Graphic Memoir Research Articles

‘There were days I felt empty’: care, affect, and graphic medicine

There is a world, invisible to many, of terminally ill people being cared for full time by a loving family member or friend. These caregivers are living with burdens and pressures that even regular visitors can miss. Stan Mack (Stan Mack in Sandra Lee Fenster’s (2000), ‘When a Comic Is Taken Seriously,’ The New York Times) Care and labour are inextricably linked, particularly in the context of chronic illness, as caregivers often bear emotional, social, financial, and psychological burdens that can lead to negative consequences. While several studies have examined the physical and psychological impacts of care labour on caregivers, the felt experiences of caregiving (such as fear, guilt, and disappointment, among others) have not received adequate scholarly attention. The present article seeks to closely read selected sections from Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me, a graphic memoir about Alzheimer’s caregiving, to bring to light the complex visceral experiences of unpaid caregivers. Although Tangles is an autobiographical narrative, it also serves as a means to re-examine the conventional notions of care that undervalue and disregard the lived experiences of caregivers. The article investigates how comics medium facilitates the representation of affective forces that shapes the lived experiences of caregivers. Further, the article also examines how exploring such affective realms render a nuanced understanding of care and caring relation. In doing so, this essay not only characterises care as an assemblage of bodies, discourses, performances, and affective relationships, among other things, but also underscores the cultural significance of graphic medicine in critiquing the traditional notions of care.

Traversing ruins: Kristen Radtke’s post-apocalyptic dark tours in Imagine Wanting Only This

ABSTRACT Kristen Radtke’s graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This (2017) visually chronicles the author’s journeys through post-apocalyptic sites including abandoned cities, derelict landscapes, and architectural ruins in order to process the grief over the loss of her uncle and to confront her recurrent thoughts on mortality. Diagnosed with a fatal heart condition that catapults her into reflections on the transience of human existence, Radtke seeks answers by engaging in a series of dark tours to find physical manifestations of her inner turmoil amidst deserted cities and modern ruins. This essay examines how Radtke treads complex subjects of loss, angst, and death through nuanced visual storytelling while associating her vulnerable body with the dilapidated structures she explores. It further investigates how ruins as transitional spaces that simultaneously evoke recollections of a catastrophic past as well as the hope of human endurance offer avenues of self-reflection for the grieving protagonist, aiding her to successfully navigate her grief and overcome her anxieties.

Brazilian Trans Artivism, Comics and Communities, between Digital and Print

Abstract This article looks at the intersection of web-based comics and print graphic memoirs authored by transgender Brazilian comics artists. Brazilian comics have in recent years opened up to internet platforms, a change that has proved particularly fruitful for LGBTQ+ artists, traditionally marginalised by the Brazilian comics industry. The article examines two case studies – those of Luiza Lemos and Alice Pereira, both authors of comics originally posted on social media and later published in print. By means of a mixed methodology that brings together semi-structured interviews with the authors and close readings, this contribution investigates the dynamics regulating the creative and publishing processes of these works, as well as the relationship that they entertain with the practice of transsexual self-narration and self-portraiture.

Visualising “unhomeliness” and tracing trauma in Malik Sajad’s graphic memoir Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir

ABSTRACT The paper deals with the sudden experience of an unfamiliar feeling due to the blurring of the boundaries between the private and the public space, resulting in what Bhabha calls ‘unhomely.’ It has been further argued that this sudden emergence of unfamiliar experiences acts as a traumatic event, represented through graphic narration in Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. The sense of ‘unhomeliness’ caused due to various factors like constant surveillance is responsible for the traumatic feeling in Munnu. The paper also explores the idea of the panopticon, which engenders the blurring of the boundaries between the home and the world. The blurred boundaries make our private space strange and unfamiliar, which is supposed to be an intimate place without any invasion by the external world. Therefore, the present study explores the notion of ‘unhomely’ and the trauma caused by it, as represented in the graphic narration of the events through dreams and nightmares.

