Comics, Self, and Trauma

Examining Autobiographical Graphic Narratives by Women Writers

Mokshda Manchanda

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9789369529971
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women Authors Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book explores autobiographical graphic narratives by three women writer-cartoonists: Alison Bechdel, Ellen Forney, and Kabi Nagata, to understand why and how they choose to narrate their life stories in the comics medium.
Comics, Self, and Trauma analyses the representation of multiple selves and problematises how the past selves of the writer-cartoonists struggle through various mental and social anxieties and how it has been depicted in this particular medium. This analysis goes beyond the traumatic events or the underlying causes of anxieties in the writer-cartoonists' lives; it examines how they narrate and represent these psychosocial anxieties and their respective coping methods.
The fundamental questions raised and answered through this book are: firstly, and most importantly, why do these women choose the comics medium to document, understand, and re-create their own struggles in an autobiographical mode; secondly, how are their narrated and narrative selves re-constructed and represented through this medium?; and lastly, how is the language employed in a verbal and a visual medium and how does it allow authors to re-create their own cognitive, social, and sexual histories?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Images
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Autobiographical Graphic Narratives, Trauma, and Language
• 2 Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Depression, and Intertextuality in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother?
• 3 Bipolarity, Creativity, and Fluidity in Ellen Forney’s Marbles
• 4 Sexuality, Self-Acceptance, and Social Anxieties in Nagata Kabi’s Autobiographical Manga
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author