Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives
    Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives
    Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives
    Ebook454 pages6 hours

    Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives

    By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives presents critical essays on contemporary Canadian cartoonists working in graphic life narrative, from confession to memoir to biography. The contributors draw on literary theory, visual studies, and cultural history to show how Canadian cartoonists have become so prominent in the international market for comic books based on real-life experiences. The essays explore the visual styles and storytelling techniques of Canadian cartoonists, as well as their shared concern with the spectacular vulnerability of the self. Canadian Graphic also considers the role of graphic life narratives in reimagining the national past, including Indigenous–settler relations, both world wars, and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.

    Contributors use a range of approaches to analyze the political, aesthetic, and narrative tensions in these works between self and other, memory and history, individual and collective. An original contribution to the study of auto/biography, alternative comics, and Canadian print culture, Canadian Graphic proposes new ways of reading the intersection of comics and auto/ biography both within and across national boundaries.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateMay 15, 2016
    ISBN9781771121811
    Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives

    Related to Canadian Graphic

    Titles in the series (57)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Underground Cartoonist, Dies At 74

      Dec 1, 2022

      Aline Kominsky-Crumb, an American cartoonist known for her feminist themes and often brutally frank, highly personal and self-critical work, has died at the age of 74.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Comics as System

      Dec 9, 2019

      Comics as System
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Genius of Terry Southern

      Mar 18, 2019

      The Genius of Terry Southern
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Ceremony

      Sep 6, 2022

      It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. M

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Stories We Tell

      Oct 25, 2022

      Eternally Yours by Patrice Caldwell Described as a “one-of-a-kind anthology,” editor Patrice Caldwell — founder of People of Color in Publishing, a “grassroots organization dedicated to supporting, empowering, and uplifting” POC writers — does that a

      2 min read

    • Article

      Yes, Some Comics Are For Kids — And They're Big Business

      Jul 22, 2017

      What's the best way to get people reading comics? Hook 'em young. And comics for early readers are booming — even big publishers like DC, famed for grim and gritty, are getting in on the action.

      2 min read

    • Article

      BLaCK BeLT EaGLE SCOuT

      Apr 12, 2023

      BLaCK BeLT EaGLE SCOuT
      11 min read

    • Article

      Joseph Cassara Wants His Characters to Break Your Heart

      Feb 1, 2018

      The Puerto Rican drag queen is a recognizable personification of New York in the 1980s, the neighbor (and opposite) of the white, Gordon Gekko-style master of the universe with his slicked-back hair. In The House of Impossible Beauties, debut novelis

      12 min read

    • Article

      In The Best Movies Of 2019, The Definition Of Independent Is Blurrier Than Ever

      Dec 12, 2019

      I have been writing under the umbrella of "Indie Focus" for The Times for more than 10 years now and throughout that time, the definition of what it means to be an independent filmmaker has remained elusive and pliable. Yes, there is the strict defin

      5 min read

    Reviews for Canadian Graphic

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Canadian Graphic - Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

      CANDIDA RIFKIND AND LINDA WARLEY

      I

      CANADIAN GRAPHIC

      IN 1985, A YOUNG WOMAN IN MONTREAL named Sylvie Rancourt began creating comics about her life as a nude dancer in the city’s infamous strip clubs. She photocopied these semi-fictionalized comics about her thinly disguised avatar, Mélody, and distributed them to her clients in the clubs. Then she started self-publishing her barzines, which led to an American small press publishing contract. For a while, Mélody became a cult comic, especially in the United States. Rancourt’s prolific output and sexual frankness found her fans among comics aficionados who embraced the confessional, taboo-breaking stories just as much as the charming, minimalist drawings. However, by the late 1990s, when numerous other Canadian cartoonists started to produce graphic life writing to popular and critical acclaim, Rancourt’s comic was disappearing from view. The complicated publishing history of Mélody , attributable in part to its French dialogue and explicit sexuality, points to the ups and downs of Canadian graphic life narratives over the past three decades. ¹ Brought back into print in 2015, Mélody is now being acknowledged as a first, if not the first, Canadian comics autobiography.

