of autobiography. In the first place, of course, the work is,
anomalously for an autobiography, a dialogue:

To notate our strange

melody, I have some use
for all the white space. ()
 Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love 

What is the “use / for all the white space”? For one thing, it vividly embod-
ies the space of reflection and feeling that subsists between face-to-face
encounters in the therapeutic dialogue, showing that the “dialogue on love”
includes ongoing internalization, nearly imperceptible change, and the lit-
erally unspeakable. For another, as Jason Edwards points out, the space cre-
ated with the shift to “a separate genre . . . effectively drop[s] the first person
from the form” () of the haikus. Or, I would say, if they do not wholly
“drop” the first person, the haikus do relativize its centrality and force us
to reconsider its function. The autobiographical first person in this work
is formed inextricably from its exchange with an interlocutor, of course,
whose printed notes display their own white spaces in the unjustified right
margins; but Sedgwick’s first person is purposively blurred around the edges
for other reasons as well. Edwards goes on to reference Sedgwick’s interview
with Michael Snediker, in which they discuss the way that subject-formation
and the experience of subjectivity depends not only on attachments but
also on “a sky-like emptiness or internal spaciousness that isn’t identical to
any one of those” inner objects.6 Thus, the white space on the page ges-
tures toward Sedgwick’s awareness that what’s important is not always—
or not only—thought, feeling, or “content” of any kind. The “sky-like nature
of mind” leads her to consider the principle that “form is emptiness, empti-
ness form. One of the most basic formulations of Mahayana Buddhism.”7
The approach of death and its dissolution of the person, then, is not the
“meaning” of the white space, though Edwards does point out that the vol-
ume ends with a “conspicuously large number of blank endpages, suggest-
ing Sedgwick’s disappearance into thin air or empty space at the end of the
book.”8 The white space also indicates the positively charged emptiness of
the contemplative, meditative, sky-like mind, floating and holding the self
within the self, amid the vast spaces of the surrounding universe.9
One standard premise in studies of autobiography is that the autobio-
graphical narrator cannot narrate her own death. Yet, Sedgwick manages
to perform rather than narrate it. She frames the entire work not only with
the consciousness of her own impending death but also with her lifelong
wish to stop, to rest, to die. In her first interview with Van Wey, who will
soon become the beloved interlocutor of these years and this project, she
remembers feeling satisfied, after the publication of her ground-breaking
work, Epistemology of the Closet: “It was one of those happy times when
you say to yourself, Okay, this is good, this is enough; I’m ready to go now.
When the diagnosis came, I was feeling—as an intellectual—loved, used,
 c a r o ly n w il l ia ms

appreciated. I would have been very, very content to quit while I was
ahead” (). He asks her if she felt surprised to be feeling that way. No, she
answers, for “to feel the wish of not living! It’s one of the oldest sensations
I can remember” (). The depression she experiences after the diagnosis is
so familiar as to seem the defining feature of life itself, and its recognition
gives rise, in this work, to an exploration of its force and texture throughout
Sedgwick’s childhood and young adulthood.
Writing both retrospectively and prospectively in  (ten years before
her death in ), Sedgwick makes it clear to her readers that one day in
the future, beyond the narrative’s frame, she will have died. At the end of
A Dialogue on Love, she leaves the narrative in Shannon’s voice, with his
note, short and retrospective, written directly after a session; we see the
typeface change, representing this “voice” to our eye. She has left the nar-
rative, at its concluding verge, entrusting it to him. Thus the work comes
full circle, again to embody, as it did at the opening, the establishment of
dialogue—and love—around the awareness of her own approaching death.
Shannon’s last note reports her description of the renewal she experienced
in psychoanalysis as her “having come to be able to hear a voice
like my voice inside herself when it is quiet that she can trust
and have confidence in. i can imagine the voice telling her she
can stop.”
With this blending of their voices (as “my voice inside herself ” yields to
“I can imagine”), Sedgwick enfolds herself in Shannon’s comforting, hold-
ing imagination as she exits the text, while accomplishing the performance
of an “impossible first person . . . of someone dead or in the process of
dying.” In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick calls such a performance a
“common” but “peculiarly potent sentimental marker.” In that earlier work,
she comments on the “impossible first person” in the midst of a trenchant
revaluation of sentimentality; here, however, we can say, with her, that our
“goose bumps . . . [are nevertheless] poised for erection” and our “water-
works primed” to feel this impossible first person always present in her
absence.10 White space remains. But it is far from empty.

notes
1. See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper
Paperbacks, ), and Martin Meisel, Realizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, ).
2. Jared Gardner, “Reading Out of the Gutter: Comics and Sequential Graphic Nar-
rative,” lecture given at the English Institute, Harvard University, September , ,
 Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love 

essay version to appear in Repetition, ed. Michael Moon (forthcoming, University of

Minnesota Press).
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (Boston: Beacon Press, ). Fur-
ther citations will appear in parentheses in the text of this essay.
4. James Merrill, “Prose of Departure,” in The Inner Room (New York: Knopf,
).
5. On the moment of lyric interruption, see Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickin-
son and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). On the
lyric within print culture, see Matthew Rowlinson, “Lyric,” in Companion to Victorian
Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Black-
well, ), –. James Olney offers one way to differentiate three kinds of auto-
biography—the retrospective narrative, the lyrical portrait of a self in the moment, and
the overview of self in relation to the archetypes—in “Some Versions of Memory /
Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography” (in Autobiography: Essays
Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
]). It could be argued that Sedgwick performs all three simultaneously in A Dia-
logue on Love.
6. Jason Edwards, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (London: Routledge, ), ; Michael
D. Snediker, “Queer Little Gods: A Conversation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Octo-
ber , ,” Massachusetts Review ./ (Spring/Summer ): –.
7. “Queer Little Gods,” –.
8. Edwards, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, .
9. A Dialogue on Love thus presages Sedgwick’s later Buddhist work. See especially
“Pedagogy of Buddhism” (in Touching Feeling [Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
], –), in which she develops the Buddhist metaphor of “pointing at the moon,”
the distinction between “to indicate” and “to proffer,” and the critical importance of
“the baseline pedagogical recourse of pointing” (–).
10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, ), .
 

Photau(gyno)graphy
The Work of Joanne Leonard

dom n a c. sta nton

Some twenty-five years ago in the introduction “Autogynography: Is the

Subject Different?” of The Female Autograph, I examined the (then scant)
autobiographical writing done by women to ascertain whether there were
important differences from those done by men. Emulating Virginia Woolf ’s
task in A Room of One’s Own, I reached tentative conclusions that, I sug-
gested, only time would confirm or prove the need to revise, due to the par-
ticular tensions and splits within female subjects: on the one hand, between
their (conflicted) relatedness to others (mother and child, husband or mate)
and the daily, intimate nature of their preoccupations, including the un-
said desires and experiences of women’s bodies; and, on the other hand, the
ambitions of a vocational self, defined through the act of writing; a divided
consciousness, then, between the private and the public. To view Joanne
Leonard’s Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir () through this
lens as an example—and exemplar—of autogynography today is to find both
surprising similarities and some significant differences. Yet another kind of
conjuncture/disjuncture between past and present informs my own experi-
ence viewing/reading this book, for I was Leonard’s colleague for almost
twenty years at the University of Michigan. I dimly remember our meeting
in the early s when she arrived for a women’s studies meeting at my
smallish apartment on Island Drive, with her young, sleeping daughter. The
friendly feminist colleague I knew is—and is not—the nuanced, layered per-
son who comes into being in this book, a woman with whom, as an academic
and a mother, I find some similarities and, inevitably, many differences. Her
private/public figure is both an-other and a likeness through whom I can
also see myself and women in history.


 Photau(gyno)graphy 

Informed by feminist perspectives, Leonard’s “intimate documentary”

(Being in Pictures, ) is built on the credo that the private should be a testa-
ment, a witnessing, and an account. The book’s thirteen sections follow a
biographical chronology through the large number of photos in differing col-
ors accompanied by varying lines of texts in alternating fonts that layer the
pages. This formal variety enables Leonard to realize the quest, defined in the
prologue (), to transform the personal into the public through art. Com-
menting on “Red Triptych” (), one of her earliest photo collages, she
registers a fear that she is merely “recording intimate moments” in the face
of “the carnage and misery” of her country’s war against Vietnam; thus she
constructs “idyllic scenes” reminiscent of medieval images of the Virgin and
child on one side of the painted wooden altarlike shape, but with a newspaper
photograph on the back of an “anguished mother” holding her war-wounded
baby (Being in Pictures, –). “Julia and the Window of Vulnerability”
(), one of Leonard’s best-known works (reproduced in Gardner’s Art
Through the Ages []), comes out of a mother’s “heightened anxieties
about the world and [her daughter’s] safety” (), and constitutes, through
the depiction of a fragile, childlike rendition of home and landscape or sky-
scape, a response to President Reagan’s claims that stockpiles of antiballistic
missiles close a “window of vulnerability” (). More recently, private fam-
ily history (documents, letters, photographs), rolled out in Leonard’s largest
work, Reel Family, a twenty-nine-foot scroll that evokes both Hollywood
celluloid and the Torah, is also a history of immigration and anti-Semitism.
Leonard’s search to find a visual vocabulary for women’s embodied ex-
periences, once dismissed as private or too taboo to be seen in public, is
best epitomized by her “Journal from a Miscarriage” (), which is repro-
duced for the first time here in full and in color to occupy the central part
of Being in Pictures (–). The despairingly sad, bloodstained visual
record—likenesses of which Leonard would come to discover in the history
of twentieth-century women’s art from Frieda Kahlo to Mary Kelly, Judy
Chicago, and Miriam Shapiro—eventually transmutes into beautiful images
of flowers, shells, snails, and frogs umbilically connected to the child/fetus
(and Leonard openly states her desire to take back the fetus from the politi-
cal right []). Less painful and more mundane are the images of domestic
dailiness throughout her work, sometimes frozen in time (with piles of snow
on kitchen counters) or then, more humorously, in a photo of a chaotic,
object-strewn kitchen that she chooses to record for posterity rather than to
clean, a triumph of art over messy life ().
 d omn a c . sta n to n

The hold of powerful gender scripts is depicted by the seeing and writing
“I” and is then overcome in time and art. There are longings for romance
and fantasies of being rescued and saved by a knight, ablaze in color through
a glass window, in what is arguably Leonard’s best-known work, “Romanti-
cism Is Ultimately Fatal” (). The confident, controlling great man/artist
who became the center of Leonard’s life () leaves without a backward
glance. But in the process, her recorded looks at his naked sleeping body in
a series of layered works that incorporate positive transparencies and col-
lage (for instance, “Dreams and Nightmares,” ) reverse the gaze that has
objectified women’s bodies and move through hurt, pain, anger, and outrage
to rewrite the history of art.
Relatedness that creates connections, but that is always threatened by
separation and loss, is a leitmotif throughout Being in Pictures, beginning
with a daughter’s relation to a beloved, inspiring mother, an accomplished,
professional role model who encouraged Leonard’s artistic vocation and
is immortalized in these pages before she falls victim to Alzheimer’s, as
“Devastation” (–) unbearably shows.1 “Where does a mother’s story
end and a daughter’s begin?” () asks Leonard, a universal question that
affects herself as a daughter as much as her relation to her own daughter.
Indeed, grandmother, mother, self as daughter/mother, and daughter—four
generations of women—fill this family album with close connections (e.g.,
“Four Generations, One Absent” [–], ) (see fig. .), rather than
the distant, silent father figure who, she says, was closer to his dog than to
his granddaughter (). But some of these family photographs also raise
complex ethical issues. For if, as Leonard recognizes, her work compensates
for the loss of her “absent” mother () by re-presenting her, resurrecting
her, and even gives her control over a painful memory by visualizing a
“nearly unthinkable subject,” she also knows that her mother would have
been “mortified by being exposed as a demented person” (). An analo-
gous problem devolves from the constant “taking pictures” of her daughter,
Julia—and the phrase hints at the gesture’s violence—not only is it a sign of
“maternal absorption and devotion,” Leonard avows, but possibly also a “hor-
ridly intrusive . . . exploitive, or even pornographic” act (). Photos of Julia
that range from sleeping babe to defiant teen expose strain as the grown
daughter moves physically and psychically away, even though in a final image
from , the daughter becomes the photographer of herself as well ().
Connection/separation, together/apart—these twin themes are conjoined
in Leonard’s Being, and nowhere more so than in her representations of her
 Photau(gyno)graphy 

figure . “Four Generations, One Absent” (–) by Joanne Leonard.

Reprinted with permission of the artist from Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo
Memoir.

identical twin, Elly, with whom she admits to suffering painful comparison,
but with whom she still reconnects every single day, differences and physi-
cal distances notwithstanding, as “two sides of a coin” ().
Fears of aloneness are visually captured in Leonard’s repeated renditions
of the solitary tea cup (, ) (see fig. .) and thereby mastered, but
they are also comforted by the women artists and feminist critics she cites
throughout her work (Charlotte Salomon, Louise Gluck, Adrienne Rich, and
Virginia Woolf )—a sustaining network that the author of A Room of One’s
Own conspicuously lacked. In fact, the chronological sequence of Leonard’s
life stages diminishes in importance about two-thirds of the way through
Being in Pictures, and a thematic order takes over, structured by work that
becomes larger and more complex through the experimental forms and
predigital techniques she develops for the layered, nuanced, realistic, and
figure . Detail from “Roots and Wings” () by Joanne Leonard. From the
collection of Barbara Raymond. Reprinted with permission of the artist from Being in
Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir.
 Photau(gyno)graphy 

surrealistic art she produces. From the girl of seventeen with a Brownie
around her neck () through all the competing selves she documents and all
the intimate, political, and professional experiences that women across the
centuries would not have exposed much less embraced, this feminist artist
seems ready to continue: there is life ahead at the end of this Künstlerroman,
as I turn to the “Artist’s Chronology” at the back and close Leonard’s book.

Coda: The day I began to write this piece on Joanne Leonard, I caught the
television premiere of Chiaro Clemente’s Our City Dreams, a documentary
about five women artists working in New York, who range from thirty to
eighty years old (Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramović, and
Nancy Spero). Swoon, the youngest, declares that except for the occasional
“dude who tries to take tools out of your hands,” she feels very encouraged
and supported as a woman artist today; at the film’s end, Spero, the oldest,
defines herself as a woman warrior still, because “the fight never stops.”
note
1. Joanne Leonard did not date individual works in Being in Pictures but gave them
dates (a span of time rather than two dates) extending between  and . She
explains the series and dates in Being in Pictures, .

works cited
Leonard, Joanne. Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, .
Stanton, Domna C., ed. The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography
from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
. First published in  by the New York Literary Forum.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, .
 part i v

Varieties of the Self

 

The Diary Comic

isa ac c ate s

In a story Jesse Reklaw contributed to the parody minicomic Krayons Ego,

a young comics artist seeking inspiration attends a “superstar lecture” by
the cartoonist James Kochalka. When a student in the audience asks for a
topic for her “first comic,” the parody version of Kochalka, with a bright
grin, replies, “Oh, that’s simple. Do diary comics. They’re totally easy!”1 The
lack of explanation around this climactic punch line suggests that the
reader, presumably part of the “indie” minicomics coterie, already knows
about both Kochalka’s seminal role in the diary comics phenomenon and
the present ubiquity of diary comics among the rising generation of young
cartoonists. Kochalka is best known for his twelve-year (and counting) diary
strip American Elf, collected in four volumes of Sketchbook Diaries, an
omnibus American Elf collection, two subsequent collections covering two
years apiece, and further ongoing strips at americanelf.com. Since ,
dozens or perhaps hundreds of young cartoonists have followed his exam-
ple, bringing the mundane incidents of their daily lives to print or to the Web
and shaping their autobiographies in a form originally designed to contain
comedic daily strips like Peanuts. Although these diary strips are unques-
tionably a form of autobiographical writing, they hardly conform to generic
expectations about memoir or autobiography; they even distort the cate-
gory of the diary in important ways. In their daily publication rhythm and
their quotidian presumptions, diary comics resemble blogs, but the formal
constraints of the page or (more commonly) the four-panel strip require a
sort of concision that most forms of Internet writing do not. A real con-
sideration of diary comics as a mode of life writing, then, invites us to bor-
row generic expectations not only from the documentary genres of diary


 isa ac c ate s

and memoir but also from other modes, particularly the lyric poem and the
lyric sequence.
It would be difficult to overstate the ubiquity of diary comics among
today’s young cartoonists, particularly as a learning exercise or a tempo-
rary rite of passage for cartoonists in their teens or twenties. Just after the
turn of the twenty-first century, having seen Kochalka’s first self-published
collections of the American Elf strip, the young cartoonists Todd Webb
(Casual Poet) and Drew Weing (The Journal Comic) took advantage of the
possibility of Internet publication to bring their diary comics online.2 In
the following years, the ready availability of photocopying and the growing
“minicomics” subculture provided a venue for several other diary cartoon-
ists, such as Vanessa Davis (Spaniel Rage), Ryan Claytor (And Then One Day),
and J. P. Coovert (Simple Routines).3 Many other diary cartoonists, such
as Erika Moen (DAR), Jesse Reklaw (Ten Thousand Things to Do), and Liz
Prince (Delayed Replays), have published initially online and subsequently
in minicomics collections. More experienced artists, like the prolific French
cartoonist Lewis Trondheim (Les Petit Riens), have since been drawn to the
diary strip’s capacity to record the nuances and rhythms of daily life. Diary
comics have become one of the most common minicomics genres for both
aspiring and established cartoonists, ubiquitous even to the point of becom-
ing a target of derision. Not all of these diary cartoonists see Kochalka as a
primary influence, though his American Elf remains the most prominent
and the longest-running diary strip, and the genre’s conventions owe a great
deal to his approach and his aesthetic. Even by , Kochalka’s status as the
preeminent diary cartoonist was distinct enough that one of Drew Weing’s
journal comics from that year shows Weing and Todd Webb, armed and ad-
vancing on him, announcing, “Your days are numbered, Kochalka!”4 Now,
more than a decade after American Elf began, Kochalka’s work stands as
the definitive diary comic, as much for its accumulating length (indeed, a
different sort of numbering of his days) as for the gradual sharpening of
Kochalka’s vignette-writing craft. Although it does not offer the structure or
closure of a typical memoir, American Elf is an unparalleled record of an
individual life in comics, tracking Kochalka’s gradual growth as an artist and
as a husband and father.
In fact, as Kochalka recounts it, the notion for the diary comic was orig-
inally a reaction against the fashioned closure of the memoir, the narrative
structural devices that such writing borrows from fiction. In the introduc-
tion to the first volume of Sketchbook Diaries, Kochalka writes,
 The Diary Comic 

I wanted to explore the rhythm of daily life, to become more conscious of what
it really means to live. / Sleeping, eating, thinking, talking, day in & day out. /
My body & its action, / my surroundings, / my mind & its thoughts, / and the
people I love . . . / Life is not structured like a typical narrative. Stories have
beginnings, middles, and ends. / Life has ins & outs and ups & downs and
backs & forths of endless repetition / and endless distractions. / The story of
my life is not a story at all.5

Here, still early in his project but with a strong sense of its purpose,
Kochalka establishes the tension between “story”—the narrative structures
familiar from fiction and anecdote—and “the story of my life,” which con-
sists of cycles, repetitions, processes without closure, and moments of in-
determinate or undetermined significance. In an interview conducted for
the tenth anniversary of the American Elf project, Kochalka ruminates
again on the ways in which life as it is experienced does not resemble nar-
rative art:

Our lives are not stories. . . . Our lives are thousands of interconnected threads,
wrapping and looping around each other. Certain things happen again and
again and again. Some threads of story stop very suddenly, seemingly unre-
solved, only to be taken up again later.6

This observation is what Kochalka describes as the initial inspiration for his
comics diary: if life is a network or tangle of threads, or if it consists more of
gradual change and repetition than the closed structures of narrative, then
other modes of writing might better capture both the experience and the
meaning of everyday life. Kochalka’s project is therefore open ended, with
no clear terminus or telos other than his own eventual mortality; American
Elf is also necessarily contingent in its claims and provisional in its knowl-
edge about Kochalka’s life. Diary strips cannot know the future of the “story”
in which they participate.
A clear example of this effect is in Kochalka’s strips from September .
Readers with a historical awareness of that month can’t help reading its first
ten diary entries with a distinct halo of innocence drawn from the comic’s
ignorance of the looming / attacks. The diaries reveal that the attacks
hit Kochalka hard: five days pass before the content of the strip returns to
normal, and on that day even Kochalka’s decision to tolerate a “tiny mush-
room” growing in his bathroom is tinged with gravity (see fig. .). In the
 isa ac c ate s

collected American Elf, the September , , strip is in the bottom right
corner of a right-hand page, making its pictures of the burning World Trade
Center towers visible for the reader even as an earlier, unknowing Kochalka
drinks wine, complains about his friend’s driving, and talks to his cat. The
September  strip shows Kochalka riding his bicycle and sniffing the air
with a smile on his face: “Little rotting crab apples / fall from the trees /
smelling sour & musty sweet. / I’d like to win a Pulitzer.”7 The breezy, opti-
mistic punch line of this strip strikes a note that is not unusual for Kochalka.

figure . Four of James Kochalka’s American Elf diary strips from September
. Courtesy of James Kochalka.
 The Diary Comic 

But had it been written a day later—even if it were an accurate but back-
dated description of this particular afternoon—this strip would read less as
playful idleness than as asinine hubris. Positioned as it is, however, it pre-
serves a moment of easy innocence before terrible events rang in a new
national temper, and thus seems poignantly, almost impossibly carefree.
There is even a sort of bravery in Kochalka’s subsequent decision to publish
the September  strip unaltered, although that is his constant approach to
curating rather than editing these strips for publication. One might argue
that only a diary could accurately represent a writer’s mood just before the
events of /, because any retrospective point of view would require the
ignorance of the moment to be juxtaposed with later knowledge; a narrative
about the preceding innocence could not escape self-consciousness about
that innocence.
This effect of contingent meaning, of writing in the moment with no
access to its future, also permeates the depiction of events in Kochalka’s
family life. In the domestic strips, the first-time reader shares Kochalka’s
ignorance about the future and must share, too, the contingent or indeter-
minate nature of the lived “text.” When, for example, the American Elf strips
in mid-September  reveal excitedly that Kochalka’s wife Amy is preg-
nant for a second time, these early diary strips cannot hint that the baby will
miscarry. That realization must unfold a month later when Amy consults
with her doctor, hears the bad news, and informs Kochalka, who is so dis-
traught that he considers giving up drawing the diary strip.8 A retrospective
memoir of the pregnancy, or merely of the year, could not write from the
position of ignorance these strips necessarily depict. And yet in this two-
month sequence, Kochalka’s ordinary life continues: individual daily strips
focus on rock performances (with his band, James Kochalka Superstar),
arguments with his son, Eli, moments of humor, and other seemingly trivial
events that would probably be excluded from a more structured narrative.
One possible motive for Kochalka’s continuing documentation of his and
his son’s illnesses is the fact that the severity or extent of an illness can’t be
known when the symptoms first appear: in the fear that a sore throat or a
rash might turn into a major problem (even perhaps as a ward against that
worry), Kochalka needs to document the beginning of that thread in his
life’s long, unplanned, and contingent plot.
By privileging the brief and only potentially meaningful events of daily
life, rather than the larger arcs and major events that appear prominent in
retrospect, the diary strip pushes against the narrative expectations of the
 isa ac c ate s

autobiographical genre. To an extent, Kochalka’s interest in the minutiae of

daily life is consistent with what Charles Hatfield has described as the
“radical appreciation for the mundane” in the comics of Harvey Pekar and
the alternative-comics autobiographers that emerged under his influence.9
Kochalka certainly does not flinch at depicting unpleasant moments in his
life, his health, or his behavior toward his loved ones. Like Pekar and the
post-Pekar alternative generation, Kochalka no doubt understands the im-
plicit claim to authenticity staked by unpleasant or embarrassing revelations:
an artist who shows himself at his worst, daring to seem unsympathetic,
is also hoisting a flag of honesty, offering to “tell all” in spite of the fictive
limits of medium or genre. And, like the brief humdrum vignettes in Pekar’s
American Splendor, Kochalka’s four-panel diary strips offer an autobiography
that is at best “accretive” rather than linear in exposition and progressive
action: like Pekar, Kochalka is willing to make a strip out of an inconse-
quential conversation or workaday meditation.10 But we would never con-
fuse Kochalka’s diary with a larger project like Pekar’s Our Cancer Year. A
memoir, in comics or in prose, requires a degree of structure, a degree of de-
liberate storytelling, that is not available to diary comics, because the diarist
can never entirely see the larger plots and arguments that his life will even-
tually fulfill.
Diary comics and diary writing in general lack the characteristic of narra-
tive that the theorist Jerome Bruner has called “hermeneutic composability,”
describing the necessary interrelation of meaning between the component
parts of a narrative and its whole. In a narrative, Bruner writes, the episodes
selected for telling must “be constituted in light of the overall narrative” and
“made ‘functions’ of the story,” not merely separate, interesting incidents in
their own right.11 Because we interpret narratives by construing the com-
ponent meaning of their incidents, we expect to find each part of a story
related with an awareness of its place in the larger narrative. It may be pos-
sible to see larger narrative structures in a diarist’s life—to see individual
events as they relate to these structures—but the diary as a genre does not
construct life in those terms. The story awareness central to the project of
memoir is necessarily missing from any standard diary project, in comics or
in prose, because the purpose of a diary is, in part, to “preserve the gradual
acquisition of knowledge and shifting of values that occur in life.”12 The
contingent development of knowledge and value, therefore, partly defines
the diary genre. Jerome Bruner argues that applying narrative structures to
memories of lived experience creates a useful way of understanding these
 The Diary Comic 

events: as structured by intentions and results, by major disruptive events

and their consequences, or by the capacity to compare one person’s condi-
tion with another’s.13 The project of diary comics essentially offers an alter-
native model for constructing the experience of living, not as a “story” but
as a series of moments or events. The patterns that emerge in diary writing
are not necessarily narrative patterns. The meaning of the events a diarist
records lies in their momentary capacity to move the diarist or the reader
(whether in sympathy, laughter, interest, or surprise), or else in their pro-
leptic capacity to create potential meaning beyond the moment of the diary
strip, to be revealed in a future unknown to the cartoonist at the moment
of writing.
It’s true that many individual diary strips are narrative in their approach,
in that they tell the “story” of a brief event and its consequences. In impor-
tant ways, however, even these four-panel microstories do not work as we
normally expect narrative to work. Bringing the expectations of the narrative
mode to a four-panel strip, therefore, may lead to a distorted assessment
of the strip’s representation of lived experience. The July , , American
Elf strip, for example, shows Kochalka petting his cat Spandy while saying
“Petting the kitty,” then Spandy biting him, one retributive slap, and a fourth
panel that returns to the actions of the first panel, with a small change:
Kochalka’s eyes are pressed closed in a smile. We could certainly consider
this strip’s representation of causally connected events over time, or the
interplay of intentions and their outcomes, or the disruption to one state of
affairs and a consequence that reformulates the original state (Bruner calls
this characteristic of narrative “canonicity and breach”14). But to regard this
brief interaction between cartoonist and cat as a story would be to inflate the
importance of cause and effect in the strip, making the final panel an image
of the pleasures of retribution or the assertion of mastery over a pet. Instead,
the strip seems mainly to be about the small charms of certain ongoing ele-
ments of Kochalka’s life, such as Spandy’s crankiness and Kochalka’s almost
childlike pleasure in his cat’s companionship. In other words, the final panel
of the strip should show Kochalka happy in spite of being bitten and react-
ing with a slap, whereas looking at the four panels as a story (instead of
merely the depiction of a moment) might suggest that he is happy in the final
panel because of what immediately precedes that smile. Because sequence
is built in to the way we read comics (one panel following another), it is
almost always possible to impose a cause-and-effect narrative framework
on these four-panel strips, but reading them for the structure and closure of
 isa ac c ate s

ordinary narrative often thwarts the value Kochalka deliberately places on

inconsequential idleness, seemingly meaningless moments, and exchanges
that operate outside of narrative motives.
As we have seen, the diary is required by its nature to preserve the un-
knowability of its future and the merely provisional meaning or value of the
present it describes, and therefore must always lack the narrative structures
and “hermeneutic composability” at which large-scale life writing always
aims. Similarly, while the brief format of American Elf strips (and most
other diary comics) allows for miniature or local narratives, the goals and
expectations of the narrative mode may not provide the best means for
understanding the potential impact of an ongoing diary comic.
But American Elf is also not quite a diary in the normal sense of the term,
even though the strip is a daily and at least officially “true” record of its
author’s life. Many of the interpretive strategies developed for thinking
about literary diaries are less useful in the case of diary comics. An ordinary
prose diary is imagined to be a private undertaking, written for the sake of
the diarist alone. As Steven Kagle describes it, the diary generally “does not
anticipate an audience.”15 It is certainly true that, as Kagle also notes, “many
diarists have written with the clear expectation of a future audience”—and
that, as Lynn Z. Bloom has argued, a writer’s diary in particular “is invari-
ably alert to the concerns of an audience” and is often shaped to accom-
modate a notional public reader, whether the diary is intended for public
consumption or not.16 However, few diarists before the Internet age could
have imagined so large a public and daily readership for their ongoing works.
In fact, thousands of people read Kochalka’s comics diary daily online and
weekly in the local alternative paper Seven Days. And unlike the private
diary, American Elf (like any other diary strip) is clearly intended to be read.
In Bloom’s terms, the diary comic makes conscious efforts of “contextual-
ization” that render it intelligible to outside readers, as well as efforts of
characterization and self-characterization familiar to the memoir. There
are episodes in which Kochalka directly addresses his readers, as in the July
, , strip, when, after three panels of going around the house on all
fours, he faces the reader and says, “If you’re wondering why I’m crawl-
ing, it’s because my leg is asleep.”17 When Kochalka loses his voice during a
trip to San Diego, the narration of two different daily strips explains that
he can’t speak, even after a strip in which he explains his condition to a
convention attendee.18 This repeated exposition shows Kochalka offering
contextual material for both his regular readers and for the intermittent
 The Diary Comic 

readership fostered by Internet serialization. In this way American Elf and

other diary strips differ from private diaries not simply in their actual con-
temporary readership but also in their awareness of that continuous, genre-
conscious audience. In this way they are only notionally private, written and
drawn for a public rather than for the self, and yet these comics diaries are
also definitely and deliberately not memoirs. In fact, they differ in important
formal and generic ways even from the semipublic or notionally public lit-
erary diaries of writers discussed by Bloom, because diary comics lack the
“overall narrative structure” or “wider scope” of Virginia Woolf ’s diary, for
example.19 The diary strip thus occupies a precarious place between the
familiar public and private modes of life writing: diurnal as a private diary
but turned outward; crafted for a public audience like a memoir, but with-
out the structures and narrative closure of that genre.
The structure of the four-panel strip, typical for American Elf and many
others in the genre, also reveals two other prominent differences between
diary comics and our typical concept of the prose diary. The four-panel
comic strip has a number of built-in structural characteristics—what most
cartoonists refer to as the strip’s “rhythm” but what we might also think of
as its rhetoric. Typically, the first three panels set up a fourth-panel punch
line or a revelation; alternately, the punch line comes in panel three, followed
by a panel of reaction. These structures are familiar from daily Peanuts or
Doonesbury comic strips, and this rhythm has been so thoroughly explored
by Charles Schulz, Garry Trudeau, and others that it has become part of
our national culture of humor. This four-panel rhythm or rhetoric creates a
shape for the experiences that Kochalka describes. Of course, many diary
cartoonists vary from the four-panel format: Erika Moen works in a larger
full-page strip; Drew Weing freely uses from one to five panels per strip;
Kochalka himself is more committed to the small square of a final layout
than to a particular number of panels, sometimes combining panels in one
or both tiers, or drawing a single larger panel as his “strip” for a day. But
the adoption of any fixed size or format limits the scale of the diary entry,
restricting most diary cartoonists to a handful of brief moments, one sus-
tained reflection, or a single event or anecdote. Unlike the typical prose
diary, a diary comic cannot expand to contain more information on more
eventful days, imposing constraints on the diary cartoonist in how much
experience he or she can represent. This formal limitation requires a degree
of self-consciousness about storytelling technique for the diarist, a constant
sense of economy and of the chosen form’s structure, as every image or word
 isa ac c ate s

crowds out other representational possibilities—as if a diarist chose to write

the events of his or her life in sonnets or daily haiku.
Again, there are exceptions to this rule of thumb, though deviating much
from the formal constraints of the comic strip moves a project away from the
expectations of the diary comic as a genre. “Notebook” diaries, like the travel
journal that Craig Thompson published as Carnet de Voyage, similar note-
books by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, or the travel accounts of
Guy Delisle don’t necessarily confine the sights and events of one day to a sin-
gle strip or a single page; these works, however, aren’t generally thought of as
diary comics. Other diary cartoonists have attempted to account for the entire
day, rather than a single event or short series of moments. James McShane,
for example, has self-published two single-day diary books (// and
//), for which his rules are: “Keep a log. Every ten minutes draw what
you’ve done. Do this all day.”20 McShane’s project is obviously not designed
as a daily practice or for daily serialization, however—each day is roughly a
hundred wordless single-panel pages long—and although it shares the diary
comic’s interest in the lyrical mundane, it’s hard to construe these books as
anything but genre outliers. Lucy Knisley and others have recently attempted
the “hourly comic,” a full-day diary drawn in more reasonable increments
than McShane’s, but still obviously impractical as a daily journal.21 Jesse
Reklaw’s Ten Thousand Things to Do is closer to the typical format of the
diary comic, but Reklaw uses his four daily panels to describe the entirety of
his day, relying heavily on captions of narration and large disjunctions of
scene from panel to panel (see fig. .). It’s not unusual for Reklaw’s comic
to contain more than a hundred words of captions plus a chart that records
his mood, energy level, caffeine and alcohol consumption, and the degree
of pain in his head, shoulders, and back.22 This comprehensive approach
is unusual for diary comics, making Ten Thousand Things to Do more of a
conventional prose diary than an offshoot of American Elf. Kochalka him-
self rarely divides his strip into multiple scenes, usually constraining his
description of the day to a single event or moment. Because they are con-
strained both in structure and in length, typical diary comics tend to limit
themselves also in scope, taking on only fragments of the cartoonist’s lived
experience.
If diary comics operate in a mode that is neither narrative nor strictly
analogous to the prose diary, this mode and its attendant expectations remain
to be defined, particularly in regard to the way that diary comics construe
or construct meaning. In many ways, and not merely because of formal
 figure . Two of Jesse
Reklaw’s Ten Thousand
Things to Do diary strips,
which take a more
expansive and less lyrical
documentary approach
than a typical diary comic.
Courtesy of Jesse Reklaw.
 isa ac c ate s

constraint or compression, an analogy to lyric poetry or haiku seems apt.

