Michael A. Chaney's edited collection Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly literature investigating graphic texts. Chaney has grouped twenty-seven essays into four sections, focusing on the work of Art Spiegelman, global autography, women's life writing, and the range of self-representational strategies to be found in recent, popular graphic work. The collection's authors include not only established scholars of life writing, comics, and narrative, and not only up-and-coming literary scholars, but also comics creators like Damian Duffy and Phoebe Gloeckner, who offer the perspective of practitioner-theorists.
The scope of this collection is impressive and will broaden the horizons of even experienced life-writing scholars; these essays offer particularly useful introductions to and contexts for an eye-opening variety of contemporary works. The essays are also interestingly varied in scope and structure, more than half of them coming in at under ten pages in length. Revised versions of Marianne Hirsch's 1992–93 Discourse essay on mourning and postmemory in Maus and of Hillary Chute's chapter on Lynda Barry from her 2011 Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics are juxtaposed with shorter reflections, like Paul John Eakin's meditation on reading Spiegelman on CD-ROM and Andrea Lunsford's recollection of Lynda Barry's 2008 visit to Stanford and its impact on Lunsford's subsequent teaching. Longer essays on widely studied and taught texts, including Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, accompany investigations of lesser-known works and subgenres, including comics representing the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s and “crisis comics” produced by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The collection amply fulfills Chaney's aim “to reimagine the format of the typical academic essay collection by counterbalancing conventional, chapter-length essays … with brief philosophical musings on pictorial autobiography or graphic novel representations of authorial subjectivity” (7).
Graphic Subjects also does an admirable job of focusing readers’ attention on the ways visual representations can reshape our ideas of self and subjectivity, particularly as they are mediated and made through literary and graphic art. This collection repeatedly offers detailed examples of and strategies for reading graphic narrative, but it also repeatedly provides provocative insights into what those close-reading strategies mean for life writing as a field. As Chaney suggests early on, “the pictorial presence of the autobiographical subject of comics both fortifies and unravels autobiography's founding generic claims” (7), which in turn encourages readers “to rethink the assumptions of an inherently print-based study of autobiography—its formal modalities, representational practices, and discursive contexts” (7–8).
Unsurprisingly, given the collection's range, its authors take up such issues in a variety of ways. For example, Linda Haverty Rugg's short piece on cinema and “the autobiographical avatar” ultimately turns toward considering “the collaborative nature of selfhood” itself (75). Sidonie Smith's meditation on human rights and comics explores how graphic autobiographies might function ethically as witness narratives (69–71), a question to which Chaney returns in his own essay on narratives of the Rwandan genocide featuring the “abyssal gaze” of animal witnesses (93–95). Writing about Fun Home and Persepolis respectively, Julia Watson, Leigh Gilmore, and Nima Naghibi also examine issues of ethics, empathy, and the (re)schooling of emotion through these graphic memoirs’ projects of “invit[ing] new theorizing of subjectivity, genre, and readers’ engagement with the autobiographical” (133), and of visualizing theories of memory itself. Theresa Tensuan, Domna Stanton, and Carolyn Williams discuss the ways several women's texts—two twenty-first-century cancer narratives, Joanne Leonard's “photo(gyno)graphy,” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's typographically innovative A Dialogue on Love—afford their creators ways to rethink the representation of women's embodied lives, particularly in relation to illness and medical discourses. Detailing how Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary paved the way for subsequent confessional comics that would “show selfhood as a production process” (229), Joseph Witek guides us toward wondering what it is about comics themselves that makes space for autobiographical disclosures, hearkening back to one of Chaney's introductory observations about “the uniquely supple procedures the comics form makes possible for the representation of multiple, yet simultaneous, timescapes and competing, yet coincident, ways of knowing, seeing, and being” (5).