      Mélody is a good starting point for this introduction to a collection of essays on Canadian graphic life narratives because it heralds a contemporary form of graphic storytelling in both French and English Canada that celebrates the intimate and challenges the conventional. Rancourt’s work reminds us that graphic life narratives have a long and varied history in Canada, one that we are only beginning to discover and reconstruct. The story of Mélody—both the character’s and the publication’s—shadows the larger story of alternative Canadian comics with Rancourt’s do-it-yourself attitude and her autobiographical energies. In the three decades since Mélody’s debut, Canada has become a hub of alternative comics publishing, distribution, and reception. Like Rancourt, many of these cartoonists are drawn to the various modes of life narrative: memoir, confession, autobiography, and biography. Unlike Rancourt, they are being published by Canadian and international presses dedicated to producing books that will endure.

      The story of alternative comics in English Canada really begins in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Toronto and converges in 1990s Montreal. John Bell’s Invaders from the North provides an important print history of alternative comics leading up to this period. It documents the geographic shift from a diffuse underground comics scene spread across the country to its early 1980s concentration in Toronto. Bell identifies 1986 as a landmark year in alternative Canadian comics, in keeping with larger North American trends, as comic book stores flourished, comics became increasingly fetishized as collectibles, and publishers already active in Canada rushed to release titles directed less and less at children and more and more at affluent adolescents and young adults (129–30). This mania for new alternative comics produced a predictable downturn in the late 1980s, however, as the deluge of new titles weren’t especially impressive (131). Despite its boom-and-bust cycle and perceived amateurishness, this mid-1980s alternative comics scene also nurtured the confessional self-published comics of Julie Doucet and Chester Brown, who would go on to international acclaim as pioneers of contemporary graphic life narratives. Then, in 1989, Chris Oliveros founded Drawn & Quarterly (D&Q) in Montreal and started publishing complex, sophisticated English-language graphic narratives by both Canadian and international cartoonists. D&Q has achieved financial as well as critical success for its high production values and well-chosen catalogue of reprints, translations, and original titles. A 2009 Canadian Business article reported their annual revenue at $2 million Canadian, although industry insiders reported it was higher, and that 75 percent of its sales were in the United States, a rate unheard of for other small Canadian presses (McBride). It is not an overstatement to declare D&Q pivotal in the 1990s North American shift from cheap pamphlet comics to hardcover, meticulously designed graphic texts.²

      In 1998, Martin Brault and Frédéric Gauthier co-founded La Pastèque (The Watermelon) to publish French-language comics from Quebec and invigorate the scene with bandes dessinées (BDs) that showcased personal narratives and drew on the best of the Franco-Belgian album tradition and the emergent North American alternative comics (Boyd). By the early 1990s, Montreal had become the publishing, if not the actual, home for many North American alternative print cartoonists working in both languages and across a variety of styles. This is not surprising. Montreal has long been a hotbed of countercultural and underground literary and cultural activity; it is also a city where North American and European comics traditions co-mingle (Bell 178). Some of those artists appear in this volume and are part of a larger group of Canadian cartoonists who joined international colleagues at D&Q and La Pastèque: Chester Brown, David Collier, Guy Delisle, Julie Doucet, Joe Matt, Michel Rabagliati, Seth, and Rick Trembles, among others. They have now become the first generation of alternative Canadian cartoonists, with the trinity of Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, and Seth drawing the greatest international acclaim and scholarly attention. This first generation has since been joined by such second-generation print and digital Canadian alternative cartoonists as Ho Che Anderson, Kate Beaton, Nina Bunjevac, Hervé Bouchard, Emily Carroll, Genevieve Castrée, Scott Chantler, Michael Cho, Meags Fitzgerald, Pascal Girard, Phillipe Girard, Gord Hill, Sarah Leavitt, Jeff Lemire, Diane Obomsawin, Joe Ollmann, David Alexander Robertson, Leanne Shapton, Jillian Tamaki, and Émilie Villeneuve. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, and the ranks of alternative cartoonists working in Canada grow each year. This volume includes essays on both the first generation (Brown, Doucet, and Seth) and the second generation (Anderson, Chantler, Leavitt, and Robertson) of print Canadian cartoonists.