Like lyric poems, diary strips are often concerned with describing brief sen-
sory impressions or preserving the emotional charge of a single moment.
Writing or drawing such a moment deliberately stalls the forward move-
ment of time, which is not only a defining characteristic of narrative but also
a property of the comics medium, because we almost always read visual
juxtaposition as a chronological sequence. As mentioned, Kochalka some-
times disables the strip’s sequential aspect by placing such a lyric moment
in a single large panel, accompanied by a descriptive caption: “Late at night,
across the street, through the windows, through the trees, I can see the little
blue rectangle of the neighbor’s TV,” for example, or “I heard the wild wind
and looked up from my book to see the snow blow fiercely.”23 These are lyric
efforts, describing the details of a single suspended moment and drawing
out the moment’s emotional tenor with both the content and the tone of the
images. The amount of visual clutter in “The Snow Blew Fiercely,” for exam-
ple—the closed glass doors, the furniture and other objects between the
viewer and the snowy window—reinforces the mediated distance between
Kochalka and the snow that looks like “static on the TV screen” (see fig. .).
This same lyric impulse to preserve a momentary impression animates many
American Elf strips that use multiple panels and therefore ostensibly de-
note multiple moments in time. In “I Like to Notice Things,” the April ,
, strip, for example, the first two panels show Kochalka noticing and
then calling Eli’s attention to the grass; the final, longer panel shows what
he has seen and describes it: “The shadows have frost in them this morn-
ing.”24 Similar strips describe the way that snow in Burlington can make
March feel like Christmas, a watch and a wall clock “ticking in tandem,” or
the “dizzying shimmer” of power lines and fighter jets against the blue sum-
mer sky.25 In fact, this impulse to record a brief moment and its emotional
impact seems to underlie almost every American Elf strip. “The moments
are fleeting,” Kochalka writes in the introduction to the strip’s first omni-
bus collection, and he feels pressure to draw quickly in order to “capture
that energy.”26
The lyrical use of an inherently sequential medium raises the question
of how lyric and narrative can be simultaneously present in a single work.
Of course, sentences are also a sequential medium, and lines of lyric verse
similarly develop over time. Some recent work by narratologists has offered
to analyze lyric poems in terms of narrative, focusing on the plot or “emplot-
ment” of works like William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
figure . Four lyrical American Elf strips. (The strip misdated July  is actually
from June , .) Courtesy of James Kochalka. These strips are available in color
on Kochalka’s website, http://www.americanelf.com.
 isa ac c ate s

and making the lyric in effect a strange subspecies of narrative.27 This sort
of reading reminds us that it would be a mistake, for instance, to collapse
the beginning and end of Wordsworth’s poem into a single moment, or to
confuse the position of that poem’s retrospective speaker with the position
of the figure standing beside the field of daffodils. And, to be fair, such nar-
ratological efforts are not intended to conflate the categories of lyric and
narrative, or to “treat poems indiscriminately as narrative texts.”28 It might
make still more sense to read lyric and narrative, as Heather Dubrow does,
not as competing genres but as interpenetrating and finally cooperative
modes, present to mixed degrees within an individual work. Dubrow shows
that “lyric enables narrative” and, conversely, that even the supposedly “sta-
tic temporality” of lyric necessarily unfolds in a narrative dimension.29 And
in fact, we might think of comics as a form that is eternally static (in each
unmoving panel) as well as inherently sequential. Although the time denoted
by a panel isn’t exactly a photographic instant—dialogue takes time to utter,
motion can be described in a single panel, and so forth—the framework
of static panels on each page promises to arrest time more than verse or
prose truly could.30 To see diary comics like Kochalka’s on their own generic
terms, we should remain open to the possibility of a comic strip guided by
the lyrical impulse, and to see in the daily record of individual events the
possibility of lyric autobiography. I don’t mean to suggest that the lyric is
a necessary generic component of the diary more generally—many diarists
would be more concerned with “story,” either from day to day or in the
long term, than Kochalka is—but it does seem necessary to recognize those
aspects of diary writing that work against narrative closure and “hermeneu-
tic composability,” and to locate within these variations the potential for
writing in distinctly nonnarrative modes.31
Kochalka is concerned not only with the depiction of mundane moments
but also with the way these brief moments recur or change over time, with
the ebb and flow of seasons, the growth and development of his sons, and the
gradual changes of personality in himself and in others. “I like watching the
seasons change,” he writes, “and watching [his] hair thin,” and seeing himself
make “the same mistakes again and again.”32 Reading a collection of Ameri-
can Elf strips is not merely a process of reading hundreds of lyric moments,
because they do unfold in a chronology even if their relation to passing time
is not narrative. In some ways, the most useful generic model for reading
Kochalka’s diary strips might be the contemporary lyric sequence, in the way
that these poetic sequences ask the reader continually to draw inferences
 The Diary Comic 

about the connections among poems, incidents, and voices, and about those
aspects of the described world that do not appear in any of the lyrics but
which lie somewhere between them. In Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris or Paul
Muldoon’s “Hopewell Haiku” (in Hay), for example, autobiographical or ob-
servational lyrics are pinned to the natural processes of the unfolding year,
and the reader infers or constructs the world that extends beyond the slight,
spare poems. The experience of reading American Elf is inevitably a process
of inference and imaginative construction, extrapolating from each individ-
ual strip to the other events of that day, or to the connections between these
events and other ones: the reader wonders whether the Kochalkas’ drug-
dealing neighbor will cause trouble, tracks Eli’s linguistic and social devel-
opment, and waits for Kochalka to spin into another temper tantrum. This
process of extrapolation is motivated as much by the strip’s serialization (the
knowledge that tomorrow’s installment is yet to be written) as by its lyric
mode and attendant lack of narrative closure.
Much of the long-term effectiveness of a diary comic relies on this read-
erly extrapolation, which is a form of imaginative involvement, and the way
that subsequent strips confirm and correct earlier readerly inferences about
the characters, their relationships, and their personalities. As more aspects
of Kochalka’s personality are revealed, or as Eli’s personality develops, we
get more nuanced and more complex impressions of them. As Kochalka
writes, “Each individual strip might be close to meaningless, but . . . /
together they are becoming a fully realized portrait of my life.” Accompany-
ing this text, as a sort of “portrait,” is a cartoon close-up of Kochalka’s
eye, open wide with a small pupil, as if offering a small, dark window into
his life.33 If each of the thousands of American Elf strips is a single small
aperture for viewing Kochalka’s life, the resulting composite vista—much of
which is inferred rather than merely received—has a comprehensive com-
pleteness that the structures of memoir could barely hope to attain. In the
end, then, Kochalka’s American Elf may emerge as his masterwork as much
because it refuses narrative closure as because his “storytelling” skill in the
four-panel gag strip has been honed by a dozen years of steady daily practice.
If memoir is, as Jerome Bruner implies, literature’s best approximation of the
way we remember and understand our lives, a diary comic like Kochalka’s
might still be a better representation of the way we live those lives. The con-
tinually advancing present, always contingent in its meaning and uncertain
in its value, nevertheless swarms with noteworthy, moving, humorous, or
beautiful moments that might never need to appear in the so-called story of
 isa ac c ate s

a life; Kochalka strives to record and honor these moments as they pass,
even if their significance is fleeting.
As it turns out, Kochalka is so resolutely focused on the unfolding pres-
ent moment of his diary comic that he does not even look back over the
individual strips when they’re published in book form. The retrospective
quality of memoir is thus absent even from Kochalka’s experience of his
published project: “I’m kind of waiting,” he says in a  interview, “so that
when I read it, it will all be brand new.”34 Working on American Elf for more
than a decade, turning some part of each day into a comic strip, has instead
altered Kochalka’s experience of the present moment, so that he now parses
his daily life in terms of possible four-panel strips. He often sees experience
“broken down into comic strip form, in real time, while I’m actually living
the experience. In the beginning this felt a lot like going insane, but now . . .
it just feels natural and normal. . . . My life is art, and my art is life, and that’s
good.”35 Diary comics, then, seem to offer a structure analogous to the ret-
rospectively comprehended structures of narrative, but one that works to
encapsulate, to parse, to describe, and ultimately to honor the present, as
well as the process of the present’s continuing forward development.

notes
In addition to thanking Michael Chaney, whose editorial feedback and patience were a
great help with this chapter, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the help of car-
toonists Jesse Reklaw, Todd Webb, and James Kochalka, who answered my questions
generously, and the research pointers I received from Anna Jackson of Victoria Uni-
versity of Wellington (NZ).
1. Jesse Reklaw, “Project: Inferior,” in Krayons Ego, ed. Jesse Reklaw and Karen Snei-
der (Portland, OR: self-published, ), . The story’s protagonist, misunderstand-
ing Kochalka’s advice, produces an overworked superhero-style adaptation of The
Diary of Anne Frank. A version of Art Spiegelman denounces the adaptation thus: “To
the extent that Maus was a great piece of art, this is a great piece of shit” ().
2. Todd Webb, e-mail to the author, May , . Webb’s diary comics are currently
archived at http://www.toddbot.com/journalindex.html; Weing’s are archived at
http://www.drewweing.com/journalcomic/?date=archive.
3. “Minicomics” are self-published and usually hand-assembled photocopied comics,
made, sold, and traded mainly by amateur cartoonists at small press comics festivals
and conventions (or by mail). Although they are often smaller or shorter than standard
comics, the prefix mini- is generally understood to refer to the size of the comic’s print
run, which is frequently only a few hundred.
4. Drew Weing, The Journal Comic, September , , http://www.drewweing.com/
journalcomic/?date=.
 The Diary Comic 

5. James Kochalka, American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James

Kochalka (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, ), n.p. (). Here and elsewhere I indicate the
break between panels with a slash.
6. James Kochalka, interview by Michael Jewell, The Comics Journal (online),
November , , http://archives.tcj.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=
view&id=&Itemid=.
7. Kochalka, American Elf, September , .
8. James Kochalka, American Elf, Book  (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, ), Septem-
ber –, October , –, and –, .
9. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: an Emerging Literature (Jackson: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, ) .
10. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, .
11. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 
():  (italics in the original).
12. Steven E. Kagle, American Diary Literature, – (Boston: Twayne Pub-
lishers, ), .
13. Bruner, “Narrative Construction,” –, –.
14. Ibid., –.
15. Kagle, American Diary Literature, .
16. Ibid., ; Lynn Z. Bloom, “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’: Private Diaries as
Public Documents,” in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, ed.
Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
), .
17. Kochalka, American Elf, Book Two (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, ), July ,
.
18. Kochalka, American Elf, July , , and , . He explains the problem again
on July , in a caption above a strip about performing at CBGB’s: “Rocking with a sore
throat in New York City.”
19. Bloom, “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers,’” –.
20. James McShane, // (Providence, RI: self-published, ), n.p.
21. Lucy Knisley’s hourly comics are online at http://www.lucyknisley.com/gal
leries/comics/images/ and http://www.lucyknisley.com/galleries/comics/images/
 as well as in her collection Radiator Days (Rhinebeck, NY: Epigraph Publishing,
).
22. Reklaw’s diary comic, now published as Ten Thousand Things to Do (Portland,
OR: self-published, ), originally appeared in his flickr.com account; his mood/pain
chart is implemented and explained in the January , , strip: http://www.flickr
.com/photos/jessereklaw//.
23. Kochalka, American Elf, Book Two, January , ; Kochalka, American Elf
(online), January , , http://www.americanelf.com/comics/americanelf.php?view
=single&ID=.
24. Kochalka, American Elf (online), April , , http://www.americanelf.com/
comics/americanelf.php?view=single&ID=.
25. Kochalka, American Elf, March , ; Kochalka, American Elf, May , ;
Kochalka, American Elf, Book Two, June , .
26. Kochalka, American Elf, n.p. ().
 isa ac c ate s

27. Peter Hühn, “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry,” in Theory into
Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik
(New York: Rodopi, ), –.
28. Hühn, “Plotting the Lyric,” .
29. Heather Dubrow, “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooper-
ation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam,” Narrative . (October ): ,
, .
30. For a discussion of the panel’s duration in time, see Thierry Groensteen, The
System of Comics, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, ), –. See also Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invis-
ible Art (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, ), –.
31. Part of the reason that both the lyric and the diary have frequently been gen-
dered as feminine is that both genres resist concepts of time (organized by teleologies
of progress) linked to patriarchal structures, whereas narrative, from the martial epic
forward, supposedly offers to master and reinforce these structures. See Dubrow,
“Interplay,”  and , for a characterization of the argument about lyric (and a cri-
tique thereof ); for an account of gender theory surrounding the diary, see Suzanne L.
Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, “Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and
Critical Introduction,” in Inscribing the Daily, –.
32. Kochalka, American Elf, n.p. ().
33. Ibid., n.p. ().
34. James Kochalka, Interview with Brian Heater, Daily Cross Hatch (online), Feb-
ruary , , http://thedailycrosshatch.com////interview-james-kochalka-
pt--of-/.
35. James Kochalka, e-mail to the author, May , .
 

Justin Green
Autobiography Meets the Comics

joseph witek

Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary () has long
been acknowledged as a fundamental breakthrough in the history of the
comics form. Green’s wildly hilarious and deeply moving story of his alter
ego Binky’s youthful psychic torment has a legitimate claim to be, if not the
first autobiographical comic ever, certainly the seminal instance in English
of what has become the signature genre of contemporary comics: the con-
fessional autobiography.
Indeed, the influence of a single work on any art form can rarely be traced
so directly and so explicitly. Green’s closest compatriots in the underground
comix, Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Art Spiegelman, credit
Green’s  comic book with transforming their vision of the potential
for telling life stories in comics form. Simply to name the many cartoonists
who have been influenced by that group is to trace the genealogy of autobi-
ographical comics in North America. In fact, much of the significant auto-
biographical work bridging the underground comix of the s to the
small press comics and graphic novels of today was first published in venues
edited by those figures.1 Although Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
looked like nothing produced in comics before, a great deal of the most cel-
ebrated work in the form clearly has followed its lead.
No surprise, then, that the journal Biography adopted the cover of Binky
Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary for its special issue on autobiographi-
cal comics. In that issue, Jared Gardner’s careful account of the histori-
cal development of contemporary autobiographical comics gives full credit
to Justin Green’s contributions and usefully warns against overreliance on
heroic origin stories centered on “a single individual’s agency” (“Autography’s


 joseph witek

Biography,” ). Gardner begins his essay by unpacking Alison Bechdel’s

intuition that she finds “something inherently autobiographical about car-
tooning,” that she feels like the comics form “almost demands people to
write autobiographies” (“Alison Bechdel Interview,” ). While first noting
that autobiography was nearly unknown for most of the history of comics,
Gardner ultimately locates the link between the formal qualities of comics
and those self-depictions he calls “autography” in the way that visual pres-
entation of character inherently foregrounds the split between narrator and
narrated subject: “Comics autobiography from Green to Bechdel highlights
that split and puts it to productive use, allowing the autographer to be both
victim of trauma and detached observer” (“Autography’s Biography,” ).
Judging by current artistic practice and its enthusiastic critical reception,
autobiographical comics seem to comprise a fortunate union of an art form
with its most auspicious and productive subject matter.
The notion of an intrinsic affinity between the comics form and the phe-
nomenological situation of the narrativizing self goes far to explain the sub-
sequent proliferation of autobiography, memoir, and reportage in comics
form. As the earliest example of confessional autobiographical comics, Binky
Brown announces a sharp break with a comics tradition that had rarely
evinced even the slightest traces of autobiography. However, Gardner’s ear-
lier caution against focusing the history of comics on individual moments
of artistic heroism leads back to an unanswered question: If the comics form
is so thoroughly and fundamentally suited to narrativize the self, why did
it take so long for anyone to notice, and how did Justin Green happen to be
the one to do it?
Autobiographical comics are connected to earlier comics, I would argue,
by the way that comics pages spatialize both physical and psychic experi-
ence whether the stories are self-narrated or not. Bart Beaty has argued that
“the ability to move between representational and subjective modes . . . dis-
tinguishes the comics form from the traditions of oil painting and situates
the play of reality and subjectivity as central to the autobiographical project”
(Unpopular Culture, ). As Beaty suggests, comics are suited not simply
to autobiographical narratives but to any depiction of the problematics of
identity and subjectivity. Binky Brown shows the congruence of the comics
form with a postmodern conception of the subject; its pages function as
schematic diagrams of a decentered subjectivity, indicating why comics of
many genres gravitate toward themes of split identities and the visualization
of fragmented aspects of the self.
 Justin Green 

In the realist-illustrative mode, the comics page supports windowlike

panels through which readers look into a self-contained and empirically con-
sistent physical world; in the contrasting mode, the surface of the diagram-
matic page itself becomes a textual field that can spatially embody many
different discursive codes simultaneously, and at any given moment words
and images can be presented as representational, symbolic, allegorical, asso-
ciative, and allusive, or they may work in several modes at once. At various
moments, Green’s pages use all of these modes to show selfhood as a pro-
duction process: the comic creates a blueprint of the machinery of Binky’s
undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder as well as an inventory of the
variegated raw materials of Catholic doctrine and iconography, bourgeois
ideology, and adolescent sexuality that feed that mechanism. The spaces of
the comic become visual-textual analogues to Binky Brown’s massively and
chaotically overdetermined subjectivity.
The intensely schematic pages of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
suggest that the book became the primal instance of comics autobiography
not in spite of but because of its refusal to participate in the empirical and
aesthetically realist “autobiographical pact” at all.2 As the very title of the
book asserts, Justin Green both is and is not the same as Binky Brown. The
sardonic third-person voice narrating the story of Binky’s disordered con-
sciousness occasionally shows up as a distracted first-person avatar of the
protagonist who refers to Binky as “he” but lays claim to the story as “my
material.” Of course, in the autobiographical situation, the subject who
writes is always cut off from direct access to the self who is written, but as
a character Binky Brown is denied even the everyday illusion of himself as
a unified self. Fragments of Binky’s subjectivity crowd the pages in visual
form: Binky pictures his soul, the Catholic true and eternal self, as a pair
of free-floating, disease-spotted lungs, and his bodily self appears in such
guises as a naked high school love god, an involuntarily orgasmic bicyclist,
a disembodied penis, and a Bizarro-faced obsessive-compulsive.
The guilt-ridden sinner figured as one of Superman’s perversely con-
trarian antagonists, one who can share the same physical space and sym-
bolic status with biblical imagery and Catholic iconography, is a reminder
that long before the era of autobiographical comics began, comic strips
and comic books were mapping the geographies of disordered psychologi-
cal states and nonrational modes of consciousness. The nightmare-haunted
rarebit eaters of Winsor McCay would recognize a fellow sufferer in the
waking Binky Brown, who himself might find the shifting mindscapes of
 joseph witek

George Herriman’s Coconino County less bizarre than the streets of his
suburban Chicago. Binky’s fragmented self and the repetition-compulsions
of his daily life too find an echo in the superhero’s multiplying iterations of
secret identities and mirror-image sidekicks, animal counterparts, and robot
selves, all arrayed in the matching costumes that serve as the family livery.
The not-entirely ironic title, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, iden-
tifies the psychic struggle that heralds the genre of confessional autobio-
graphical comics not as a complete break with the past but as a variation on
the familiar comic book fight scene.
Certainly a great deal has changed in comics since the fistfights of cos-
tumed heroes and villains were joined by the quieter and fiercer combats of
self meeting self and self meeting the world. As postmodernism recasts
human subjectivity from a privileged unity to a site of discursive conflict,
cartoonists have found ready to hand an art form long accustomed to ren-
dering time as space, characters as multiplicities, and the disputed frontier
between self and not-self as a permeable zone open for exploration.
notes
1. Such anthologies include the magazines Weirdo (–), edited at various times
by Robert Crumb, Peter Bagge, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and RAW (–), edited
by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. Book collections and comic book series
closely connected with the underground comix featuring autobiographical comics in-
clude Twisted Sisters (), Twisted Sisters  (), Wimmen’s Comix (–), and
Gay Comix (–).
2. The phrase derives from Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography.

works cited
Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the s.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, .
Bechdel, Alison. Interview. Comics Journal  (April ): –.
Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, –.” Biography . (): –.
Green, Justin. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco-
Funnies, . Reprinted as Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler. San Francisco:
Last Gasp, .
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Edited and with a foreword by Paul John Eakin;
translated by Katherine M. Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
.
Noomin, Diane, ed. Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art. New York: Penguin,
.
———. ed. Twisted Sisters : Drawing the Line. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press,
.
 

Narrative Worldmaking in
Graphic Life Writing
david her m a n

In the structuralist-narratological vocabulary so influentially developed by

Gérard Genette (), autobiography constitutes a special case of first-
person or homodiegetic narration, namely, autodiegetic narration, in which
the narrator is also the main character of the story. This understanding of
autobiography is serviceable so far as it goes, capturing a key property of
life writing as practiced across any number of storytelling media, from print
texts to podcasts. But structuralist theorists of narrative like Genette, Roland
Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, A. J. Greimas, and Claude Bremond failed to come
to terms with two aspects of stories that bear crucially on autobiography in
general, as well as the species of autobiographical discourse—life writing
in the form of graphic narratives—that constitute the focal concern of the
present volume. The first aspect is the referential or world-creating poten-
tial of narrative; the second aspect is the medium-specificity of stories, or
the way any given narrative derives at least part of its meaning or effect from
the medium in which it is told. In this chapter I compare and contrast Mary
Fleener’s Life of the Party () with two texts by Jeffrey Brown, Clumsy
() and Unlikely (), to explore these two aspects of narrative in con-
texts of graphic life writing.1 The general issue at stake is how interpreters of
stories—readers of print narratives, interlocutors in face-to-face discourse,
and viewers of films—use textual cues to build up representations of story-
worlds, or the worlds evoked by but not necessarily explicitly characterized
in narrative discourse.2 The specific issue I focus on in what follows is how
graphic narratives deploy word-image combinations to tell the story of a
self ’s becoming, thereby inviting readers to engage in particular methods of
worldmaking.


 david h er m a n

Recontextualizing Structuralist Models:

Narrative Reference and Storytelling Media
The structuralists neglected the referential dimensions of narrative in part
because of the exclusion of the referent in favor of signifier and signified in
the language theory developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. Coupled with work
by the Russian formalists, the Saussurean approach shaped early narrato-
logical models, which were premised on a bipartite division between the
fabula, the formalists’ term for what is being told about in a narrative (the
signified), and the sjuzhet, or how that narrative matter is presented (the
signifier). At issue is the distinction between the chronological sequence
of events recounted in a narrative, on the one hand, and the sequentially
arranged discourse cues on the basis of which readers reconstruct a time-
line for those events, on the other hand. Later analysts such as Lubomír
Doležel () and Dorrit Cohn (), however, introduced a third term in
the analysis—referent or world—to account for readers’ contrasting orien-
tations toward different kinds of narratives.3 Readers orient differently to
stories that make a claim to fact, or evoke what is taken to be a (falsifiable)
version of our more or less shared, public world, than they do to fictional
narratives, which evoke what Doležel () terms “sovereign” worlds. In
connection with the autonomous, standalone worlds of fiction, it simply
doesn’t make sense to try to confirm or falsify reports about situations and
events in the way that a prosecuting attorney seeks to corroborate a version
of what happened during the commission of a crime via the testimony of
multiple witnesses. In other words, it would be a category mistake to attempt
to characterize as true or false the events surrounding Emma Bovary’s death
in Madame Bovary or Molly Bloom’s assignation with Blazes Boylan in
Ulysses. Instead of providing corroborating or disconfirmatory evidence vis-
à-vis what happens in Gustave Flaubert’s and James Joyce’s narratives, any
additional retellings of these events would only create new fictional worlds.
As Philippe Lejeune () and then Cohn () argued, furthermore,
autobiographies fall into the category of factual versus fictional narratives—
that is, narratives for which questions about truth value are indeed perti-
nent. Because of what Lejeune described as “the autobiographical pact,”
interpreters and producers of autobiographical discourse share the assump-
tion that there is a homology among the author, narrator, and protagonist.
This homology distinguishes autobiographies from first-person fictional nar-
ratives like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or fictional autobiographies
such as Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. In such texts, in parallel with
 Narrative Worldmaking 

autobiographies, the narrating I (the self who tells) can be viewed as a later
incarnation of the experiencing I (the self told about), but in contrast with
autobiographical accounts, in fictional narratives like these the narrator’s
claims about events he or she experienced earlier cannot be assumed to be
ones that the author would endorse as propositions that are true about the
larger world in which the process of narration is itself situated.4
How then do the specific attributes of graphic narrative shape the de-
sign and interpretation of discourse to which readers are invited to orient
themselves in accordance with the autobiographical pact? Questions about
medium-specificity fall under the scope of what can be called transmedial
narratology, or the study of narrative across media. Unlike classical, struc-
turalist narratology, transmedial narratology disputes the notion that the
fabula, or story level of a narrative, remains wholly invariant across shifts
of medium. Yet it also assumes that stories do have gists that can be reme-
diated more or less fully and recognizably, depending in part on the semi-
otic properties of the source and target media (Herman ). Transmedial
narratology is thus premised on the assumption that, although stories con-
veyed via different media share common features insofar as they are all
instances of the narrative text type, storytelling practices are nonetheless
inflected by the constraints and affordances associated with a given semiotic
environment. Sets of constraints and affordances interact in multimodal
storytelling, or forms of narration that, like graphic narratives, recruit from
more than one semiotic channel to evoke storyworlds (see Herman ).
In graphic life writing specifically, a key focus for research is how the verbal-
visual logic of the narratives at issue relates to their referential profile. Put
another way, how do such texts use word-image pairings as construction
elements for storyworlds whose told-about agents can be assumed to have
become, through the very events being recounted, the agents of the telling—
in a manner subject to falsification via cross-comparison with other accounts?
In graphic autobiographies, what protocols for worldmaking constrain but
also enable an author’s representation of her own self-becoming?

Case Studies in Graphic Life Writing

As a comparative analysis of Fleener’s and Brown’s texts underscores, graphic
narratives afford a variety of expressive resources—verbal as well as visual
resources for narrative worldmaking—that support the construction of auto-
biographical accounts. To suggest the range of possibilities, I focus in the re-
mainder of this chapter on three key dimensions of life writing and indicate
 david h er m a n

the extent to which the narrative methods used by Fleener and Brown differ
along each dimension. The three dimensions are the emplotment of events
into the story of a life, the models of self that take shape when those larger
story lines are fleshed out via the representational styles deployed in a given
text, and the use or non-use of overt commentary by the narrating I to frame
or contextualize earlier events. Although these overlapping dimensions are
relevant for the study of worldmaking procedures in autobiographical dis-
course in general, regardless of medium, my discussion will foreground how
the three dimensions can be used to generate productive research questions
when it comes to graphic life writing in particular.

Methods of Emplotment
A distinguishing feature of all retrospective narrative is how it enables past
events more or less widely separated in time to be chained together into a
story line trending toward—and helping to account for—the present moment
of narration. The historian Hayden White () coined the term emplot-
ment to describe this event-connecting dimension of narrative. Both Fleener
and Brown emplot events as elements of emergent story lines, but the scope
of and selection criteria for their emplotments differ, and they also handle
differently the relationships among emplotted events.
Jason Mittell () draws a contrast between episodic and serial struc-
tures in extended television narratives, suggesting that whereas serial narra-
tion involves story lines cutting across multiple episodes, “with an ongoing
diegesis that demands viewers to construct an overarching storyworld using
information gathered from their full history of viewing” (), in episodic
narration “characters, settings, and relationships carry over across episodes,
but the plots stand on their own, requiring little need for consistent view-
ing or knowledge of diegetic history to comprehend the narrative” ().
Characterized in these terms, Fleener’s text uses mainly an episodic method
of worldmaking, whereas Brown’s is largely serial in nature. The authors’
contrasting methods may derive, in part, from the different time spans cov-
ered by their narratives. Life of the Party narrates Mary’s experiences in dis-
crete blocks—molecular units—consisting of episodes spanning decades;
the twenty-six episodes spread out across this period of time are linked in
some cases by constellations of characters and by thematic continuities, but
they function largely as self-contained stories in their own right. These sto-
ries range from “Turn off that Jungle Music,” about Mary’s early recognition
of her family’s racist attitudes and her contrasting identification with black
 Narrative Worldmaking 

musical artists, to “Hush Yuppies,” about cocaine-using friends, one of whom

combines his drug addiction with a shoe fetish, to “Boogie Chillun,” which
recounts Mary’s initially frustrating entrance into the world of surfing. The
main constant across these episodes is Mary herself, whose encounters with
a variety of people and situations are portrayed as having imbued her with
the values underscored, in turn, by the narrating I’s presentation of her ear-
lier experiences: loyalty to and straightforwardness with friends and loved
ones, avoidance of self-destructive behaviors, and independence and having
the courage to try new things. Fleener’s method of emplotment thus allows
for in-depth exploration of particular episodes that have contributed to the
formation of the older, narrating self who holds these values and who, as I
discuss later in the chapter, explicitly frames her earlier experiences in the
terms that they afford.
By contrast, Brown’s narratives focus more microanalytically on the events
associated with two failed relationships—events that transpire over months
rather than decades. The shorter time periods covered by Brown’s texts are
subdivided into many more titled sections than the  episodes included in
Life of the Party; there are  such sections in Clumsy, and  in Unlikely.
The result is a highly detailed method of presentation in which brief vig-
nettes are used to outline atomic constituents of an ongoing story—the first
feelings of romantic attraction, a phone call expected but never received, a
hurtful or troubling remark, the last night a couple ever spent together. In
this way Brown’s narratives can explore, in a fine-grained manner, patterns
of behavior that the texts diagnose as fatally destructive for the two rela-
tionships whose trajectory they record. Clumsy explores how Jeff’s feelings
of insecurity and recurrent desire for reassurance (cf. –, –) con-
flict with (and perhaps feed into) Theresa’s tendency to withdraw, as when
she says, “I can’t hold your hand  hours a day. Can’t hold you  hours
a day. Can’t kiss you  hours a day. Can’t have sex  hours a day” (). In
Unlikely, which was published after Clumsy but explores a prior relation-
ship, sexual problems together with Allisyn’s tendency to “self-medicate”
with drugs and alcohol recur throughout the narrative, with each vignette
helping to build a composite picture of the issues and behavioral tendencies
that undermined Allisyn and Jeff’s relationship.5

Modeling the Self

Fleener’s and Brown’s methods of emplotment imply different models of the
self, which dovetail with the contrasting representational styles used by the
 david h er m a n

authors. In Fleener’s text, the self is shaped by key episodes that function as
turning points in an unfolding life story, which encompasses the episodes at
issue in the way that a gestalt structure is more than the sum of its parts. In
parallel with this model of the self as accruing complexity (experiences,
memories, relationships, values) over time, Fleener uses a visual style that
is comparatively baroque. Individual pages contain shifts between more or
less proximal views of the scenes she represents and also use a striking,
Picasso-like technique that Fleener has termed cubismo to figure intense
feelings and mental states (Zone )—as exemplified in figure ., taken
from “Hush Yuppies.” The third panel portrays Mary’s angry reaction to
Jack’s drug use, while the fifth and sixth panels represent Jack experiencing
the effects of cocaine.
Overall the text’s shifts in perspective, more or less detailed portrayals of
situations and events, and expressionist-cubist renderings of mental states
allow Fleener to visually mark changes in the relative salience and emotional
impact of events—both over the course of a given episode and across larger
temporal spans, as the narrating I interpreting (or constructing) events
through retrospective telling comes to evaluate them differently than the
experiencing I did in the past. Episode-internal fluctuations of this sort are
evident in figure ., where Fleener’s use of the cubismo technique regis-
ters how events have a different experiential quality or texture for different
characters. Likewise, the skulls appearing in the mirror in the fourth panel
reflect the inference that Jack’s drug use is tantamount to death, though it is
unclear whether this assessment should be attributed to the experiencing
I or the narrating I, or both.
Figure ., from “Turn off that Jungle Music,” shows how the emotional
valence of events can change over longer stretches of time. The second
panel represents a very young Mary as frenetically excited by the display of
the latest hit records at the end of aisle  in the neighborhood grocery,
whereas the narrating I’s report mentions only that Mary “noticed” the
records. The narrating self ’s assessment of the status of the experiencing self
in the following panel (“I was a  year old rock ’n’ roll kid who wanted to own
every record in the world”) further underlines the temporal and affective
distance between narrator and protagonist.
Meanwhile, the self figured in Brown’s serially linked microsequences
is always emergent, a fragile, vulnerable achievement, with the incremental
method of emplotment suggesting the need to reevaluate this precarious
accomplishment on almost a moment-by-moment basis. In the image-track,
figure . Examples of cubismo style in Mary Fleener’s Life of the Party (p. ).
© Mary Fleener, reprinted courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.
figure . Longer-term changes in the evaluation of events in Fleener’s Life of the
Party (p. ). © Mary Fleener, reprinted courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.
 Narrative Worldmaking 

similarly, Brown’s drawings are stripped-down, minimalist—his characters’

long, thin limbs and extended torsos recalling stick figures rather than cub-
ist portraits.6 Figure ., from Clumsy, portrays Jeff as inconsolably lonely
and anxious, even after a drawn-out phone call with Theresa, with whom
he hangs up only after being prodded to do so—and even then only very
reluctantly.
Whereas Fleener uses variations in her drawing style to indicate the
fluctuating salience and emotional impact of events, Brown confines him-
self almost exclusively to medium-distance views of the scenes he portrays.
As suggested by Figure ., in Brown’s minimalist style explicit indicators
of the emotional valence of events are limited to the section titles (here,
“I’m Sorry”) and the characters’ facial expressions and comments as they
react to what is going on. To anticipate my discussion that follows: whereas
Fleener draws on a large repertoire of perspective-marking techniques as
well as direct verbal assessments by the narrating I to indicate the relative

figure . Vignette from Jeffrey Brown’s Clumsy (p. –). © Jeffrey Brown,
reprinted courtesy of Top Shelf Productions.
 david h er m a n

significance of events, in Brown’s texts what might be termed the “ampli-

tude” of changes in perspective is smaller, and there is no older narrating self
commenting explicitly on the meaning or import of the past.7

Modes of Narration
As figure . demonstrates, in Life of the Party information about Mary’s
formative experiences is spread out across multiple textual layers: speech
and thought balloons, descriptive tags affixed to particular objects in indi-
vidual panels, and comments originating from the narrating I who evalu-
ates the significance of earlier events from the vantage point of the present
moment of narration. In this context the narrating I’s assessments are espe-
cially consequential, because they provide a kind of overarching frame in
which the reactions of the storyworld inhabitants (including those of the
experiencing I) can be situated. Thus, in figure ., the narrating I’s com-
ments, separated from the characters’ utterances in the storyworld by the
use of rectangular boxes versus rounded speech balloons, account for the
nine-year-old Mary’s surprised response to Howlin’ Wolf ’s  blues hit
“Back Door Man.”8 Similarly, the narrator frames the racism that surfaces
in Mary’s mother’s suggestion, in the first panel of figure ., that the
family shop on another day, as well as her angry or disgusted expression
in the second panel: “My mother grew up in the Crenshaw District of Los
Angeles. In the ’s and ’s, it was considered ‘a nice neighborhood.’ By the
’s, it was racially mixed, much to the mortification of my folks” (Fleener
, ).
By contrast, rather than using an older narrating self to provide explicit
assessments of the meaning or impact of events encountered by the younger
experiencing self, and thereby distancing the world of the telling from the
world of the told, Brown’s texts can be viewed as a tentative, provisional,
still-unfinished attempt to come to terms with the events they portray.
These narratives are less an encapsulation of the past than a lived engage-
ment with its ongoing legacy. The lack of an overarching narrational layer
in the verbal track (e.g., in the form of text boxes) suggests how past events
resist distillation in the form of retrospective assessments, which would lit-
erally preside over and frame the contents of individual panels. By the same
token, the absence of commentary by an overt narrating I requires readers
to draw their own conclusions about exactly how the teller’s current under-
standing (and evaluation) of his earlier experiences may have shaped his
presentation of events in the storyworld.
 Narrative Worldmaking 

Brown’s method of narration also places the onus on readers to ascer-

tain where a given scene can be positioned along the time line stretching
between past and present. Such temporal navigation can be particularly
challenging in Clumsy—even though the inside back cover does include a
map indicating in general terms what happened where and when. For exam-
ple, the narrative’s concluding panels move from a vignette titled “The End,”
in which Jeff is left crushed when Theresa breaks up with him over the
phone, to one called “The First Time,” which recounts the first time the
couple slept together, to the final sequence, “You Can Ask Me,” whose title
derives from Theresa’s comment during an earlier phone conversation that
in five years’ time she will allow Jeff to ask her to marry him. Does the order
of presentation here mirror how the narrating I has processed these events,
and the way what lingers longest in memory may not coincide with what
happens last in an extended sequence of events? Is it meant to indicate the
fragility and mutability of any human arrangement or relationship, or, on a
darker reading, to ironize Theresa’s comment about the possibility of mar-
riage? The absence of any explicit narrative framing leaves these questions
open and suggests that attempting to resolve them may in fact be out of
keeping with the elusive, ever-changing meaning of past experiences in the
broader context of a life story that itself never stops changing and evolving.