Several essays illuminate their subjects’ ways of representing and existing within temporal and historical frameworks. Both Stephen Tabachnick's piece on David B.'s Epileptic, and Isaac Cates's essay on “The Diary Comic,” which focuses on James Kolchalka's American Elf and Sketchbook Diaries comics, examine the impact of a serial format (with its potential for documenting discovery and creating an open-ended textual space) on extended visual autobiographical narrative. Several authors, including Stanton and Eakin, contextualize their work here within the arc of their careers as life-writing specialists, while Erin McGlothlin's and Bella Brodzki's essays on Art Spiegelman use his 2008 Breakdowns to explore the development of Spiegelman's career and “the multifarious ways Spiegelman visualizes himself” (53). Other authors have their work contextualized: two essays after Witek's discussion of Justin Green's foundational role in autobiographical comics, Ian Gordon lauds the field-shaping power of Witek's own critical work—the 1989 study Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. In fact, the shaping of fields remains one of this collection's concerns, from its first section on Spiegelman, through Bart Beaty's piece on how Toronto comics artists Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth co-created a “self-conscious network of artistic and social relationships” (248) in the 1990s and Damian Duffy's account of creating “hyperreal” virtual reality installations with collaborator John Jennings, to its final essays—Chute's and Lunsford's discussions of Lynda Barry's “autobifictionalographic” work in One Hundred Demons and What It Is, both of which feature explicitly instructional elements designed to invite readers to become practitioners.
Particularly, since Graphic Subjects details so many different comics and graphic subcultures, as well as critical and creative genealogies, it is difficult not to wish that the collection had offered a stronger sense of guidance through its fascinating terrain, perhaps in the form of a lengthier critical and historical introduction and|or a chronology of the major movements, moments, and texts the collection explores (such as the rise of the bande dessinée in Belgium and France, featured in Jan Bataens's essay on Dominique Goblet, or the developments of manga in 1960s Japan that James Dorsey discusses).
More vexing is Chaney's use of “graphic novels” in his collection's subtitle and introductory discussion. Chaney suggests that “the controversy over the term ‘graphic novel’ has not dismayed autobiography scholars as much as it has comics scholars, who complain that the term is commercially rather than aesthetically imposed, not to mention misleading” (4–5). He then simply declares that, though most of the texts discussed in Graphic Subjects “are not technically novels at all,” “the term ‘graphic novel’ adequately locates the family of works under attention here” (5). But this collection's greatest strength is that it focuses explicitly on the intersection of graphic text and life writing—which distinguishes it from collections like Stephen E. Tabachnick's 2009 Modern Language Association volume Teaching the Graphic Novel or Lan Dong's 2012 collection Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives, both of which range through fictional and nonfictional texts. Nearly all of Graphic Subjects’ essays are more precise and better rationalized than their collection's title, using terms like “graphic narratives and autobiography” (51), “graphic memoirs, or autographics” (66), “graphic life writing” (70), “autographic memoir” (123), “comics autobiography” and “confessional autobiographical comics” (228), and, most broadly and frequently, “graphic narrative.” The essays that take up actual graphic novels (such as Victoria Elmwood's discussion of Watchmen and Rocío Davis's work on American Born Chinese) focus on how autobiographical moments and modes are deployed within those fictional texts, thus helping to suggest why it matters to retain “graphic novel” itself as a term capable of being used precisely.
In their essays for Tabachnick's Teaching the Graphic Novel volume, Charles Hatfield and Joseph Witek wisely cautioned against undue definitional strictness, with Hatfield positing that “comics shouldn’t be easy to define, as they are an interdisciplinary, indeed antidisciplinary, phenomenon, nudging us usefully out of accustomed habits of thought” (23), and Witek reminding us that “[c]omics scholarship is a growing field, and its critical vocabulary is in constant flux” (219). But that volume's editor, too, sidesteps a legitimate question about why comics and life-writing scholars and teachers would want to use “graphic novel” as our umbrella term. Tabachnick simply notes that: “The term graphic novel seems to have stuck despite the fact that graphic novels are often compelling nonfictional works, such as biographies, autobiographies, histories, reportage, and travelogues” (2). But rather than continuing to solidify an overly narrow and frequently inaccurate term, why should scholarly work not substitute for “graphic novel” a term that encompasses all of these fictional and nonfictional subgenres, since one exists in “graphic narrative”?
This issue of critical nomenclature aside, though, Graphic Subjects is an exciting work, and one that will be valuable to students, teachers, and scholars. David Herman concludes his contribution to this volume with “a call for a whole program of research—one that will require the combined efforts of narrative scholars, theorists of autobiography, and comics experts” (242). Indeed, the essays that Michael Chaney has assembled here seem likely to provoke a whole array of programs of future research into graphic work and life writing.