Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives ed. by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives ed. by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley Olga Michael Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, eds. Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives. Wilfrid Laurier up, 2016. 305 pp. $29.99. Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives is a collection of ten essays edited by Candida Rifkind and Laura Warley. Together with Rifkind and Warley's introduction, these essays shed light on the alternative comics scene in Canada, focusing on print book-length graphic life narratives produced from 1980 to 2011, created by five white men, three white women, one Indigenous man, and one Black Canadian man (Rifkind and Warley 4). Because of its inclusivity in terms of creators' backgrounds and subject matters, the collection provides access to a diverse body of Canadian [End Page 199] graphic life narratives, offering nuanced readings that foreground the richness and complexities of the comics representation of issues both specific to the Canadian culture and extending beyond it. The collection is a much-needed tool for students and scholars interested in life writing and comics studies because it successfully demonstrates how and why comics is a fertile medium for verbalizing and visualizing unspeakable stories. These concern relationality and the deconstruction of identity through Alzheimer's, trauma and loss, failed white masculinity, masculinity and military culture, abject female sexuality, the suffering of Indigenous populations, and the role of gender in colonial Canada. In addition, we come across an analysis of an alternative re-presentation of (Martin Luther King as) a political figure, the image of the child in relation to the Canadian nation, and the educational potential of graphic biographies for young people. Canadian Graphic is groundbreaking not only in its variety of analyses that successfully blend various theoretical backgrounds and examination of the verbal and visual components of these texts but also in how it opens the door into controversial issues as those are depicted via the language of comics. Rifkind and Warley's introduction situates Canadian Graphic in life writing studies and sets the comics scene in Canada in a very detailed and insightful way, starting by naming Sylvie Rancourt's Mélodie, her semi-fictionalized comics about her life "as a nude dancer in [Montreal's] infamous strip clubs," as "a first, if not the first, Canadian comics autobiography" (1–2). While acknowledging female contribution in the field and foregrounding Rancourt's controversial subject matter, the introduction never feels like it focuses on a specific aspect of the Canadian graphic life narrative. Contrarily, it provides information about the development of comics both in Francophone and Anglophone Canada, its web and print outputs. Additionally, it refers to the history of the Canadian comics publishing industry as well as to the reception of comics within and outside academia, mentioning university courses devoted to the medium, gallery exhibitions, the establishment of the bilingual Canadian Society for the Study of Comics, and the annual international conference attached to the Toronto Comics Art Fair (6–7). After providing an overview of the development of Canadian comics, Rifkind and Warley proceed to aptly state what the following essays illustrate: that "remembering in comics can extend beyond the personal and can be a pedagogical project connected to constructions of nation, gender, and race" (11). The collection is composed by three sections, each starting with a cover page including its title and a comics illustration—an excerpt from [End Page 200] one of the primary texts analyzed in the following chapters. This, together with its cover, makes the book as attractive in terms of presentation as it is thought-provoking in terms of contents. The first part, "Confession and the Relational Self," starts with an essay by Kevin Ziegler that introduces "a category of formal composition [called] comics confession," a genre that renders the reader an intimate listener of shameful stories (23). Closely reading excerpts from Chester Brown's Yummy Fur (1983–94), Julie Doucet's My New York Diary (2013), and Sarah Leavitt's Tangles (2010), Ziegler foregrounds "comics confession" as "a distinct model of personal address" that "engages readers and asks them to participate in a dialogue through a strategy of formal intimacy" expressed via the visuality of comics, which evokes affect in the relationship...