Many people are drawn to autobiographical stories.
Whether it is in prose, film, podcasts, or even comics and graphic novels, they are attracted to the ideas of truth and authenticity that these stories of real people’s lives offer up.
Audiences can be said to situate themselves differently to autobiography than they do to fiction, where anything can happen. With autobiography and memoir, audiences expect to see or read about people and events that actually happened. Even stories that use strong visual metaphors that keep reality at a distance can reveal the feelings and emotions of the author and other people involved. These stories are often far from the escapist fantasies that many associate with comics.
I’ve always been drawn to comics set in what can loosely be termed the real world.
As a child I read Dennis the Menace, Tintin, and Asterix, all of which had occasional fantastical elements, but the worlds depicted seemed like the world I lived in (or could have done if I had lived two thousand years earlier). Even the superheroes I liked were on the more prosaic side, Bananaman in Nutty comic or The Incredible Hulk – although I was more interested in the melancholy 1970s Hulk TV show than the exuberant Marvel comics. Bananaman’s alter-ego, ‘ordinary schoolboy’ Eric Wimp (pictured), was a working-class kid with a crew cut and a duffle coat, much like me and my friends.
Later, in the 1990s and 2000s, I looked mainly to US alternative comics and French small press comics to feed my craving for real life and autobiographical stories, which were then undergoing a boom in popularity. I devoured comics by Julie Doucet, Joe Sacco, Mary Fleener, Eddie Campbell, Roberta Gregory and many others who were producing stories about their own lives. Many of these were inspired by the first flourishings of the autobiographical comics and graphic memoir genres in the 1970s by creators such as Justin Green and Harvey Pekar. Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary was published in 1972 and visually depicted his adolescent agonies over his Catholic guilt, as well as what was then an undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder. It also featured the use of a thinly veiled fictionalised version of the author, or autobiographical avatar: Binky Brown was Justin Green in all but name.
Mollie Ray’s 2024 book Giant transposes her brother’s cancer diagnosis into a graphic memoir where the brother character literally becomes a giant.
There are many recognisable elements from a patient’s cancer journey, such as chemotherapy sessions and a sibling shaving their hair to support the brother through the hair loss resulting from the medical procedures. As readers, we can empathise with the characters even if they are drawn to resemble large bean-like creatures rather than the human form. Unusually for a graphic memoir, Ray’s book is wordless, and the story is related only through meticulously drawn pages created in biro.
Wordless (or ‘silent’) comics tend to be a more contemplative experience for the reader, as they have to more closely absorb the images to follow the story. Comics with words sometimes allow the text to do the heavy lifting in the storytelling. It may also mean that the author has to include more panels or pages than would otherwise be necessary, so that the meaning is made clear. Comics creators will often use strategies such as this to try to control the reading experience, although it is ultimately the reader who can decide whether to read quickly in one sitting or pause or skip back to previous pages to help make sense of the narrative, a feature that is distinctive to comics.
Aside from the realistic events depicted in Giant through visual metaphor, we also know that the events are based on Ray’s real-life experience because she tells us in the acknowledgements page, where she thanks medical professionals and family and friends.
This spring sees the publication of Craig Thompson’s new graphic memoir Ginseng Roots.
The book follows Craig and his family growing and harvesting ginseng on Wisconsin farms during the summers of his youth. Later in life, Craig rediscovers the herb and the book becomes part memoir, part travelogue and cultural history. The book is a follow-up to his celebrated 2003 memoir Blankets, which was recently re-released in a twentieth anniversary edition.
Blankets explores Craig’s childhood and adolescence, from the relationship with his brother to his first love as a teenager, as well as the conflicts he feels due to his Christian upbringing. It was highly praised and won several awards from the comics industries in the US and France. It also became one of the few books (at least at that time) to cross over from the comics realm into mainstream publishing. This has now become a common pathway for graphic memoir – readers who generally don’t read comics will often have read an autobiographical work such as Maus, Persepolis, or Fun Home. This demonstrates a desire for ‘true life’ stories that transcends medium or art form.
Wordless comics like Giant are uncommon – comics are usually a mixture of text and image. A quote from the Bloomsbury Review demonstrates Craig Thompson’s success with the co-mingling of these elements. It describes Blankets as ‘a superb example of the art of cartooning: the blending of word and picture to achieve an effect that neither is capable of without the other’. Thompson’s beautiful brushwork and high contrast black-and-white art works in conjunction with his writing. The art is what drew me to Thompson’s work in the first place, but both the art and text superbly support the raw feelings of childhood and first love in the story. However, the page displayed here also attests to Thompson’s skill at visually relating a wordless scene filled with visual metaphor.
Blankets also demonstrates the influence of earlier autobiographical comics on Thompson’s work, particularly in the drawing style.
Thompson has cited French cartoonists such as Blutch and David B. (the pen name of cartoonist David Beauchard) as inspirations; both were part of the wave of French cartoonists in the 1990s who gained popularity publishing autobiographical work with small publishers.
David B.’s Epileptic is a graphic memoir of his childhood and his family’s quest to understand and potentially cure his brother Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy. This is a dense comic filled with striking black-and-white artwork. We see David playing with his siblings as children, but also the toll his brother’s condition takes on the whole family. In a particularly vivid visual metaphor, David B. depicts his brother’s epileptic fits not just as his brother shaking and struggling on the floor but as a wrestling match between Jean-Christophe and a reptilian creature. The image of Thompson and his brother above shows a similar expressionist style.