Concluding Remarks
My most general claim in this chapter is that storytellers use the semiotic
cues available in a given narrative medium to design blueprints for creat-
ing and updating storyworlds, toward which interpreters orient in different
ways depending on those worlds’ referential status. But I have also out-
lined more specific claims about the procedures for narrative worldmaking
in contexts of graphic life writing, using Fleener’s and Brown’s narratives
to discuss just a few of the design parameters that come into play in such
contexts. In Life of the Party, fluctuating degrees of visual complexity along
with multiple textual layers provide scaffolding for the interpretation and
evaluation of past events; the emphasis is on how past experiences, intelli-
gible because of their place in the larger unfolding of a life, have made the
narrating self who and what she is. In Brown’s narratives, by contrast, the
sparseness of the visual and verbal tracks, coupled with the scenic mode of
narration, suggests that even when microanalyzed, the past cannot be fully
understood from the vantage point of the present.9 Some past events remain,
by their nature, unfinished business; they continue to resist assimilation into
 david h er m a n

a larger life story, despite the present self ’s best efforts to make sense of
them in those terms.
In sketching out this analysis, however, my broader goal is to issue a
call for a whole program for research—one that will require the combined
efforts of narrative scholars, theorists of autobiography, and comics experts.
What this new research program will entail is not yet clear, but it can cer-
tainly take impetus from the present volume.
notes
My work on this chapter was supported by a fellowship from the American Council
of Learned Societies and a supplemental external fellowship subsidy awarded by the
College of the Arts and Humanities at Ohio State University. I gratefully acknowledge
these sources of support.
1. Although the subtitle of Clumsy is A Novel, paratextual indicators, such as the
statement on the inside back cover that “Clumsy . . . depicts events that occurred
between July   and June  ,” align the text with life writing. Other terms
with the same semantic scope as graphic life writing include autobiographix, coined
by Fleener, and autography, coined by Whitlock (; see also Whitlock and Poletti
). Both Zone () and Gardner () link the autobiographical impulse in re-
cent and contemporary graphic narratives to pioneering works by Robert Crumb,
Justin Green, and other participants in the underground comics tradition that took
root on the West Coast of the United States in the s.
2. As discussed in Herman (, –), the notion “storyworld” is consonant
with a range of other concepts—including “deictic center,” “mental model,” “situation
model,” “discourse model,” “contextual frame,” and “possible world”—proposed by ana-
lysts concerned with aspects of discourse comprehension in general, as well as narra-
tive understanding more specifically. For additional discussion of narrative as a system
for creating, transforming, and aggregating storyworlds, see Herman (, –).
3. For further critique of the structuralists’ bipartite model, see Herman ().
4. This distinction between narrating I and experiencing I, developed by Franz Karl
Stanzel () as well as Lejeune (), has been influential in the field of narrative
studies in general, as well as in research on autobiography in particular. I thus revert
to this distinction in my cross-comparison of Fleener’s and Brown’s texts in the next
section.
5. In this connection, exploiting the expressive resources of graphic narrative, in
Unlikely Brown always draws circles under the characters’ eyes to indicate when they
have been using drugs.
6. As James Kolchalka puts it in the blurb on the back cover of Clumsy, “The frailty
of the drawn line perfectly matches the human frailty portrayed within the story.”
7. Likewise, Brown very rarely uses thought balloons as indices of emotional
responses and other mental states.
8. For more information about this song, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_
Door_Man.
9. In Genette’s () account, scenic narration involves a specific kind of temporal
relation between the process of telling and the events being told about. More precisely,
 Narrative Worldmaking 

in the scenic mode the duration of the act of narrating is meant to approximate that of
the narrated events.

references
Brown, Jeffrey. . Clumsy: A Novel. Marietta, GA: Topshelf Productions.
———. . Unlikely: A True Love Story. Marietta, GA: Topshelf Productions.
Cohn, Dorrit. . The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Doležel, Lubomír. . Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Fleener, Mary. . Life of the Party. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.
Gardner, Jared. . “Autography’s Biography, –.” Biography .:–.
Genette, Gérard. . Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E.
Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Herman, David. . Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
———. . “Toward a Transmedial Narratology.” In Narrative across Media: The
Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, –. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
———. . “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance.” Partial Answers .:–.
———. . Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
———. . “Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives.”
In Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life, ed. Deborah Schiffrin,
Anna de Fina, and Anastasia Nylund, –. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press.
Lejeune, Philippe. . On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mittell, Jason. . “Film and Television Narrative.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Narrative, ed. David Herman, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stanzel, Franz Karl. . A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
White, Hayden. . “Emplotment.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, . London: Routledge.
Whitlock, Gillian. . “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction
Studies .:–.
Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti, eds. . Biography .. Special issue on
Autographics.”
Zone, Ray. . “Introduction.” In Life of the Party, by Mary Fleener, –. Seattle:
Fantagraphics Books.
 

In Praise of Joseph Witek’s

Comic Books as History
ian g o rd o n

Twenty years ago the University Press of Mississippi published Joseph

“Rusty” Witek’s Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson,
Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Although not the first academic book-
length study of American comics, it was seminal in its longer-term impact.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the book in retrospect is the pre-
science of Witek’s framing device: the narrative art of comic books and the
ways in which the artists he discussed developed that medium’s potential. It
is now somewhat obvious that by the s some major shifts were afoot in
comics. But that was not so clear in , as Witek says: “Hell, Maus wasn’t
even finished then.” Although the underground comix of the s had
waned, the creative space and distribution methods opened by those comics
offered new possibilities for the art form. Witek had gone to graduate school
at Vanderbilt “interested in the study of narrative forms of all kinds” and
“particularly interested in James Joyce.” He turned to a study of comics for
his PhD dissertation not to position himself in the job market, but in the
belief that he may as well study something he loved given the general unlike-
lihood of finding a position in a tight market. Ironically, Witek was proba-
bly the first American academic to carve out a career on the basis of his
work on comics.1
One of the merits of Comic Books as History is the seriousness with which
it takes the comic art form. Unlike so many previous works on comics, Witek
made no apologies for studying comics. The book opens with the declara-
tive sentence: “This book presupposes that comic books as narratives and as
cultural productions merit serious critical analysis.” Such a statement may
now seem self-evident, but prior to Witek almost every study of American


 Witek’s Comic Books as History 

comics included some justification, from the usual “fun house” mirror de-
fense to the “most read section of the daily newspaper” ploy. The point here
was not so much whether these validating statements were right or wrong,
but that making such statements adopted defensive postures from the
beginning and undercut any analysis that followed because the argument
for justification often became the raison d’être for the work. After Witek,
scholars who felt a need to defend their study of comics, even as a rhetori-
cal device, seem either ill informed of critical writing on the medium or
lacking confidence.
Witek’s confidence in comics as an art form allowed him to see the poten-
tial of the transformation being wrought in the form by Jack Jackson, Art
Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Connecting Jackson’s history, Spiegelman’s
historical biography, and Pekar’s autobiographical work, Witek makes the
point that the comic art form is particularly suited to these sorts of narra-
tives because of the complexity in representation that a mix of illustrative
material and written word allows. Taken together, these comics may not
have represented a movement, but they did suggest that a transformation
was occurring both in the sort of themes and issues comics dealt with and
in the way the form needed to be analyzed. As Witek says, he tried to under-
stand what it was that made “a big issue of RAW, a magazine-sized Pekar,
and one of Jackson’s Fantagraphics collections like Los Tejanos . . . a very
different stack of objects than a group of Marvel—or even underground
comix—pamphlets.”2 Witek saw before most others did that work such as
Jackson’s, Spiegelman’s, and Pekar’s refigured comics by creating or reinvig-
orating genres in the medium and consequently opening a door both for
the form and its analysis. Moreover, when numerous journalists and critics
wrote of Spiegelman’s accomplishment as something unique and perhaps
not really of comics, but rather rising above the form to achieve greatness,
Witek demonstrated through a brief history that Spiegelman’s achievement
was firmly attached to comics as an art form.
For numerous reasons, such as marketing and aesthetic judgments,
graphic novels have come to mark something classier than a comic book.
Art Spiegelman has suggested that a paternity test is required before nam-
ing him as the father of graphic novels, which comes in part from his unease
at the distinction and also at some of the sloppy work being passed off as
graphic novels.3 Witek shows us that if we want to consider graphic novels
as something distinct from comic books, the definition is mostly artificial
and more about a perception of comic books as a genre rather than as a
 ia n g o r d o n

medium. Witek does not make this case explicitly simply because his book
predates such arguments. At the same time, though, Witek stresses that the
comix showed that “the fantasy and escapism of comic books was an artifi-
cially imposed cultural constraint” (Comic Books as History, ). The com-
bative, contrarian nature of comix prevented them from ever being more
than a countercultural form. However, the move to historical, biographi-
cal, and autobiographical works by some comix artists after the waning of
the s cultural revolution had, by , opened new possibilities for the
comic book form. Witek made a prescient argument.
Comic Books as History did not receive broad acclaim on publication.
Nevertheless, the book is a touchstone of scholarship on comics and in-
creasingly on memory and autobiography. Although not directly following
in the footsteps of Comic Books as History, Charles Hatfield’s excellent
Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature () owes it a heavy debt,
particularly in the chapter on Pekar. Spiegelman has led many scholars of
the Holocaust, and those using Holocaust memoirs to discuss history and
memory, to think about comics. Those writers have inevitably consulted
Comic Books as History. And rightly so because Witek dealt with issues on
which scholars are only just now focusing.
notes
1. Private correspondence with Joseph Witek, March .
2. Ibid.
3. Sam Thielman, “Art Spiegelman Breaks It All Down for You,” Publishers Weekly,
October , , http://www.booklife.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/comics/article/
-art-spiegelman-breaks-it-all-down-for-you-.html (accessed July , ).
 

Selective Mutual Reinforcement in the

Comics of Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth
ba rt be at y

“Before I met Joe Matt, I figured he was exaggerating himself in his work. . . .
Now I know he’s not! If anything, he’s making himself look better.”1 So
begins Seth’s two-page strip in the seventh issue of Drawn and Quarterly
magazine (March ). During the course of “Some Things I Think You
Should Know about Joe Matt,” Seth lays into his “true friend” and fellow
cartoonist, condemning him for his crazy ideas, his cheapness and venality,
his lack of ethics, his rudeness, general unpreparedness, laziness, and low
taste in cinema. On occasion, to bolster his claims, Seth introduces Chester
Brown into the strip as a witness, inevitably and only to confirm Seth’s com-
ments. While the strip itself, with its comics monologue format, is simple
to comprehend, its significance depends on several linked factors. In order
to understand all the different relationships at play in this strip, it is imper-
ative first to recognize the fact that all three people depicted are not only
friends but also cartoonists, and, further, that by  they were acclaimed
autobiographical cartoonists and therefore likely known to the reader. Sec-
ond, the strip appeared in Drawn and Quarterly, the flagship anthology
from the publisher of the same name. This was the publisher that, by no
means coincidentally, published the individual comic book series of Seth,
Matt, and Brown at this time and was a market leader in the genre of autobi-
ographical comics in the early s. Third, Seth’s strip, with its small pan-
els, regularized grid (one page is six by six panels, the other is five by seven),
lack of background detail, and round, cartoony lines, self-consciously adopts
the visual trappings of Matt’s earliest autobiographical works, published in
the pages of Snarf and in previous issues of Drawn and Quarterly. Finally,
and only in retrospect, it is possible to read in Seth’s parody of Matt’s work


 b art be at y

the origins of a visual style that he himself would adopt in earnest later in
his career. In particular, works such as Wimbledon Green () bridge the
casual approach to cartooning demonstrated here with a disjointed narra-
tive style influenced by Chris Ware. In sum, this two-page strip coalesces the
image of what can be called a Toronto School of autobiographical cartoon-
ing that was central to the development of the genre in the early s. It
reifies, through a gently mocking critique, the privileged status accorded to
the author/character by the comics community of the period. Thus, it serves
as a kind of retroactive lens through which the emergence of the second
wave of North American autobiographical cartoonists comes into focus.

Building a Legacy
North American autobiographical comics arose in two important waves,
with the second heavily indebted to the first. Importantly, members of the
second wave have been highly self-conscious of their status as artists and
have actively sought to articulate interpersonal relationships to the cartoon-
ing community through their work as a way of intensifying their self-image
as artists at the vanguard of a creative movement. This self-consciousness
should not be read as a critique or as a new way of organizing related artists
into coherent schools or groups. Indeed, such efforts to map the personal
and social relationships between cultural creators have been a hallmark of
approaches to the artist in a wide range of historical eras, from ancient
Greece to English romanticism. These scholarly and popular discourses help
to establish a mythology around artist figures that simultaneously heightens
their social significance and psychological exceptionalism. I deploy it here
not to reify these relationships, but to shine a critical light on the ways the
second generation of autobiographical cartoonists not only cite each other
but also invoke the influences of their most consecrated forebears in order to
establish their own credibility within the field. In creating a self-conscious
network of artistic and social relationships out of a small coterie of friends
who also happen to be cartoonists, second-generation autobiographical car-
toonists struggle to insert their work into a wider field in which their own
contribution can be identified as a significant artistic movement.
Notably, when pressed to cite their influences, the Toronto autobiogra-
phers are remarkably predictable: Chester Brown cites the influence of the
first generation’s Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman in a  interview in
The Comics Journal, and Crumb and Harvey Pekar in a Crash interview in
 (“when I thought about autobiographical comics I just thought of Pekar
 Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth 

and Crumb”); Joe Matt mentions Crumb in his  Comics Journal inter-
view (“I soon became totally obsessed with Crumb”); while only Seth offers
a different route into the autobiographical mode, citing Lynda Barry as his
most direct influence (“it was Lynda Barry’s stuff that most impressed me at
the time. And I just assumed it was all autobiographical. Later I pretty much
found out that most of it’s fictional”).2 The early issues of American Splen-
dor featuring the work of Pekar and Crumb are most frequently cited as
the works that gave birth to the nascent autobiographical comics movement
in the s. Correspondingly, the evolution of the Toronto circle shifted
the balance of power within the autobiographical comics field by appoint-
ing clear successors and by lifting autobiographical comics out of its histor-
ically specific location within the underground comics scene of the s. In
other words, by simultaneously paying homage to the first generation, while
advancing their own distinct style, the Toronto autobiographical artists sug-
gest a maturing of the genre and the development of a new movement that
places their own work at the center.
In October  The Comics Journal published a special issue dedicated
to the topic of autobiographical cartoonists that placed Seth, Matt, and
Brown at the forefront. Besides a joint interview of the three Toronto-based
artists conducted in , the issue contained a psychological examination
of Chester Brown’s comics by Bob Levin, interviews with Diane Noomin,
Harvey Pekar, and Dennis Eichhorn, and an “Autobiographical Cartoonists
Survey.” That survey featured brief biographical notes on sixty-nine artists
involved with autobiographical comics, including major figures such as Eddie
Campbell, Julie Doucet, Mary Fleener, Justin Green, Pekar, Sylvie Rancourt,
Joe Sacco, and Colin Upton, as well as those who worked only sporadically in
the genre, including Kyle Baker, Dan Clowes, Evan Dorkin, Todd McFarlane,
Dave Sim, and Wally Wood. It therefore provides a detailed snapshot of the
state of the autobiographical comics genre as it existed at that time.3 Over
the course of almost two intervening decades, many of these creators have
left the genre of autobiography or seen their importance within it dimin-
ished by history. At the same time, the sheer number of cartoonists working
in the genre at that time testifies to its perceived vitality, as well as to its
importance in the creation of a comic book aesthetic that would define the
so-called alternative comics movement of the period. Significantly, Charles
Hatfield dedicates two chapters to autobiography in his account of the rise
of American alternative comics in the s, and my own study of the devel-
opment of European small press work during the same period includes a
 b art be at y

chapter on the topic.4 The centrality of this movement within alternative

comics production of the period is further evidenced by the fact that artists
like Seth, Matt, and Brown tend to cite each other and their generational
peers as influences just as strongly as they would members of the American
underground movement. Moreover, Brown locates the proximate influences
on his decision to shift from the psychological fantasy of Ed the Happy
Clown to autobiographical work as being Canadian cartoonists Julie Doucet,
Colin Upton, and Joe Matt (an American citizen living in Toronto at the
time), each of whom he repeatedly plugged on the letters pages and back
covers of his first autobiographical comic book series, Yummy Fur; each,
not surprisingly, were mainstays of the publisher Drawn and Quarterly, the
publisher most closely aligned with the autobiographical comics movement
of this period.5

Building a Genre
When the first issue of Joe Matt’s Peepshow received a mixed review in the
pages of The Comics Journal in , Chester Brown was quick to send a
response.6 This can be read as the kindly act of an artist standing up for the
work of his good friend, but given the proximity (geographic, ideological,
and aesthetic) of Brown and Matt, it may also reflect a degree of self-interest.
After all, all three of the Toronto cartoonists share common interests in the
autobiographical genre that can be found in their particular relationship
to modes of confession and self-criticism (ranging, as they do, from melan-
cholia to self-disgust), depictions of familial relations, the construction of
an intimate homosocial community rooted around comics, and the shift-
ing dynamics involving accuracy and authenticity in their comics work. An
attack on one, therefore, might be read as a criticism of all three.
The Comics Journal review of Joe Matt’s work to which Chester Brown
replied is particularly significant because the artist to whom Matt was com-
pared and found lacking was, of course, Chester Brown. Critic Frank Young
argued that Brown’s Playboy stories (Yummy Fur, nos. –) constituted
the “pivotal work” in the emergence of a new autobiographical trend that
privileged “complete honesty.”7 This work, collected under the title The Play-
boy in , established a mixture of personal awkwardness, sexual compul-
siveness, and individualized self-contempt that characterizes Brown’s comics
about his youth. Throughout the story, Brown recurrently depicts himself
masturbating, often in an unusual fashion, stripping away social conven-
tions concerning privacy in a confessional rush toward public humiliation.
 Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth 

Tellingly, the title of the first chapter is “Disgust.”8 In a subsequent autobio-

graphical short work, “Danny’s Story” (Yummy Fur, no. ), Brown depicts
his typical morning routine in graphic images that show him urinating and
eating his own snot. These highly revealing moments confirm the artist’s
stated desire to depict what he claims is his daily morning routine, while
situating, in a highly self-conscious manner, Brown in the abject tradition of
autobiographical comics that existed at this time. In his  interview with
Steve Solomos, himself a character frequently depicted in the comics of Joe
Matt and a critic of “Danny’s Story,” Brown insisted, “When I was growing
up, it always seemed to me that what I wanted to do when I became an
artist, was to show life the way I thought it really was. That was my inten-
tion. As you actually become an artist you realize how impossible this is.
But still there’s a feeling that there are certain things in life that you show
and certain things that you don’t show, and I don’t want to follow those
rules.”9 With this, Brown signals his awareness of the conventions operating
in the genre, as well as his desire to contravene them by pushing the confes-
sional aspect of autobiographical comics in startling, and even disturbing,
new directions.
Similarly, Joe Matt’s Peepshow, launched in , more than two years
after Brown’s turn to autobiography, follows a similarly revealing trajectory.
Indeed, the very first image found in Peepshow depicts Matt masturbating
while his girlfriend is at work, and the image of the artist that develops
over the ensuing pages is considerably less flattering. It is little surprise that
Frank Young termed the comic “the harshest self-portrait in comics history,”
leaving the comment as a statement of fact rather than judgment of qual-
ity.10 Throughout the course of the three titles serialized in the fourteen
issues of Peepshow between  and , The Poor Bastard, Fair Weather,
and Spent, Matt has generated an image of himself as a person that is even
more strikingly unflattering than that painted by Seth in the Drawn and
Quarterly strip. He portrays himself as a porn-addicted, abusive boyfriend
and a chronic liar and user with deep emotional scarring and severe social
anxieties. In the work collected as Spent, the image of his personal misery is
deeply disturbing. The book’s four chapters each unfold on a single day, two
in , one in , and one in , with embedded flashbacks to Matt’s
childhood in the s. Over the course of the nine years depicted in the
slim book, Matt suggests that virtually nothing of interest occurs in his life
outside of his regular meetings with Seth and Chester and his own incessant
editing of pornographic videotapes and chronic masturbation in his room
 b art be at y

at a Toronto rooming house. Matt’s seeming desire to one-up Brown, who

chronicled his personal fascination with pornography in The Playboy by pil-
ing up his psychosexual compulsions, contributes a strong sense of unease
to his work. Moreover, his unrelenting and largely unreflective focus on his
interiority (in The Poor Bastard all but a few panels depict Matt himself, a
tendency that has diminished by the time Spent was written) contributes to
a striking image of personal unhappiness that is emblematic of the down-
beat aesthetic of second-wave autobiographical comics.
Contrary to the lead of his friends, Seth does not engage in the aesthetics
of masturbatory self-revelation. The story serialized in Palookaville, no. –,
“It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken” (collected as a book with the same
title in ), offers a more subdued image of the artist as a questing comics
historian, discovering the work of the New Yorker gag cartoonists that will
so clearly influence his drawing style and hunting down biographical infor-
mation on one of these men, Jack “Kalo” Kalloway. While it is less shaped
by the confession of personal idiosyncrasy, Seth’s work nonetheless offers a
great deal of insight into his interior life and particularly stresses the author’s
depressive and melancholic tendencies. Throughout the course of the story
Seth evokes nostalgia for his childhood, as in his visit to the Royal Ontario
Museum or the sadness he feels when faced with old buildings. As he writes,
“there’s something in the decay of old things that provokes an evocative
sadness for the vanished past.”11 Depicted, as Barbara Postema has argued,
as a nostalgic flâneur pining equally for the past of his own childhood and
for a past that has never existed, Seth moves through urban Toronto and
rural Ontario in an effort to cure the psychic traumas that trouble him: “No
contentment . . . no real lasting happiness.”12 For Seth, as with Brown and
Matt, a primary cause of regret is intimate sexual and romantic relation-
ships that constantly fail. All three share a common commitment to depict-
ing the absolute dysfunction of their own love lives, to the degree that these
failures take on a central position as the origin of larger miseries in the nar-
ratives. Insofar as he raises the possibility of romantic love in “It’s a Good
Life” only to see it dashed, Seth shares with Brown and Matt a fixation on the
confessional, but also, and more importantly, an abiding expression of per-
sonal unhappiness that, despite its roots in first-generation work by Crumb,
Pekar, and Spiegelman, became cemented as the hallmark of autobiograph-
ical seriousness in the early s.
Aside from their incapacity to engage in meaningful romantic and sexual
relationships, many things seem to trouble the autobiographical personae
 Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth 

presented by Seth, Matt, and Brown, but perhaps chief among these is fam-
ily. In two stories by Brown the evolution of the portrait of his family life
is striking. In The Playboy, Brown depicts his family only in passing, and
notes, in a manner that is parenthetical to the primary story of sexual com-
pulsion that he is recounting, that his mother passed away while the rest of
the family was on vacation.13 In “Fuck” (collected as I Never Liked You), how-
ever, his family occupies a much more central role. Specifically, the twinned
poles of his mother’s strict religiosity and schizophrenia are shown to struc-
ture young Chester’s social development in unusual ways, from his crippling
inability to act on his romantic longings toward Sky to his refusal to curse,
a stand that makes him a target for bullying classmates. Throughout “Fuck,”
Brown’s sexual awakening is closely linked to his mother’s declining mental
state. Brown’s mother occupies three important narrative roles in the story,
all of which contribute to a picture of Brown as a broken subject. First, she
repeatedly lectures him on the use of foul language, reinforcing an absolute
stigma against it that is adhered to by Chester as a young man, even while it
is aggressively undermined by the very title of the piece. Second, she cryp-
tically initiates Chester and his brother into the mysteries of sex, lecturing
them on the topic of body image (“so I wear a padded brassiere . . .”) and
modeling positive affective relationships (as in the scene by the fire in which
Chester is unable to tell his mother that he loves her). Third, she falls into
a severe illness and dies. It is the intersection of these three themes—lan-
guage, sex, and death—and the way that they are replayed in miniature by a
seemingly uncomprehending Chester among his peer group, that form the
basis for “Fuck,” and that, further, allow his other autobiographical, and even
nonautobiographical, work to be read anew. In light of “Fuck,” it is all the
more striking that The Playboy contains only four images of Brown’s mother,
and that two of them depict her as an angel disapproving of his sexual com-
pulsion. In an interview in The Comics Journal, Brown told Bob Levin “I
really couldn’t have asked for a more perfect mother” and identifies the guilt
that he feels about her death as a driving force behind his comics.14
The way that Seth and Joe Matt present their relationships to their fam-
ily is much less dramatic but no less central to their self-construction. Seth
opens “It’s a Good Life” on a trip to visit his mother and brother in London,
Ontario, a university town west of Toronto. His mother is quickly established
as a charitable person, tired from a day spent lending a hand at her church
helping to clothe a refugee family, but seemingly pleased to be cooking for
her sons. Although he returns to visit his mother at the conclusion of the
 b art be at y

story, she plays no other role in the narrative. To this end, Seth’s mother is,
like the old buildings that he venerates, a source of misty-eyed nostalgia and
an emotional safe haven in an ever-changing world (“It seems I used to like
to get inside cardboard boxes and close them up behind me. I enjoyed being
in that safe, confined space. My mother’s place is a lot like those boxes”).15
In the two panels in which she appears in The Poor Bastard, Matt presents
his mother as a simplistic cartoon stereotype: on both occasions she urges
her son to eat more. The image, however, is quite different in Fair Weather,
his recollection of a summer during his adolescence in which he portrays
his mother as a source of emotional trauma, particularly when she throws
away his comic book collection after he refuses to mow the lawn. In Fair
Weather, this is a crucial turning point, and Matt dedicates eight pages to
establishing and playing out the scene as a fundamental trauma structuring
the adult Joe’s obsessive desire to collect and preserve the old View-Master
reels and comic strips depicted in The Poor Bastard and Spent.
The crime committed by Joe’s mother in Fair Weather is a sin against
comics. Joe, who is obsessed with collecting and, particularly, with the eco-
nomic value of old comics (Action Comics no.  is worth “Thousands! Thou-
sands and thousands and thousands!” he tells his friend Dave), is unable
to forgive his mother’s treachery. In his later life, Joe’s social relations will
center on sex (including pornography) and comics to the near exclusion of
other factors. In Spent, for instance, he buys a collection of Jimmie Frise’s
Birdseye Center (coveted by Seth) out of spite and spends lavish amounts
of money on Gasoline Alley strips clipped from old newspapers and sold
via the Internet. The substitution of comics for human companionship is
common in the work of all three cartoonists. Alone in his old hometown of
Strathroy, Seth comforts himself with the purchase of an old Turok comic
book, and on three occasions Chester passes off his Playboy purchases as
comic books. Throughout their works, these three artists stress comics as
the source of their common bond and as a determining aspect of their per-
sonalities. Allowed to go “upstairs” at the Village bookstore to look at col-
lections of New Yorker cartoons, Seth strikes gold, telling Chester, “I was
practically shaking when he showed me these books.”16 At the same time,
however, Seth’s excitement turns to disappointment when Chester declares
the work only “fine,” as he is unable to comprehend how his friend, a car-
toonist, doesn’t “like this stuff more.”17 Collectively, in the work of all three
men, it becomes clear that comics form the basis for the only sustaining
relationships in their lives—each other.
 Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth 

