Studies in Comics - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010

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.

This article discusses Aline Kominsky Crumb's graphic memoir Need More Love (2007), and especially her portrayals of Jewish identity in this work. Through close readings of several comics found in the memoir, as well as a discussion of the structure of the memoir as a whole, I show how for her, depicting the body visually and verbally is so inextricably tied to her location and status as a woman that the Jewish body is always inevitably a gendered body. Her graphic memoir questions the constructions that form and inform self-identifications (of woman, Jew or artist), the constructed boundaries between how we define ourselves and how others define us, and the ways that self-representation on the page, through the interplay of text and image, can inform, supplant or destabilize these various constructions. Her work demonstrates the possibility, through art, of inhabiting a liminal or in-between space; it is a space or a style that she continually redefines and rearranges as she negotiates the boundaries between self and other.

In the notes to the penultimate volume of Cerebus, Dave Sim remarks that it's not too much of a stretch to say that fantasy writers are schizophrenic for a living in referring to how a single author must come to inhabit his own fiction if he wishes for it to remain plausibly consistent over decades and thousands of pages. This article, in two parts, examines how Sim uses parodies of autobiographical details from his own life (and denials of the inclusion thereof) to lay bare the poverty of the language of representation; how the comic text becomes an experience rather than merely representing lived events fundamentally alien to it; how the parody and the life are, ironically, relatively independent; and how the two halves of his schizophrenic life relate to rather than represent each other. Part one, Dave is not Dave Sim, focuses on how in Volume 9 (Minds) Sim presents himself as Dave, a voice that, for the most part, remains contained solely within Cerebus' own thought bubbles. Part two, Cerebus is not Dave Sim, begins from an obvious presumption that the character Cerebus does not represent him to examine why it is that Cerebus, both the character and comic, are subjected to so many personal events in Sim's life. It becomes clear that autobiography in Cerebus is a game of seduction in which the denial of autobiography becomes the clearest invitation to see it there.

While the primary argument of this article is that graphic memoirists significantly complicate their visual self-representations with variation, embellishment and interpretation, an equally important methodological thesis concerns the actual process of reading graphic memoirs. In Systeme de la bande dessine/The System of Comics (2007), Thierry Groensteen presents a method of reading comics that is based on discovering linkages amongst non-contiguous panels. While Groensteen predicates his nonlinear system of networking on whole panels, I argue that a finer-grained analysis of image fragments (e.g. facial hair, gestures, demon figures, symbols, etc.) in relationship with each other results in a more complex reading of a graphic text. I argue that units smaller than the panel, liberated from the panel, carry their own semiotic weight, and can share iconic solidarity with other visual fragments of the text. This article limits its consideration to comic memoirs, and discerns a set of visual series (Groensteen 2007) that illuminate self-representational techniques in David B.'s L'Ascension du Haut-Mal/ Epileptic (2005), Toufic El Rassi's Arab in America (2007), Craig Thompson's Carnet de Voyage (2004) and Aleksandar Zograf's Regards from Serbia (2007).

The article uses David B's graphic memoir Epileptic as a way of identifying the semiotic resources that are available to comics artists in order to convey their subjective experiences of temporality. Epileptic describes the increasingly desperate, and ultimately futile, attempts by the autobiographical narrator's parents to find a cure for his elder brother's illness. The whole family is caught up in a recurring cycle of hope and despair, and time becomes frustratingly circular, trapping the family members and isolating them both from each other and from the outside world. Drawing on Hatfield's (2005) notion of comics as the art of tensions, I argue that the medium is well suited to the task of conveying subjective time, since many of its formal features follow patterns that reflect the way memory itself works. Examples include the way in which comics panels are separated by gaps, and the fact that in this medium meanings emerge not only through the syntagmatic logic of the sequence, but also through associative links across a page or even a whole work. Most importantly, comics reflect the intimate links between our experience of time and of space. The size, shape and layout of panels can, for instance, strongly influence our perception of the flow of time.

David Small's graphic memoir Stiches (2009), about his childhood and youth in Detroit in the 1950s, is a book of silences: the silence of a withdrawing mother whose compensatory language is to wash the dishes noisily; the silence of a father who goes to the basement to thump a punching bag; the silence of a little brother who beats incessantly on a drum. In a household in which conversation is infrequent and at best tense, Small is left to guess his way to hidden family stories of both the present (his mother's closeted lesbianism) and the past (the circumstances surrounding the violent death of a grandfather). The most devastating silences in Small's depiction of his early years, however, grow out of his bouts with cancer, the diagnosis of which his parents left him ignorant about, and that was the cause of tests made by his radiologist father. After returning from two hospital operations at age 14, Small finds that he has only one vocal cord left, that he has been transformed into a mute teenager in a profoundly malfunctional family.

With reference to the literature on verbal/visual tensions in graphic narrative, various writings on comics autobiography, as well as to works that address the relationship between trauma and narratology, my article explores the various ways in which Stitches can be said to be showing silence. A book of more images than words, Small's memoir powerfully describes visually a gestic that articulates painful isolation as a result of various forms of incommunication. Using pen and ink as well as grey-toned watercolour, Small creates a black and white world of shadows and darkness, of starkly precise memories and vivid dreams that blend into one another, of imaginary spaces into which the pained child at the centre of the story retreats. An image of tearing apart and bringing together, of wounding as well as healing, the stitches of the title refer both to the scar across David's throat and to the way in which he weaves his narrative together, as an attempt at human recovery against substantial odds.