South Asian COVID-19 Memoirs: Mourning and Erasure of “Grievable Lives”

This article analyzes how narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic are beginning to memorialize lives lost in the crisis. It juxtaposes the author’s personal experience of the loss of family members with emerging memoirs by South Asian women to explore the diversity of genres like the lyric essay and the graphic memoir that memorialize lives lost to COVID-19. While acknowledging that the current pandemic and its effects are far from over, the essay argues that these memoirs are a conscious attempt to mourn and thereby restore the humanity of lives robbed of traditional acts of remembrance due to the isolation and bureaucracy of laws governing COVID-19 deaths and funerals. These texts by Barkha Dutt, Kay Sohini, and Jhumpa Lahiri are exceptional because the great majority of deaths during this time have been consigned to erasure, lack of documentation, or censorship. These texts are resisting the dominant trend to leave the pandemic behind and resume normal lives. By committing to grief instead of a facile recuperation, these memoirs are not just charting a private path of healing but also transforming private grief into a statement of shared suffering and solidarity, even when the pandemic has affected individuals differently based on stratifications of race, class, and privilege.

ТОМАС БЕРНХАРД. ПОРТРЕТ ХУДОЖНИКА В КОМИКСАХ

The article offers an analysis of graphic books based on the works of Thomas Bernhard (1931−1989), the classic of Austrian literature of the 20th century. The material for the study consists of graphic novels, graphic memoirs, and biographical books created by two Austrian artists − Nicholas Maler and Lucas Kummer. The techniques used by the creators in their work with the “hypotext” (G. Genette) − Bernhard's dramatic and narrative oeuvre: the play “The World-Fixer” (Der Weltverbesserer, 1978), the novel “Old Masters: A Comedy” (Alte Meister: Komödie, 1985), and the autobiographical novellas “An Indication of the Cause” (Die Ursache: Eine Andeutung, 1975), “The Cellar: An Escape” (Der Keller: Eine Entziehung, 1976), “Atem: Eine Entscheidung” (Breath: A Decision, 1978), and “In the Cold” (Die Kälte: Eine Isolation, 1981) – are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the methods of conveying the writer's poetics through artistic means, such as drawing techniques, color palette, panel composition, character stylization, and scenes. The selection of thematic complexes (theatricality and metatheatricality, the problem of truth and fiction, trauma, etc.) and the peculiarities of translating the writer's individual literary style (syntax, rhythm and rhetoric, etc.) are examined. The comparative analysis allows to identify similarities and differences in the ways of visualizing and interpreting the literary material, to reveal the diversity of visual solutions and approaches towards the artistic world of Thomas Bernhard. The research results enable a comprehensive understanding of the potential of comics as a means of conveying literary aesthetics and creating a unique visual space that complements and expands the textual dimension of literary works.

Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer

Reviewed by: Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer Danica Ronquillo Myer, Sarah Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story; written and illus. by Sarah Myer. First Second, 2023 [272p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250268792 $25.99 Paper ed. ISBN 9781250268808 $17.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9-12 Living in Maryland with her white parents in the 1980’s, Korean adoptee Sarah Myer has an active imagination. Her older adoptee sister and classmates find her rambunctious personality distasteful, but she is steadfast in her love for mermaids, drawing, and watching anime and cosplaying to express her queerness. These outlets help Sarah feel “safe and happy, shrouded in my identity as an artist. But something dark still lurked beneath”; she doesn’t know who her own birth parents are and cannot feel a sense of belonging anywhere as she experiences racism and bullying at school. As she enters middle and high school, she increasingly uses violence to defend herself and push people away, unable to control her anger and feeling as though she is a monster. This is a fierce graphic memoir with grit and honesty, and Myer’s mix of cartoon and sketch illustrations powerfully portray the loneliness of exploring marginalized identities within predominantly white, hetero spaces, with unsupportive faculty members and rising homophobia. While sparkling bright color palettes easily convey Sarah’s sense of joy and freedom at attending art and pop culture events, the bright hues contrast with the deforming panels, aggressive line work, and intense dialogue to skillfully capture Sarah’s dehumanizing experiences at school and deep insecurities. Visceral imagery of anatomical bodies and the ghoulish physical manifestation of anger represent Sarah’s raw, uncomfortable emotions. Eventually, Sarah finds a support system in her parents, who are sympathetic and admit their regrets for not doing enough for her, and in a theater club whose members genuinely want to be friends with her. Sarah’s father offers the keen observation that “sometimes people try to invade your world without trying to understand or respect it,” underscoring the book’s message to young people to find their happiness and build the life they want for themselves. End matter has an author’s note and adoptee and mental health resources. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Soloùp’s graphic memoir Aivali: Reconstructing a deconstructed community