Building a Movement
The relationship of Seth to the New Yorker cartoonists, and specifically to
the fictional Kalo, takes the comics-cartoonist relationship in directions
that are unexplored by Brown and Matt, particularly as they allow for an
exploration of the artist’s subjectivity by substitution. In “It’s a Good Life,”
Seth details the development of his interest in New Yorker style cartooning,
which he would adopt when he turned to autobiographical cartooning, in
distinction from his earlier work on Mr. X. At the same time, Seth uses a (fic-
tional) quest narrative within the confines of purported autobiography in
order to delve into his own personality. To this end, Seth is not so much
looking for Kalo in the small towns that shaped his early life and the New
York that embodies his fantasies of success as he is looking to resolve his
own personal anxieties about his chosen career. Seth’s creation of a small-
town cartoonist who made it to the big time only to give it all up for mar-
riage, a family, and a life as a small-town realtor enables his own character
to assess his own hopes, dreams, and anxieties, which are intimately bound
up with his depressive tendencies, his devotion to comics, and his nostalgia
for simplified relationships and unconditional love. When, for example, he
explains, in narration, that he loves the comic strip characters passed on to
him from his parents, but that “it’s a sad sort of love,” he establishes a con-
nection between personal subjectivity, family history, and comics that is at
the heart of his narrative. “It’s a Good Life” is a story about the artist’s aspi-
rations in the face of fundamental life choices. When the choices made by
Kalo are ultimately revealed, crucially by that artist’s mother, Seth is left, as
are his readers, to ponder the question of what constitutes the “Good Life”
of the title and, more importantly, what constitutes weakening.
Of course, another key issue in “It’s a Good Life” stems from the fact that,
as the author openly admitted after the work was completed, Kalo never
existed and most of the events depicted in the work are fictional. The ques-
tion of the “truth value” of autobiographical works has dogged the study of
autobiography since its origins, and this issue is particularly spotlighted by
the work of these cartoonists, especially insofar as their works tend to re-
inforce each other in what Philippe Lejeune has termed “the referential pact.”
Lejeune suggests autobiographical works are referential, that is to say that
they can be submitted, like scientific and historical discourses, to tests of
verification.18 In the example of the Toronto cartoonists, this form of verifi-
cation is provided, in a closed and circular manner, by the evidence pro-
vided by the other Toronto cartoonists. This is to say, “It’s a Good Life”
 b art be at y

was widely read as autobiographical not only because its author presented
it as such, nor because Drawn and Quarterly was the leading publisher of
autobiographical comics at the time of its publication, but also because
the image of Seth presented in the work corresponded to the image of the
artist derived from interviews and other real-life sources, and because that
image so precisely matched the one of Seth presented by Matt and Brown in
their works.
Of the three, Brown has less frequently depicted the other two. Indeed,
none of his comics have shown his relationship with Matt, and only the
short story “Showing Helder,” in Yummy Fur, no. , depicts his relationship
with Seth. In this story, Brown recounts the production of his first auto-
biographical comics work, the short story “Helder” that appeared in the pre-
vious issue with an emphasis on his self-doubts about the autobiographical
turn in his comics. During the course of “Showing Helder,” he solicits feed-
back about the unpublished pages of “Helder” from a number of his friends,
including his ex-girlfriend (Kris), his friend Mark Askwith, and Seth. The
central debate in “Showing Helder” concerns the inclusion of panels in which
Brown speaks directly to the reader, a topic on which his friends are decid-
edly split. Seth appears several times in the narrative, reassuring Brown as
to the quality of the work. The facts established by Brown in this piece, which
predate Seth’s first autobiographical work by a year, include his physical
appearance, his work as an illustrator, his unwillingness to share his works
in progress with Chester, and his constant smoking. Insofar as these facts
accord with what is generally known about Seth, the work takes on the aura
of “truth.” Further, the anecdotal nature of the story lends an air of authen-
ticity for readers who might well wonder why someone would bother to fab-
ricate a story that is so slight. From this standpoint, a story like “Showing
Helder” becomes a starting point against which the “truth” of other auto-
biographical stories featuring the same characters might be measured.
Much more than Seth and Brown, Matt has made the relationship among
the three cartoonists a central aspect of his work. While neither Brown nor
Seth depict Matt in their comics (with the exception of Seth’s previously
cited parody of Matt), Matt has made them the basis for much of his work
and has done the most to establish the public image of the trio. Importantly,
however, Matt has also always been quite clear that his work involves a great
deal of fictionalization. In a  interview he described his work as con-
taining “a certain fictitious quality in that you are often combining events
and fictionalizing just a little for the sake of the story, and I overdramatize
 Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth 

other things.”19 This tendency toward fictionalization and overdramatization

is an aesthetic strategy that is directly referenced in the work itself, notably
when, in Peepshow, no. , Matt’s friends Andy and Kim confront him about
their fictionalized portrayal in previous issues of the title. While this con-
frontation highlights the constructed nature of Matt’s work and foregrounds
the dissolution of the referential pact, the artist further undercuts it in Spent
when, looking at a copy of The Poor Bastard, he bemoans the fact that “none
of this stuff even happened the way I drew it! It’s half fabrication!”20 Para-
doxically, of course, the confession in Spent that he fictionalized, or invented
whole cloth, those aspects of the story that are least open to verification
(such as the pathetically failed ménage-à-trois that concludes Peepshow,
no. ), lends his work a greater sense of honesty, particularly concerning
those elements, such as the personae of Seth and Brown, that can be recon-
ciled according to additional sources.
As the least “true” of all of the works discussed here, Seth’s “It’s a Good
Life, If You Don’t Weaken” presents an interesting dilemma. In his work of
fiction presented as autobiography, Seth goes to a lot of effort, particularly
in the paratextual elements of the comic books, to ensure that the story is
read autobiographically, even amid clues intended to reveal his game. Thus,
for instance, Seth has Brown remark on the fact that Kalo’s drawings and
Seth’s are very similar (“he kinda draws like you”) from the very moment
that the fictional cartoonist is introduced into the story. Starting with the
second part of the story (Palookaville, no. ), Seth includes a falsified Kalo
cartoon on the back cover of his magazine, reprinted in such a manner
(poor reproduction quality, visible printer’s marks) so as to suggest that the
cartoon was more than half a century old. He would repeat this gambit in
subsequent issues, until, ultimately, revealing the lone New Yorker Kalo car-
toon printed on an undated  page from that magazine as the back cover
of Palookaville, no. . He also encouraged readers to search for undiscov-
ered Kalo cartoons in old magazines. At the same time, Seth provided clues
as to the fictional nature of his work, referencing Hergé’s Tintin in the third
chapter and then, in the appended glossary, indicating that The Castafiore
Emerald, from which he derived the name Kalo, was his favorite of all the
books. In the final issue of the serialization, Seth even went so far as to
reprint a panel from that book that contains the word “Kalo” printed upside
down in the refuse of a gypsy camp. Thus, Seth’s book simultaneously
enacts and destabilizes the referential pact, and it does so primarily by pre-
senting an image of the artist, and of Brown, that accords so neatly with the
 b art be at y

previously established images of these men that the ruse is established with
very little effort. Therefore, while the actual narrative turns out to be fic-
tional, the autobiographical aspect remains strongly cemented through the
subtextual elements that invoke known relationships and personality quirks
established elsewhere by other artists. In this sense, then, the individual
works of Seth, Matt, and Brown cannot be read merely as isolated texts, but
are always implicated in a field of artistic production that is self-consciously
perpetuating itself as something of lasting artistic and social importance.
Crucially, these relationships are best seen, and at times only seen, in
the original comic book serializations of the works. Seth’s use of the specific
elements of the comic book format (letters pages, multiple covers) in the
construction of his autobiographical fiction emphasizes that these autobio-
graphical comics derived their meaning from their creators’ participation
in the comics world as it existed in the early s. Seth was established,
because of the first three issues of Palookaville, as an autobiographical car-
toonist before he turned to self-fictionalization with “It’s a Good Life.” In
the comic books, as opposed to the book collections of the work, Brown’s
autobiographical work appeared in conjunction with his adaptation of the
biblical Book of Matthew, a relationship that particularly inflected his depic-
tions of his mother’s religiosity and his personal sense of guilt. However, it
is Matt, due to the incredibly slow pace of his production, who was most
responsible for sustaining the image of the three cartoonists as central fig-
ures in the second wave of the autobiographical comics movement. Matt’s
work, which incorporates Seth and Brown in contrast to their less-frequent
inclusion of him, is that which cements the relationship. In the penultimate
chapter of Spent, a waitress asks the lunching trio: “Are you three related?
You look very similar.”21 The truth, of course, is that they’re not related;
they’re just drawn as if they were.

notes
1. Seth, “Some Things I Think You Should Know about Joe Matt,” Drawn and Quar-
terly, no.  (March ): .
2. Scott Grammel, “Chester Brown: From the Sacred to the Scatological,” The
Comics Journal, no.  (April ): ; Steve Solomos, “Shades of Brown,” Crash, no.
 (Fall ): ; Christopher Brayshaw, “Joe Matt,” The Comics Journal, no.  (Jan-
uary ): ; Gary Groth, “Seth,” The Comics Journal, no.  (February ): .
3. Jeremy Pinkham and Eric Reynolds, “Autobio: The Autobiographical Cartoonist
Survey,” The Comics Journal, no.  (October ): –.
 Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth 

4. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: Univer-

sity Press of Mississippi, ); Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the Euro-
pean Comic Book in the s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ).
5. Mark Daly and Rich Kreiner, “Seth. Brown. Matt,” The Comics Journal, no. 
(October ): . Brown recommended Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte to his readers
in Yummy Fur, nos. , , , and , Upton’s work in no. , and Matt’s Peepshow in
no. .
6. Frank Young, “Peeping Joe,” The Comics Journal, no.  (March ): –;
Chester Brown, “Who’s All Wet? Frank or Chet?” The Comics Journal, no.  (July
): –.
7. Young, “Peeping Joe,” .
8. Chester Brown, “Disgust,” Yummy Fur, no.  (June ): .
9. Steve Solomos, “Shades of Brown,” .
10. Young, “Peeping Joe,” .
11. Seth, “It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken,” part , Palookaville, no.  (Decem-
ber ): .
12. Barbara Postema, “Memories that Don’t Weaken: Seth and Walter Benjamin,”
International Journal of Comics Art , no.  (Fall ): –; Seth, “It’s a Good Life,”
part , .
13. Chester Brown, “The Playboy Stories,” part , Yummy Fur, no.  (December
): .
14. Bob Levin, “Good Ol’ Chester Brown: A Psycho-Literary Exploration of ‘Yummy
Fur,’” The Comics Journal, no.  (October ): .
15. Seth, “It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken,” part , Palookaville, no.  (Decem-
ber ): .
16. Ibid., .
17. Ibid., .
18. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, ), .
19. Daly and Kreiner, “Seth. Brown. Matt,” .
20. Joe Matt, Spent (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, ), .
21. Ibid., .
 

Keeping it (Hyper)Real
Autobiographical Fiction in -D

da mian duff y

At one point in time, before we had ever met, John Jennings wrote a short
story called “No More Candy,” based on an exercise in a book of story
prompts. This prompt offered a challenge paraphrased as “Write about
when you first became aware of your own mortality.”
In  the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA) in Athens,
Georgia, put out an open call for submissions to an art exhibition titled Dear
Diary: The Autobiographical Comic Book. By this point, John and I had been
collaborating on comics for over a year and had already had some success
with creating graphic narratives, specifically for comics art shows, which lead
John to suggest that I adapt “No More Candy” into a comic for the exhibition.
I was, in other words, tasked with writing someone else’s autobiography.
In adapting the story into a comic, I was struck by this odd disconnection,
writing (and later lettering) a narrative for an exhibition of autobiographi-
cal works that contained nothing of my own autobiography. It felt like I
was lying. In reaction, I decided to make my own narrative voice explicit in
the work, making the incursion of fiction into autobiographical nonfiction
transparent by expressing my own autobiographical voice when discussing
the work of adapting the prose piece.
John wrote “No More Candy” as a reminiscence of an episode from his
youth in rural Mississippi, in which the death of an elderly neighbor who
often gave John and his sister candy made young John aware of the mortal-
ity of those around him, as well as the reality of his own unavoidable death.
In the adaptation that I wrote and John illustrated, Trees You Can’t Climb,
the autobiographical narrative of “No More Candy” is framed by a sequence
set in the present day, in which John speaks with a nameless student about


 Keeping it (Hyper)Real 

how recorded video of an event distorts that event’s reality. This sequence
employs a narrative voice identified as me, the adapter of John’s story, and
explicitly identifies the present-day conversation with the student as entirely
fictional: “Bear in mind, John never actually said any of this. This part is fic-
tion I made out of words and fragments of memories of things I’ve heard
John say.”1
During the explicitly fictional conversation between the adult John and
his student, John mentions to the student Jean Baudrillard’s conception of
the hyperreal, a simulation without a referent. The simulated student of our
comic then offers John a piece of candy, triggering the childhood reminis-
cence originally described in prose in “No More Candy.” At this point the
narrative captions become John’s autobiographical authorial voice. That
this voice is placed in quotation marks, however, reinforces the problematic
of postmodern self-referentiality suggested in the opening sequence. The
same situation presented at the opening, which identifies itself as a fiction
constructed from words and fragments of memories, is now juxtaposed
with John’s autobiographical (and therefore nonfictional) narrative likewise
constructed from words and fragments of memories.
John and I completed the ten-page Trees You Can’t Climb comic, which
was accepted to the ATHICA exhibition in the spring of . Soon there-
after, another opportunity for a comics-related exhibition presented itself
in the form of the Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio
(CANVAS), a -D virtual reality environment housed at the Krannert Art
Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The CANVAS
is comprised of three black, back-projectioned screens that retain the polar-
ization of light, with LCD projectors and circularly polarized light filters
projecting behind them. When viewed through circular-polarized viewing
glasses, images projected on the screens appear in -D. These virtual -D
environments can then be navigated by the viewer using directional buttons
on a gamepad, similar to those used for video game consoles.
We decided to reuse Trees You Can’t Climb for this -D virtual environ-
ment by deconstructing the page layouts of the comic, making each panel of
the comic into a separate jpeg file. The jpeg of each panel was then imported
into the CANVAS as a -D plane floating in virtual -D space; each image
floats in space in front of you as the preceding and succeeding panels float to
your left and right. In order to read the comic in the CANVAS, the reader/
viewer must literally move from panel to panel using the directional con-
trols on the gamepad. When the directional control is pushed to the right or
 da mian duff y

the left, the panels slide past, like windows on an invisible passing train, or
album art in the “cover flow” feature of iPods and iTunes.
However, moving only left and right would waste the unique simulation
of three dimensions afforded by the CANVAS. The design problem became
how to place these -D panels into -D space in such a way that the artwork
activated the depth of the virtual environment. We eventually decided that
we would arrange the panels so that the third dimension functioned as a
map of narrative time within the story.
Discussions of how the comics form expresses the passage of time tend
to focus on the conflation of time with space. Scott McCloud explains that
time equals space in comics because moving from panel to panel on the page
creates the perception of the progression of time in the narrative, a concep-
tion of comics as a “temporal map.”2 This portrayal of time through space
in comics narrative is, of course, far more complex and metaphoric than the
analytic certainty implied by the map metaphor.3 Nonetheless, visual design
in comics can have the effect of making time seem perceptual as a “tangible”
dimension.4 The version of Trees You Can’t Climb installed in the CANVAS

figure . Overhead view of conceptual design for virtual comic panel layout.
Courtesy of Damian Duffy.
 Keeping it (Hyper)Real 

deploys this perceived conflation of time and space in comics as a medium,

but instead of using two dimensions to imply four, the CANVAS installation
uses three.
The individual panels of Trees You Can’t Climb are arranged in the
CANVAS as a spiral pattern; figure . is an approximation of the overhead
view of this pattern. The spiraling path (indicated in figure . with a dot-
ted line) is meant to be a time line, evocative of the rings on a tree stump,
with the center of the spiral being the point of John’s birth and the end of
the spiral, the moment of his death. (Of course, this time line is in no way to
scale; John will be with us for many years to come.) The panels of the comic
that portray the present-day scenes with John as a professor are placed on
an outer ring of the spiral, with the panels portraying John as a child placed
further in, closer to the point of his birth in the time line. As a result, when
present-day John is handed a piece of candy, occasioning a flashback to
his youth, the reader must literally travel backward through the virtual -D
space to reach the next panel, where the child John is handed candy by his
neighbor (figure . portrays a visualization of this point in the story in the
CANVAS installation).
The CANVAS environment nicely parallels the allusion to hyperreality
in the story, because the CANVAS itself is hyperreal. This is a self-reflexive
hyperreality; standing in front of those screens, glasses on, navigating three

figure . Visualization of view of -D comic at the point between present day
(foreground) and flashback (background). Courtesy of Damian Duffy.
 da mian duff y

fake dimensions with a gamepad, the artificiality of the setting is such that
it can’t help but call attention to itself as a simulation. When putting a comic
in this space, narrative time is given shape, making explicit the idea of time
as single perceivable dimension. Like the postmodern play with narrative
voice in Trees You Can’t Climb, this new media installation asks questions
about the complexity of the appeal to reality in autobiographical comics,
which always remain, on some level, inventions of memory in the guise of
recorded truth.
notes
1. Duffy and Jennings, Trees You Can’t Climb, .
2. McCloud, Reinventing Comics, .
3. See Cohn, “The Limits of Time and Transitions.”
4. Bernard and Carter, “Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel.”

works cited
Bernard, Mark, and James Bucky Carter. “Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel: Con-
fronting the Fourth Dimension.” Imagetext , no.  (). http://www.english.ufl
.edu/imagetext/archives/v_/carter/.
Cohn, Neil. “The Limits of Time and Transitions: Challenges to Theories of Sequential
Image Comprehension.” Studies in Comics , no.  (). http://www.intellect
books.co.uk/File:download,id=/STIC....pdf.
Duffy, Damian, and John Jennings. Trees You Can’t Climb. . http://www.webcomics
nation.com/eyetrauma/trees/series.php?view=archive&chapter=&name=tr
ees&mpe=&fromwhich=&direction=b.
McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. New York: Paradox Press, .
 

Fictional Auto/Biography and

Graphic Lives in Watchmen
v ic to ria a . el mwo od

Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen seems like a
highly eccentric choice, at best, for the subject of a chapter on life writing
and the graphic medium. However, the variety of autobiographical genres
and media that it uses to construct identities and backstories for its super-
heroes, including those born both before the Great Depression and after
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) trials, offers the
opportunity to consider broad questions about narrative and medium and
the way in which they configure identity in conjunction with historical con-
text. The tension evident in the comic book’s fictional present is represented
abstractly as the tension between a cautiously reactionary conservation of
established values (what I will call nostalgia) and a postmodern, boundary-
rupturing, utopian experimentalism (what I will call millennialism). These
two tendencies are emblematized, of course, in the Veidt fragrances of
the same name as one of the main characters, Adrian Veidt, that appear in
advertisements throughout the graphic novel, but they are also legible in the
genres of life narrative that are used to depict the fictional lives of Watch-
men’s superheroes. It is the presence of this ideological tension at the level
of autobiographical genre, in both the literary and the graphic sense, that
this chapter will uncover.
The nature of the superhero’s link to political ideology has been the focus
of much recent criticism written on Watchmen. Matthew Wolf-Meyer and
Jamie A. Hughes disagree, for instance, on the status of the superhero as
being positioned inside or outside of ideology. Both critics agree that the
superheroes in Watchmen are noteworthy for the manner in which they ex-
plicitly function within the politically charged field of cold war international


 v ic to ria a . el mwo o d

and domestic relations. Where Wolf-Meyer and Hughes differ, though, is in

their reading of earlier superheroes’ ideological orientations. Wolf-Meyer
sees earlier superheroes as thinly veiled dupes of capitalist hegemony (“The
World Ozymandias Made,” ), a charge he levels (unfairly, I would argue)
at comic book readers themselves (–). On the other hand, instead of
mapping Watchmen’s heroes on a late twentieth-century political spectrum
as Wolf-Meyer does (), Hughes asserts that earlier superheroes were
constructed by their authors to exist within a hermetic sphere, isolated from
religion, politics, culture wars, or other sectarian squabbles. In Hughes’s view,
law enforcement and justice systems often act as either auxiliaries or straw
men for the superheroes’ efforts (“‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’” ).
Equally important to note is the broad variety of empowerment enjoyed
by the different superheroes in Watchmen. The attempted rape of Sally
Jupiter exposes one such clear difference in physical power at a basic level,
while Adrian Veidt’s attempt to atomize Dr. Manhattan in light of the futil-
ity of physical combat suggests that the heroes occupy a range of merely
human to superhuman capacities. But even the superhuman is subject to
bad PR, as the graphic novel demonstrates when Dr. Manhattan becomes
almost violently upset on live television (:–). This last example sug-
gests that no matter how powerful the superhero is, his or her identity is
always a function of its position within the human sociopolitical world. Even
Dr. Manhattan’s choice to depart the human world is a direct consequence
of human affairs having become too complicated for his taste, declaring as
he does his intention to create his own life (:).
Closely linked to ideology is the question of history, a concern that both
Mike S. Dubose and Laurent Queyssi highlight as paramount in Watchmen.
This concern includes inquiries about both historical genre distinctions
and the ways in which the graphic novel intervenes in the historical context
of its own composition and publication. Queyssi notes in particular the
extraordinary depth and complexity with which Moore and Gibbons endow
their characters, a fact that distinguishes them generically from other super-
hero characters that precede them (“La Révolution des super-héroes,” para.
). Dubose, somewhat differently, considers the question of vigilantism in
the context of Reaganism as a distinct cultural milieu. According to Dubose,
during the s, the vigilante functioned as a key component of a hero-
ism whose definition included an outlaw status that was tempered by the
requirement of sticking to a moral code. However, the vigilante also bore
the transcendent proviso of superhuman physical abilities, abilities that
 Fictional Auto/Biography in Watchmen 

made the superhero “an alternate force of power” (“Holding Out for a
Hero,” ). The following pages focus less on the question of vigilantism to
instead emphasize the ways that the alternate worlds and history (uchronies
in French) characteristic of speculative fiction that so fascinate Queyssi
serve as a scaffolding for the superhero rather than as a subject matter to be
transcended in favor of an ahistorical struggle of good versus evil.

Under the Hood

Hollis Mason’s fictional autobiography has the basic traits of a traditional
autobiographical narrative; it is a linear chronological story in written form
told from the first-person perspective that follows a teleological trajectory
of the teller to a certain climax or culminating point in his or her life. Fur-
thermore, the graphic novel itself gives Under the Hood the visual appear-
ance of a print narrative, complete with illustrated photographs, captions,
and a paper-clipped, anonymous note, distinguishing it from the rest of the
graphic novel. In depictions of Mason’s apartment elsewhere in Watchmen,
copies of the book are visible (:) and other characters make reference to
the book’s publication as a significant event, giving Hollis’s oeuvre a phe-
nomenological heft of its own within the narrative world of Watchmen.
Interestingly, there are some events, which characters affirm as being men-
tioned in Hollis’s autobiography, that are reproduced for us in the text of
the graphic novel itself but not included in the text portions of the book
presented there—most notably Sally Jupiter’s rape by Edward Blake. The
world of moral certainty from which Mason derives his inspiration is
emblematic of a world that is fading rapidly in the face of the postatomic
mass society of the cold war and especially the Vietnam War. His story
depicts the origins of the first U.S. costumed crime-fighting group in New
York City, the Minutemen, and the rise and eventual disbandment of this
group at the beginning of the antiauthoritarian protest movement in the
s. The straightforward, seemingly objective reporting style that Mason
uses demonstrates his faith in a more simplistic imagined relationship
between narrative and reality. For Mason, the narrative “I” of autobiogra-
phy corresponds unproblematically with the author who writes and the
individual who experienced and remembers. Though Mason himself ques-
tions his own grandfather’s Manichean sense of morality (:), aligned
with the turn-of-the-century Progressivist binary of country versus city,
he holds an equally simplistic view of text and narrative as hermeneutically
transparent.
 v ic to ria a . el mwo o d

In Mason’s blunt world of objective reportage, secrets are the most vital
and valuable currency. Fittingly, Mason reveals some secrets and even per-
forms some detective work himself to muster a guess at some mysteries
that remain uncovered at the heart of the Minutemen. We do not, as I pre-
viously mentioned, see Mason’s narrative rendition of the Comedian’s rape
of the Silk Spectre. Instead, the graphic novel depicts the events themselves,
seemingly without a lens. However, the differing views taken of it by the
various superheroes (and by Jupiter herself, views that change over time)
give us reason to pause over even this depiction, seeing as it comes to us at
a very early point in the narrative, before Blake’s character has been firmly
established.
A greater mystery is the identity of Hooded Justice, or H.J., the actual
first costumed superhero, whose first publicly reported act of heroism was
that of saving a couple from three violent attackers. Though almost all of the
Minutemen, who operated during the s and s, and their second-
generation inheritors of the late s and s, the Watchmen, are given
first and last names, identities, and fates—both good and bad—Hooded
Justice’s remains indeterminate. Mason assigns him a name, an identity, and
a cause of death, but these are only tentative guesses. Thus, for Mason, the
thorniest questions of autobiography involve the he-said, she-said elements
and the discovery of secrets through some good old-fashioned detective
work, guesswork that essentially involves a good hunch about a local circus
strongman. An old model, a relic unable to survive in a world that has
changed too quickly for him to be of further use, Mason is bludgeoned to
death with an icon of his own when a group of young gang members mis-
takes him for Dan Dreiberg, the second Nite Owl.

Rorschach
Identity questions loom much larger for Rorschach, who begins life as
Walter Kovacs, the son of an abusive small-time prostitute, who wends his
way in and out of boys’ homes and psych wards to wind up as a worker in
New York City’s garment business (:). Appalled by the widely witnessed
rape and murder of a client, Kovacs embarks on a series of masked vigilante
escapades. It is not until he finds himself in pursuit of a child molester and
murderer that he experiences what he describes as the psychological trans-
figuration through which he becomes Rorschach. On discovering that the
two German shepherds he finds in the murderer’s home while the mur-
derer is away have eaten the body of an abducted child, Rorschach kills the
 Fictional Auto/Biography in Watchmen 

dogs with a meat cleaver. Before striking the bridge of the first dog’s nose,
Rorschach describes himself, while telling the story of his early develop-
ment, as Kovacs, closing his eyes only to open them a second later as
Rorschach (:).
Equally important to the verbal account that Rorschach finally gives to
Dr. Malcolm Long are the additional supporting documents and reports
that are pieced together and presented to the reader from the various insti-
tutions (a boys’ home, for instance) in which Kovacs had been interned.
Again, as with Mason’s book, the documents are depicted graphically as
they appear on the psychiatrist’s desk, with coffee stains, on the old boys’
home stationary, and with Dr. Long’s personal calendar included. Together,
these documents present a multiperspective mosaic of Kovacs as a child,
exploring both how he attempted to understand his own predicament in
his life (especially living without a father) and how social services officials
sought to typologize him. Most problematic for young Kovacs, it appears,
are the combined absence of a father and the presence of a shrewish mother
perpetually bothered by his existence. The paternal absence creates in
Kovacs a compensatory pride in shared national father figures such as Harry
Truman, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower (:). Even more intrigu-
ing, however, is a short essay written by thirteen-year-old Kovacs about a
dream in which he witnesses the Freudian primal scene: his mother having
sex with a customer, a scene that he then represents as an inkblot, glimpsed
across the room in the dark. As we discover at a later point in the graphic
novel, this scene is not so much a dream as an actual event (:). If this were
not haunting enough, it is also significant to note that, as Rorschach passes
through the cityscape, the graphic novel depicts graffiti that particularly
upsets Rorschach—the spray-painted, life-sized silhouette of a male-female
couple embracing in a kiss (:, :, :, for instance). The painted cou-
ple is described in the graphic novel as apocalyptic, reminiscent of the shad-
owy remains of people left imprinted onto walls in the wake of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki’s twin atomic blasts.
Rorschach/Kovacs’s identity is perhaps the most confusingly structured
in the entire book. Not only does he masquerade as a sandwich-board-
carrying harbinger of fiery destruction by day and a masked vigilante by
night, but he also seems to hold down a job and an apartment, however
minimal and shabby. More important, Rorschach/Kovacs creates a clear
and unequivocal division between one identity and another, declaring to no
longer inhabit the identity with which he grew up, to the extent that he no
 v ic to ria a . el mwo o d

longer responds to the same name or possess any direct connection with
those supplanted personality structures.
One device that adds an effective element of structure from without is
Rorschach’s diary, the fragments of which are conveyed via yellow boxes
of internal narrative within various stretches of graphic panels throughout
the narrative. These passages from Rorschach’s diary piece together the
mystery of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias’s genetically engineered pseudoalien
hoax as Rorschach and Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl seek to resolve the intrigue
behind Edward Blake’s death. Rorschach’s voice mimics a Mickey Spillane
hero in some respects, but the diary also includes a heavy dose of narcissis-
tic antidecadent philosophizing about the nature of apocalypse. In addition
to providing an internal anchor to Rorschach’s persona and narrative unity
to the graphic novel, the diary also contributes to the multiple facets of
source materials though which we glimpse Rorschach’s developing and var-
iegated persona over the course of his life. Through the lenses of boys’ home
files, conversations with Dr. Long, and his own diary, we get a multiper-
spective view of Rorschach, a view that depicts him in greater complexity
and in more dimensions than any other character in Watchmen. Moreover,
his voice receives the extra privilege of having the implicit last word, as the
superhero’s journal appears to be almost in the hands of an editorial assis-
tant at the right-wing newspaper The New Frontiersman in the second-to-
last panel.

Dr. Manhattan
Defying the chronological order of the diary is Dr. Manhattan’s life nar-
rative. Though not presented as a written story, he gives a discrete first-
person narrative account of the series of events through which he becomes
superhuman, but the account stands in a meaningful contrast to the diur-
nally ordered time of the traditional diary form and of the sequentially
ordered traditional autobiography. Much like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim
character in Slaughterhouse-Five, Dr. Manhattan lives a consciousness in
which he is “unstuck in time.” For instance, within one panel, Manhattan’s
narrative jumps from  to  to , from human state as Jonathan
Osterman to superhuman state as Dr. Manhattan.
Despite the chronological jumbling of Manhattan’s life experience, there
remains an anchor for his being, a chronological point in time and space
to which he returns and denotes as retaining noteworthiness. Interestingly,
it is marked with a snapshot, which represents the irrevocable experience of
 Fictional Auto/Biography in Watchmen 

the raw moment, which remains so despite the fact that Dr. Manhattan can
somehow experience his entire life without regard to chronological sequence.
The snapshot in question shows himself as a young physicist at an amuse-
ment park with his soon-to-be girlfriend, Janey Slater, with whom he is
in the process of falling in love. For him, the picture is an artifact that en-
capsulates the event, but also traces the impossibility of seizing or preserv-
ing experience. Dr. Manhattan’s consciousness is distinct from that of the
human superheroes in that he experiences all time simultaneously or at
least that he can access all moments of his own being in time equally. There
is no momentary being—no becoming, no forgetting, and no memory—
because everything (or almost everything) is recorded indelibly, yet it is also
never complete.
Hollis Mason’s self-appointed task of recording the superhero’s origins
and Dr. Manhattan’s posthuman experimental consciousness align with and
highlight two divergent topoi in Watchmen of nostalgia and millennialism.
Even the entrepreneur Adrian Veidt merchandises the two moods as designer
scents. A paradox in and of himself, Rorschach is at once a masker and
an unmasker in his quest to identify Blake’s murderer and record the lat-
ter’s identity in his diary for public knowledge. His procrustean moral code
speaks of a nostalgic fixity, but the ever-shifting blots on his mask and his
mystery identity speak of perpetual flux; Rorschach seems to embody the
mix of these two late-twentieth-century warring extremes as this graphic
novel construes them.
Finally, the differences in genre signify as stridently as differences in con-
tent. That is, the magazine interviewee is framed and allowed into speech
differently from the diarist or the traditional autobiographer. Thus, each
superhero’s biographical constitution turns on his or her means of speech
within the graphic novel and its imagined world. Each superhero’s genre
of biographical narration in Watchmen is somehow in tune with his or her
overall persona; a Boy Scout and representative of traditional morality (:),
Hollis Mason’s autobiography upholds traditional assumptions about lan-
guage’s ability to faithfully depict recalled experience. The most psycholog-
ically volatile of the living superheroes, Rorschach, comes to us in multiple
voices and genres, some written, some spoken, sometimes speaking from
the position of victim and sometimes from that of avenger. Unanchored
in time but drawn inescapably to a photograph that is linked to his genesis
as a superhuman being, Dr. Manhattan attempts to narrate the achronolog-
ical state of being without a life narrative. Occupying all points in his life
 v ic to ria a . el mwo o d

equally and simultaneously, Dr. Manhattan is no longer able to relate to the

concepts of linear time and forgetfulness that make life narrative itself a
meaningful activity and product.
Taken together, the three life narrators create a typology of increasing
uncertainty and instability that challenges the idea of autonomous unified
selfhood, the notion that all human identity is grounded in an essential core,
a personal concept based on a discrete set of past experiences that are easily
grasped, accessed, and related through verifiable individual narrative mem-
ories. The most familiar type in modern industrial Western culture would
be the more ontologically self-assured narrator, such as Hollis Mason, who
harbors no philosophical or representational qualms about the relation-
ship between his life as represented for readers in Under the Hood and
his own recalled, lived experience. More commonly associated with post-
atomic means of production and mass communication, then, are individu-
als with multiple (or perhaps split) selves and identities that are not capable
of being represented narratively. Indeed, Osterman/Dr. Manhattan seems
not to undergo the eminently human process of forgetting.1
Where Watchmen takes an even keener look at the phenomenon of the
superhero and its nature as a product of twentieth-century technology’s
mass media production and distribution is in its rendering of trade enter-
tainment and news magazines. Of particular interest here are the highly
divergent magazine interviews of Sally Jupiter and Adrian Veidt, again, both
biographical documents whose genres—and the magazines in which they
are published—say as much about their subjects as the subjects say about
themselves. And while it may not be so easy to map the two interviews on
a spectrum examining each interviewee’s ideas about the autobiographical
self, we can compare them in terms of what they suggest about the gender
politics implicit in the cold war tensions of Watchmen’s increasingly apoca-
lyptic alternate world. Put simply, the tension between nostalgia and mil-
lennialism that is demonstrated in the ever-deconstructing life narratives
of the graphic novel’s heroes is also implicit in the gender politics of Jupi-
ter and Veidt’s interviews, included at the beginning and the end of the
narrative, respectively. Though Jupiter spends her golden years in sunny
obscurity and Veidt finishes out the story as the Apollonian billionaire sav-
ior of humanity, in the next section I argue that the last pages of Watch-
men betray the sense of a need for nostalgia in the face of millennialism,
in order to provide a necessary and curative balance to dizzying and bound-
less change.
 Fictional Auto/Biography in Watchmen 

