Self-reflexive graphic narrative: Seriality and Art Spiegelman's Portrait of the Artist as a Young &

In the fall of 2008, Art Spiegelman reissued his first collection of comic strips, Breakdowns: From Maus to Now, in celebration of its 30th anniversary. While the original 1978 version included a brief preface, the new edition of Breakdowns contains an extended self-representational introduction, titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young & (2008). Portrait tackles the recursivity of memory and the serial nature of experience, and this self-reflexive introduction is uniquely positioned to address the ways in which audiences and authors approach autobiographical graphic narrative as his texts underscore the possibilities for serial production of graphic life writing. Indeed, Spiegelman's memoirs present self-representation and lived experience as inherently episodic. In turn, and in tandem with the larger memoir boom of the last thirty years, Spiegelman's graphic memoirs expose a contemporary cultural impulse to engage in the practice of repeated self-examination, self-presentation and visual self-archivization.