In 2014, the graphic memoir Aivali created by the prolific comics artist with the pen name Soloùp was published in Greece with great success. His book constitutes a mosaic of personal experiences relating mainly to the cities of Aivali, Chania and the island of Lesbos. More precisely, Soloùp’s sequential art recounts his own personal experiences and reminiscences from a day trip in Aivali sometime in the 2000s, the autobiographical memories of three Greek authors that refer to their lives in the same city before and during the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor and the story of a Turkish young man, a family member of the Turkish writer Ahmet Yorulmaz, who resided in Chania until his settlement in Aivali in 1923. The purpose of this article is to examine the way in which the spirit of community is revived, how the city of Aivali is socially reconstructed and finally, the manner in which community and space are connected with each other and also with social memory. The notions of community, space and social memory will be approached through the lens of classical sociology theories formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs.

‘Is This the Real Me? What Is the Real Me?’: Deconstructing Authenticity in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love

In spite of being a central figure in the underground comix scene, a trailblazer in the field of female-authored comics, and one of the progenitors of the graphic memoir, there has been relatively little scholarship on Aline Kominsky-Crumb. For much of her career, she was in the shadow of her husband, Robert Crumb, an iconic figure of the counterculture, and any attention she has received for her own work tended to be marred by condescension or predicated on the naïve assumption that, as Susan Kirtley claims, it ‘showcase[s] a raw, unvarnished authenticity’. It also tended to ignore her writing, focusing almost exclusively on her artwork. In this essay, I analyse her anthology, Need More Love, paying particular attention to the nuances of its uses of text, to argue that Kominsky-Crumb’s work might be read as a sustained, self-reflexive interrogation of the idea of authenticity.

“The World Stretched and Contracted Before Me:” Race, Reconciliation, and Resistance in Jim Terry’s Come Home, Indio

This examination of Jim Terry’s 2020 graphic memoir, Come Home, Indio, places the comic within conversations about what Kate Polak has identified as comics potential to operate as access generators to complex political conversations regarding the inequities faced by Indigenous peoples in the United States. Making use of what comics scholar Barbara Postema has identified as “narrative weaving” in comics, Come Home, Indio explores complexity of racial and social injustice on both a micro and macro scale as well as how those who are confronted with such inequities might reconcile with others and form deeper bonds with their own communities through spiritual and political activism. Although much critical energy has been spent on graphic memoirs, this article emphasizes how Terry’s comic might be considered within the complexities of twenty-first century American life, adding to recent conversations, like Frederic Aldama’s 2020 edited collection, Graphic Indigeneity. To date, scholarly engagement with comics by Indigenous creators has been limited, which situates this article as part of an important step forward, moving beyond mere acknowledgement of Native creators and toward prioritizing the role of their political voices and experiences in comics.

Three graphic memoirs and the “family mind” in action

ABSTRACT This article looks at three graphic memoirs and considers the specific ways in which the comic medium allows for the representation of complex and non-verbal interactions between the members of a family. The selected texts show how the sequencing of panels in a comic can depict the unspoken affects that circulate within a family unit. The comic medium seems to be apt for representing the distributed consciousness of a family, and also for splintering a character temporally so that older and younger versions of the character can be put into dialogue with each other in a family context.

The Queerness of Character-Details

Abstract This essay reconsiders the skepticism toward queer characters and the default privilege given to antirepresentational aesthetics in queer theory. To grasp the queer affordances of character, the essay identifies character-detail as an iconic and embodied dimension of character as an aesthetic form. Character-details beckon for queer uptake, or the recirculation of character-details into contexts, genres, and media to unlock new narrative trajectories for queerness. Character-details thus highlight the promiscuously queer relationality of character as an aesthetic form. The essay then turns to A. K. Summers’s graphic memoir, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag (2014), which takes up the character-details of Tintin to expand the narration of gender nonconformity. Finally, the essay traces how character-details focalize bisexual queer eroticism in Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory” from Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Taken together, these texts exemplify the centrality of queer characters to—and character as an aesthetic form in—contemporary queer literature.