In this article I will examine an unusual queer relationship, as represented by comics artist Alison Bechdel, best known for her strip Dykes to Watch Out For. While the fatherdaughter relationship is a common literary theme, it becomes more complicated in Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home, which depicts two generations simultaneously struggling with issues of gender identity. Alison's ability to lead a queer lifestyle exists in sharp contrast to the way that her father, Bruce, has handled his homosexuality. Rather than reacting to her father's example, either positively or negatively, Alison must create her own narrative, relying primarily on literature to guide the way. Yet, by identifying as queer, Alison opens the door for her father to discuss his sexuality, leading Alison to wonder, Which of us was the father? (Bechdel 2006: 221). Because of the history of queerness across generations in America, it is Alison who is in a position to set a positive, open example in a queer fatherdaughter relationship.

Adding to the intricate ways in which Alison and Bruce explore their identities and relationship is the fascinating style in which Bechdel draws both herself and her father. As characters on the page, they look remarkably similar to one another, a coincidence that is reinforced by Bechdel's use of the pose method to draw her memoir that is, she dresses up as the character, takes photos and bases her drawings on those photos. However, there is more than that at stake: in some panels, Bechdel draws an explicit physical comparison between Alison and Bruce at various stages in their lives. As a comics artist, Bechdel is able to make use of a variety of visual cues that play an important role in her representation of queer identity.

These visual cues extend to include visual adaptations of texts, from love letters between her parents to excerpts from her father's noted and underlined novels. Using these real documents as evidence, she describes her parents as literary figures rather than people. This is most noticeable in her extended comparison of herself and her father to Stephen Dedalus and Leo Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses. Such a comparison simultaneously distances the reader and reaffirms the legitimacy of the relationship. The presence of those references serves to remind us that Alison's relationship to her father is part of a larger literary pattern, something that can be comfortably understood and examined. Not only is Bechdel able to naturalize and familiarize that relationship, the comparison even canonizes it. Bechdel combines familiar, cartoonish characters with careful textual detail in both her narration and her frequent use of literary citation. Using her own relationship to literature as a way of exploring her relationship with her father, Bechdel is able to tackle the complexity of a multigenerational narrative that is simultaneously empowering and disempowering, that requires that she both embrace and fear her own queer identity.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), an account of Bechdel's life with her father, is one of the most renowned contemporary autobiographical comics. Despite its relatively recent publication, it has already attracted much scholarly attention. Critics have highlighted the text's complexity, focussing particularly on Bechdel's diligent graphic attempt to reconstruct her family life, as well as her recurrent intertextual references, and the examination of gender roles entailed by her and her father's respective homosexuality.

This article will propose another point of access to Bechdel's intricately constructed family story: putting it in the context of the Gothic mode. At first glance, connecting the perceived authenticity of the autobiographic mode with the obvious artifice of Gothic fiction seems counter-intuitive. However, Fun Home offers more than one way of reading it as a Gothic narrative: not only are there distinctly Gothic elements in Bechdel's description of her family life and home, its basic structure circles around themes of death, trauma, Otherness and the past, ideas central to the Gothic.

In addition to analysing these parallels, the article will demonstrate how the very act of autobiographical remembrance and reconstruction can be perceived as Gothic. Here, special attention will be paid to notions of construction, artifice and art, which become important in a threefold way: as self-conscious thematic instances in Bechdel's narrative, as prevalent elements of understanding the self in postmodern autobiography theory, and as inherent traits of the Gothic mode. On this theoretical background, it will be suggested that the Gothic can be used as a valuable concept for investigating complex and self-aware life narratives, taking the formation, ambiguities and limits of their representation into account. This reading is especially relevant for the unique ways of self-portrayal within the medium of comics and applicable to other prominent graphic autobiographies, interpreting their multi-faceted representation of past traumata.

Comics Arts Conference and Comic-Con, San Diego CA: 2327 July 2010

Rude Britannia: British Comic Art 9 June5 September 2010, Tate Britain, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG

Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, edited by Jrn Ahrens and Arno Meteling (2010) London and New York: Continuum International Publishing, 288 pp., ISBN: 9780826403896, Hardback, 60.00, ISBN: 9780826440198, Paperback, 15.99

Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives, edited by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn (2010) Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 308 pp. ISBN 9780786439874, Paperback, $39.95

Psychiatric Tales, Darryl Cunningham (2010) London: Blank Slate Books, 152 pp. Hardback 11.99 ISBN: 1906653089

The Search for Smilin' Ed!, Kim Deitch (2010) London: Fantagraphic Books, 161 pp., ISBN: 978-1606993248, Paperback, $16.99

The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies and Identities of Japanese Imagination. A European Perspective (With an Essay by Jean-Marie Bouissou), Marco Pellitteri (2010) Latina: Tunu, 689 pp., 25.00

Superman vs. Hollywood: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors, and Warring Writers Grounded an American Icon, Jake Rossen (2008) Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 339 pp., ISBN: 1556527314, Paperback, $16.95

My Life with Charlie Brown, Charles M. Schulz; introduction by M. Thomas Inge (2010) Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 193 pp. ISBN: 978-1-60473-448-5, Hardback, $25.00