      The general boom in autobiographical book publishing that Julie Rak has noted has also happened in the comics scene. As the field grows, so does the gender and racial diversity of the cartoonists. In this volume, we collect scholarly essays on ten Canadian cartoonists whose work appeared in print between 1980 and 2011. There are five white men, three white women, one Indigenous man, and one Black Canadian man in this group. We break down the gender and racial identities of the cartoonists to acknowledge that Canadian alternative comics has, until recently, been largely dominated by white cartoonists. Some white female cartoonists have been present from the early days, but we note that cartoonists of colour and Indigenous cartoonists in particular remain under-represented in the scholarship. Why is this? One reason may be that academic publishing lags behind the burgeoning comics publishing scene in Canada, which has in the past few years opened up to a greater diversity of artists. This collection appears on the cusp of a new era in alternative Canadian comics, in which diversification of many different kinds is taking place; the cartoonists’ identities and subject positions are diversifying, and so are their styles, stories, and publishing platforms. Another reason may be that this volume focuses on graphic life narratives. In its first two decades, Canadian alternative comics was distinguished by how many of these mostly white male artists favoured autobiographical genres, especially confession and memoir. They participate in the North American post-underground ethos of what Charles Hatfield describes as an unprecedented sense of intimacy, which blurs the lines between confession, realism, fantasy, and parody (7). However, we also see in the first few decades of alternative Canadian comics the desire to make self-referential claims that frequently ironize, unpack, and sabotage the nexus of settler colonial mythologies about gender and race that have shaped dominant Canadian culture. Chester Brown’s teenage sexual anxieties, Seth’s mundane, melancholic masculine subjects, and Scott Chantler’s traumatized soldiers all disrupt illusions of heroic white masculinity. Julie Doucet’s heterosexual disappointments and Sarah Leavitt’s queer self-reflections also trouble normative gender expectations.

      Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner’s encyclopedic Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present comments on a shared melancholic tone in many 1990s autobiographical comics, suggesting that this unites North American alternative cartoonists as distinct from European and Asian artists. At least one Canadian critic has read this melancholy as a specifically Canadian political position. In her pioneering discussion of Saskatchewan-based cartoonist David Collier, Deena Rhyms identifies him as part of a new movement in alternative comics with a strong interest in marginal identities and the social values that engender difference (75). Rhyms argues that this identification with outsiders arises from New Comics’ (her term) emergence from various countercultural movements, such as the hippies and punks, which seek to challenge hegemonic institutions. If there is a shared melancholy to Canadian graphic life narratives, particularly those by white male cartoonists, then the contributors to this volume show how such an affect arises from various sites of personal and cultural introspection.

      At the same time, a number of contemporary Canadian cartoonists of colour and Indigenous cartoonists have resisted the pull of graphic life narratives. The visual artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has developed a fusion of Pacific Northwest Indigenous icons and Japanese manga he calls Haida manga. His 2009 book, Red: A Haida Manga, consists of 108 hand-painted colour plates that tell a revenge tale based in Haida storytelling. As Doris Wolf discusses in this volume, Indigenous comics is a diverse and expanding field that extends well beyond graphic life narratives into genres of fantasy, myth, and speculative fiction. Two important Asian Canadian cartoonists are producing fictional works that may draw on elements of life experience but are not memoirs. The critically acclaimed illustrator and cartoonist Michael Cho conveys a compelling and visually stunning story about a young Korean Canadian woman in his 2014 graphic novel, Shoplifter. Her racial identity is present throughout, yet her struggles with depression and loneliness in the post-college phase of urban Toronto life are the central theme. Similarly, Jillian Tamaki’s individual works and collaborations with her cousin, writer Mariko Tamaki, draw readers into the fictional lives of Asian Canadian characters without explicitly thematizing race. Tamaki has spoken eloquently in interviews about the burden on artists and writers of colour to be cultural representatives. In an interview with Anne Ishii for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she responds to the question of whether race is an important factor in her career:

      It came up a lot with Skim—people want to pin a story on you and tie up the narrative and make you a stand-in. I mean race was touched on in that story but it was almost as touched on as being gay was. I don’t blame people, because if you’re writing a story people want some sort of narrative which is natural. But that’s not a mission statement to say that I am talking for all Japanese Canadians. (Ishii)

      Tamaki challenges the expectation that writers and artists of colour can only write autobiographically. She also questions why readers often want race to be an explicit narrative theme of one autobiographical text rather than seeing it across all her books: That’s super strange that you would think that [race] won’t be in all my stories, that now it’s time to ‘branch off’ or write something more sophisticated (Ishii). Tamaki deftly points out the work that still needs to be done by alternative comics readers and scholars. On the one hand, we need to resist the demand for cartoonists from traditionally under-represented groups to take on the burden of community representation. On the other hand, we must be attentive to how race informs all graphic narratives, so that whiteness is no longer the invisible norm but a visible and contested category.