Of comics and dementia: an interview with Nigel Baines, Rebecca Roher, and Liza Futerman

ABSTRACT Dementia is often represented as both a terrifying illness and a social threat. Graphic medicine is a burgeoning comics genre dealing with the experience of dementia through physical, and emotional issues. Through the medium of comics, graphic memoirs tease out how dementia operates formally and thematically. In this email interview, three graphic memoirists, Nigel Baines (author of Afloat), Rebecca Roher (author of Bird in a Cage) and Liza Futerman (author of Keeper of the Clouds), reflect on their nuanced understanding of dementia, their experience as caregivers, the challenges of dementia caregiving, and the potential of graphic medicine to convey such issues. The interview is divided into two sections: in Part I, titled Of Comics and Dementia, the authors respond to common questions related to dementia, personhood, dementia care, and graphic memoirs, among others, and in Part II, titled ‘Tragedy not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends’: The Power of Storytelling, each of the authors responds to questions related to their respective dementia comics

In Limbo: A Graphic Memoir by Deb JJ Lee

Reviewed by: In Limbo: A Graphic Memoir by Deb JJ Lee Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Lee, Deb Jj In Limbo: A Graphic Memoir; written and illus. by Deb JJ Lee. First Second, 2023 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250252654 $24.99 Paper ed. ISBN 9781250252661 $17.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 9-12 Freshman year doesn’t begin so great for Deb: she gets teased for her Korean name, even when she insists everyone just call her Deborah, she has to endure her mother’s increasingly abusive criticisms, and she’s not doing so great in her classes. She’s looking forward to being with her friends in orchestra, but music isn’t her true passion, more of a demand by her mother. Deb’s more interested in art, and when [End Page 227] her mom signs her up for art classes and she finds a new friendship in bold and confident Quinn, things start to look up. Social dynamics change, however, and Deb’s mom’s emotional abuse escalates to physical, leading an overwhelmed Deb to attempt suicide. Fortunately, subsequent therapy and new friends and opportunities, including a visit to Seoul, help her find her footing, though she admits that her relationship with her mother will always be complex. There are few bright spots in Lee’s graphic novel memoir, and even the lighter ones have only a dull gleam, overshadowed by depression and social anxiety and making for a bleak but painfully authentic portrayal of mental illness and family trauma. That persistent despair is felt in the mostly monochromatic illustrations, with black and blue shadows constantly encroaching on the lighter elements and shifting panel structure echoing Deb’s moods. Lee’s artistic skill is undeniable, and the subtle stylistic changes add depth to both visual and emotional impact of the narrative. Readers of Krosoczka’s Hey, Kiddo (BCCB 11/18) might find this a somber counterpart that still explores the healing nature of art and its role in managing mental health and trauma. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A gulf of secrets: Priya Kuriyan’s graphic memoir “Ebony and Ivory”

While the key role that migration plays in the economies of countries like India is widely recognized, subtler affective and cultural circuits are both less easily discerned, and perhaps as a consequence, less explored in scholarly literature. The transnational relation over the past several decades of India to West Asia has produced sophisticated and complex heterogenous forms — both traditional literary novelistic genres, as well as newer forms such as the graphic memoir. Through a close and attentive reading of one such memoir, Priya Kuriyan’s “Ebony and Ivory” (2017), this article seeks to articulate the fraught weight of migration. It probes the construction of migrant identities as they unfold over several generations within a single family. The memoir deconstructs the successful economic migrant as in reality bearing the scars of decades of secrecy and shame. Through the use of several refined visual strategies, Kuriyan tells us another tale of the migrant — one that, even as it seeks to carve a special narrative of courage and success in distant lands, must nevertheless also own up to a dismantling of the entrenched narrative of the happy, hardworking immigrant family.

Mapping transnational lives: patterns of dislocation and reorientation in contemporary carto-graphic memoirs

ABSTRACT This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito’s Swallows (Part I), and Pia Valentini’s Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell 2007; Norment 2012), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic processes of autobiographical (re)orientation, drawing, storytelling, and intellectual reflection. Dominant narratives of Italian migration redeem the struggle and shame of migration through individual success, upward mobility, and racial ‘whitening’. These three works challenge stereotypical representations of Italian migration, and Italian hyphenated identities, focusing instead on geographical, historical and autobiographical fragments that come together on the page to sketch provisional and fragile, yet emotionally and intellectually powerful patterns. Such patterns reveal histories and geographies of racism, class exploitation, violence, trauma, but also histories of physical, existential, cultural, linguistic and intellectual resistance, exchange, and creativity. Each of these memoirs locate Italian migrants and their descendants at the intersection of traumatic histories and geographies of nationalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and class exploitation. In doing so, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between transnational histories and individual lives.

