Drawing from Life

Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art

Jane Tolmie

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781496802644, 9781617039058
• eBook ISBN: 9781628468380
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Autobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics, and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of the death of the author/subject, while also demanding new approaches from critics. Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art is a collection of essays about autobiography, semi-autobiography, fictionalized autobiography, memory, and self-narration in sequential art, or comics. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds including English, American studies, comparative literature, gender studies, art history, and cultural studies. The book engages with well-known figures such as Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel; with cult-status figures such as Martin Vaughn-James; and with lesser-known works by artists such as Frédéric Boilet. Negotiations between artist/writer/body and drawn/written/text raise questions of how comics construct identity, and are read and perceived, requiring a critical turn towards theorizing the comics' viewer. At stake in comic memoir and semi-autobiography is embodiment. Remembering a scene with the intent of rendering it in sequential art requires nonlinear thinking and engagement with physicality. Who was in the room and where? What was worn? Who spoke first? What images dominated the encounter? Did anybody smile? Man or mouse? Unhinged from the summary paragraph, the comics artist must confront the fact of the flesh, or the corporeal world, and they do so with fascinating results.

Index

Page numbers in bold indicate illustrations.

Adorno, Theodor, 180

Advocate, The, 12

Agamben, Giorgio, 52, 170–72, 174, 176, 177

“Alternative Girlhood: Diaristic and Contemporary Female Artists,” 209

American Born Chinese: assimilation in, 56–57

Chin-Kee in, 53

human-animal hybridity in, 44, 55

intertextuality in, 56–57

Monkey King Brooding, 51

Monkey King in, 51–52, 53, 54, 55, 57

Wei-Chen’s True Self, 54

American Widow, 194, 196

collective versus private memories in, 187, 194–98

development of images in, 189

images and trauma in, 191–92

9/11 and, 188–89

Anderson, Ho Che, King, 45–46, 46

animal in comics: in American Born Chinese, 51–56, 57–58

in Black Hole, 47, 50

concepts of, 44

in Epilectic, 58–63

in funny subgenre, 45, 47

human-animal hybridity and, 47–50

in King, 45–46

in Krazy Kat, 47–48, 49

in My New York Diary, 47

trickster and, 55–56

animetaphor, 44

Anna Karenina, 13, 26

Aristotle, 132

Art Institute of Chicago, 87

Ashcroft, John, 179

Atelier Bande Dessinée, 118

Aurita, Aurélia, 116

Bakunin, Mikhail, 251

Baldwin, Chris, Little Dee, 44

bande dessinée, 116–17, 118, 119–20. See also nouvelle bande dessinée

Barrington, Judith, Writing the Memoir, 267

Barry, Lynda, 213

What It Is, 34–35, 35. See also One! Hundred! Demons! Batman, 44

Beaty, Bart, 117, 118, 119

Bechdel, Alison: Are You My Mother?, 22, 23, 33

“Coming Out Story,” 9, 9, 13, 14, 15, 15, 19

“Compulsory Reading,” 22

on confession, 4

Dykes to Look Out For, 12

Essential Dykes to Look Out For, 30

The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Look Out For, 4, 12

lesbian the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Allusive Confessions
• What Is an Experience?
• Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel
• Uncaging and Reframing Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage
• Comics as Non-Sequential Art
• Yukiko’s Spinach and the Nouvelle Manga Aesthetic
• Memory, Signal, and Noise in the Collaborations of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
• The Graphic Memoir in a State of Exception
• History, Memory, and Trauma
• You Must Look at the Personal Clutter
• A Female Prophet?
• Showing the Voice of the Body
• Contributors
• Index