      Canadian alternative comics are also diversifying their publishing venues. Over the past decade and a half, numerous presses have joined D&Q and La Pastèque to issue comics titles and nurture Canadian cartoonists: Arcana (British Columbia); Bedside Press (Ontario); Conundrum (Nova Scotia); Kids Can (Ontario); Koyama (Ontario); Les 400 Coups (Montreal); Pop Sandbox (Ontario); and Portage & Main (Manitoba). As well, established Canadian publishers are venturing into the graphic narrative market, including Arsenal Pulp (British Columbia), Broadview (Ontario), Douglas & McIntyre (British Columbia), Groundwood/House of Anansi (Ontario), and McClelland & Stewart (Ontario). This rapid expansion of the comic book publishing market in Canada is also reflected in the appearance of graphic novel sections of all the major independent and chain bookstores, while such long-standing comic book stores as Halifax’s Strange Adventures, Toronto’s The Beguiling, Edmonton’s Happy Harbor, and Vancouver’s Elfsar (to name just a few) continue to flourish. Clearly, the alternative Canadian comics scene is in robust health, as proven by the growth of the Toronto Comic Arts Fair (TCAF) from six hundred attendees in its inaugural 2003 year to twenty-two thousand in 2014, and the many different nominees in multiple categories for The Joe Shuster Awards.³

      As well, editors and publishers are bringing out reprints that fill in the gaps of Canadian cartooning history. D&Q’s collected volume of Mélody comics is one such example, as is their publication of collected volumes of Doug Wright’s pioneering 1940s–1960s comics strip, Nipper. Hope Nicholson’s Bedside Press is dedicated to both researching and republishing out-of-print comics and publishing new voices in ways that are changing the Canadian comics landscape. Her 2014 edited collection, Nelvana of the Northern Lights, reprinted Adrian Dingle’s pioneering 1940s series about an Inuit demi-goddess; her 2015 collection of short comics, Moonshot: An Indigenous Comics Collection, features new work by over a dozen Indigenous writers and cartoonists. Nicholson uses the crowd fundraising platform Kickstarter to support these projects as a way to overcome the difficulties of small press publishing. She is upholding the tradition in Canada of individual publishers as passionate cultural workers, labouring at kitchen tables and in farmhouses as well as offices to support Canadian alternative cartoonists. Like Chris Oliveros at D&Q and Andy Brown at Conundrum, Nicholson is a champion of past and present Canadian comics, and she is bringing lost and overlooked, as well as new and under-represented, cartoonists to an ever-expanding public.

      This constellation of cartoonists, publishers, retailers, and critics suggests that Canadian alternative comics has arrived as a coherent field of cultural production, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of a zone of social activity intent on creating a kind of cultural product defined as much by the creator as by the expectations and values of the audience, from readers to reviewers, as well as the power of institutions, from publishers to professors and prize committees (see Bourdieu). The 2010 establishment of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics/Société canadienne pour l’étude de la bande dessinée (CSSC/SCEBD) brings a bilingual community of academics working in comics studies into contact with each other as well as international scholars at an annual conference attached to TCAF. The academic study of alternative comics continues to grow at Canadian universities. Graphic narratives are being added to existing courses in literary and cultural studies, and new courses dedicated entirely to graphic narratives are being launched across the country. Major Canadian art institutions have also begun to integrate comics and cartoons into their exhibitions. In 2008, the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit, Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art, highlighted the dynamism and diversity of over one hundred years of popular visual culture. The Art Gallery of Ontario has also embraced alternative comics through acquisitions, exhibits, and events featuring Chester Brown, Nina Bunjevac, and Art Spiegelman. Smaller galleries are exhibiting cartoonists and artists working with comics. Seth’s ongoing work-in-progress, a cardboard model city of Dominion (the setting of most of his graphic narratives), has been displayed alongside pages of his books and scrapbooks at numerous galleries across the country. This curatorial and academic interest is supported by discussions of comics and graphic narratives on blogs, podcasts, and websites, including Sequential: Canadian Comix News & Culture, launched in 2002. Clearly, Canada is a robust site for the creation, production, and study of alternative comics.