David B., L’Ascension du haut mal , and the entangled body in pain

Linking Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard’s theory of the dynamics of entanglement and Thierry Groensteen’s semiotic function of tressage, this article argues that David B.’s graphic memoir L’Ascension du haut mal (1996–2004) [Epileptic (2005)] uses plurivectorial aesthetic and narrative strategies to depict pain, suffering, and trauma. The book explores the intersection of illness and the counterculture in France, the violent networks and legacies of family. David B.’s depiction additionally entangles the pain of the individual and the suffering of the family as he explores illness as a systemic event which shapes the entire domestic unit, and pictures the difficulty of delineating separate identities in a family where one member’s illness is a consuming and resistant vortex at the centre.

The embodied city: Reconstructing Beirut in Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows

In her graphic memoir, A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return, Zeina Abirached depicts the city of Beirut during its protracted civil war, relying on her own recollections and those of family and neighbours to reconstruct an urban environment that was radically altered by conflict. This article examines the book’s depiction of Beirut as an embodied space of experience, a city that is full of life not only because of how its inhabitants adjust to the spatial disruptions of the war, but also because it lives in memory. Through both images and text, Abirached’s memoir suggests that while the body of the city reflects the trauma felt by its inhabitants during conflict, it also fosters a sense of identity, illustrating that figuratively reconstructed places can serve to memorialize both individual and collective responses to trauma and its aftermath.

‘With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye’: girlhood in crisis in Persepolis

ABSTRACT Marjane Satrapi's 2003 graphic memoir Persepolis is a coming-of-age story set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. 19 years after its publication, at a time when we are witnessing increased cultural displacement across the globe, Persepolis's representation of an adolescence lived across and between cultures feels as insightful and provocative as ever. Satrapi explores Marjane's childhood development as she grows into adolescence and experiments with identities. In Persepolis, Marjane's coming-of-age does not result in her becoming comfortable or fixed in a particular identity (or identities) but represents Marjane's acceptance of her liminal and marginal status in the various cultures she occupies. Marjane is shown to be engaged in an ongoing journey through identity formations that does not end when the memoir does. In this essay, we consider the chapter titled ‘The Cigarette' from Persepolis to explore how Satrapi develops a narrative style and an aesthetic for representing a liminal adolescent experience. Through her use of an episodic structure; simple, graphic repetition; and dialogic and multivocal encounters between the child and adult self and the protagonist and her mother, Satrapi shows the complex negotiations with ‘the self’ that characterise her coming-of-age.

Compassionate Comics

The 2015 publication of Nick Sousanis’s graphic dissertation, Unflattening, opened doors for artist-scholars who challenge conventional research methodologies by producing graphic dissertations, graphic research, and comics-based publications in academic, scientific, and medical journals. Unflattening came out one year after I began a PhD program in cultural studies at the University of California, Davis, with a proposed graphic dissertation of my own. In this essay, I will discuss how my intended project, a graphic narrative about my maternal grandmother and her experiences of the Second World War in Germany, became a graphic memoir—an intersectional feminist Bildungsroman that explores themes of transgenerational memory, displacement, and childhood sexual abuse. As an astute scholar in my cohort put it, “You’ve found a new way of ‘doing’ psychology and history.” How is the very particular kind of subjectivity, a seeing from the ground up, or from a “snail’s eye view,” engendered by the comics form, useful for contemporary decolonial scholarship? In addition to writing about my graphic memoir, Queen of Snails (forthcoming by Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press in 2022), I will interview Kay Sohini, a PhD candidate at Stonybrook, about Unbelonging, her graphic dissertation in progress, Helen Blejerman (Lulu La Sensationelle, Presque Lune Editions, 2014), and Sarah Lightman (Book of Sarah, Myriad Press and Penn State University Press, 2021). How has the process of creating their graphic narratives changed their approaches to research? What have they learned by employing drawing and writing in crafting works that include autobiographical elements? How might some of these processes be useful to scholars seeking to unpack intersectional issues of transgenerational trauma, misogyny, and racism?