A fruitful reading of the best North American and European
autobiographical comics A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a
disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the
comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal
stories of considerable complexity and depth. In Autobiographical
Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long
overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and
narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers
eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that
cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different
artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary
fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history,
and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features
of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling.
For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's
self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of
identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image.
The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing
their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes
and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators
are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western
culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the
authentic nature of their stories. Elisabeth El Refaie, Cardiff, United
Kingdom, is a senior lecturer at Cardiff University in the United
Kingdom. Her work has been published in Studies in Comics, Visual
Studies, and HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, among other
periodicals.