      II

      PICTURING LIFE NARRATIVE

      THAT SO MANY CANADIAN CARTOONISTS create autobiographical texts has not entirely escaped the notice of comics scholars; however, there is much more work to be done. Given the proliferation of cartoonists in Canada and the diversity of their themes, as well as their drawing and writing styles, we anticipate that both comics scholarship and autobiography scholarship will increasingly deal with these works. In Auto/biography in Canada, the first volume that looks specifically at Canadian texts, Julie Rak rightly comments that no collection can be definitive and that various forms of autobiographical work (she mentions art history and electronic media) are not addressed. Ten years later, she would likely also note the gap in scholarship on Canadian graphic life narratives. Until now, when Canadian texts were discussed, it was usually in the context of North American or even European comics. While we do not wish to suggest that there is anything recognizably Canadian about graphic life narratives produced in Canada by Canadians—there is no distinctly Canadian style or theme, just as there is no singular Canadian identity—we do believe that it is important to recognize in our analyses elements of the texts that speak to Canadian differences. In part, those differences are historical and political. Chester Brown moved from the comics underground to the Canadian and international mainstream with the publication of Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, a book about the political and spiritual leader of the Métis people. Along with the comic strip, it offers an author’s foreword, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index—all standard aspects of conventional biography but rarely, at least until Brown’s pioneering book, found in comics. Such meta-textual material situates Brown’s book as an alter/native telling of the history of the Red River settlement, the 1885 Northwest Resistance by the Métis people, and the charge of treason against and eventual hanging of Riel. This history continues to shape political discourse in Canada around issues of Métis identity and Métis land rights. In I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, Bernice Eisenstein combines written memoir with graphic illustration to relate her family’s Holocaust experience and how their experiences and memories have shaped her own identity as a Jewish Canadian woman. She also puts particular focus on the postwar Jewish community of Toronto’s Kensington Market, an area of the city whose Jewish roots have now been largely overwritten by other immigrants’ narratives. And when Seth parodically represents a history of Canadian cartooning in his book The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, he does so by visually citing popular, even stereotypical, images of Canadian culture—Mounties, igloos, wilderness landscapes, and the like. Being attentive to these cartoonists as Canadian artists, writers, and cultural producers, even though many of them travel and work outside Canada, allows us to read how and why they engage with national mythologies, narratives, and images.

      While for marketing reasons these books might be categorized and labelled as graphic novels, in fact, many of Canada’s cartoonists employ autobiographical discourses in their work. This distinction between the fictional and the autobiographical has been important in autobiography scholarship, as evidenced by the intense theoretical discussions around issues of truth and referentiality published over the past four decades. Phillipe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, which is the contract between author and reader that guarantees the narrated I, the narrating I, and the author are one and the same person, is still salient because it marks a border that can be blurred but not crossed. When readers discover that a memoir or autobiography has been entirely or substantially faked, they feel betrayed because genres create expectations.⁴ The autobiographical pact is also relevant to today’s social media–saturated milieu, where millions of people have posted online identities but where the self-represented scales a continuum from merely enhanced to completely invented.⁵ The crafting of a textual persona in any medium inevitably involves artifice. In comics, artifice is celebrated. Cartoonists draw simplified, caricatured versions of themselves in frame after frame, sometimes as younger versions of themselves, situated in various settings and engaged with other caricatures who may be recognizable as family members, friends, lovers, or neighbours.

      Comics scholars have recognized that many cartoonists use personal material and memories about their own experiences in their narratives. Hillary L. Chute, for example, has written about women’s use of personal stories and real events (2). For Chute, comics offers a unique opportunity for women to push on conceptions of the unrepresentable that have become commonplace in the wake of deconstruction, especially in contemporary discourse about trauma. Against a valorization of absence and aporia, graphic narrative asserts the value of presence, however complex and contingent (2). This assertion of the value of presence aligns with the issue of truth in life narratives, however truth is negotiated. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson comment that autobiographical discourse is not so much a coherent language but a process that, crucially, involves the reader/viewer:

