This book explores the representation of fatherhood in contemporary
North American autobiographical comics that depict paternal conduct from
the post-war period up to the present. It offers equal space to
autobiographical comics penned by daughters who represent their fathers'
complicated and often disappointing behavior, and to works by male
cartoonists who depict and usually celebrate their own experiences as
fathers. This book asks questions about how the desire to forgive or be
forgiven can compromise the authors' ethics or dictate style, considers
the ownership of life stories whose subjects cannot or do not agree to
be represented, and investigates the pervasive and complicated effects
of dominant masculinities. By close reading these cartoonists' complex
strategies of (self-)representation, this volume also places photography
and archival work alongside the problematic legacy of self-deprecation
carried on from underground comics, and shows how the vocabulary of
graphic narration can work with other media and at the intersection of
various genres and modes to produce a valuable scrutiny of contemporary
norms of fatherhood.