One of the ways that cartoonists draw attention to the authenticity of their stories is to include some kind of evidence, whether in scanned form or as recreated documents in the comic’s pages.
As noted above, Mollie Ray adds extra information to the book outside of the story. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s memoir about her childhood living in a funeral home, as well as coming out and learning about her father’s sexuality, Bechdel meticulously redraws photographs as well as journal entries and typeset book pages. These are all recreated in Bechdel’s distinctive pen and ink style. However, the photographs visually deviate from the main story pages. The whole book is drawn in a realistic style but there is still an element of simplification and cartooning to the characters and settings.
The photographs, however, are rendered in a much more detailed and realistic style, drawn in thin lines with detailed cross-hatching to render the tones. This allows the reader to believe the photos exist and that they support the stories being told. This is important as one photo in particular reveals more about her father than Bechdel was previously aware of and helps her reconsider her relationship with her deceased father.
Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus depicts his father’s experience in Auschwitz, as well as his own fractious relationship with his father as he quizzes him for details in order to create the book.
The memoir was partly inspired by Justin Green’s Binky Brown – in the reissue of Green’s book Spiegelman writes in the introduction that Maus would not exist without Binky Brown. There are two photographs reproduced in Maus. One is of toddler Art with his mother and the other, near the end of the book, is a picture of his father Vladek in a concentration camp uniform. Unlike Bechdel, Spiegelman has photocopied these photographs rather than drawn them. Vladek’s photo was taken to send to his family as proof of his experience in the concentration camp but also to show that he had survived. At first glance this seems to make sense, but the photo bears further scrutiny. In the image Vladek is healthy and the uniform he is wearing is clean and well presented. Despite this picture being proof of his experience, it is not really a picture of Vladek in a concentration camp. As he attests in the text, it is actually a souvenir photo taken in a photography studio soon after his release. The reality is even more complicated than it might first appear.
Another way that comics creators draw attention to the ‘authentic’ nature of their stories is to include panels where they are seen to be drawing a comic, and often the very page you are reading.
This can be seen in a panel from the beginning of the second volume of Maus. Here, Spiegelman reflects on the offers he has received to turn his book into a film or TV show. He has drawn himself in his typical ‘autobiographical avatar’ style – black waistcoat and mouse mask sitting at his drawing table. Beneath the table is a pile of Jewish corpses, and Spiegelman says ‘lately I’ve been feeling depressed’, indicating the guilt Spiegelman feels at telling his father’s story and the demands he has received since the release of the first volume in 1986. Maus is influenced by the funny animal comics Spiegelman read as a child, and he uses the central visual conceit that the Jews are depicted as mice and the Nazis as cats. This metaphor gets a bit garbled as he includes other nations (the British as fish? From fish and chips?) but Spiegelman’s visual metaphor can only really work in comics form.
As the graphic memoir genre has grown so has the popularity of stories in films, TV shows, and books that feature a disclaimer that they are ‘based on a true story’.
Sometimes this can produce a negative reaction if audiences feel that they have been cheated in some way – James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces was relabelled as semi-fictional after an outcry when he was found to have fabricated some sections. However, what this simple statement does is open up a space in which the creator can play with ideas of truth. If autobiography uses the techniques of fiction to tell a ‘true’ story, then this fictionalisation can sometimes chip away at the authenticity or truth by using edited timelines, visual metaphors, composite characters, changed names, and other techniques to tell stories that feel true.
In comics, authors can use the dual modes of text and image to play with or against each other to explore unique storytelling techniques in autobiography. This can be seen in American cartoonist Lynda Barry’s graphic memoir One! Hundred! Demons! In the book Barry confronts various demons or traumas from her childhood. In the introduction, she depicts herself drawing the comics page we are reading, which can be seen as a claim to authenticity. However, she complicates this in the text by questioning the nature of graphic memoir – she asks ‘Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?’ – a question that confronts all readers of autobiography. Barry then goes on to coin a new term for these hybrid stories – ‘autobiofictionalography’.
I wrestle with these ideas in making my own autobiographical comics.
In the first issue, The Adventures of Ticking Boy, I was perhaps overly conscious of being ‘authentic’ and telling the ‘truth’, especially when writing about other members of my family. However, by the second issue, Whatever Happened to Ticking Boy, published ten years later, I was keen to explore ambiguity in storytelling and the space that being ‘based on a true story’ opens up to play games with truth. Visual metaphor and fictionalisation can lead to an emotional truth even if the facts are not strictly ‘true’ – doing a PhD in autobiographical comics in the interim will do that to you!
Discussing his own autobiographical work, in an interview with comics publisher and historian Paul Gravett (one of the judges of the Faber / Observer / Comica Graphic Short Story competition), the French cartoonist Blutch acknowledged these ideas when he stated: ‘I could say that nothing is true but everything is accurate’.
Damon Herd is an artist, lecturer and researcher with a PhD in Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee. His research area is autobiographical comic books, performance, and the games authors play with truth. You can purchase his mini-comics online here, and read more of his writing on the comics blog Graphixia.
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The captivating and affecting graphic novel debut of a major new talent.
Deeply moving and tender, with gorgeous ball-point illustrations, Mollie Ray’s debut graphic novel is a resonant story of empathy, healing and hope.
An international event, this highly anticipated graphic novel – the first in nearly fifteen years from the best-selling, award-winning author of Blankets and Habibi – takes us on an extraordinary journey.
Special 20th Anniversary edition of contemporary-comics-classic, ‘one of the best graphic novels of all time’ (Guardian)