      If we approach [ . . . ] self-referential writing as an intersubjective process that occurs within a dialogic exchange between writer and reader/viewer rather than a story to be proved or falsified, the emphasis on reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding. (16–17)

      Their comments are apropos when we look at graphic life narratives because the communicative exchange is (at least) a two-pronged process whereby the reader/viewer is called upon to interpret both words and drawn images. Readers/viewers also have to make sense of the cartoonist’s use of frames, gutters, blank spaces, speech balloons or boxed commentary, and more. Readers of comics are very aware of the necessity of doing quite a bit of work to navigate and understand the text, a process of active reading Hatfield describes as the otherness of comics reading (32–67). The process is a lot less linear than what is involved in reading conventional written auto/biographies, as readers are called upon to decipher multiple graphic elements (words, images, icons, symbols) at once and to navigate the tensions between individual panels, panels in sequence, and the whole page layout. As Wolk observes, "a lot of the pleasure in reading comics is filling in all the blank space beyond each panel, as far as it can go in both space and time, with the drawing on the page as a guide or set of hints" (132).

      Autobiographical comics provide a rich opportunity for critics of life writing. In 2008, Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti published Autographics, a special issue of the journal Biography, in which they note: While many of us working in autobiography studies need to develop the skills to read these new multimodal self-representations sensitively, we should also embrace how our existing methods and interpretive strengths can make vital contributions to research and analysis already being undertaken in burgeoning fields such as internet and new media studies (xviii). This increased critical attention was on view at the 2014 International Autobiography and Biography Association (IABA) conference. On the program were no fewer than three packed sessions on autobiographical and web comics, and there was much interest in these new forms of life writing. This reinforces Smith and Watson’s 2010 remark:

      As graphic memoirs [we would include other forms of life narrative] become a dominant international form, ideas of autobiographical subjectivity may increasingly be shaped by the registering and archiving of embodied styles and practices that elicit the viewer’s relational identification in co-constructing a narrative. . . . As the global reach of graphic memoirs expands as a popular form of witnessing to histories of trauma and marking the need to remember, new issues for scholars of life narratives arise: how autographics call us to know and see otherwise; how they produce us as different kinds of readers; how they witness and with what effects; and how they circulate and are taken up by larger projects of remembering. (173)

      As we see in chapters by Eva C. Karpinski, Doris Wolf, and Linda Warley and Alan Filewod, remembering in comics can extend beyond the personal and can be a pedagogical project connected to constructions of nation, gender, and race.

      While comics are often connected to popular genres associated with youth cultures and escapist fare, they are also overwhelmingly serious in their content: they are political as well as personal. We note with interest that bodies are everywhere in the graphic life narratives discussed in this volume. Injured and murdered bodies appear in the stories about Helen Betty Osborne and civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Disoriented and dis/abled bodies appear in the queer illness narrative of Tangles. War wounded and killed bodies are important to Scott Chantler’s rendering of his grandfather’s World War II diary. Gendered, sexualized, and abject bodies emerge and disrupt Julie Doucet’s intense graphic life narratives and Chester Brown’s coming-of-age comic, I Never Liked You. The invisibility of the child’s body in the adult world is depicted by Hervé Bouchard and Janice Nadeau in Harvey. On the one hand, these serious stories are about the vulnerabilities of individual bodies in repressive or violent social spaces. On the other hand, the form of graphic life narrative, which combines the intersubjectivity of autobiography and the artisanal production and auteur culture of alternative comics, invites the body in. Chute celebrates the presence of the body of the maker in graphic texts, evident in the subjective signs of handwriting and the attention to the craftedness of the text when she asserts that the subjective mark of the body is rendered directly onto the page and constitutes how we view the page (Chute 11). The surface images and the materiality of comic books share an intimacy with the subject matter of life writing, which emerges in the narrative attention to corporeality and the visual concern with bodies in various states of becoming and unbecoming.