Mass Mediated Identities: Sally Jupiter and Adrian Veidt

The accounts that Mason, Rorschach, and Dr. Manhattan give of their lives,
though varied in structure and content, all tell relatively complete autobio-
graphical narratives mostly narrated in first-person perspective. Watchmen
also presents biographical artifacts on the lives of other superheroes, includ-
ing, to the most significant degree, Sally Jupiter (the Silk Spectre) and Adrian
Veidt (Ozymandias). Like any of the other characters in the graphic novel,
both Jupiter and Veidt divulge details about their lives through intradiegetic
speech. However, we gain a much keener insight into their personalities and
motivations, or at least the outward face of them, in the scraps presented as
part of the Minutemen/Watchmen archive.
A graphic novel filled with various multimedia genres, Watchmen inte-
grates an essential savvy about print technologies as crucial to its mode
of storytelling. The warring newspapers Nova Express and The New Fron-
tiersman, another graphic novel-within-the-novel, television shows, televi-
sion interviews, print interviews, doctor’s notes, film reviews, and academic
articles are all knit together in a loose weave in order to produce the effect
of a polyphony united by some key common matters of concern. Each of
the documents comprising Jupiter and Veidt’s dossiers, when considered as
(auto)biographical documents, require special individual scrutiny in regard
to the type and the purpose of the document, as well as what its content
might suggest about its subject. Though both Jupiter and Veidt court fame
and work carefully to construct and maintain their public image, their gen-
der and access to mass media mechanisms plays a pivotal role in the amount
of control they are able to wield over media organs in using them to create
and transmit a popularly consumable identity commodity. Veidt is obvi-
ously the more successful of the two, although the question must be asked
regarding how much of this is due to his gender as well as to the number of
different means of mass communication and mass commodity circulation
that saturate the lives of his contemporaries.
Of all the documents that appear and give details on Sally Jupiter’s life,
we see very few over which she seems to exert much authorial control. In
addition to having her career as a public superhero consist largely of a media
blitz managed by the Hollywood PR man whom she would eventually marry,
Jupiter also appears to have little editorial control over the very personal
documents that represent her early days in the graphic novel. While corre-
spondence to her is included, there are no full documents of which Jupiter
is the sole author; she merely writes tart retorts in the margins of the letters
 v ic to ria a . el mwo o d

written to her by Captain Metropolis/Nelson Gardner and her manager/

future husband, Laurence Shexnayder (:–). Despite her lack of control
over how her image is constructed, reproduced, and deployed, Jupiter has a
desire to see it multiplied, regardless of circumstance or context. For exam-
ple, after a lengthy stall in production, a film that was initially supposed to
be based on Jupiter’s life is finally released, with Jupiter replaced by a B-
movie starlet named Cherry Dean and the film’s narrative rewritten as a
bondage film (:). Nonetheless, Jupiter keeps the clipping, just as she col-
lects the small pornographic comic books (“Tijuana bibles”) that old fans
send to her in the mail, much to the disgust of her daughter, the second Silk
Spectre, Laurel Jane Juspeczyk, who finds them “nauseating” and “degrad-
ing” (:). For Jupiter, the matter of image reproduction is one over which,
as a women in an industry dominated by men and men’s tastes, she feels she
can have little control.
Perhaps the most successful instance of it that she enjoys is through her
daughter, even though, throughout the novel, their relationship is charac-
terized by Laurel Jane’s disappointment with and failure to understand her
mother. At the end of Watchmen, however, filial piety proves to be a force
capable of enduring apocalypse and outlaw status as the newly joined couple
of Dreiberg and Juspeczyk covertly visit Jupiter at her California rest home.
Following an amicable exchange, Jupiter coyly suggests that the couple get
started having children as soon as possible—procreating the old-fashioned
way in a world of hypermediated mass commodities and genetically engi-
neered clones (:).
In noteworthy contrast to Jupiter, the multibillionaire entrepreneur Adrian
Veidt, formerly known as the superhero Ozymandias, evinces a mastery over
his own mediated image as commodity, as evidenced by his memos regard-
ing action figure marketing schemes, self-improvement kits, and magazine
interviews. A shrewd observer of public tastes, Veidt is his own PR man, an
astute spin doctor capable of harnessing popular tastes, beliefs, and fears,
and channeling them as crucial strategic components of his own money-
making ventures. Equally dexterous socially as he is in terms of mass psy-
chology, the ease with which he deals with and wins over individuals is
apparent in his handwritten notes and epistolary responses to his employ-
ees. More important, in contrast with Jupiter, however, is Veidt’s ability to
interact smoothly with and charm the press to his own advantage. While
Jupiter appears cagey and defensive in her magazine interview, Veidt comes
across as suave, charming, and even hip. Jupiter is continuously put on the
 Fictional Auto/Biography in Watchmen 

spot to divulge secrets, rescind or maintain accusations, or prolong old

animosities, but Veidt sidesteps and downplays, corrects, and even cracks
insider jokes with his interlocutor. The management that Jupiter depends
on from her truculent entertainment business husband is second-nature for
Veidt.
Given the period during which Jupiter operates as a superhero, her posi-
tion as a woman, especially a single woman, constrains her in ways that
simply do not apply to Veidt as a single male businessman in the s.
Indeed, Jupiter is a superhero who never has a secret identity, except the
one indicated by her actual Polish surname, Juspeczyk. A starlet first and a
superhero second, she is described as selecting the identity of Silk Spectre
(:) in the first newspaper article written about her from , presented
in her scrapbook. Thus, rather than appearing as a mysterious public figure
with a secret personal life, Jupiter’s personal identity is as publicized a mat-
ter as her superhero identity. She appears as a gossip item in Hollywood
tabloids throughout her career, and the interview included on the final page
of her scrapbook deals exclusively with sexuality and motherhood (:). It
is, in fact, only in the very first articles about the Silk Spectre that we ever
hear about her professional exploits as a crime fighter. Even as an actress
she seems to have little recorded activity besides some footage in a B-movie
initially intended to chronicle her life story (:, ). By contrast, Veidt is
asked to speak about his own professional philosophy and how it intersects
with global politics. When asked to gossip about fellow Watchmen, he is
able to make his interviewer accept responses framed in terms of individual
political beliefs, rather than surrendering dishy tidbits.
The contrasting use of photographs in these two interviews is also inter-
esting. Jupiter’s features a triptych of photos taken decades past her prime.
Moving from left to right, the first photo consists of an extreme three-
quarter shot that hides almost one-half of her face in shadow and shows her
with a deeply pensive look, lower lip resting slightly on her index finger. In
the middle picture, she wears an anxiety-ridden face and nervously chews
at the nail of her pinky finger. Finally, the third photo in the series shows
Jupiter’s face full-on, with her teeth clenched in a weak grin and a strong hint
of crow’s feet around her eyes. Her left hand is upturned with splayed fin-
gers, in a gesture of surrender—perhaps because she’s surrendered secrets
about certain Minutemen’s sexuality, about her conflicted feelings regarding
her rapist Edward Blake, or about her own mothering practices. Though
Jupiter may be using her acting skills to enhance the dramatic qualities of
 v ic to ria a . el mwo o d

these pictures, they nonetheless reflect a lack of composure that the con-
stant ellipses and incomplete sentences of Jupiter’s interview reinforce.
The two photographs included in the Veidt interview, however, suggest a
very different state of affairs. These photos function as a visual public rela-
tions campaign for Veidt. The first is a vertically oriented half-page panel in
which the character stands in workout gear resembling his superhero cos-
tume, including arm greaves, metal headband, and booties, complemented
by a towel. The image’s shading indicates the high gleam covering Veidt’s
body. Veidt’s genetically engineered lynx, Bubastis, the only female with
whom he is ever linked, sits at his feet, and a set of parallel bars and rings hang
in the background. A fierce yet soft expression adorns his face, and the super-
hero’s requisite muscularity is paired with controlled vigilance, as he stands
with his hands, arms, and hips in a stance that exactly mimics Michelangelo’s
David. The viewer’s eye, coincidentally, is positioned somewhere in the re-
gion between his large shiny belt and his knees, adding to the heroic pro-
portions already suggested by the other parts of the photo’s composition.
In the second photo, Veidt wears a black turtleneck and double-breasted
jacket, striking the pose of an information broker, as he stands against a grid
of television sets showing news, sports, cartoons, and commercials, one of
which advertises a Veidt product. His face is calm and impassive, and his
forearms crossed at his chest suggest an attitude of calm command. Perhaps
the most telling element of both photos is not the snapshots themselves, but
their origin, which is not the publication they appear in (Nova Express) but
“Triangle, Inc.” Given Veidt’s obsession with ancient Egypt and his penchant
for naming his covert subsidiaries things such as “Pyramid” (:), there is
the suggestion of a PR company that is a Veidt-owned instrument. Thus, the
images not only convey a visual message of impassive self-control but also
suggest that this control comes from more than an abstract feeling.
The geopolitical situation at the end of Watchmen suggests that the
manipulated media image world of Veidt is in ascendency—a place in which
the realities of power are managed by a small number of behind-the-scenes
players who operate with no limitations or checks on their capacity to make
life-and-death decisions affecting large numbers of humans. However, the
last pages of the graphic novel, I argue, are allotted to those seemingly left
on the scrap heap, implying that old regimes and the power of nostalgia may
not be as dead as they appear. Indeed, when “the Hollises” (Dan Dreiberg and
Laurel Juspeczyk) visit Sally Jupiter in disguise, the couple plans a future of
crime fighting, and they do not respond too negatively to Jupiter’s suggestion
 Fictional Auto/Biography in Watchmen 

that they get started on the next generation of superheroes. The intimation
that the second Nite Owl and the daughter of Sally Jupiter and the Come-
dian continue crime fighting and produce a child through traditional means
suggests a continuation of a non-Veidtian legacy, one in which biological
reproduction carried out under the auspices of the nuclear family continues
in opposition to life characterized by cloning labs or superhuman beings.
Equally important for the Hollises’ future as the nostalgic counterpart to the
simulated Veidt-forged Russo-American peace of Watchmen’s final chapter
is the penultimate panel of the graphic novel. As the bumbling editorial
assistant of The New Frontiersman, Seymour, reaches toward Rorschach’s
journal, which contains the truth of Veidt’s cloned pseudoalien, the reader
is left to wonder not only if this is a story that will make it out of “the crank
file” and into the tabloid, but also if anyone will buy a story from such a
clearly partisan newspaper. The John Cale quote in the final panel, just
above a clock reading midnight (the time of the alien’s unleashing), seems
equally open-ended: “It would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world to
die in.” This thought leaves one wondering which world, in fact, is being re-
ferred to in this sentence. Is it the world of Veidt’s secretive millennial peace
or is it a messier but more organic nostalgic order? And, equally significant,
what else might be at stake in the choice between these two regimes?
notes
1. In Living Autobiographically, John Eakin asks about the extent to which we
can say Alzheimer’s patients have experienced a loss of identity with their loss of the
ability to remember and speak about their memoried pasts (). While this line of
questioning leads Eakin to make assertions about the constitutive relationship between
personal narratives and personal identity, Dr. Manhattan’s superhuman surplus of
memory leads me to wonder whether forgetfulness and the need to remember via self-
narration is not a key characteristic of the normative modern identity. A woman living
in California, for instance, with a memory dysfunction known as hyperthymestic syn-
drome, retains a perfect record of “almost every day of her life since age ” (Foer,
“Remember This,” ). Though she is probably unique in the world, AJ’s own tendency
to supplement her sharp memory with outside documentation () suggests that a cer-
tain degree of forgetfulness is requisite to normative selfhood.

works cited
Dubose, Mike S. “Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and
Captain America.” The Journal of Popular Culture . (): –.
Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, .
Foer, Joshua. “Remember This.” National Geographic . (November ): –.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com///memory/foer-text/.
 v ic to ria a . el mwo o d

Hughes, Jamie A. “‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’ Ideology and ‘Real World’ Super-
heroes.” The Journal of Popular Culture . (): –.
Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, . Originally
published in  issues, –.
Queyssi, Laurent. “La Révolution des super-héroes: Watchmen d’Alan Moore et Dave
Gibbons.” Cycnos . (): –. http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id
=.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero
Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference.” The Journal of Popular
Culture . (Winter ): –.
 

American Born Chinese

Challenging the Stereotype

ro c ío g. davis

Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, the first graphic novel nominated
for a National Book Award, presents three parallel narratives that are revealed
to be parts of the same whole: first, Yang retells the story of Monkey King,
based on the legendary character of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to
the West; in the second thread, Jin Wang, a Chinese American boy, wants to
fit in; finally, Danny is a blond teenager mortified by yearly visits from his
Chinese cousin Chin-Kee, the embodiment of the Chinese stereotype. Yang
has admitted that American Born Chinese is “fiction with heavy doses of auto-
biography,” as the relationship between Jin Wang and his friend Wei-Chen
reproduces “the dynamic I went through in junior high school” (“You Go,
Graphic!” ). But, we might argue, an autobiographical perspective also
shapes the ways Yang draws the Asian American’s process of ethnic appreci-
ation and self-acceptance. Yang’s blending of the legend of Monkey King with
the American stereotype of Chinese men as part of his protagonist’s itinerary
of cultural and personal knowledge reproduces the strategy that other auto-
biographers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, enact as they explore possible
meanings of Chineseness in the shifting American context. Monkey King,
Wei-Chen, and Chin-Kee serve as signposts to possible forms of identification
with Chinese heritage. The forms of the three stories—the first is a legend,
the second a bildungsroman, the third a “sit-com on paper” (Yang, lecture)—
also reproduces the narrative paradigms available to the protagonist.
By presenting the Monkey King’s story first, Yang uses it as the frame
through which to read the rest of the book, which illustrates themes of trans-
formation, ethnic self-acceptance, and empowerment. As Binbin Fu explains
in his review of American Born Chinese:


 r o c ío g . davis

The legendary trickster figure has been repeatedly re-imagined by Chinese

American writers as a source of cultural strength, a symbol of subversion and
resistance, and a metaphor for cross-cultural and interracial negotiation. Yang’s
new rendition, by transforming the proverbial monkey’s tale into one of self-
search and self-acceptance, provides an illuminating parallel to Jin Wang’s/
Danny’s coming-of-age narrative. ()

Humiliated by the gods, Monkey King learns the twelve disciplines of Kung
Fu to prove to the deities that he is a god. The creator Tze-Yo-Tzuh punishes
him for his pride and stubbornness by trapping him under a mountain
for five hundred years. He breaks out of this prison when he decides to be
himself. This lesson connects with Jin Wang’s struggle to resist the implica-
tions of his Chineseness, as he tells the herbalist’s wife that he wants to be a
“transformer” when he grows up. She tells him that “it’s easy to become any-
thing you wish . . . so long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul” (). For a
while, he does become someone else: Danny, haunted by the (literal) specter
of the Asian stereotype.
Yang’s overdrawn depiction of Chin-Kee, though problematic for some,
is deliberate. Chin-Kee embodies two crucial stereotypes of Chinese: the
“Heathen Chinee”—slit-eyed, bucktoothed, with a queue, speaking pidgin
English (note the phonetic pronunciation of his name)—that originated from
nineteenth-century American cartoons; and the “model minority” myth,
answering all the questions at school. His exclamations—“Would cousin
Da-nee care to tly Chin-Kee’s Clispy Flied Cat Gizzards Wiff Noodle?” ()
or “Now Chin-Kee go to Riblaly to find Amellican girl to bind feet and bear
Chin-Kee’s children” ()—simultaneously entertain and disturb. Yang uses
the comic form to draw (or draw out) his Asian American character’s most
secret fear: the classification into a stereotype. Indeed, Yang seems to argue,
this is how children—even Asian American children—receive and therefore
perceive Chineseness. Jin Wang, therefore, is a victim of the pervasiveness
of racial stereotypes: he suffers the consequences of their existence at the
same time that he accepts them. Yang knowingly exaggerates the stereo-
type—the character is drawn larger-than-life and occupies much of the space
in the panels—in order to force the character to reconsider the origins and
nature of his perceptions about his heritage. Immersed within the paradigms
of American culture, Jin/Danny strives to separate himself from all that Chin-
Kee represents. Ironically, only when he accepts what Chin-Kee was created
 American Born Chinese 

to remind him of can he successfully transcend (by symbolically beheading)

the stereotype and be himself.
Yang’s Christianization of the traditional Buddhist tale of Monkey King
connects with the notion of Asian American representation and makes the
narrative more personal. Yang, a practicing Roman Catholic, recalls his Ital-
ian Buddhist creative writing professor’s advice about religion in fiction:
“Don’t be overly conscious of religion; simply see what comes out naturally”
(“You Go, Graphic!” ). The Monkey King story, thus, includes a Christian
message of fraternal love, humility, and obedience to the will of God. This
“Christianization” of the original story also reflects the multiple layers of
the Asian American imaginary, which includes an amalgam of Eastern and
Western stories and drawing techniques (the drawing style of Yang’s central
story line—Disney-type realistic characters—differs from his representa-
tion of Chin-Kee, which mimics early nineteenth-century cartoons).
Yang’s incorporation of an “alien” character—and Chin-Kee’s portrayal
classifies him an “alien”—connects with Chinese American children’s author
Laurence Yep’s idea that writing about aliens reflects his process of self-
awareness: “In writing about alienated people and aliens in my science fic-
tion, I was writing about myself as a Chinese American” (The Lost Garden,
). But Yang uses this figure to acknowledge, appropriate, and overcome
this stereotypical image. The psychological implications of Yang’s meta-
critical use of the stereotype of Chineseness resound as a vital part of Asian
Americans’ process of individuality and self-acceptance. Yang’s charac-
ters’ journeys, ultimately, involve facing stereotypes, conquering them, and
understanding the multiple cultural forces that intervene in one’s self-
understanding and self-representation.
works cited
Cart, Michael. “You Go, Graphic!” Booklist, March , , .
Fu, Binbin. Review of American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. MELUS . (Fall
): –.
Yang, Gene L. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, .
———. “Why Comics?” Lecture delivered as part of the Graphic Novel Speakers Series
at the University of Pennsylvania, December , . http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=xYAHNbcRs (accessed August , ).
Yep, Laurence. The Lost Garden. New York: Simon and Schuster, .
 

Materializing Memory
Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons

hill ary c hu te

Almost from its inception, Lynda Barry’s work has focused on what she calls
“trouble.”1 Her comics are largely composed of black line art, and she paints
her words and images with a brush: her lines are thick and round, often
animated by energetic exaggerations of gesture; they can exude a scruffi-
ness. Barry continually works with the absences the form of comics pro-
vides; she does not display trauma so much as work in the edges of events,
unsettling readers by leaving us to imagine the incidents whose aftereffects
she plumbs. And Barry is deeply engaged with theorizing memory.
In the late s, Barry says, “people just hated what I was doing,”
because of the “darkness” in her work; disturbing content and comic strips
seemed incommensurable (Chute , ).2 She had done a comic strip
called Two Sisters, with light lines and “some really decorative parts,” about
endearing oddball twins named Rita and Evette, which was popular; but
“after a while I couldn’t draw Rita and Evette anymore.” When she started
drawing “comics that had trouble in them,” Barry recalls, “people were very
upset and I wasn’t in many papers at that time. There weren’t many comic
strips that had a lot of trouble, that weren’t funny. The setup for a comic strip
is four panels and the last thing should be a punch line, so when people
didn’t get that punch line they became very upset and they would write furi-
ous letters to the editor about how there’s nothing funny about child abuse.
The strip was not funny, it was sad” (Chute , ). While there had been
comic strips with disturbing content in the underground, Barry’s “sad” comic
strips in commercial newspapers were new.
Barry started compiling book versions of her comics on her own by Xerox-
ing her work.3 Around the time that she was getting a sharply negative


 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

response from newspaper audiences, in , she sent her comics to New
York City’s Printed Matter, an arts organization then based in SoHo with
both a store and exhibition space devoted to artists’ books.4 Their accep-
tance marked a turning point in Barry’s work in terms of her commitment
to expanding the notion of what comic strips could be; comics with “trou-
ble” could be viable. She explains, “Whoever it was wrote me back this note
saying, ‘I really like what you’re doing.’ You know, ‘We’ll buy.’. . . . [Printed
Matter] got it, and I thought, OK, well somebody else is getting this” (Chute
, ). Barry’s first book, Girls and Boys, was published in  by the
independent publisher Real Comet Press; Printed Matter carried that book
and her following two titles. As Barry kept producing the type of work she
found compelling—as she previously puts it, sad things and long stories—
popular assumptions about format and content started changing. News-
paper audiences realized, Barry says, “that a comic strip could contain some-
thing sad, like a song. A song could be happy or sad, and I thought a comic
strip should be the same. Then people started liking the work, and I realized
I could discuss anything in the comics then” (Barry interview).5

“The Red Comb” and Naked Ladies!

My central focus is One Hundred Demons (), Barry’s fifteenth book and
her first foray into nonfiction narrative.6 Yet a brief discussion of selected
early works sheds light on the project of One Hundred Demons. “The Red
Comb,” from Down the Street (a), is a four-panel comic strip that
exhibits the darkness in Barry’s work, its remarkable economy, and how she
amplifies the gaps natural to the comics form in her traumatic story lines.7
Black and white, “The Red Comb” has no dialogue (see figure .). It begins
with a text box at the top of the frame, which cuts into the first image, ren-
dering two characters—one small girl in a striped dress and a much larger
boy, in black jeans and sneakers—standing silently, headless, in a posture
of facing each other. The text obscures their faces. “Everybody knows a
bad influence,” declare the words, all in upper-case letters. “On our street it
was Kenny Watford who could whistle so loud” (Barry a, ). This first
frame is the only one we see of the male figure we presume is Kenny. Right
away the strip activates meaning through incompletion.
The second frame shows us the face of the girl, identifiable by her striped
dress. She faces left toward the first panel, hand on a branch, in a thicket of
leaves, wide-eyed, childish, pictured from the chest up. The text reads: “Him
sitting alone on some cardboard in the ravine, holding out the red comb to
 h il l a ry c hu te

you just ten steps away” (Barry a, ). The frame is shaded with thin
black horizontal lines behind the leaves; this darkening effect appears to
indicate evening, or night—or, an alternate temporality, a recollected event.
“And he would say it,” begins the third frame. “‘I want to be your boyfriend,
secretly I am your boyfriend, honey.’ And you would stand there pretending
something else was happening, anything else” ().
In this third panel, the girl stands facing to the left, as before, but the
panel focuses up close: She looks as if she is being blown in a strong breeze,
bracing her body, hunching her shoulders, closing her eyes, setting her
mouth. Movement lines ring her face. And whereas the second panel intro-
duced horizontal lines behind her, here they shade over her, covering her;

figure . “The Red Comb.” From Lynda Barry, Down the Street (New York:
Harper & Row, ), pp. –. Courtesy of Lynda Barry.
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

as if something is washing over her. In the last panel, she faces away, in the
opposite direction, kneeling on the ground, covering her ears, literally turn-
ing her back on the ravine. The panel is not as still, silent, and clean as the
first; it retains some of the patchy dark shading of the middle two. Women’s
legs, cut off as Kenny’s were in the first frame, move in from the right toward
the girl, echoing the opening image. “And later, way later, when you hear
his whistle screaming from the corner, you’ll turn up the knob on the TV so
loud that your mother will finally come running in and stop you” (Barry
a, ). The expression on the face of the girl, whose eyes are closed—
as in the third frame—is anguished: her body is folded up on itself and her
brow is deeply furrowed.
The gaps in the story across which we are provoked to make connections
are as much a part of the story as the frames themselves, which display very
little interaction between protagonist and antagonist. In order to engage with
the narrative on even the most rudimentary level, we are forced to guess the
circumstances around which the strip revolves. When I have taught “The
Red Comb” to college students, the immediate consensus is that it is about
sexual abuse, but the strip never names it as such, leaving us only with asso-
ciations to piece together (“bad influence”; “secretly your boyfriend”; the
male sexual overtones of a “red comb” Kenny would be “holding out”). The
strip even retains the gap between words and images across its story line,
as we guess the girl pictured is the narrator, without external confirmation.
Both are nameless, and the prose narration, the first line of which includes
all of us—“everybody knows a bad influence”—ends with the word “you”
and uses the intimate second person throughout: “He always said to you,
‘Meet me in the woods, meet me in the woods’ and sometimes you did”
(Barry a, ). The tense of the strip also works to establish the activ-
ity and urgency of the story, bringing the reader into the narrative, as the
first sentence places us in the present (“everybody knows”), then switches
to the past (“it was Kenny Watford”) and reverts to a kind of continuous
past (“he always said to you . . .”). Throughout, Barry maintains the shifting
of tenses, as when the last panel announces: and later, you will turn up the
volume—a verdict on what will happen in the future. A deceptively simple
combination of only four images and nine sentences, Barry’s “The Red Comb”
retains its haunting gaps, weaving them into the most basic process of how
we understand the story. It is disturbing in what it does present, and even
more so in provoking us to ponder what it does not, as it offers us the fall-
out of a situation we are supposed to imagine. Space is an active, signifying
 h il l a ry c hu te

element of the story’s rhythm: the space in between words and images (e.g.,
in between pictured protagonist and narrator) the space in between narra-
tor and hailed reader; the space of time, which on the page is a visual white
space, between linked events.
“The Red Comb” shows what a traditional four-panel comic strip can do
in the hands of Lynda Barry. We see that even in her short, fictional comic
strips—which certainly do, as Barry suggests, refigure the traditional setup
of a “punch line”—Barry has always used the rhythm and narrative interplay
of comics to give form to traumatic events in childhood, thematizing and
inscribing gulfs of knowledge on the page. But she has not only addressed
the traumatic aspects of female experience. She has also tinkered with the
gaps so crucial to comics form, creating new textures for word and image
narratives in order to allow readers to productively project a range of expe-
rience into the slippage between word and image.
If we see, in “The Red Comb,” traditional comics at its most incisive, then
in Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! we see Barry experimenting
with the narrative aspects of comics, expanding them to create a taxonom-
ically and generically unstable book object that also addresses lived sexual-
ity, as “The Red Comb” presumably does, but which focuses on the question
of collectivity and representation. One Hundred Demons, published almost
twenty years later, finally moves into nonfiction and incorporates the con-
cerns of both “The Red Comb” and Naked Ladies!: including episodes of
sexual abuse, it firmly establishes Barry’s method and her interest in collec-
tive address.
The idea for Naked Ladies! came from a deck of “nudie playing cards”
Barry bought in Las Vegas that advertised “ different girls.” When Barry
gave the deck to her little brother, he asked if it actually was composed of
photographs of different women, or rather “five girls with  wigs” (Powers
, ). The question resonated; it prompted Barry to realize that it could
really be five girls with  wigs, because “the body types are always the same,”
as she told The Comics Journal—or, as she phrased it in an interview with
me, “There’s only one naked lady, right?” (Barry interview). Barry started
drawing naked women “with every type of body” in response and it “turned
into a show; it turned into some paintings; it turned into this coloring book.
And then,” she explains, “I wrote this narrative to go with it” (Powers ,
). Naked Ladies!, which is unpaginated, opens with black endpapers filled
completely with handwritten women’s names in white, separated by commas;
they bleed off every edge, roughly  of them: Georgene, Linnea, Aiko, Ola,
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

Ada-Mae. The title page features a spread of five cards laying face down in
the center of the page: they are each decorated with a large seashell, framed
by a curvy dagger above and a long snarling fish below. The bivalve seashell,
which recalls Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, provides an icon of femininity,
which is edged, as we can see in the deck’s dagger and fish motif, with anger.8
The most salient aspect of Naked Ladies! is its form. The book puts por-
traiture and prose fiction together but does not match them in any precise
denotative or illustrative way: they exist graphically together on the page,
but neither narrative—the sequence of images, or the prose story—explicitly
acknowledges the other, except loosely, thematically. The words thread under
the black linework portraits, which arrive one per page—providing, from
a graphic angle at least, a platform for the unfurling images. Sometimes
there is a full stop at the end of a page, but the sentences are largely frag-
mented across the pictures, propelling one forward through the images, but
not necessarily corresponding to them. The images present a wide range of
women—American, African, Japanese, Samoan, Indian, middle-aged, preg-
nant, elderly, bodybuilding, bulimic (pictured vomiting)—in various poses.
There is no one type of woman in whom the book is anchored; they are
all equally weighted in between its covers. Most are aware of being looked
at and look back at the viewer (see figure ., in which a woman stares
intently, her act of looking graphically highlighted by thick black circling
her eyes).9 The prose narrative, on the other hand, provides a strong first-
person voice—a voice that recollects girlhood in a frank, idiosyncratic way,
and establishes an “I” immediately. Below a tribal African woman with neck-
laces, bracelets, bare breasts, headpiece, and spear (the ace of diamonds),
the text begins: “When I was about five years old my cousin who was the
same age came running around the corner from the back of the house and
said did I want to see a boner” (Barry , n.p.). Although the entire book
is billed as “fictitious,” one may plausibly map this first-person voice onto
the figure of Lynda Barry the author: her spoken word recording The Lynda
Barry Experience opens with the performance of a piece called “Naked
Ladies” that almost precisely matches her book’s story.
This construction, this odd formal interplay—what to process first? How
to read, how to view?—is the most interesting aspect of the book, even as
it produces a bulky rhythm of consumption, or “acquisition,” to use Will
Eisner’s term, because it establishes a major theme of Barry’s oeuvre: the self
in conversation with collectivities (Eisner , ). We get Barry’s verbal
narrative, here, across visualizations of many women. The form of the book
 h il l a ry c hu te

models how Barry’s texts aim to address and include collective bodies; it
is a book that involves but decentralizes the self. Barry adds herself among
the women pictured (she is the ace of spades), but it is in the disjunction
between words and images in Naked Ladies! that we recognize Barry’s aim
to enlarge and address readerships. The book works in the unconstructed
space in between the words and images, where we are interpellated. The
prose narrative, which traces the process by which girls come to realize that
they do not live up to a standard of beauty, gradually moves outward from
the “I” to speak for an “us”—“it put us in a bad mood for the next ten years”
is the last line—but this “us,” because it does not fuse with the images,
retains its particularity (Barry , n.p.). The gap that is kept open between
this particularized narrative, and the spectrum of women the book presents
visually, proposes space for both possible connection and disconnection.
Naked Ladies! does not profess to speak for all women, and certainly not

figure . The

queen of hearts.
From Lynda Barry,
Naked Ladies! Naked
Ladies! Naked
Ladies! (Seattle: Real
Comet Press, ),
n.p. Courtesy of
Lynda Barry.
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

even for the women it represents pictorially. The book allows itself to have
a first-person voice, but it is a double-tracked text, allowing its spate of
images their own independence and integrity, and in so doing, demonstrat-
ing its desire to move beyond the individual. Barry posits her story as only
one among many and asks us to consider our own and others’ positional-
ity.10 The “coloring book” form of Naked Ladies!—which implies interactiv-
ity and participation—is a metaphor for the book’s central suggestion: its
readers “fill in” the narrative with their own experience.11

Demystification and Debris: One Hundred Demons

In One Hundred Demons, as with Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life ()
and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (), the author-subject makes political,
collective claims by testifying to the very ordinariness of her trauma. And,
as with Gloeckner and Satrapi, Barry’s autobiography in words and images
swerves from the amusing to the appalling, insisting on both as the lived
reality of girlhood. One Hundred Demons explores the rich fabric of the
weave, both violent and joyful, of the everyday lives of displaced, working-
class children on the interracial streets of Seattle in the s (Barry herself
is part Filipina and grew up in a primarily black neighborhood).12
Structured into nineteen discrete comic strips—as is Persepolis—each
named for a “demon,” One Hundred Demons is Barry’s first explicitly auto-
biographical work. But One Hundred Demons is not a typical autobiography.
In Barry’s handwritten print, the publication page offers the following pro-
viso: “Please note: This is a work of autobifictionalography.” The table of
contents is bordered at the bottom by the same designation, floating in red
cursive, and, to its left, the following phrase, in baby-blue print: “Are these
stories true or false?” A red check mark affirms both terms. Barry inserts
herself as a radically visible adult narrator in her autobifictionalography; in
the introduction, she paints herself at her desk, painting the book we read.
(One Hundred Demons is entirely painted, not drawn; Barry explains in an
interview that she switched from a pen to a brush in , which changed
the nature of her work, because a different voice is created by different writ-
ing implements: “There was something about using a brush that made it
so I couldn’t draw that same kind of strip”).13 “Is it autobiography if parts of
it are not true?” the narration reads. “Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (Barry
, n.p.) (see figure .). While this page’s two panels are bisected by a
very slim gutter—and at first glance look so similar that one might take
them to represent consecutive moments—a considerable amount of time
 h il l a ry c hu te

passes from one to the next. In the first frame, the paper in front of her is
blank, and she is just starting to paint; in the second, she has filled the space,
finished the panel, and contemplates it—just as we too contemplate the
same panel, twice: Barry’s duplication of this frame within itself creates a
mise en abyme. In pointing to this act of physical creation across the gutter,
the sequence highlights the meaning of “fiction”—and also autobiography,
too, she here implies—as the material process of making (from the Latin
“fictio,” a nominal derivative from the verb “fingo,” whose definition is to
make by shaping [from clay, wax, molten metal, etc.]). From the start, Barry
embraces the discursive and generic fault lines of her work as productive,
making that instability—that problematizing of taxonomy and reference—
the basis on which we approach her work.14
One Hundred Demons—in the spirit of its destabilizing claim to “autobi-
fictionalography”—straddles the “high” and the “mass.” The style and form of
the book are influenced by a tradition of the historical avant-garde, as is also
the case with Satrapi—but Barry demonstrates a different approach to self-
visualization. Whereas Satrapi embraces minimalism, Barry embraces lush
collage (as did the pattern and decoration movement of the s, in which
artists like Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff mixed fabric and paint and

figure . Two panels from “Intro.” From Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons
(Seattle: Sasquatch Books, ), n.p. Original is in color. Courtesy of Lynda Barry.
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

explored the use of commonplace materials, putting pressure on mainstream

concepts of art that devalued ornamentation and handicraft as “women’s
work”).15 In this full-color text, we see a piling on of commonly found, dis-
posable, everyday objects. Describing her process, Barry explains, “I have
tons of trash laying all over the floor and everywhere in bowls” in her studio
(Barry interview). Each chapter of One Hundred Demons begins with a dig-
ital reproduction, a scan, of a two-page multimedia collage, which preserves
the three-dimensionality of the collage, what Barry terms its bumpiness.16
Barry’s collage interludes, which are unpaginated, are dense and accumula-
tive, presenting a vibrant, thick, colorful surface texture. The rich visual vol-
ume and density of these collages offset the striking economy of each of the
comics narratives they precede, which vary from only fourteen to twenty
frames (and typically offer only two frames per page). These collages offer
snippets of the subsequent strip, repeated handwritten words and phrases,
original painted illustrations, and a piling on of sundry materials, including
strips of brightly colored fabrics, cardboard, magazine pictures, tissue paper,
the scalloped edge of a paper bag, photographs, the printed insides of bank
envelopes, interior candy bar and gum wrapping, pieces of old pajamas,
dried flowers, bits of doilies, glitter globs, rickrack, Chinese postage stamps,
origami creatures, and a stuffed animal. Additionally, each chapter’s last page,
which is always washed with color but otherwise pictorially empty, con-
cludes with a small, echoing, punctuating collage that appears in its lower
right-hand corner.
Yet while One Hundred Demons showcases its composition as fine art
and its unique, handcrafted creation as a high-art artists’ book, it is a nar-
rative powerfully invested in its own populism (literally and theoretically)
and its accessibility. One immediately notices on the acknowledgments page
that the strips contained within the book first appeared on the mainstream
website Salon.com, and that the introduction is painted on yellow legal paper.
As I will discuss further in my reading of the book’s specific use of genre
and otherwise everyday material, and its embrace of its “low” cultural sta-
tus, the text does not enshrine or sanctify itself—either as a life narrative or
as a work of art—but attempts to inspire the responsive, dialogic creation of
narrative through its form. “Intro,” whose eight frames all picture Lynda at
her desk working on the book we are holding, ends with her hope that one
will “dig these demons and then pick up a paintbrush and paint your own,”
which is underlined in a speech balloon that reads, “Sincerely! Pass it on!!”
(Barry , n.p.).
 h il l a ry c hu te

