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Volume 14, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 2040-3232
  • E-ISSN: 2040-3240

Abstract

Alison Bechdel said in an interview with Lynn Emmert that both maps and comics ‘take a complex or confusing three-dimensional reality and iron it out into a much more manageable two-dimensional version’. Yet the way maps weave together space, place, history, tradition and personal experience through multiple levels of signification points to anything but transparency of form, especially when deployed within autographics. We often encounter maps in autobiographical comics, where their uses can be as different as the lives they help to illustrate. When the layers of historical, cultural and personal references that intersect on the map plane are embedded in the formalist structures of comics, the levels of signification become multiplied – panel borders and topographical borders intersect, the geography of space merges with the geography of the page, and the subjectivity of the illustrated line overlays the objectivity of cartography. While the semiotic structures of maps and comics are presentationally different, both derive narratorial power from the relationships they make explicit through the marks on the page, and how their boundaries carve up space and time. Mapping traditions may be referenced to signpost authentication strategies within graphic memoirs. The structures of the map may be utilized – or even disrupted – in order to illustrate dynamics that cannot be signified through text or representational mimesis. This article will critically examine mapping modalities used in a variety of autographic narratives, focusing on the link between representation and experience of place for both the author and reader. By analysing what is included and excluded in a map, as well as the relationships the maps create between signifier and signified, we can draw some conclusions about how the mapmaker is positioning themselves within such frameworks as cultural background, socio-economic structures and hierarchies of knowledge.

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2024-08-28
2025-01-20
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/content/journals/10.1386/stic_00107_1
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Separating the territory from the map: The intersection of cartography, memory and identity in autobiographical comics
Studies in Comics 14, 191 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00107_1
/content/journals/10.1386/stic_00107_1
/content/journals/10.1386/stic_00107_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): childhood; graphic narrative; mapping; memoir; post-structuralism; semiotics; signification

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