      Drawing multiple versions of the self in a single text constitutes a particular kind of serial autobiography. Leigh Gilmore, writing about Jamaica Kincaid’s series of autobiographical books, theorizes that serial autobiography "offers a mode of writing against death even in its face" (97). The endless, excessive representation of self in serial autobiography allows the author to return to the autobiographical scene in order to explore multiple representations of the self and to forestall endings—of the narrative, of the life. In autobiographical comics, perhaps, it is not so much about writing against something, whether death or the illusion of the singular self, but about drawing into something—the presence that Chute finds especially in women’s cartoons. There is a certain anxiety about identity and meaning in many of the books discussed in this volume. The human subjects depicted in works that are aligned with memoir, confession, or diary are ordinary people whose lives are unremarkable, even mundane. And while the biographies discussed in this volume take on famous people—Martin Luther King, World War I hero Billy Bishop, and political activist Nellie McClung—they engage with conventional histories and established biographical discourses, either to challenge or to reinforce them. The autobiographical works, on the other hand, tend to consider what it means to be present at all. The serial self of autobiographical comics, then, is a visual repetition of a body drawn over and over again to assert its presence on the page as well as a thematic, even philosophical, experimentation with being and becoming a person who lives from one moment to the next (appears in one panel to the next) but is not always self-same.

      III

      THE CHAPTERS

      THIS COLLECTION is divided into three sections. The four chapters in Part One: Confession and the Relational Self consider how the intersubjectivity of comics as a form that demands active reading on the part of the reader/viewer connects to the intersubjective narrative mode of confession, particularly of sexual and other ugly feelings, to use Sianne Ngai’s now widely cited term. Kevin Ziegler’s essay, Public Dialogues: Intimacy and Judgment in Canadian Confessional Comics, proposes that the confessional mode dominates contemporary Canadian life narratives and often positions the reader as an intimate confidante. Ziegler explores this formal intimacy between cartoonist and reader as a kind of cultural exchange that crosses the borders between public and private. In his analysis of Chester Brown’s short comic Helder from Yummy Fur, Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary, and Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles, Ziegler draws on the tradition of prose confession and theories of comics rhetoric to argue that the sincere or truthful mode of these confessional comics needs to be understood as a discursive construction of intimacy. In "Untangling the Graphic Power of Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me," Kathleen Venema situates this comic book within the larger field of Alzheimer’s narratives that negotiate the evacuation of selves so often part of this disease’s impact on individuals and their families. Venema’s close analysis of Leavitt’s relationship with her mother considers the interrelated work of witnessing and remembering, of being present with her aging mother and recalling the history of their relationship. Venema also focuses on monsters and monstrosity as a recurring motif and trope in Tangles, analyzing Leavitt’s visual and rhetorical concern with disassociations of self from self as part of the ethics of mourning. A related set of questions about the body, sexuality, and the confessional self is taken up by J. Andrew Deman in "‘Oh Well’: My New York Diary, Autographics, and the Depiction of Female Sexuality in Comics." Drawing on theories of autographics first developed by Gillian Whitlock, Deman argues that Doucet’s feminist aesthetics and politics in My New York Diary are an important intervention, from the position of underground and alternative comics, into the encrusted masculinity of mainstream comics. Deman reads Doucet’s text as a Künstlerroman and a sexual coming-of-age narrative that mobilizes the spectacularity of the comics page and a rough style to challenge the status of women as looked-at, eroticized objects within mainstream comics culture. James C. Hall’s essay, ‘Say Shit" Chester’: Language, Alienation, and the Aesthetic in Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You: A Comic-Strip Narrative, also pays attention to the mode of comics confession, gender politics, and the representation of anxious adolescent masculinity. Hall’s analysis of Brown’s representation of his younger self’s relationship with his mother argues that, in this text, female prescription simultaneously enables creativity and disables relational subjectivity. Brown’s young Chester, like Doucet’s Julie, is an emerging artist who, like Leavitt’s Sarah, must confront a difficult maternal relationship and contend with scenes of knowing disappointment." Hall’s close reading of Brown’s self-representation focuses on the complex relationships between desire, speech, and actions at the heart of his emerging artistic self.

      In Part Two: Collective Memory and Visual Biography, the authors turn away from representations of the self in confession, autobiography, or memoir and focus on cartoonists’ use of biographical forms. The comics analyzed in this section engage with larger political narratives, such as civil rights and war, and are also interested in discourses of personal and collective remembering in specific national contexts. Kathleen Dunley, in "Personal, Vernacular, Canadian: Seth’s Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists as Life Writing," situates what is ostensibly a work of biography—Seth’s history of neglected Canadian cartoonists—as a work that is also about the artist

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1