Style, Trauma, and the Child: Creating Space

Barry’s printed surrealist collages show how One Hundred Demons, an adult
recollection of childhood events, makes clear its process of interpretation as
visualization, an aesthetic “working through.” It is also centrally about the
relationship of space, memory, and the past: one needs a sense of space for
memories to come forward and take shape, and One Hundred Demons the-
orizes and creates that space materially on the page. Like its sibling text
What It Is (), One Hundred Demons is about capturing the structure of
remembering. The layered space in Barry’s book indicates that the past is
not linear but all around us; we think of time, or the past, as moving from
one point to another, Barry says, “but if you think of these images, they can
move every which way, and you don’t know when they’re coming to you”
(Chute , ). Barry’s autobiographical work calls attention to itself as
multilayered composition, the self as collage, in its rich, open layers of paint-
ing, words, and bits and pieces of ostensible debris: feathers, stamps, buttons,
cotton balls, old labels, denim, felt, and odds and ends from magazines. In
that we can understand the visual work of One Hundred Demons as pastiche
(drawing on the sense of pastiche as a “‘stylistic medley’ or blend of diverse
ingredients”), Ingeborg Hoesterey’s claim that “postmodern pastiche is about
cultural memory and the merging of horizons past and present” makes much
sense for this conspicuously multimedia autobiography (, , xi).17 Barry’s
work is about process: of remembering, of reconstructing, of narrativizing;
in this sense, it recalls Seyla Benhabib’s concept of selfhood and the con-
stitutive role of narrative, in which “making sense” involves—in opposition
to beginning, unfolding, ending—the “psychodynamic capacity to go on, to
retell, to re-member, to reconfigure” (Benhabib , ). With its textured
accretions of images and color, One Hundred Demons is about the process
of accumulating and distilling memories as a visual practice.
One Hundred Demons, like much of Barry’s earlier work, tackles the hid-
den and the traumatic. While it offers a subtle, wry humor, it expresses, as its
title clearly would suggest, a certain kind of experience: difficult, “demonic.”
It repeats collage elements, piles on physical markers of memory, and coun-
terposes spaciousness with heaps of ordinary, everyday material—a juxta-
position we see, for instance, on each chapter’s final page. One Hundred
Demons, in its collaged layers, a literal re-collection, visualizes a process of
recollection and re-narrativization that well figures the assimilation of trau-
matizing experience.18 We can see this, to name one example, in the book’s
sixth chapter, “Resilience.” This story presents a central concern of Barry’s
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

work: the seeming paradox of traumatic memory, in which people “forget”

trauma, but do not “forget” it enough (while these memories may no longer
be verbal, they yet drive behavior).19 Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist and re-
searcher whose work is important to Barry, points out in Unchained Mem-
ories, her study of traumatic memory, both how repressed memory can be
retrieved by visual cues and how place, more than anything else, remains
attached to highly emotional episodic memory (, , ). Episodic
memory works “like a movie”—“sometimes you can see only a few frames,”
Terr writes; this memory can go missing, except for fragments (, ,
). Traumatic memory tends to be more fragmentary and condensed than
regular memory—a good description of the basic form of comics (). And
“we remember terrible events with a marked spatial sense” while temporal
perspective (sequencing, causality) is often lost in trauma ().20 “Memories
of our placement in space are among the best entry points we have to our old
memories,” Terr emphasizes. “We can literally map out on paper or mentally
follow our childhood selves” (). Comics is deeply relevant for this map-
ping: authors are able to put their child bodies in space on the page. The basic
structural form of comics—which replicates the structure of traumatic mem-
ory with its fragmentation, condensation, and placement of elements in
space—is able to express the movement of memory. It both evokes and pro-
vokes memory: placing themselves in space, authors may forcefully convey
the shifting layers of memory, and create a peculiar entry point for represent-
ing experience. In “Resilience,” we see Barry map a process of memory—
make it material on the page—through the spatializing form of comics.
When the child Marlys creates her own comic about witnessing rape in
Barry’s It’s So Magic, she scrawls, “Just forget it” over a blank panel: Marlys
comes up against the unrepresentable (, ). So does the child Lynda
in “Resilience,” who at age twelve “already knew too much about sex, found
out about it in harsh ways” (, ). Barry repeatedly inscribes, with dif-
ferent typographical hands, the phrases “Can’t remember / Can’t forget” in
the two-page collage prefacing the story. In addition to varying how this pair
of phrases appears by switching colors, handwriting, and use of upper- and
lower-case letters, she emphasizes the problem of memory by stamping, in
large, childish glitter, the words “FORGET” and “FORGOT” in the collage.
She also presents the twinned “can’t”s in the chapter’s punctuating, epilogic
collage, in which the phrases stand in an architectural, perpendicular rela-
tion to each other: this, Barry shows us, is the situation of trauma and mem-
ory. As Cathy Caruth writes, “If traumatic experience, as Freud indicates
 h il l a ry c hu te

suggestively, is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs, then

[texts of trauma] . . . ask what it means to transmit and to theorize around a
crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simul-
taneously defies and demands our witness” (, ). The entire text of
One Hundred Demons is a meditation on memory and the importance of
remembering, as the chapter “Dogs,” also about trauma, thematizes and
states outright (“If we had been thinking, if we had been remembering, we’d
have realized we were doing the wrong thing”), yet as the swarming collages
indicate, “remembering” is not a transparent state that is simply accessible
(Barry , ).
“When I was still little, bad things had gone on, things too awful to
remember but impossible to forget,” Lynda reports (Barry , ). Cru-
cially, Barry frames childhood sexual trauma as endemic: “I wasn’t alone in
my knowledge. Nearly every kid in my neighborhood knew too much too
soon,” the narrating Lynda writes.21 “Resilience” represents not simply the
devastating aftereffects of her experience but also critiques a broad, self-
serving adult discourse about childhood trauma. In a panel that depicts the
sleeping twelve-year-old, the adult Lynda narrates, in boxed text above the
image, “I cringe when people talk about the resiliency of children. It’s a hope
adults have about the nature of a child’s inner life” (). In a later panel,
again above the sleeping girl, she asserts, “This ability to exist in pieces is
what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of
resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget
trauma” (). In this personal story, Barry explicitly frames her experience
collectively, evident in the way the strip speaks to the prevalence of abuse;
she moves, on the last page, to the intimate second person, generalizing this
experience outward to a public sphere, shifting away from the “I”: “You can’t
forget it but you do remember never to remember it. . . .” (). Echoing this
complex, layered state of not forgetting, the strip recursively ends where the
“plot” of trauma begins. The very last panel depicts a child sitting in the
grass, while an adult man—cut off above the waist, as in “The Red Comb,”
and with his hand foregrounded, clutching a cigarette—asks, “Do you and
your dolly want to go for a ride?” (). This strip not only addresses trau-
matic memory’s paradox but also enacts it—how it defies and demands our
witness—in its narrative composition.22
This is suggested forcefully in “Resilience’s” introductory collage (see fig-
ures . and .). Here Barry presents a photograph of herself as a child
with a translucent strip of orange pasted over her eyes, filtering our ability
figures . and . Collage from “Resilience.” From Lynda Barry, One Hundred
Demons (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, ), first and second page of double-spread
collage preface. Original is in color. Courtesy of Lynda Barry.
 h il l a ry c hu te

to see her—and also, at least graphically, filtering the subject’s own outward
gaze at us. The girl in the photograph is the same age as the girl in the story’s
last frame. Posed for a portrait, the child beams; her short red hair is coiffed
and one small chubby hand rests on her chin. An older, adolescent Lynda
is painted facing this picture of her younger self. She stares blankly at the
photograph, her hands on her chin, echoing the posture of the child: short
red hair, short sleeves, elbows on the table in front of her. Instead of neat
photo corners, blue pieces of tape, appearing haphazardly placed, as if float-
ing instead of affixing, anchor the adolescent Lynda on the page. Between
the two images of her—one photographic, one drawn; one toddler, one ado-
lescent; one smiling, one gloomy—is a window, whose twinned panes prof-
fer the dilemma the story undertakes: “CAN’T remember can’t FORGET”
(Barry , n.p.). An upside-down stuffed toy also appears between the
two images; its white blank eyes mark the center of the page. The childish
toy upturned indicates upheaval for the child and is repeated by a black
paper monster—a demon—also sporting white circular eyes, lurking upside
down in the lower left corner; the two inverted creatures seem to diagonally
enclose the child in the photograph, almost as a physical barrier. Above the
small black demon is an upright figure, an alligator; buttons of glitter indi-
cate a man’s shirt, and a shiny glob of silver paper rests over his crotch. His
body is turned to the left, legs locked stiffly, as the man who concludes the
story also stands.
On the opposite, right-hand collage page, a large and prominent painted
doll, which evokes the character Lynda with its red hair and childish purple
dress, lies on its back with simple gaping holes for eyes. This doll also matches
the doll that Lynda clutches in the story’s very last frame, as we watch the
child face the man we cannot see: both wear a dark dress and sport a
chopped bob. As in other prefatory collages, this page features a frame that
looks like a stage of sorts: above the doll’s prone body, legs apart, three
demons hold a placard: “Today’s DEMON: RESILIENCE.” The rounded
flowers behind and in front of the doll’s body evoke the flowers among
which the child Lynda sits at the story’s conclusion. This doll of the collage,
then, figures the character Lynda—bow in her hair, she is in what looks like
a helpless and wounded position, supine on her back—and also the doll of
the narrative: with her inanimate pose and vacated eyes, she is a figure for
both dissociation and forgetting. The posture of physical helplessness (“on
her back”) works here as a postplot ending appearing as a kind of prologue:
through our own projections and associations about what might happen to
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

the Lynda character, this wounded figure stands in for her. “Resilience” is set
up, then, so that the very end of the story circles back to the collage; it defies
linearity. An origami creature, similar to a large insect, and with a phallic,
pointed head, swoops into the frame over the space between the doll’s legs;
its three-dimensionality here, against the flat drawing of the panel, further
implies a physical violation. Sight is a theme: the doll has conspicuously
emptied-out eyeballs, which contrasts with the demons hovering above her;
one has a disproportionately large and blinking eye, while the other has two
sets of eyes in a row. She sees little or nothing, while the demons see too
much (“can’t remember/can’t forget”). A small black-and-white panel, dan-
gling off the bottom left corner of the titular frame, pictures a teenaged girl,
eyes obscured by glasses: she faces away.
The chapters of One Hundred Demons—the demons—run the gamut,
from “Hate” to “San Francisco” to “Cicadas” to “Girlness.” Barry does not
adhere to a chronological or otherwise stabilizing structure: throughout she
moves back and forth between childhood, adulthood, and interim stages in
the space of the book. Each individual chapter loops through different tem-
poralities; the collection of temporal moments palimpsested in the open-
ing collage pages indicates the book’s overall approach to narrativizing a
life. Unlike Aline Kominsky-Crumb, whose Love That Bunch () begins
with youth and ends in middle age, Gloeckner, who follows her protagon-
ist Minnie closely as she grows up bit by bit, and Satrapi, who presents a
strictly linear account of her childhood, Barry’s narrative of development is
looped, retracked: “We think that we are going into the future, but actually
what we’re doing is going into the past,” she claims about how images—
memories—present themselves. “There’s this feeling that there’s a chrono-
logical order to things because there’s an order to the years, and there is
an order to our cell division from the time we’re a little embryo until we’re
dust again. But I think the past has no order whatsoever” (Barry interview).
In part the recursivity in her work indicates a temporal scrambling intro-
duced by trauma, but more broadly its collection of nonsequential pieces—
chapters—of visual and verbal narrative suggest how memory works, as well
as offering a view of narrative identity that eschews the notion of a fixed self
persisting over time. Because her books are about remembering, they mimic,
with their profusion of images that “move every which way,” as she puts it,
the process of how one remembers (Chute , ). And, as in Spiegel-
man’s Maus, Barry destabilizes the ostensibly discrete categories of “past”
and “present,” suggesting their porousness and fluidity.
 h il l a ry c hu te

In the circumstantial details of Lynda’s upbringing, One Hundred Demons

presents an opposite picture from Persepolis, a text also interrogating child-
hood trauma. While Persepolis is indisputably a book about class—its pro-
tagonist interrogating her class privilege in a fractured Iran—so too is One
Hundred Demons, although from an inverse perspective: the family of the
character Lynda is decisively working class. And while Persepolis is about
the power of family relationships, so too is One Hundred Demons, but as a
negative proposition—particularly in the figure of Lynda’s abusive mother,
whose “very intense swearing in Tagalog” is characteristic of their interac-
tions ().23 In the book’s first chapter, “Head Lice and My Worst Boy-
friend,” an adult Lynda cannot figure out of whom her boyfriend reminds
her; but when he screams at her, “You talk talk talk about asinine memo-
ries like they mean something! You’re shallow! You’re poison! Do you really
think I’m interested?” she stares at him disbelievingly and says, “Mom?!”
(, , ).24 It is significant that the accusation familiar to Lynda—
“you talk about asinine memories”—materializes in her autobiography’s
first chapter. Right away, the book establishes memory as its focus, and
“writes” against the verdict of Lynda’s mother and Lynda’s “worst boyfriend”
(who gives himself the authority to gloss—and to denigrate and romanti-
cize—a narrative of her life).25 Barry explores her difficult and constitutive
relationships with relatives, friends, and community, as well as with trauma,
re-creation, and the very notion of creativity, visualizing and materializing
memory as counter not only to those who would fix her identity (and believe
identity fixable), but also to those who would diminish the political impor-
tance of the everyday.

Ordinary Material: Self, Address, and Genre

A story about genre, form, and narrative itself, One Hundred Demons’ final
chapter, “Lost and Found,” is a miniature Künstlerroman, a narrative of Lynda’s
development as a cartoonist that has a decidedly populist beginning in the
classifieds. Here a child Lynda, an adolescent Lynda, and an adult Lynda
are all pictured protagonists (a “present-day” adult Lynda is narrating). “We
didn’t have books in the house, but the paper gave me plenty to work with,”
the story begins (, ). We see a rapt Lynda, nine years old, with her
trademark halo of spiky red hair, sprawled out on the floor of her home
surrounded by the open classifieds section of the newspaper. Unsurpris-
ingly, Lynda is “fascinated” by the tiny narratives of the classified ads. These
ads are, in many ways, evocative of the economical form of comics: “They
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

gave me so many weird blanks to fill in,” Lynda explains (after noting “each
quarter-inch ad was like a chapter in a book”) (, ).
Barry then paints for us, in comics form—as a child would, with crooked
lines and spelling errors—the stories that the child protagonist imagines
explain the ads.26 Here, Barry literally reimagines and re-creates her under-
valued childhood “art” in the context of literary narrative. The “found” in
the title “Lost and Found” is the exuberant mode of imaginative storytelling
and self-expression that the genre material of the newspaper and its ilk—
specifically the classifieds, the Readers’ Digest series “Joe’s Lung,” and the
newspaper homemaking advice column “Hints From Heloise”—provided
Lynda as a child. Yet Lynda’s love of genre material, as she narrates, marked
her as unadvanced.
“My trouble ended when I started making comic strips. It’s not some-
thing a person has to be very ‘advanced’ to do. At least not in the minds of
literary types,” Lynda writes (, ). Barry argues for comics as populist
art; “Lost and Found” is a critique of this visual form’s elitist detractors:
“Nobody feels the need to provide deep critical insight to something writ-
ten by hand” (). This comment highlights the usefully unstable form of
comics, which bridges mass and high culture because it is mass-produced
and yet handwritten and artisanal. It also focuses attention on the generic
strangeness of such a lush and beautiful object as Barry’s book (suggesting
that critics who cannot easily categorize such work ignore it). Additionally
it points to Barry’s particular emphasis throughout One Hundred Demons
on the presence of the hand in the text, both pictorially and in prose. Barry’s
work is very conspicuously in and about “handwriting”; she frequently de-
picts Lynda in the act of composing, hand on paper. In the book’s “Intro” and
“Outro,” Barry portrays Lynda in the act of inscription; in “Lost and Found,”
an only eighteen-frame chapter, Barry draws Lynda in four frames—at differ-
ent stages of her life and at different stages in the story—in the act of writing,
her working hands visible (, , , ). This attention to the hand rep-
resents Barry’s obvious respect for handcraft—and also a passionate project
of demystification: she not only wants to call our attention to the body in the
text as it writes, but she also wants to show us that act of writing.27
The last page of “Lost and Found” presents two frames. The first is an
address to the adult Barry’s (female) readers, in the resignified style of Heloise
(it begins: “Gals, ever felt so intimidated . . .”) (, ). The adult Lynda
sits at her desk, framed by lamplight, brush poised to paper, foreground-
ing the enunciative situation of the book. This frame is followed by the
 h il l a ry c hu te

nine-year-old Lynda again reading out loud from the classifieds, pictured as
in the opening frames of the chapter: “Lost. Somewhere around puberty.
Ability to make up stories. Happiness depends on it. Please write” ().
Here we see Barry, whose love of the classifieds inspired her as a child, in
turn embedding her own life narrative within that form in the story. “Please
write,” of course, is both part of the classified advertisement’s protocol, and
a wider, psychic injunction to artistic (self-)expression. This frame, which
concludes One Hundred Demons’ last narrative chapter, represents a vital
circling backward: the implication is that the young Lynda—as she has for
other classified ads—will then imagine and narrate a story for that “ad”
(which might be, of course, the very narrative we have just completed). Both
bodies face left, against the direction of reading, back toward the beginning
of the book (on the story’s first page, Lynda faces right, with the narrative
movement of reading).
The homage to the power of genre material of the everyday in “Lost and
Found” extends into One Hundred Demons’ “Outro.” Although it appears to
be a postplot chapter (it is, like “Intro,” unpaginated), the “Outro” is as con-
stitutive as any of the other chapters in building the autobiographical fabric
of the text. Indeed, it is the most explicitly nonfictional portion of the book,
in that it details—very precisely, including through eleven photographs—
Barry’s process of painting One Hundred Demons. “Outro,” which explains
how one would paint his or her own demons as Barry has done, best theo-
rizes Barry’s position on the political (and the physical) work of visual cul-
ture. W. J. T. Mitchell’s sense of visual culture as not only the socialization
of the visual field but also, more importantly, the visualization of the social,
is useful here (, ). Barry not only loves the classifieds, we learn, but
she also draws on and over them. The last page is an appropriately anti-
teleological closing to the book, for in its citing of the classifieds in detailing
its own production it takes us backward to the previous chapter, “Lost and
Found”: “I like to PAINT on LEGAL paper or on the CLASSIFIED SEC-
TION of the newspaper OR EVEN pages from OLD BOOKS! I will try ANY
PAPER, typing paper, wrapping paper even PAPER BAGS!” (, n.p.). We
see this clearly in the yellow legal paper on which “Intro” and “Outro” are
painted, and in the frontispiece to the book, which is a painting drawn over
a page of an old novel whose table of contents is as follows: Introduction,
Selfhood, Breed, Ethick. By painting over—but incompletely—this schema,
Barry at once invokes and rejects traditional narratives of self-development,
materially and figuratively refiguring how a life narrative signifies.
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

The classifieds provide both an inspiration and a manifest practice for

Barry; they are a figurative and actual foundation for her comic strips. Barry
incorporates newspaper classifieds—what she calls “one of the things I
enjoyed reading most” when little (, ), which is still in her adult life
“the first thing I read in the paper” ()—in her work as a material founda-
tion, literalizing the idea of “drawing on” genre material and offering, here,
the idea of her own life narrative as a populist palimpsest.28 Paying homage
to the tiny narratives of the classifieds, Barry confirms their literal usability.
A full-page color photograph of Barry at her desk, in profile, opens
“Outro”: She is painting on yellow legal paper in her pajamas.29 This image,
which is demystifying in that it visually locates the precise materials with
which she works, is not presented in order to referentially confirm the auto-
biography in “autobifictionalography”: Barry’s refusal to look at readers in
this image shifts the narrative emphasis, and readerly interpretation, away
from an identification of an authentic individual self to a confirmation, rather,
of the act of writing. She looks down at the page, not at readers, surrounded
by writing implements: this page directly echoes the images that precede it
in “Lost and Found” of the character Lynda showing us the hand on and in
the page; it is simply one more thread in that visual dialogue.
The next page offers the injunction “Paint Your Demon”—this is the image
that Barry paints in the directly preceding photograph; and the next five
pages explain in detail how one might do that. “Outro,” composed mostly
in text and photographs, lays bare its own procedure, not only showing a
reader how One Hundred Demons is composed but even where one could
purchase art supplies Barry uses (an “autobiographical” detail presented in
the context of inspiring others to, presumably, their own autobiographical
practice). The first two pages of these instructions detail necessary materi-
als (such as an inkstone “at least  ×  inches. You can get a good, simple one
for under .” and an inkstick “made of soot compressed into a hard
stick—PERMANENT!! ARCHIVAL!! Really fantastic!!”). Barry devotes a
whole page to brushes: “The one I used for this book,” she writes—which
she is presumably still using—“had a brush hair length of  inch and a base
diameter of ¼ inch” (, n.p.). The subsequent three pages detail the mix-
ing of ink and water, instructions on how to hold the brush, and, on the book’s
very last page, Barry’s description of what she likes to paint on—which, as I
have noted, circles us back to “Lost and Found” in citing the classifieds.
One Hundred Demons’ final page, repeating “Paint Your Demon,” also
offers, in its center, a second photograph of Barry working on the original
 h il l a ry c hu te

“Paint Your Demon” page that opens the chapter (see figure .). This is
yet another move that, as in the final panel of “Lost and Found,” implies a
self-reflexive circling backward, a deliberately repetitive gesture indicat-
ing process. Facing us, Barry’s face is yet cut off just below the eyes; we see
the bottom rims of her glasses. This photograph, as with the previous one,
presenting her face only partially, signals its refusal to perform the role of
“objective” correlate to her drawn self in order to authenticate the autobio-
graphical subject. (Motifs here, such as the presentation of absented eyes,
and the truncating of a full view of the subject by the top panel border, also
connect it to stories such as “Resilience,” in which the painted doll haunt-
ing the prefatory collage has conspicuously absent eyes.) This final chapter
materially emphasizes that the concept of the composition of the book itself,
like the fabric of subjectivity, is a procedure rather than a product. It follows
that its conclusion is open: the process of making it—“discovering the paint-
brush, inkstone, inkstick and resulting demons,” Lynda writes—“has been
the most important thing to happen to me in years” (n.p.).
Relevant as feminist praxis, One Hundred Demons is a vital feminist work,
resignifying the detritus of girlhood as productive collage by aesthetically
revisioning it. The re-contextualization of cheap, common, or utilitarian

figure . “Outro.” From Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons (Seattle: Sasquatch
Books, ), final page. Original is a color comics page including a photograph.
Courtesy of Lynda Barry.
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

paper (which also harkens back to the historical avant-garde) may be under-
stood as a transvaluation of the idea of working on “waste”—a knowing,
ironic acknowledgment on Barry’s part that her life narrative, itself perhaps
considered insignificant, is visualized in an accessible popular medium,
comics, that is still largely viewed as “garbage.” And significantly, the use of
genre and/or everyday materials such as newspapers and paper bags as a
foundation for drawing is consonant, materially and theoretically, with DIY
(“do-it-yourself ”) culture: the DIY ethic, so prominent in punk and youth
subcultural practice, and in contemporary grassroots feminism today, is not
an abstraction in Barry’s work, but constitutes its explicit political context.
Barry’s feminist demystification—and feminist valuation—of the “writer” and
“artist” in the figure of a genre material-obsessed cartoonist is a significant
contribution to visual culture, as is her summary dispatching of any notion
of a coherent self: the concept of a life narrative as “autobifictionalography”
is a fine theorization of subject-constitution, especially in light of Benhabib’s
persuasive narrative view of identity, which “regards individual as well as
collective identities as woven out of tales and fragments belonging both to
oneself and others” (Benhabib , ).30 Further, the visual register of
this “autobifictionalography” allows Barry to end her narrative showing—
literally, through brushwork and photography—a female subject constitut-
ing herself, provisionally, through an address to others.
And for momentous, or traumatic events specifically, studies point to a
pervasive underlying sensory component, above all one that is imagistic.
“The memories are represented imagistically: ‘intrusions in daily thoughts
are typically visual memories and images of the traumatic event,’” writes
David Pillemer, a psychologist studying narrative and memory (, ). In
a very simple way, then, it becomes clear why comics, with its visual com-
ponent, may lend itself to certain kinds of stories about events and about
the memory of events. Pillemer claims, “Just as autobiographical memory
development cannot be adequately described as following a single, uni-
versal trajectory, so personal memories cannot be adequately described as
occurring within a single level of mental representation or as involving a
single mode of expression.” He then describes the difficulty of a person
who wishes to recount trauma, and who then “must translate nonverbal,
affect-laden, sensory images into an understandable . . . verbal narrative”
(, ). Lynda Barry does not need to “translate” the nonverbal, affect-
laden, sensory images into verbal narrative to approach her past; rather, she
includes them. She maintains the plural levels that Pillemer identifies in
 h il l a ry c hu te

autobiographical memory; she engages multiple modes of expression, and

further demonstrates the notion that “memories need not be expressed as
explicit, conscious, fully formed narratives in order to be influential” in her
work, which plays with and off absence (Pillemer , ). The spatial form
of comics recognizes and acts on the notion of memory as located in mind
and body, and as, perhaps, shiftingly inaccessible and accessible. Comics is
adept at engaging the notion and matter of memory, and reproducing the
effects of memory—its gaps, fragments, positions, layers, circularities. And—
crucially—Lynda Barry’s work constitutes a subject, while yet expressing
experiences of traumatic deconstitution.

notes
1. At the Evergreen State College in Washington, Barry published comic strips in the
campus newspaper. After she graduated in , her comic strips first appeared in the
alternative newspaper the Seattle Sun, were picked up by the Chicago Reader, and went
on to national syndication. For more on Barry’s early career, see my interview with her
in The Believer, where she discusses “trouble” (Chute , ).
2. I interviewed Barry in New York City on June –, , following a public inter-
view I conducted with her for a symposium cosponsored by New York University and
the New York Institute of the Humanities (unpublished interview cited as Barry inter-
view). A portion of my interview with Barry appeared in The Believer’s  art issue
(cited as Chute ).
3. Today, many self-distributing comics authors create what are called “minicomics.”
The term indicates that the author controls the printing process with whatever tech-
nology she has on hand (e.g., Xerox machines and silk screening setups, scissors and
glue and staplers. In this way, minicomics and zines are similar; the two can overlap).
4. Printed Matter’s mission is “to foster the appreciation, dissemination, and under-
standing of artists’ publications, which we define as books or other editioned publica-
tions conceived by artists as art works, or, more succinctly, as ‘artwork for the page.’”
See http://printedmatter.org/about/index.cfm.
5. Barry and close friend Matt Groening, creator of the comics series Life in Hell and
the animated television program The Simpsons, vocally supported each other’s comics
after graduating from Evergreen and did book signings together when they started
publishing. Barry explains that she was not deterred by the asymmetrical response
their work elicited: “Matt’s stuff and my stuff was really different, and if you’re gonna
have a book that’s very clever and really funny and talking about people’s difficult situ-
ation at work, or you’re going to have a book that’s about horrible things that happen
in childhood, there’s gonna be one that has a long line, and another one that has a
shorter line” (Chute , ).
6. Barry considers her first book the Xerox-on-demand edition of the collected Two
Sisters that she would enclose in an individually decorated Manila envelope. Subse-
quently, she has published ten works of comics—Girls and Boys (); Big Ideas ();
Everything in the World (); The Fun House (); Down the Street (a); Come
Over, Come Over (); My Perfect Life (); It’s So Magic (); The Freddie
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

Stories (b); and The Greatest of Marlys ()—and two novels: The Good Times
Are Killing Me (b), about an interracial adolescent friendship, which she adapted
as an Off-Broadway play in , and the moving and gory Cruddy (a), whose girl
protagonist, Roberta, is kidnapped by her father, a butcher and Navy man, and
renamed Clyde. In  Barry published the oversize Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!
Naked Ladies!: Coloring Book, which features black line art illustrations of fifty-four
different “naked” women. In her last two books, One Hundred Demons () and
What It Is (), Barry has shifted to nonfiction, but these works embrace generic and
formal instability and innovation.
7. In two reviews, the New York Times has also emphasized this economy: while
Dave Eggers particularly sees it in how Barry’s narratives begin, “she is, not surpris-
ingly, a master of the opening line” (, ), Nick Hornby recognizes it in how they
end, “these stories all contain little grenades of meaning that tend to explode just after
you’ve read the last line” (, ).
8. Seashells, in Botticelli as elsewhere, have long functioned as metaphors for
women’s vulvas. See, for instance, Blackledge , –.
9. Some, however, have their eyes closed—for instance, while masturbating.
10. Barry does not choose her visual self-insertion as the location for text and image
to meet. Significantly, the segment of story that appears with the self-portrait, while
it retains the first-person voice of the prose, is focused on describing a friend of the
narrator.
11. Naked Ladies! could by all means be used as an actual, and not simply figurative,
coloring book; its sense of play, and of utilitarian purpose, is underlined by the fact that
at its center it offers a color foldout of the complete deck of “cards” of the women, with
the shell, fish, and dagger motif printed on the other side of each, so that one could
plausibly cut them out for use. This attention to the book as functional object resur-
faces in other works, including What It Is, in which Barry prints multiple pages of
“word cards” that she recommends cutting out and using for writing exercises.
12. The first academic essay on One Hundred Demons—also the first academic
essay on Barry—was published in . It focuses specifically on Barry’s contributions
to Filipina American feminist writing: “Barry’s comix reach far more mainstream read-
ers than any other Filipino American artist today” (de Jesús a, ). The author,
Melinda de Jesús, published a similar article in the same year focusing on Filipina
American identity and motherhood in One Hundred Demons (de Jesús b).
13. See Powers’s interview in The Comics Journal (Powers , ). One Hundred
Demons is a painting exercise; the example that inspired Barry was a hand-scroll
painted by a Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku in sixteenth-century Japan. In “Intro”
Barry paints a frame depicting Lynda viewing this example in the book The Art of Zen
by Stephen Addiss (Barry , n.p.).
14. Whereas Spiegelman draws himself at his desk, explicitly foregrounding Maus’s
enunciative situation (“I started working on this page at the very end of February
 . . .”) well into the second volume of Maus (Spiegelman , ), Barry does it
immediately.
15. On collage and the avant-garde, see, for instance, Cottington , especially
the chapter “Collage and Counter-Discourse: Aestheticism and the ‘Popular’”; and
Gopnik and Varnedoe . For the pattern and decoration movement—and Schapiro’s
 h il l a ry c hu te

concept of “femmage,” a specific collage technique that highlights the connection with
women’s domestic crafts—see Broude . Like Barry’s work, pattern and decoration
sought to dissolve dichotomies governing artistic valuation. Sandra Sider sees that
the “pluralist exuberance” of today’s American art can be traced to pattern and deco-
ration (Sider , ). But while Schapiro used material that had been gendered
female, such as fabric, with paint to call into question the divide between decorative
and “fine” art, she generally combined these on canvas, whereas Barry works strictly on
common paper.
16. Barry would flatten the collage with the scanner, getting “as close to the work as
possible” to preserve the texture. Describing her preference for the scanner, Barry
explains, “If you’ve ever just put your hand on a scanner and scanned it, you’ll see that
it won’t just do the surface, it’ll do it up another eighth of an inch around it, so you will
get -D stuff, and it’s low tech” (Barry interview). Although Barry’s collages, as made
objects, contain both representations of things, such as cutout magazine photographs,
and three-dimensional things themselves, such as flowers, they come to us as scanned
and printed representations, offering a kind of trompe l’oeil collage.
17. Hoesterey writes that postmodern pastiche can “[attain] the status of critical
art that could legitimately claim to represent an emancipatory aesthetics [as this term
was understood in the discursive climate of the Frankfurt School], i.e., art that fosters
critical thinking” (Hoesterey , xi–xii).
18. Caruth, in Unclaimed Experience (), and Felman and Laub, in Testimony
(), for instance, emphasize how an unknowingness is part of how one under-
stands trauma, which remains, to a certain degree, outside of standard categories of
comprehension.
19. As Freud and many later analysts and theorists of trauma and memory have
pointed out, behavior linked to trauma gets repeated.
20. “Physical placement . . . is very exact in memory, especially memory formed
under terrifying circumstances [in childhood],” Terr writes (, ).
21. I will refer to the author by her last name (“Barry”), to the narrator in the text by
her first name (“Lynda”), and to the protagonist by her first name and/or childhood
nickname (in this case, also “Lynda”). In One Hundred Demons the narrator usually
narrates outside of or overlaying the frame’s pictorial content; the protagonist, pic-
tured within the frame, speaks in speech balloons.
22. Unlike “The Red Comb,” which strongly suggests sex without naming it,
“Resilience” plainly identifies its subject as sexual abuse (“I already knew too much
about sex”). However, the circumstances of the abuse, described here as “harsh,” “bad,”
“too awful to remember,” remain, crucially, opaque in the story (Barry , ). In my
interview with her in The Believer, Barry described that she glosses One Hundred
Demons to parents who buy the book for children in the following way: “‘Well, just to
let you know, there’s incest and suicide, and drug taking’” (Chute , ). Suicide
is the topic of the story “Cicadas,” and drug taking is the topic of “The Visitor.” As
“Resilience” is the only story to address sexual abuse, we might deduce that the abuse
at its center is incestuous. The story does not offer any information on the perpetra-
tor(s) until the last panel, and keeps the identity of the man who appears vague. This
vagueness prompted my reading of the man as a stranger; knowing that the man could
potentially be known to her but is presented with such distance amplifies the dramatic
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

effect of the story that leaves us at the very moment that the trauma begins. It also
underscores the fact that “Resilience” is about traumatic memory, not about describ-
ing the situation of the abuse itself.
23. Of her parents, Barry told me: “I haven’t seen or talked to them in probably six-
teen years, and it’s been absolutely mutual, and they’ve never come looking for me
either, so it’s been the best sixteen years of my life” (Barry interview).
24. Barry is most explicit, as an adult narrator, on her relationship with her mother
in the chapters “Dogs” and “Girlness.” In the former, she tells us: “I . . . grew up in a vio-
lent house”; in the latter, she discusses her mother’s abusive behavior as stemming, in
part, from her traumatic experiences in the Philippines after the Japanese invasion dur-
ing the war (, ). See also the spoken-word piece “Wartime” on The Lynda Barry
Experience ().
25. This boyfriend, who calls her “little ghetto girl,” thinks he can sum up Lynda’s
history: “My mother thinks you’re lying about your age. She thinks you’re older. I told
her about your history. How it’s like war. The foot soldiers always age faster than the
officers” (, ).
26. Lynda stars in the stories that she creates in conversation with the classifieds:
“I’d imagine the whole story: the freaked-out people, the freaked-out animals, and me,
always coming to the rescue and never accepting the reward,” we learn, for instance,
about ads placed for lost pets (, ). She paints the stories that accompany the fol-
lowing classified ads: “Crypt in mausoleum. Prime loc. Eye-level. Best offer. Evenings”;
“Sz.  wedding dress. Never worn. Must sacrifice”; “Fill dirt, very clean”; “Party pianist.
My piano or yours” (). Of these heroic mini-narratives, Barry tells us: “Mostly I died
in my classified stories. Even then I loved tragic endings. People would be crying so
hard. They’d cover my coffin with fill dirt, very clean. The party pianist would play” ().
27. This interest in and respect for making the situation of the book’s own produc-
tion evident is also clear in Barry’s desire for “the wrinkling to show”—to show her
“mistakes” instead of eliding them (Barry interview).
28. One Hundred Demons is closest, among memoirs, to Adrienne Kennedy’s
People Who Led to My Plays (), which presents not a literal palimpsest as Barry’s
collaged self-representation does but rather democratically presents a huge range of
people, texts, and events that formed the author. Kennedy’s book is composed entirely
of lists of identifications. Her work, like Barry’s, is feminist in its methodology: its dis-
ruption of linearity, its fluid, unfixed sense of self, and its merging of the private and
the public—how Kennedy productively identifies and disidentifies with public culture,
both high and low—is given the same value in the book as her personal, intimate iden-
tifications. As with Barry, Kennedy weights the ordinary and everyday in her narrative
of self-formation, including one-line entries such as “People: Those I saw walking in
the snow on my street one Christmas afternoon” (, ).
29. Barry underlines the link between this scene of creation and the actual materi-
ality of the book by the fact that she incorporates pieces of pajamas into her collages.
A diamond-pattern pair also frames the front and back inside covers of the book. What
she wears on her body her book also wears.
30. In this model of subjectivity, importantly, “to be ‘constituted’ by narrative is not
to be ‘determined’ by it; situatedness does not preclude critical distantiation and reflex-
ivity” (Benhabib , – n. ).
 h il l a ry c hu te

references
Barry, Lynda. . Girls and Boys. Seattle: Real Comet Press.
———. . Big Ideas. Seattle: Real Comet Press.
———. . Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!: Coloring Book. Seattle: Real
Comet Press.
———. . Everything in the World. New York: Harper & Row.
———. . The Fun House. New York: Harper & Row.
———. a. Down the Street. New York: Harper & Row.
———. b. The Good Times Are Killing Me. Seattle: Real Comet Press.
———. . Come Over, Come Over. New York: HarperCollins.
———. . My Perfect Life. New York: HarperCollins.
———. . The Lynda Barry Experience. Audio CD. Gang Go.
———. . It’s So Magic. New York: HarperCollins.
———. a. Cruddy. New York: New York: Simon & Schuster.
———. b. The Freddie Stories. Seattle: Sasquatch Books.
———. . The Greatest of Marlys. Seattle: Sasquatch Books.
———. . One Hundred Demons. Seattle: Sasquatch Books.
———. . What It Is. Montréal, Québec, Canada: Drawn and Quarterly.
Barry, Lynda, Jessica Abel, and Matt Maden. . The Best American Comics. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Benhabib, Seyla. . “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global
Constellation.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society .:–.
Blackledge, Catherine. . The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Broude, Norma. . “The Pattern and Decoration Movement.” In The Power of Fem-
inist Art, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, –. New York: Harry N.
Abrams.
Caruth, Cathy. . Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chute, Hillary. . “Interview with Lynda Barry [Cartoonist].” The Believer .:–.
Cottington, David. . Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics
in Paris –, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
de Jesús, Melinda. a. “Liminality and Mestiza Consciousness in Lynda Barry’s
‘One Hundred Demons.’” MELUS .:–.
———. b. “Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and Maternal
Legacies in Lynda J. Barry’s ‘One Hundred Demons.’” Meridians: Feminism, Race,
Transnationalism .:–.
Eggers, Dave. . “After Wham! Pow! Shazam!” New York Times, November , –.
Eisner, Will. . Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, eds. . Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Liter-
ature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.
Gloeckner, Phoebe. . A Child’s Life. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Gopnik, Adam, and Kirk Varnedoe. . Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings
in High and Low. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Hoesterey, Ingeborg. . Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
 Barry’s One Hundred Demons 

