Graphic Memoir

Writing  about  the  Holocaust  means  negotiating  with  silence  and  investigating  the  repercussions of a trauma that never stopped affecting our present. The process of historical recognition  from  the  perspective  of  a  third-generation  artist  implies  the  reconstruction  of the past through objects, photographs and documents, written and visual evidence. Through the analysis of two contemporary German graphic novels – Love  looks  away(2008) by Line Hoven and Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018) by Nora Krug – this essay will identify the multiple compositional techniques and aesthetic strategies in order to understand how drawing, text and photography converge in a single effort to untangle History, either micro or macro, in order to understand what came before and after significant historical events – and perhaps even explain why those events occurred.

This paper establishes the ways in which graphic narratives generate unfettered spaces for marginalized identities, focusing specifically on the first self-portrayals of women cartoonists in the 1960s comix underground. Aline Kominsky’s autobiographical “Goldie: A Neurotic Women” was published in the inaugural issue of The Wimmen’s Comix Collective, instituting a new and progressive conception of the female experience
in graphic form. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Janet Miller, and Hillary L. Chute, among others, I argue illustrated depictions of selfhood employ an alternative mode of expression from conventional writing methods. In doing so, graphic autobiographies necessitate a “recuperating [and] reconstructing” of the self, “even as [it is] produce[d]… differently in the very act of telling” (“Giving Account of Oneself” Butler). In reconciling the work of Aline Kominsky and the Wimmen’s Comix Collective with theories of self-expression and narratology, I demonstrate the emancipatory potential of graphic narratives. The graphic form liberates the eye from the repetitive and compulsory rituals of linear analysis, creating opportunities for progressive representations and complex understandings of gender, sexual, and racial identities.

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive
of queer books in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of
reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of
lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative
function in the portrayal of Alison’s lesbian identification and its
complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West.

KEYWORDS lesbian, Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, Are You My
Mother?, books, graphic memoirs, feelings, cultural politics, family,
queer history

This paper investigates the graphic memoir trilogy March that U.S. Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis co-authored with Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell. The aim of the article is to describe how justice and injustice are framed in Lewis’ remembrance with regard to Lewis’ slogan of “good trouble.” In particular, it formulates an approach to investigate framing strategies that the work employs within the mediality of comics. Thus, the visual and material frames of the text are examined as techniques to facilitate political framing. Finally, the framing strategies of March will be correlated to the mobilization strategies of the civil rights movement.

The formation of identity, perceptions adulthood and coming of age are universal aspects of the life experience of every individual. Regardless of social, ethnic, or cultural background, the individual is formed by the cultural, political, and ideological forces that exist in their microsocial and macrosocial environments. The study of the life narratives of individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds is an excellent tool for deconstructing the homogeneous aspects of the formation of identity, while understanding the different struggles that an individual can face in the process. Throughout the semester students will read several graphic memoirs by authors from several different racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological backgrounds. These authors also encompass a broad array of social identity categories, particularly as they pertain to physical disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and nationality. Among the broad questions this course will explore are: What are the universal elements, if any, found across these life narratives? How does each author interpret the crucial aspects of their formation? What role does family play in the process?

War as a fundamental aspect of the human condition consistently strains the boundaries of what is representable through mediatized communication. Whereas photography has a long-standing history as leading medium for the representation of war, the graphic memoir in recent years gained substantial influence in visualizing the experience of crises and traumatic experiences, as well. As a first book-length account of the phenomenon Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood details the characteristics of both media and explores their interrelations in the representation of war. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields – including visual cultural studies, (social) semiotics, as well as narrative theory and intermediality studies – Schmid outlines the field and offers close readings of the four most prominent graphic war memoirs that integrate photographs in their negotiation of the topic.

Why do recent graphic narratives about illness play with metaphors of merry-go-rounds, board games, and games of pretend and performance to explain the experience of being ill? Play and game typically associate with nostalgia, with pleasure, and with a sense of freedom, none of which come to mind as viable images to discuss a struggle with difficult physical and mental illnesses. Acclaimed graphic narratives including Miriam Engelberg's Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (2006), Daryl Cunningham's Psychiatric Tales (2011), Ellen Forney's Marbles (2012), Marisa Acocella Marchetto's Cancer Vixen (2006), and Brian Fies's Mom's Cancer (2006) use the rich narrative ambiguities of game situations to work against the grain, correlating the gap between "player" and "played" with the gap between an active, organically healthy self and a self being unmade by illness.

If the great advantage of the graphic memoir of illness and disability is that it features the body in the text, for greatest effectiveness—and affectiveness—the body ought to be recognizable as a particular human's—manifestly a thing of flesh, blood, and bone, a truly corporeal body.

This text is fashioned from an email exchange between the authors during the spring, summer, and fall of 2015. Our aim with this informal, collaborative process was to develop a few of the key principles for discussing graphic narratives as a mode of life writing, especially graphic memoirs relating to illness, disability, and care work, as well as issues of difference more broadly (including gender and sexuality). Thinking through the genres and media of graphic life writing, we discuss narrative, text authentication, institutional positioning, world-making, narrating difference, and the role of the visual, while giving particular attention to the importance of objects and temporality to the comics form. Rather than a resolved or comprehensive series of guidelines, we offer instead an experiment in epistolary criticism, through which we formulate several points of contact between graphic narrative and life writing scholarship—instances and considerations where the central concerns for scholars in both fields overlap. Ultimately, our sense is that graphic memoirs of disability, illness, and other types of difference share many characteristics with more traditional, exclusively textual life writing forms, though in graphic life writing the visual dynamic—involving the connections and disconnections between the verbal and visual—produces specific engagements with disjunction, complexity, and the ineffable.