Hornby, Nick. . “Draw What You Know.” New York Times, December , –.
Kennedy, Adrienne. . People Who Led to My Plays. New York: Knopf.
Mitchell. W. J. T. . What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pillemer, David B. . Momentous Events, Vivid Memories: How Unforgettable
Moments Help Us Understand the Meaning of Our Lives. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Powers, Thom. . “Lynda Barry.” The Comics Journal  (November): –.
Satrapi, Marjane. . Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon.
Sider, Sandra. . “Femmage: The Timeless Fabric Collage of Miriam Schapiro.”
Fiberarts . (Summer): –.
Spiegelman, Art. . Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale; And Here My Troubles Began. New
York: Pantheon.
Terr, Lenore. . Unchained Memories. New York: Basic Books.
 

Reflections on Lynda Barry

an dre a a . lunsford

Picture this: It’s shortly before : p.m. on Tuesday, September , , in
Memorial Auditorium on the campus of Stanford University. Packed into
the auditorium are some , new frosh and transfer students, squeezed
into every seat and overflowing onto the stairs, waving banners and T-
shirts, chanting rival dorm names—a swirling, raucous, glad-the-parents-
are-gone-and-I-am-finally-here mass of frosh flesh. So what’s the occasion?
Stanford’s Three Books event, held each year on the day after the new class
arrives, features the authors of said books, which the students have read as
their first college assignment.
In the “green room” behind the auditorium stage, the three authors (ZZ
Packer, Junot Díaz, and Lynda Barry) peeked out to assay the audience: This
looked like a wild crowd. When the lights went down and the dean of frosh
rose to begin the evening’s event (a question-and-answer session moderated
by the faculty member who chose this year’s books and leading to more Q
and A from the students), a brief hush greeted the writers—followed by a
tumult of clapping, cheering, and screaming (think rock stars here). As that
evening’s moderator, I felt sure that the students would be up for the occa-
sion, but even I was surprised by their response. In fact, I thought it might
take all evening for me to introduce the authors, as I was interrupted by rap-
turous applause at least ten times (in about ten minutes).
The event ran overtime, predictably, yet when it was over some twenty
students stayed behind, clustered around Barry, engaging her in further dis-
cussion. As she talked with them, she drew pictures on their shirts, their
backpacks, their books—eventually she took off her signature bandana,
drew a picture on it, and handed it away. When she finally made a getaway,


 Reflections on Lynda Barry 

she thanked the students for a “night of my life,” and they trailed after her
into the parking lot, hoping for one more minute.
I open a brief reflection on Barry’s work with this scene because it
reminds me of one of her defining characteristics: Barry is a teacher who
connects immediately with students, whether they are freshman at Stanford
or those who sign up for her fabled workshops on writing and drawing.
Tough-minded and utterly frank, she seems at once all about business (of
writing and drawing) and all about fun. And she peppers her advice with
analogies and anecdotes sure to connect what she’s saying to her immediate
audience. In urging her Three Books audience to keep alive that instinctual
part of themselves that knows how to “make an image spontaneously,” for
example, she paused to tell about meeting eight-year-old Jack on an air-
plane. Seeing that she is a cartoonist, Jack exclaims, “Oh, I have a story; I
have a story!” Barry interrupted her anecdote to connect the point she
wanted to make about Jack to her college-age audience, saying that Jack’s
sudden outburst was “like when you know you want to make out with some-
one but you don’t know quite who; you just know ‘I wanna make out; I
wanna make out.’” And the crowd explodes with recognition and apprecia-
tion. Then Barry brings it home: when you were little, she says, you were just
like Jack. You had all the stories you could ever want, and you wrote them
using drawings too and including all those funny sound effects you’d add
in—like a truck backfiring, for example. “You need to keep that alive now,”
she says. “It’s directly connected to your mental health.”
So Barry seems to me a born teacher, though I wouldn’t have guessed that
when I started reading Ernie Pook’s Comeek decades ago. But much later,
when I encountered One Hundred Demons, I began to study Barry’s word-
and-image weaving much more closely and to teach her work in several
classes. My students responded to Demons immediately: for many of them
it told stories they had lived, and they wanted to talk and write about this
book. The chapter on “Resilience” is one we always linger on, noting the way
Barry weaves strands of childhood friendship, early crushes, and sexual
abuse, all punctuated by the drumbeat of the impossible need to forget and
to the ultimate fracturing of identity: “This ability to exist in pieces is what
some adults call resilience. And I suppose it is a kind of resilience, a horri-
ble resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma” (). And we
pause to study this panel more closely, exploring the effect of the large Barry
printing that fills over half the space, pushing the drawing into the bottom
where she lies in bed, cradling her head, saying “Dear God, dead wish I was
 a n dr e a a . lun sf o r d

dead wish I was dead wish I was dead wish I was dead wish” (). Here and
in many other places in the book, the text box speaks in a more distanced,
rationalizing way that attempts to dominate the images—a move the image
and accompanying speech bubble both undercut and emphasize.
So Demons speaks to my students about life’s lessons, about growing up
and about trying to find wholeness amid chaos and pain. But it also offers
lessons in the relationship of words and images: while beginning college stu-
dents have read many comics, they have seldom had the opportunity (or
encouragement) to read these works closely, to act them out and read them
aloud, to experiment with reading them with only the words and then with
only the images, or to try their hands at creating a series of panels that tell a
story of their own with words and images. Thus, we usually end our study
of Demons by turning to the most directly pedagogical part of the volume:
the “Paint Your Demon” section at the very end. This section takes us back
to the opening and Barry’s description of the “One Hundred Demons”
painting exercise and a sixteenth-century Japanese hand scroll painting.
Now they “get” that opening, and they are inspired to follow Barry’s careful
instructions (“Wet your Brush in water and run it across a paper towel. . . .
Then Dip the Tip into the ink, hold the BRUSH straight up” (), all illus-
trated with photographs). The demons they create lead to further lessons—
the kind we have begun to call “Lynda lessons,” that is, those that we have
learned through acting and doing and performing.
From One Hundred Demons, it seems a natural move to the pedagogically
rich What It Is, published in the spring of , just a few months before
Barry appeared at the Three Books event and I had a chance to use her new
book in my sophomore-level course on graphic novels. The generosity she
displayed to the Stanford students is front and center in this book, which is
an epideictic celebration of her own college art teacher. The dedication on
the copyright page shows the familiar Barry octopus: across the top of the
head, in cursive, For Marilyn Frasca; and then, below a drawing of a butter-
fly and a fish, a simple label: TEACHER. In this rich and exceedingly com-
plex comic, Barry passes on what she learned from Frasca and from her many
years of drawing and writing, meditating on questions (What is an image?
How does reflection differ from thinking?) in the service of imagination,
creativity, and art. Part activity book, part lesson plan, part autobiography
(recounting Barry’s path toward art), and full of shimmering watercolor and
meticulous collages, What It Is is a dizzying, exhilarating, sometimes even
maddening performance of teaching. At first glance, my students felt a bit
 Reflections on Lynda Barry 

overwhelmed by this book: “How do we begin?” they said. But begin they
did, and as we worked our way through the text, they were surprised to find
themselves responding viscerally to Barry’s challenges and enticements. At
the end of the class, when I asked students what books I should choose for
the course the next time I taught it, many put What It Is at the top of the list.
Said one, “Please teach Lynda Barry’s book: of everything we read this term,
it is the one I find myself going back to again and again. It’s a keeper.”
Reading What It Is makes me want, more than anything, to be Barry’s
student, to attend one of the workshops she teaches several times a year,
described by Linda Kino as “a bit like witnessing an endurance-performance
piece. . . . Ms. Barry sings, tells jokes, acts out characters and even dances a
creditably sensual hula, all while keeping up an apparently extemporaneous
patter on subjects like brain science, her early boy-craziness, her admiration
for Jimmy Carter, and the joys of menopause.” Sounds like a class I could
hardly resist, so I was beyond jealous when my colleague Adam Rosenblatt
was invited to participate in one of Barry’s workshops last year. In it, he
encountered precisely what her books convey: a rare combination of artist,
writer, and teacher.
works cited
Barry, Lynda. One Hundred Demons. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, .
———. What It Is. Montreal, Canada: Drawn and Quarterly, .
Kino, Carol. “How to Think Like a Surreal Cartoonist.” New York Times, May , , .
 Contributors

jan baetens is professor of word and image studies and director of the
Lieven Gevaert Research Centre at the Katholieke Universiteit at Leuven
(Belgium). He is the premier European critic of bande dessinée (French
language comics) and he coedits the literary journals Formules, revue des
littératures à contraintes, and FPC/Formes poétiques contemporaines, as
well as the peer-reviewed e-journal Image & Narrative. He is coauthor of
Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image, editor of The Graphic Novel, coeditor
of Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature, and author of
eight books of poetry and countless essays on comics, narrative, and poetry
in peer-reviewed journals including Critical Inquiry, Poetics Today, Yale
French Studies, and SubStance.

bart beaty is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary

and the author of two important books on comics, Unpopular Culture:
Transforming the European Comic Book in the s and Fredric Wertham
and the Critique of Mass Culture, which historicizes the figure responsible
for comics censorship in the s and s. Beaty is also the translator
of The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen, whose original publication,
Système de la bande dessinée, outlined a systematic formal treatment of
comics semiotics, and Of Comics and Men by Jean-Paul Gabilliet, originally
published as Des Comics et des hommes, a history of the American comic
book industry. Beaty is the coauthor of Canadian Television Today with
Rebecca Sullivan and the author of David Cronenberg’s “A History of Vio-
lence,” a book-length analysis of that film.


 Contributors

bella brodzki is professor of English and comparative literature at Sarah

Lawrence College and the author of Can These Bones Live? Translation, Sur-
vival, and Cultural Memory and coeditor of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s
Autobiography. Her essays have appeared in PMLA, MLN, Yale French Stud-
ies, Studies in Twentieth-Century Fiction, Yale Journal of Criticism, Modern
Fiction Studies, and in collections such as Borderwork: Feminist Engage-
ments with Comparative Literature; Women, Autobiography, and Fiction: A
Reader; Critical Cosmos: Latin American Approaches to Fiction; Feminism
and Institutions: A Dialogue on Feminist Theory; and MLA Approaches to
Teaching Representations of the Holocaust.

isaac cates teaches English at the University of Vermont. He is currently

finishing a book on the graphic novel for Yale University Press. He has
written on comics for Indy and Confrontation magazines and on poetry for
Literary Imagination, Raritan, and The Hopkins Review. He also occasion-
ally publishes comics in collaboration with Mike Wenthe under the title
Satisfactory Comics.

michael a. chaney is associate professor of English and African and

African American Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Fugi-
tive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative, and his
essays on comics and comic art appear in American Literature, MELUS,
College Literature, International Journal of Comic Art, and the MLA volume
Approaches to Teaching the Graphic Novel.

hillary chute is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Depart-

ment of English at the University of Chicago. She was previously a Junior
Fellow in literature at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her articles have
appeared in American Periodicals, Modern Fiction Studies (for which she
also coedited the  special issue on graphic narrative), PMLA, Twentieth-
Century Literature, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. She is
associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus and author of Graphic
Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics.

rocío g. davis is professor of English at City University of Hong Kong. Her

publications include Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian Ameri-
can Family Memoirs, Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiog-
raphies of Childhood, and Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and
 Contributors 

Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles. She is coeditor of Ethnic Life Writing
and Histories: Genres, Performance, Culture (with Jaume Aurell and Ana
Beatriz Delgado), Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writ-
ing (with Sue-Im Lee), and Asian American Literature in the International
Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance (with Sämi Ludwig),
among others.

james dorsey is associate professor of Japanese at Dartmouth College. He

is the author of Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and War-
time Japan and a coeditor of Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture,
and the War. One of his current research projects focuses on the ideologi-
cally motivated folk song movement of Japan’s s, and he is also writing
about wartime representations of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, particu-
larly the submarine component. As a regular director of Dartmouth College’s
study abroad program in Japan, Dorsey often spends half the year exploring
the backstreets of Tokyo.

damian duffy is a PhD candidate in the University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science and a
founder of the Eye Trauma Comics collective (http://eyetrauma.net). He is
a comics writer and letterer whose first published graphic novel, The Hole:
Consumer Culture, created with artist John Jennings, was released by Front
 Press in . Along with Jennings, Duffy has curated several comics
art shows, including “Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators,
Characters, and Archetypes” and “Out of Sequence: Underrepresented
Voices in American Comics.” The pair’s most recent creative work can be
followed at http://jdarts.blogspot.com.

paul john eakin has been writing about autobiography since . His
most recent books are Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in
Narrative and an edited collection, The Ethics of Life Writing. He is the Ruth
N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University.

victoria a. elmwood is currently a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in the

English department at Tulane University. She specializes in life writing,
masculinity and men’s studies, twentieth-century American literature, and
American studies. She recently completed a manuscript on countercultural
men’s autobiography during the cold war, a study theorizing the gendered
 Contributors

demands of late modern U.S. citizenship, that is currently under considera-

tion at a major university press. Her work has appeared in Biography: An
Interdisciplinary Quarterly, College English, Film and History, Soundings,
and Western American Literature.

leigh gilmore is the Dorothy Cruickshank Backstrand Professor of Gen-

der and Women’s Studies at Scripps College, the author of The Limits of
Autobiography, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Self-Representation,
and numerous articles on self-representation and feminist theory, and the
coeditor of Autobiography and Postmodernism.

phoebe gloeckner is the author of A Child’s Life and Other Stories (with
an introduction by R. Crumb) and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (called “one
of the most brutally honest, shocking, tender and beautiful portrayals of
growing up female in America” by salon.com). She is an assistant professor
in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan and is cur-
rently working on a graphic novel about a family living in Ciudad Juárez,
Mexico.

ian gordon is associate professor of history and convener of American

Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is author of Comic Strips
and Consumer Culture, – and editor of Comics and Ideology and
Film and Comic Books.

david herman is professor of English at Ohio State University. The editor

of the Frontiers of Narrative book series and the journal Storyworlds, he has
published a number of studies on interdisciplinary narrative theory (with a
special focus on narrative and mind), storytelling across media, modern and
postmodern fiction, and other topics. He is currently co-guest-editing, with
Jared Gardner, a special issue of the journal SubStance devoted to “Graphic
Narratives and Narrative Theory.”

marianne hirsch is professor of English and comparative literature at

Columbia University and director of the Institute for Research on Women
and Gender. She is the author of a groundbreaking essay on Maus, which
appears in her Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory,
and her other books have helped to establish important frameworks for
thinking about trauma, memory, and visual mediations: The Familial Gaze
 Contributors 

(edited), Time and the Literary (coedited), a special issue of Signs on “Gen-
der and Cultural Memory” (coedited), and Teaching the Representation of
the Holocaust (coedited).

andrea a. lunsford is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English,

Claude and Louise Rosenberg Jr. Fellow, and director of the Program in
Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She has written or coauthored
sixteen books including The Everyday Writer, Essays on Classical Rhetoric
and Modern Discourse, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Col-
laborative Writing, and Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women and the History of
Rhetoric, as well as numerous chapters and articles. Her most recent books
include Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Public and Private Lives, Crossing Bor-
derlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies, and The New St. Martin’s
Handbook, th edition.

erin mcglothlin is associate professor German and Jewish studies at

Washington University in St. Louis. Her main research interests are in the
areas of German-Jewish literature, the literature of the Holocaust, narrative
theory, autobiography, and the graphic novel. She is the author of Second-
Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration, and
her articles have appeared in Narrative, The German Quarterly, Gegen-
wartsliteratur, and other journals and edited volumes. She has received
research fellowships from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Washington University
Center for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, and the German
Academic Exchange Service.

nima naghibi is associate professor of English at Ryerson University in

Toronto and author of Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and
Iran. She is currently working on a book-length project on the notable surge
in autobiographical forms produced by Iranian women, proposing that the
trauma of the  Iranian Revolution has created new possibilities for
Iranian women’s subjectivities.

linda haverty rugg is associate professor of Scandinavian studies at the

University of California at Berkeley and author of Picturing Ourselves: Pho-
tography and Autobiography. She is completing a manuscript, “The Auteur’s
Autograph: Cinematic Auteurism and Autobiography.”
 Contributors

sidonie smith is the Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of

English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan and  Pres-
ident of the Modern Language Association. Her publications include A
Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-
Representation; Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiograph-
ical Practices in the Twentieth Century; Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of
Autobiography (coedited with Julia Watson); Writing New Identities: Gender,
Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (coedited with Gisela
Brinker-Gabler); Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (coedited with
Julia Watson); Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narra-
tives (with Julia Watson); Moving Lives: Women’s Twentieth Century Travel
Narratives; Interfaces: Women’s Visual and Performance Autobiography (co-
edited with Julia Watson); Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of
Recognition (with Kay Schaffer).

domna c. stanton is professor of seventeenth-century and early modern

French studies at CUNY. Her first book, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study
of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-
Century French Literature, is considered a classic. Her edited volumes in-
clude The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the
Present; The Female Autograph; Discourses of Sexuality from Aristotle to
AIDS; and Feminisms in the Academy.

stephen e. tabachnick is professor of English at the University of Mem-

phis. He is the coauthor of Harold Pinter, author of Lawrence of Arabia:
An Encyclopedia; Fiercer than Tigers: The Life and Works of Rex Warner;
Images of Lawrence; Charles Doughty; and T. E. Lawrence, and editor of
Explorations in Doughty’s “Arabia Deserta” and The T. E. Lawrence Puzzle.
As a comics scholar, he is the editor of the Modern Language Association’s
Approaches to Teaching the Graphic Novel and the author of “A Comic Book
World” (World Literature Today . []). Tabachnick was among the
first to interpret the structural and religious dimensions of Spiegelman’s
Maus, in “Of Maus and Memory: The Structure of Art Spiegelman’s Graphic
Novel of the Holocaust” (Word & Image . []) and “The Religious
Meaning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus” (Shofar . []).

Theresa Tensuan is assistant professor of English at Haverford College.

Her articles include “Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda
 Contributors 

Barry and Marjane Satrapi” and “Talking-story: Rearticulating Identity,

Recasting Canons, and Rereading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman
Warrior”; her essay “Drawing the Line” on Jaime Cortez’s Sexile and the
Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus
Boycott is forthcoming in the journal Biography. She is completing a manu-
script on women’s graphic novels and social transformation.

julia watson is associate dean and professor of English at Ohio State

University. A prolific and path-finding scholar of autobiography, her books
(with long-time coeditor Sidonie Smith) include Before They Could Vote:
American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, –; Interfaces: Women,
Autobiography, Image, Performance; Reading Autobiography: A Guide for
Interpreting Life Narratives (cowritten with Sidonie Smith); Women, Autobi-
ography, Theory: A Reader; Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography;
De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography.

carolyn williams is professor of English at Rutgers. She is author of

Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism and coeditor of
Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (with Laurel Brake and Lesley Hig-
gins). Her new book on the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan will appear
in  as Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. She is currently
working on another book about the aesthetic form of Victorian melodrama.

joseph witek is professor of English at Stetson University, author of Comic

Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and
Harvey Pekar, and editor of Art Spiegelman: Conversations.
 Index
Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations.
Abellio, Raymond (George Soulès), 
Adams, Timothy Dow, 
Adorno, Theodor, , , n, 
Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias character,
, , , , , –
African autobiographical comics, –
Alechinsky, Pierre, 
Allen, Woody, , n
Alternative Comics (Hatfield), , , 
American Born Chinese (Yang), –
American Elf strips (Kochalka): about,
, ; closure and, –, ,
–; diary comics and, , –
; diary genres and, –, –,
, ; documentary and, ; fam-
ily life narratives and, , ; four
panel formal feature and, , ,
–, , –; graphic
memoirs and, , ; Internet
publications and, , , –;
life writing and, , ; lyric style
and, –, , –, n;
narrative structural devices and,
–, –, , , ; /
attacks and, –, ; present
moment experiences and, –,
–, n; punch line and, ,
; writing in the moment due to

unknowable future and, –, ,
, , 
American Splendor (Pekar), , ,
, 
animal fables/fairy tales, –, ,
, 
animals: fairy tales and, –, , ,
; as metaphors, , , , ; as
witnesses, , , –, , 
animation genre, , n
Antoine Doinel (fictional character),
, 
archives, , , , n; The
Complete Maus (Spiegelman) and,
–; crisis comics and, ;
documentary, ; Fun Home (Bechdel)
and, –, –, , n,
n; graphic novel and, , ,
n
art brut (raw art) techniques, ,
n
artifice/artifactual making, , ,
nn–
artistic development: Bechdel and, ,
; One Hundred Demons (Barry)
and, –, , , n, ;
Spiegelman and, , , –, –
, 
 Index
artists: aloneness/support, and women,
, , ; Künstlerroman and, ,
, , n, , ; reader
collaborations with, , 
Asian American representation, –
ATHICA (Athens Institute for
Contemporary Art), 
aural dimensions, –, n
Auschwitz, –, –, , ,
nn, n. See also Holocaust
autobifictionalography, –, , ,

autobiographical avatars: Binky Brown
Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (Green),
; crisis comics, –, , ;
filmic autobiographies and, –,
n; Fun Home (Bechdel), , ,
–; graphic memoirs and, , ;
otherness and, –; Persepolis
(Satrapi and Paronnaud) and, ,
, n; SecondLife and, ,
n
autobiographical comics, , , ,
n. See also graphic novel;
specific authors/artists; specific
autobiographical comics
autobiographical pacts, , , , –
autobiographies: about, , , –,
n; autobiographical comics and,
–, , –; bandes dessinées
and, , ; becoming, , , ;
childhood of author figure and, , ,
; comic books and, , , ;
comix books and, ; death of author
figure and, , , n; dramatic, ,
, , –, , n; fiction
compared with, –, , ; identity
and, , ; images and, ; Iranian
women and, , ; lyric style and,
, , , n; memoir boom
and, , ; memory and, ; narrating
I and, , –; photographs and, ;
recontextualization of structuralist
models and, –; referential pact
and, –, ; relational, , ,
n; re-vision and, , –, n;
self/other representations and, ;
self-representation and, , . See also
filmic autobiographies
autobiographix, , n
autobiography of discovery, –, ,
–
autofiction, . See also fictional graphic
novels
autographics/autographies: about, , ,
, n; crisis comics and, , ;
filmic autobiographies compared with,
, , –, , nn–;
graphic memoirs and, , , –
, –, n; otherness and, .
See also photographs; photographs/
drawings; specific authors/artists;
specific autographics
autogynography, –, . See
also autographics/autographies;
photographs
Baetens, Jan, –
bandes dessinées (French language
comics), , –. See also specific
authors/artists
Barry, Lynda: autobifictionalography
and, , , ; biographical
information about, n; on breast
cancer narratives, ; collectivities
and, , , –, ; critical
analyses and, –, nn–,
n; disturbing content and, –
, , , , , n; on
dramatic autobiography, n;
economy of style and, , n;
feminist autobiographical comics and,
, n; four panel formal feature
and, –, ; minicomics and,
, n; Naked Ladies!, –,
, n, nn–, n; nar-
rating I and, ; narrative structural
devices and, , –, n;
 Index
photographs/fictional images and,
, , , ; punch line in
comic strips and, , ; “The Red
Comb,” –, , , n;
self-representation and, , n;
sexual abuse narratives and, –,
, –, n; space as formal
feature and, , –, ; story-
telling and, –, ; as teacher,
–, –; What It Is, ,
n, n, –; writings, ,
, n. See also One Hundred
Demons (Barry)
Barthes, Roland, –, , , , ,

Bazambanza, Rupert, Smile through the
Tears, –
Beaty, Bart, , –
Beauchard, David. See David B.; Epileptic
(David B.)
Bechdel, Alison, , n, n,
. See also Fun Home (Bechdel)
Being in Pictures (Leonard), –,
, , , n
Benhabib, Seyla, , , n
Berberian, Charles, 
Bidloo, Govard, 
bildungsroman, –, n, 
Binbin Fu, –
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
(Green), , , 
Blankets (Thompson), , , 
Bloom, Lynn A., , 
bodies: anatomical representations of,
–, n, nn–, n;
violence on women’s, , , ,
n; as visual displays, –,
, , , 
Bolter, Jay David, , n
Braun, Christina von, –
Breakdowns: From Maus to Now
(Spiegelman): artistic development
and, –, ; historical/
autobiographical context and, , ;

self-representation and, , –,
–, , , 
Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a
Young @&*! (Spiegelman): artistic
development and, , , –; auto-
biographical re-vision and, , –,
n; childhood of author figure and,
, , ; death of author figure and,
, , n; identity/differences
and, ; narrative structural devices
and, , , –, , , n; self-
representation and, , n, –,
, , , ; Ur-images and, n, 
breaking the frame, , , , , , ,
–, n
breast cancer: carcinogenic products
and, , , –, , ,
n; economics of breast cancer
treatments and, , –; funding
for cancer research and, , , ;
medical system critique and, ; nar-
ratives about, –, n; spiritual
enlightenment and, ; treatments
for cancer profits and, , –,
, n; violence on women’s
bodies and, , , , n. See
also specific authors/artists; specific
autobiographical comics
Bremond, Claude, 
Brodzki, Bella, –
Brown, Chester, –, –
Brown, Jeffrey, , , , , –
, n, n, n
Bruner, Jerome, –
Camus, Albert, , 
cancer, breast. See breast cancer
The Cancer Journals (Lorde), , ,

Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person
(Engelberg), –
Cancer Vixen (Marchetto), –
CANVAS (Collaborative Advanced Nav-
igation Virtual Art Studio), –
 Index
Carnet de Voyage (Thompson), 
Caruth, Cathy, , –, n
Cates, Isaac, –
Catholocism, , , 
CD-ROM, The Complete Maus
(Spiegelman), –, n, n,
n
Chaney, Michael A., –, –
A Child’s Life (Gloeckner), , 
Chinese/Chinese American representa-
tions, , –
Chute, Hillary, , , , n,
n, n, n, n
cinematic autobiographies. See filmic
autobiographies
classified ads, –, , n
classism, , –, 
closure: about, , ; diary comics and,
–, , –; Fun Home
(Bechdel) and, , , , ,
n
Clumsy (Brown), , , , ,
–, n, n, n
Cobra movement, , n
Cohn, Dorrit, 
Colette, , 
collage, –, , n, n,
n
collectivities, , , –, ,
–, , 
comic books: autobiographies and, ,
, ; balloons/images and, , ;
critical analyses and, –; read-
ers/reading and, –, n, ,
n. See also specific authors/artists;
specific comics
Comic Books as History (Witek),
–
comics forms, , . See also specific
authors/artists; specific autobiographi-
cal comics
comic strips, , , , –, .
See also specific authors/artists; spe-
cific autobiographical comics
coming-of-age artist narrative (Künstler-
roman), , , , n, , 
coming-of-age stories: Fun Home
(Bechdel), , –, –, ,
n, , , ; Persepolis
(Satrapi and Paronnaud) and, ;
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(Satrapi), , –, , , ,
; th Century Boys (Urasawa
Naoki), 
coming-out stories, , , –,
–, , , n
comix books: about, , , , n,
–, n; critical analyses and,
–, , , –, n
The Complete Maus (Spiegelman), –
, n, n, n
confessionals, , , , , , ,

coping mechanisms, –, –
Couser, Tomas, –, n
crisis comics, –, , , –,
n, n
Crumb, Robert, , –, , ,
n, , 
cubismo technique, , 
cultural status, high/low, –, ,
–, , –, n, n,
nn–
Daston, Loraine, , 
daughter/father narratives. See Fun
Home (Bechdel)
David B., and L’Association, , .
See also Epileptic (David B.)
Davis, Rocío G., n, n, –
death/life connection, and photographs,
–, , , –, –, , 
De Jesús, Luisa, , n
DeKoven, Marienne, , n
A Dialogue on Love (Sedgwick), –,
n, n
diary comics: about, , , n,
n; closure and, –, ,
 Index
–; diary genres and, –,
–; documentary and, –,
; family life narratives and, –,
; four panel formal feature and,
, , –, , –, ;
graphic memoirs and, , ;
hourly, , n; Internet publica-
tions and, , , –, n;
life writing and, , ; lyric style
and, –, , –, n;
minicomics and, , , n;
narrative structural devices and, –
, –, , , ; / attacks
and, –, ; present moment
experiences and, –, –,
n; punch line and, , , ;
storytelling and, , –, ;
writing in the moment/unknowable
future and, –, , , ,
. See also specific authors/artists;
specific diary comics
diary genres, –, , –, ,
n
differences, and identity, , , , ,
, 
disturbing content, in comics, , –
, , , , , n
Dr. Manhattan character, –, ,
n
documentary: about, , ; aesthetic
distinction versus, , –, , ,
–, n; archives and, ;
autobiographical comics and, –,
, , ; autogynography and,
; bandes dessinées and, ; diary
comics and, –, ; filmic auto-
biographies and, , ; photographs
and, 
Doležel, Lubomír, 
domestic ethnography. See family life
narratives
Dorsey, James, –
Doucet, Julie, , , , , , ,
n

dramatic autobiography, , , ,
–, , n
Drawn and Quarterly (magazine), 
Drawn and Quarterly (publisher), ,
, 
dreams, , –, , –, ,
, n, 
Dubose, Mike S., 
Dubrow, Heather, 
Duffy, Damian, –
Duras, Marguerite, 
Dwork, Debórah, 
Eakin, Paul John, –, n
Edwards, Jason, 
Eisner, Will, , 
Elmwood, Victoria A., –
empowerment, 
Engelberg, Miriam, –
Epileptic (David B.): autobiography of
discovery and, –, , ;
coping mechanisms and, –,
–; Jewish identification and,
, , –; memory and, ;
realism/dream meld and, –,
, –, ; remembering and,
; self-discovery process and,
–, , –; truths and,
, 
Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick),
, 
Epstein, Helen, , 
erotic truths, , –, , , ,
, 
ethnicity/ethnic relations, , , , ,
. See also racism
experiencing I, , , , n
fairy tales/animal fables, –, , , 
Falloppio, Gabriele, 
family life narratives: diary comics
and, , ; entanglements/
disclosures and, , , –,
–, , , n, n;
 Index
family life narratives (continued)
father/son narratives and, –;
gendered relations in families and,
, , –, –, , n,
n, n; Maus: Volumes I & II
(Spiegelman) and, –, , , ,
; One Hundred Demons (Barry) and,
, nn–; Persepolis (Satrapi
and Paronnaud) and, , ;
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(Satrapi) and, , ; second genera-
tion of autobiographical comics and,
–. See also Fun Home (Bechdel)
family pictures, –, , , , ,
–, –, ; postmemory and,
–. See also Fun Home (Bechdel);
photographs/drawings
father/child narratives, –, –,
–, . See also Fun Home
(Bechdel)
“father tongue” resistance, , n
Felman, Shoshana, , , , ,
n
feminist autobiographical comics:
“father tongue” resistance and, ,
n; femininity/feminism and,
–, –, , ; gender
stereotypes challenges and, , , ;
homosexuality/sexuality and, ,
–, , –, , , ,
n; illness/death embodiment
and, –, n, –, n,
n; queer identification, , –;
sexual desires narratives reframed
and, , , , , –;
trauma narratives and, . See also
politics of self-representation of
women; specific authors/artists;
specific autobiographical comics
fictional graphic novels: bandes
dessinées and, –; nonfiction/
fiction categorization of Maus:
Volumes I & II (Spiegelman) and, ,
n; photographs/fictional images
and, , , , ; science
fiction/fantasy and, , ; second
generation of autobiographical
comics, ; self-representation and,
; -D autobiographical fiction and,
, , . See also specific
authors/artists
Filipina lives, , n. See also One
Hundred Demons (Barry)
filmic autobiographies: animation genre
and, , n; autobiographical
avatars, –; autographies
compared with, , , –, ,
nn–; color and, , –,
n; flashback technique and, ,
–, , n; French cinema,
–; self/other representations and,
–, n. See also Persepolis
(Satrapi and Paronnaud)
first generation of autobiographical
comics, –, . See also second
generation of autobiographical
comics; specific authors/artists;
specific autobiographical comics
flashback technique, , –, ,
n
Fleener, Mary: autobiographical comics
and, , ; autobiographix, use of
term, n; cubismo technique and,
, ; Life of the Party, , –
, , , , 
forgetting, , n
formal features. See narrative structural
devices
four panel formal feature, , –,
–, , –, 
French cinema, –. See also filmic
autobiographies
French language comics (bandes
dessinées), , –. See also specific
authors/artists
Fréon (Frémok; FRMK), , 
Freud, Sigmund, , , , , –
, n
 Index
Frohmayer, John E., 
Fun Home (Bechdel): about, , ,
–, ; archives and, –,
–, , n, n; arti-
fice/artifactual making and, , ,
nn–; artistic development
and, , ; autobiographical
avatars and, , , –;
autobiographical interface and, ,
n; autographics and, , ,
–, –, n; bodies as
visual displays and, –, , ,
, ; closure and, , , ,
, n; coming-of-age/coming-
out story and, , , –, –
, , , n, ; erotic truths
and, , –, , , , ,
; family life entanglements/
disclosures and, , , –,
–, , , n, n;
femininity/feminism and, –,
–, , ; Fun Home, use of
term, ; gendered relations in
families and, , , –, –
, , n, n, n;
graphic memoirs and, ; gutter effect
and, , ; homosexuality/sexuality
and, , –, , –, ,
, , n; memory and, –
, , , , –; mirroring/
illusion and, , , , , ;
Modernist literary references and,
, ; narrative structural devices
and, –, , –, , ,
–, nn–, n; otherness
and, ; personal criticism and, ,
n; photographs/drawings and,
–, , –, , , ,
n, n; reader-author/artist
collaborations and, ; recursive
patterns and, , –, , –
, , n; reflexivity and, ,
; reinterpretation and, , ,
, , , , ; relational

autobiographies and, , n;
sexual desire narratives reframed and,
, , , , –; spiritual
paternity and, –, ; split
subject/narratives and, –, ,
, , ; storytelling and, ,
, –, nn–; temporal
sequencing/spiraling narratives and,
, –, , , n; trauma
narratives and, , –; viewer-
voyeur and, , , . See also
Bechdel, Alison
Galiston, Peter, , 
Gardner, Jared, , , , , ,
n, –, n
gekiga (dramatic drawings comics style),
–. See also manga (Japanese
comic books/style)
gender: autobiographical comics and, ;
bandes dessinées and, ; gendered
childhood, ; gendered genres,
n; gendered relations in families
and, , , –, –, ,
n, n, n; hijab/gendered
state violence, , , , –;
Portraits crachés (Goblet) and, , –
; storytelling and, n
Genette, Gérard, , n
genre material, , –, n
Gibbons, David, , . See also
Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons)
Gilmore, Leigh, , , , , , ,
–
Glamour magazine, –
globalization: bandes dessinées and, ,
–; commodification and, , ,
; crisis comics and, –, , ,
–, n, n; human rights
politics and, –, –, –;
manga and, , –, –;
Rwanda genocide and, –. See
also Epileptic (David B.); filmic
autobiographies; Portraits crachés
 Index
globalization (continued)
(Goblet); specific authors/artists;
specific autographics
Gloeckner, Phoebe, –, –,
, n, , 
Goblet, Dominique: ambivalent status of
works by, –; autobiographies and,
; autofiction and, ; “father tongue”
resistance and, , n; feminist
autobiographical comics and, , ,
; Fréon and, , ; grammatext-
uality and, , , , ; graphiation,
–, , n; L’Association and, ;
narrative structural devices and, –
; queer identification and, ; story-
telling and, –, n; thematic
features and, , , n; writings,
. See also Portraits crachés (Goblet)
Gordon, Ian, –
grammatextuality, , , , 
graphiation, –, , n
graphic life writing: about, , –;
autobiographical pacts and, ; crisis
comics and, , ; cubismo technique
and, , ; experiencing I and, ,
, , n; life writing dimen-
sions and, –; narrating I and,
, , , , –, n,
n; narrative structural devices
and, , –; self-representation
and, –, , , , ,
nn–; storyworlds and, , ,
, , , n; worldmaking
narratives and, , –. See also
specific graphic life writing authors;
specific graphic life writings
graphic memoirs: about, , –, ;
autobiographical avatars and, , ;
autographics and, , , –;
diary comics and, , ; gutter
effect and, , ; human rights poli-
tics and, –; identity/differences
and, , ; Maus: Volumes I & II
(Spiegelman) and, ; otherness and,
; recursive patterns and, , ,
–, , –, , n;
storytelling and, ; trauma narratives
and, . See also witnessing; specific
graphic memoirs
graphic novel, use of term, –, . See
also autobiographical comics; specific
authors/artists; specific graphic novels
Green, Justin, , , , n, 
Groensteen, Thierry, 
Grusin, Richard, , n
gutter effect: about, , , ;
closure and, ; comics and, , ;
crisis comics and, , ; A Dialogue
on Love (Sedgwick), , –, ;
Fun Home (Bechdel) and, , ;
graphic memoirs and, , , , ;
meta-gutter, ; One Hundred
Demons (Barry) and, –, 
haiban (travel narrative form), 
Haidu, Peter, –
hand/handwriting, , , n
Hatfield, Charles, –, , , , 
healing, and Holocaust, , 
hentai (Japanese comics that simulate
rape and molestation), 
Hergé, Tintin series, –, , 
Herman, David, , n, –,
, n
Hernandez brothers, –
high/low cultural status of comics, –
, , –, n, n,
nn–
hijab/gendered state violence, , ,
, –
Hirsch, Marianne, –, , 
historical context: autobiographical, ,
, ; identity within, , , –
, –; Rwanda genocide and,
–, 
HIV/AIDS crisis comics, –, , ,
n
Hoesterey, Ingeborg, , n
 Index
Holocaust: Auschwitz and, –, –
, , , nn, n; children
and, –; critical analyses of comics
and, ; documentary/aesthetic
distinction and, , –, , –,
n; family pictures and, –;
healing and, , ; narrative of, ;
photographs and, , , –,
n, n; photographs/drawings
and, , , , , , , , n;
realism/representation of, ;
uncomprehension/comprehension
and, , , , 
homosexuality/sexuality, , –, ,
–, , –, , , ,
n
Howarth, William, , 
Hsu, Hsuan L., , n
Hughes, Jamie A., –
human rights politics, –, –,
–. See also crisis comics
Huyssen, Andreas, 
hyperreal, , –. See also -D
autobiographical fiction
identity: about, ; authorial, , , ;
autobiographical comics and, –;
autobiographies and, , ; differences
and, , , , , , ; within his-
torical context, , , –, ,
, , ; Jewish identification
and, , , –; Portraits
crachés (Goblet) and, –; queer
identification and, , –; self-
representation and, , n; Smile
through the Tears (Bazambanza) and,
–; truths and, , 
ideological tensions, nostalgia/
millennialism, –, , ,
–
illusion/mirroring, , , , ,

images: autobiographies and, ; balloons/
images, , ; fictional images and,

, , , ; imagetext and, ,
, , n; Ur-images and, n, 
Internet publications, , , –,
n
In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegel-
man), , , n, 
Iranian Revolution, , , , ,
, –
Jackson, Jack, 
Japanese writing forms, , –, .
See also manga (Japanese comic
books/style); specific authors/artists
Jennings, John, , , 
Jewish identification, , , –
Joyce, James, , , –, –,
nn–, , 
Kagle, Steven E., 
Kaplan, Caren, , n
King, Samantha, , 
Klüger, Ruth, n
Knisley, Lucy, , n
Kochalka, James. See American Elf strips
(Kochalka)
Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, , 
Kristiva, Julia, , n
Künstlerroman (coming-of-age artist
narrative), , , , n, , 
Lapacherie, Jean Gérard, 
L’Association, , , 
Laub, Dori, , , , , , n
Léaud, Jean-Pierre, , , 
Lejeune, Philippe, , , , , 
Leonard, Joanne, Being in Pictures, –
, , , , n
lesbianism. See homosexuality/sexuality
Life of the Party (Fleener), , –,
, , , , 
life writing, , , , –, , ,
. See also graphic life writing; poli-
tics of self-representation of women;
specific writings

Lincoln, Martha, , n
Lorde, Audre, , , , 
Lunsford, Andrea A., –
lyric style, , , , n, –,
, –, n
MAD magazine, , n, 
manga (Japanese comic books/style), ,
–, –
Manovich, Lev, , n
Marchetto, Marisa Acocella, –,
, 
Martin, Biddy, , n
Maslov, Nikolai, Siberia, –
Mason, Hollis, Under the Hood, –,
, 
mass mediated identities, , –
Matt, Joe, –
Maus: Volumes I & II (Spiegelman):
animal fables/fairy tales and, –,
, , ; artist author and, ;
Auschwitz and, –, –, ,
n; authorial identity and, ; auto-
biographical comics and, –; back
jacket, ; breaking the frame and, ,
, , , , , –, n; criti-
cal analyses and, ; death/life connec-
tion and, , , –, –, , ;
documentary/aesthetic distinction
and, , , , –, n; dualities
of characters and, ; ethnicity/ethnic
relations and, , ; family narratives
and, –, , , ; family pictures
and, , –; father/son narratives
and, –, –; female voice and,
–, ; graphic memoirs and, ;
healing and, , ; imagetext and, ,
, , n; Maus, use of term, –
; memory and, –, , , ;
mother’s absence/presence and, –
; mourning and, , , , –;
narrative structural devices and, –
, –, –, –, , –,
n, n, n; nationalities and,
Index
; nonfiction/fiction classification
and, , n; Orpheus story and,
–; otherness and, ; past/present
time and, , , , , ; photo-
graphs and, , , , , , ,
n; photographs/drawings and, ,
, , , , , , n; post-
memory and, , –, , , , ,
; “Prison on the Hell Planet,” ,
–, –, , , n, , ;
relational autobiographies and, ;
self-representation and, –, ,
n, n; survivor’s tales and, –
, , , –, nn, ; tale, use
of term, ; trauma narratives and, ,
, , –, , 
McCloud, Scott, , , , , 
McGlothlin, Erin, –
McShane, James, 
memory: autobiographical comics and,
; autobiographies and, ; Epileptic
(David B.), ; Fun Home (Bechdel)
and, –, , , , –;
Gilmore on, ; Maus: Volumes I & II
(Spiegelman) and, –, , , ;
memoir boom and, , ; One Hun-
dred Demons (Barry) and, , ,
–, n; Smile through the
Tears (Bazambanza) and, –, ;
-D autobiographical fiction and, 
men: father/child narratives, –, –
, –, ; “father tongue”
resistance and, , n. See also Fun
Home (Bechdel); gender; specific
authors/artists; specific autobio-
graphical comics
Menu, Jean-Christophe, , 
millennialism/nostalgia tensions, –
, , , –
Miller, Nancy K., n, , , n
minicomics, , , n, , n
mirroring/illusion, , , , ,

Mitchell, W. J. T., , n, 
 Index
Mittell, Jason, 
modernism/Modernist literature, , ,
–, , , n
Modernist literary references, , .
See also specific authors/artists
Moen, Erika, , 
Monkey King story, –
Moore, Alan, , . See also
Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons)
mother/child narratives, , , –,
, , , nn–
mourning, , , , , , –
Naghibi, Nima, –
Naked Ladies! (Barry), –, ,
n, nn–, n
narrated I, , 
narrating I: autobiographies and, ,
–; autogynography and, ;
Barry and, ; commentary by, ,
; experiencing I distinction from,
, , , n; graphic life
writing texts and, , , , ,
–, n, n; narrated I
distinction from, , . See also
self-representations
narrative structural devices: American
Elf strips (Kochalka), –, –
, , , ; autobiographical
comics and, , , n; Barry and,
, –, n; Breakdowns:
Portrait . . . (Spiegelman) and, , ,
–, , , n; breaking the
frame and, , , , , , , –
, n; classified ads and, –,
, n; collage and, –, ,
n, nn–; color in films
and, , –, n; cubismo
technique and, , ; database
principle and, , n; diary comics
and, –, –, , , ;
economy of style and, , n;
female voice and, –, ; flashback
technique and, , –, ,

n; four panels and, , –,
–, , –, ; Fun Home
(Bechdel) and, –, , –,
, , –, nn–, n;
genre material and, , –,
n; Goblet and, –, –, ,
, ; graphic life writing texts, ,
–; hand/handwriting and, ,
, n; list feature and, –,
, ; lyric style and, , , ,
n, –, , –, n;
Maus: Volumes I & II (Spiegelman)
and, –, –, –, –, ,
–, n, n, n; mirror-
ing/illusion and, , , , ,
; nonnarrative/narrative overlap
and, –, , , , ; One
Hundred Demons (Barry) and, ,
–, –, –, –,
n, n, n, nn–,
nn–, n; particulariza-
tion and, –; Persepolis: The Story
of a Childhood (Satrapi), –, ,
, ; Portraits crachés (Goblet)
and, –, , , , , n;
punch line and, , , , ,
; raw art techniques and, ,
n; realism/dream meld and,
–, , –, ; recontextu-
alization of, –; re-narrativization
and, , –, , nn–;
space and, , , , –, ;
split subject/narratives and, –,
, , , ; thematic features
and, , , –; viewer-voyeur and,
, , ; writing in the moment/
unknowable future and, –, ,
, , . See also closure; gutter
effect
narrative time: past/present time and,
, , , , ; Persepolis: The
Story of a Childhood (Satrapi) and,
, ; present moment experi-
ences and, –, –, n;

narrative time (continued)
temporal sequencing/spiraling
narratives and, , –, ,
, n, , –; -D
autobiographical fiction and, –,
; transient/temporal present and,
, , –, –, n;
trauma narratives and, ; Watchmen
(Moore and Gibbons) and, –,
n. See also memory; postmem-
ory; remembering
narrativization/re-narrativization, ,
–, , nn–
naturalism, , 
Neufeld, Josh, A.D.: New Orleans after
the Deluge, –, 
NGOs (nongovernmental organizations),
, , 
/ attacks (September , 
attacks), , –, 
s counterculture, –
Noomin, Diane, 
Nora, Pierre, 
nostalgia/millennialism ideological
tensions, –, , , –
Novak, Amy, , 
Olney, James, –, , n
One Hundred Demons (Barry): artistic
development and, –, , ,
n, ; autobifictionalography
and, –, ; classified ads and,
–, , n; collage and,
–, , n, nn–;
collectivities and, , , –,
; critical analyses and, n;
family life narratives and, ,
nn–; feminist autobiographi-
cal comics and, ; Filipina lives and,
, n; genre material and, ,
–, n; gutter effect and,
–, ; hand/handwriting and,
, , n; high/low cultural
status of comics and, –, ,
Index
–, n, n, nn–
; joyful/violent lives, ; Künstler-
roman and, ; memory and, ,
, –, n; narrative struc-
tural devices and, –, , n;
photographs and, , , , ,
, –, , ; reflexivity and,
, n; remembering and, ,
, , ; re-narrativization and,
–, , nn–; self-
representation and, –, , ,
, –, , n; sexual
abuse narratives and, , –,
n; space as formal feature and,
; temporal sequencing/spiraling
narratives and, , –; trauma
narratives and, , –, , –
, nn–, n, n, –
; witnessing and, , , ;
working class and, 
Orpheus story, –
Osaka Expo, , , 
Others/otherness/the other: autograph-
ics and, ; Barry and, ; graphic
memoirs and, ; Jewish identification
and, ; mother representation and,
; Persepolis (Satrapi and Paronnaud)
and, , ; self/other representa-
tions and, , , –, n
Paronnaud, Vincent, , , ,
n. See also Persepolis (Satrapi and
Paronnaud)
particularization, –
Peepshow (Matt), , , , n
Pekar, Harvey, , , , , , ,
–, 
Persepolis (film, Satrapi and Paronnaud):
about, ; animation genre and, ,
n; autobiographical avatar and,
, , n; autography/filmic
autobiography comparison and, –
, , nn–; class privilege
and, , –, ; color as formal
 Index
feature and, , –, n;
coming-of-age stories and, ; family
life narratives and, , ; filmic
autobiographies and, , , –
, , nn–, n; flashback
technique and, , –, ,
n; hijab/gendered state violence
and, , , –; Iranian Revolu-
tion and, , , –; otherness
and, , ; particularization and,
–; reinterpretation and, –
; remediation and, , n;
remembering and, , –, ,
; transient/temporal present and,
, , –, –, n;
trauma narratives and, –, ;
universality and, –
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(Satrapi): about, , n; child
witnessing and, –, , n;
coming-of-age stories and, , –,
, , , ; documentary and,
; family life narratives and, ,
; gendered childhood and, ;
graphic memoirs and, , ;
hijab/veiling as gendered state
violence and, , –; Iranian
Revolution and, , , , ,
–; narrative structural devices
and, –, , , ; readers
witnessing and, ; reflexivity and,
, ; remembering and, , ;
universality and, 
Persepolis II: The Story of a Return
(Satrapi), n, 
photographs: authorial identity and, ;
autobiographies and, ; autogyn-
ography and, –, ; death/life
connection and, –, , , –
, –, , ; documentary and,
; fictional images and, , ,
, ; Maus: Volumes I & II
(Spiegelman), , , , , , ,
n; One Hundred Demons (Barry)

and, , , , , , –,
, ; self/other representations
and, , –. See also photographs/
drawings; specific authors/artists
photographs/drawings: Fun Home
(Bechdel), –, , –, ,
, , n, n; Maus II
(Spiegelman), , , ; Maus:
Volumes I & II (Spiegelman), , ,
, , , , , n. See also
family pictures; photographs
Pillemer, David, –
Plummer, Ken, n
Pluto (Urasawa Naoki), 
politics of self-representation of women:
anatomical representations and, –
, n, nn–, n; breast
cancer narratives and, –, n;
breast illustrations and, –,
n; carcinogenic products and,
, , –, , , n;
economics of breast cancer treatments
and, , –; fetishization of
female stereotypes and, –, –
, , ; funding for cancer
research and, , , ; medical
system critique and, ; spiritual
enlightenment and, ; treatments
for cancer profits and, , –,
, n; violence on women’s
bodies and, , , , n;
women’s anatomy and, –, ,
n. See also women; specific
authors/artists; specific autobio-
graphical comics
Portraits crachés (Goblet): ambivalent
status and, , ; art brut techniques
and, , n; becoming autobio-
graphies and, , , ; database
principle and, , n; gender and,
, –; identity and, –; list
feature and, –, , ; nonnarra-
tive/narrative overlap and, –, ,
, , ; queer identification and,

Portraits crachés (Goblet) (continued)
–; space as formal feature and, ,
; storytelling and, –; thematic
features and, , , –. See also
Goblet, Dominique
postmemory: about, –, n; family
pictures and, –; Maus: Volumes I
& II (Spiegelman) and, , –, ,
, , , ; Spiegelman and, , –
, , , , , ; trauma narra-
tives and, . See also narrative time
present moment experiences, –,
–, n
Printed Matter, , n
“Prison on the Hell Planet” (Spiegelman),
, –, –, , , n, , 
Proust, Marcel, , , , , ,
, nn
punch line, , , , , 
queer identification, , –. See also
homosexuality/sexuality
Queyssi, Laurent, , 
racism, –, –, –, . See
also crisis comics; ethnicity/ethnic
relations
raw art (art brut) techniques, , n
readers: author/artist collaborations
with, , ; reading comics and, –
, n; viewer-voyeur, , , ;
as witnesses, 
realism: autobiographical comics and, ,
; cancer narratives and, ; dream
meld with, , , , –, ;
Holocaust/holocaust representation
and, , ; manga and, , ,
–
recursive patterns, , , –, ,
–, , n
“The Red Comb” (Barry), –, ,
, n
Reel Family (Leonard), 
referential pact, –, –
Index
reflexivity, , , , , , , ,
n
reinterpretation, , , , , ,
, , –
Reklaw, Jesse, , , , , n,
n
relational autobiography, , , n
remediation, , n
remembering: Epileptic (David B.) and,
; forgetting versus, , n;
One Hundred Demons (Barry), ,
, , ; Persepolis (Satrapi
Paronnaud), , –, , ;
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(Satrapi) and, , –, , ,
, 
Remi, Georges Prosper, Tintin series,
–, , 
re-narrativization/narrativization, ,
–, , nn–
rescue politics, , –, , 
Rugg, Linda Haverty, , –
Rwanda genocide, –
Sally Jupiter character, , , ,
–
Salomon, Charlotte, , n
Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis II: The Story
of a Return, n, . See also
Persepolis (Satrapi and Paronnaud);
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(Satrapi)
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 
science fiction/fantasy, , 
second generation of autobiographical
comics: about, , –, , ;
confessionals and, –; critiques of
artists and, ; downbeat aesthetics
and, ; family life narratives and,
–; narrative structural devices
and, ; network of artists and,
–, . See also selective mutual
reinforcement; specific authors/artists;
specific autobiographical comics
 Index
SecondLife, , n
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, –, n,
n
selective mutual reinforcement: comics-
cartoonist relationships and, ,
–; critiques among artists and,
–; fictional graphic novels and,
–, ; influences on artists
and, –, ; referencial pact
and, –, –; truths and, –
. See also second generation of auto-
biographical comics; specific authors/
artists; specific autobiographical
comics
self-discovery process, –, ,
–
self/other representations, , , –,
n
self-representations: autobiographical
comics and, , , –, ; autobiog-
raphies and, ; Breakdowns: From
Maus to Now (Spiegelman) and, ,
–, –, , , ; Breakdowns:
Portrait . . . (Spiegelman) and, –
, , , , ; fictional graphic
novels and, ; graphic life writing
and, –, , , , ,
nn–; Maus: Volumes I & II
(Spiegelman) and, –, , n,
n; One Hundred Demons
(Barry) and, –, , , –
, , n, n; otherness
and, , , –, n; photographs
and, ; superhero comics and, ;
Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons) and,
, n
September ,  attacks (/
attacks), , –, 
Seth (Gregory Gallant), –, –
sexual abuse narratives, –, ,
–, n
sexuality: homosexuality and, , –
, , –, , , ,
n; sexual desires narratives

reframed and, , , , ,
–
Shklovsky, Victor, 
Shoah. See Holocaust
Sketchbook Diaries (Kochalka), , .
See also American Elf strips
(Kochalka)
Slaughter, Joseph, –
Smile through the Tears (Bazambanza),
–
Smith, Sidonie, , –, n, n,

Sontag, Susan, , , 
space as formal feature, , , , –
, 
Spiegelman, Anja (mother; father’s first
wife), , –, –, , , n,
n
Spiegelman, Art: on Auschwitz tattooed
number, , n; autobiographical/
historical context and, , , ;
comix and, , ; The Complete Maus
(CD-ROM), –, n, n,
n; MAD magazine and, ,
n, ; photograph of, , . See
also Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist
as a Young @&*! (Spiegelman);
Maus: Volumes I & II (Spiegelman)
Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly (wife), ,
, 
Spiegelman, Mala (father’s second wife),
–, , 
Spiegelman, Nadja (daughter), , 
Spiegelman, Richieu (brother), , ,
, –, 
Spiegelman, Vladek (father), –, ,
–, , –, , , , –,
n, n, n
Spillane, Mickey, 
spiraling narratives/temporal
sequencing, , –, , ,
n, , –. See also
narrative time
spiritual paternity, –, 

split subject/narratives, –, ,
, , 
Stanton, Domna C., –
stereotypes: Asian American representa-
tion and, –; crisis comics and,
, , , ; fetishization of female,
–, –, , ; graphic
memoirs and, 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, –
storytelling: about, n, ; auto-
biographical comics, ; Barry and,
–, ; crisis comics and, ;
diary comics and, , –, ;
Fun Home (Bechdel) and, , ,
–, nn–; gendered genres
and, n; Goblet and, –, n;
graphic memoirs and, ; Watchmen
(Moore and Gibbons) and, 
storyworlds, , , , , ,
n
style, economy of, , n
superhero comics, , , –, ,
. See also specific comics
survivors’ tales, –, , , –,
nn, , 
Tabachnick, Stephen E., –
temporal sequencing/spiraling narra-
tives, , –, , , n,
, –. See also narrativetime
tension/tensions in narratives, –, –
, , , –
Tensuan, Theresa, –
Terr, Lenore, , n
Tezuka Osamu, , , 
Theweleit, Klaus, 
Thompson, Craig, , , , 
-D autobiographical fiction, –,
, 
time, narrative. See narrative time
Tintin series (Hergé), , , , 
Toronto School of autobiographical
comics, –, . See also specific
authors/artists
Index
transmedial narratology, 
transnational rescue networks, –,
, 
trauma narratives: Fun Home (Bechdel)
and, , –; Gilmore on, ;
graphic memoirs and, ; manga and,
–, ; Maus: Volumes I & II
(Spiegelman) and, , , , –, ,
; memoir boom and, –; narra-
tive time and, ; One Hundred
Demons (Barry) and, , –,
, –, nn–, n,
n, –; Persepolis (film,
Satrapi and Paronnaud) and, –
, ; Persepolis: The Story of a
Childhood (Satrapi) and, , –,
–, ; sexual abuse narratives
and, –, , –, n;
Smile through the Tears (Bazambanza)
and, –; uncomprehension/
comprehension and, , , , , ,
, n; witnessing narratives and,
, –
Trees You Can’t Climb (Duffy and
Jennings), –, , 
Trudeau, Garry, Doonesbury strip, 
Truffaut, François, , , 
truth/truths: about, ; Epileptic (David
B.), , ; erotic, , –, ,
, , , ; identity and, , ;
selective mutual reinforcement and,
–; -D autobiographical fiction
and, 
Twain, Mark, –
th Century Boys (Urasawa Naoki),
–, n
Two Thousand Things to Do (Reklaw),
, , n
Under the Hood (Mason), –, ,

UNHCR (United Nations High Commis-
sioner for Refugees), –, 
universality, , , , , n, –
 Index
unknowable future/writing in the
moment, –, , , , 
Unlikely (Brown), , , –,
n
Urasawa Naoki, –, n
Van Dijck, José, 
veil/gendered state violence, , ,
, –
Vesalius, Andreas, , , n
viewer-voyeur, , , 
vigilantism, –, , 
violence: hijab/gendered state, , ,
, –; joyful lives combined
with lives of, ; veneration contra-
dictions with, –, , , –;
on women’s bodies, , , ,
n
Vishniac, Roman, 
Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons):
Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias character
and, , , , , , –;
Dr. Manhattan character and, –,
, n; dramatic autobiography,
; empowerment and, ; fictional
autobiographies and, –; forget-
ting and, , n; Under the Hood
(Mason), –, , ; identity
within historical context and, ,
–, –; mass mediated
identities and, , –; narrative
time and, –, n; nostalgia/
millennialism ideological tensions
and, –, , , –;
Rorschach/Kovacs identity and, –
, , , ; Sally Jupiter
character and, , , , –;
self-representation and, , n;
storytelling and, ; vigilantism and,
–, , 
Watson, Julia, , –, n, n,
n, 

Webb, Todd, 
Weing, Drew, , 
What It Is (Barry), , n, n,
–
Whitlock, Gillian, , , , , ,
, , n
WHO (World Health Organization), –
, 
Williams, Carolyn, –
Witek, Joseph (“Rusty”), , –,
–
witnessing: animals and, , , –,
, ; child, –, , n;
crisis, –, ; narratives of, ,
–; One Hundred Demons (Barry)
and, , , ; readers and, 
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew, –
women: aloneness/support, and artistic,
, , ; female voice as narra-
tive structural device and, –, ;
hijab/gendered state violence and,
, , , –; human rights
for, , ; Iranian autobiographies
and, , ; violence on bodies of,
, , , n. See also breast
cancer; gender; politics of self-
representation of women; specific
women; specific writings
Woolf, Virginia, , , 
Wordsworth, William, , 
worldmaking narratives, , –
writing in the moment/unknowable
future, –, , , , 
Wyeth, N. C., 
Yang, Gene Luen, American Born
Chinese, –
Yep, Laurence, 
Zone, Ray, , , n
 Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
willia m l . a nd re ws
General Editor

robert f. sayre
The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James

daniel b. sh e a
Spiritual Autobiography in Early America

l ois m ark stalv e y

The Education of a WASP

m a r g a r e t sa m s
Forbidden Family: A Wartime Memoir of the Philippines, –
Edited with an introduction by Lynn Z. Bloom

c harl ot te perk ins gil m an

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
Introduction by Ann J. Lane

m ark t wain
Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review
Edited by Michael J. Kiskis

Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives

Edited by William L. Andrews, Sargent Bush, Jr., Annette Kolodny,
Amy Schrager Lang, and Daniel B. Shea

American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect

Edited by Paul John Eakin

c aroline se abury
The Diary of Caroline Seabury, –
Edited with an introduction by Suzanne L. Bunkers

c orn elia pe ak e mc d onald

A Woman’s Civil War: A Diary with Reminiscences of the War, from March 
Edited with an introduction by Minrose C. Gwin

m arian ander son

My Lord, What a Morning
Introduction by Nellie Y. McKay
 American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory
Edited with an introduction by Margo Culley

fr ank m ar sh al l davis
Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet
Edited with an introduction by John Edgar Tidwell

j oa n n e jac ob s o n
Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams

k a m au br ath waite
The Zea Mexican Diary:  September – September 

gen aro m. padil l a

My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography

fr anc e s smith foster

Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives

Native American Autobiography: An Anthology

Edited by Arnold Krupat

American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing

Edited by Robert F. Sayre

c arol h ol ly
Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the
Autobiographies of Henry James

People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity

Edited by Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin

g. thom a s c o user
Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing

j oh n d ownton h a z let t
My Generation: Collective Autobiography and Identity Politics

will ia m h erric k
Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical

Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader

Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

josé angel gu tiérre z

The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal
 m arie h al l ets
Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant

c ar so n mc c ul l er s
Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Edited with an introduction by Carlos L. Dews

y i-f u t uan
Who Am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit

h enry bibb
The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave
Introduction by Charles J. Heglar

Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler

Edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers

jim l ane
The Autobiographical Documentary in America

sandr a p ouc het paquet

Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation

m ark o’brien, with gillian k endall

How I Became a Human Being: A Disabled Man’s Quest for Independence

eliz abeth l . bank s

Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl
in Late Victorian London
Introduction by Mary Suzanne Schriber and Abbey L. Zink

miria m f uc h s
The Text Is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe

je an m. hume z
Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories

Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography

Edited by Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor, and M. Heather Carver

l oreta janeta vel a z que z

The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez,
Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier
Introduction by Jesse Alemán

c athryn halver son

Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, –
 jeffre y br ac e
The Blind African Slave: Or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace
as told to Benjamin F. Prentiss, Esq.
Edited with an introduction by Kari J. Winter

c olet te ine z
The Secret of M. Dulong: A Memoir

Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, –

Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

bertr a m j. c oh l er
Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography

phil ip h ol den
Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State

jin g m. wang
When “I” Was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China

Conjoined Twins in Black and White: The Lives of Millie-Christine McKoy

and Daisy and Violet Hilton
Edited by Linda Frost

Four Russian Serf Narratives

Translated, edited, and with an introduction by John MacKay

m ark t wain
Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review,
second edition
Edited by Michael J. Kiskis

Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels

Edited by Michael A. Chaney

om ar ibn said
A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said
Translated from the Arabic, edited, and with an introduction by Ala Alryyes