Drawing from Life

Essays that query the roles of trust truth and family memoirs in autobiographical comicsEssays by Jan Baetens David M. Ball Lopamudra Basu Christopher Bush Isaac Cates Michael A. Chaney Alisia Chase Sharon O'Brien Davida Pines Yaël Schlick Rachel Trousdale and Benjamin WidissAutobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of the death of the author/subject while also demanding new approaches from critics.Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art is a collection of essays about autobiography semiautobiography fictionalized autobiography memory and self-narration in sequential art or comics. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds including English American studies comparative literature gender studies art history and cultural studies. The book engages with wellknown figures such as Art Spiegelman Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel; with cult-status figures such as Martin Vaughn James; and with lesser-known works by artists such as Frédéric Boilet.Negotiations between artist/writer/ body and drawn/written/text raise questions of how comics construct identity and are read and perceived requiring a critical turn towards theorizing the comics' viewer. At stake in comic memoir and semi-autobiography is embodiment. Remembering a scene with the intent of rendering it in sequential art requires nonlinear thinking and engagement with physicality. Who was in the room and where? What was worn? Who spoke first? What images dominated the encounter? Did anybody smile? Man or mouse? Unhinged from the summary paragraph the comics artist must confront the fact of the flesh or the corporeal world and they do so with fascinating results.Jane Tolmie Kingston Ontario Canada is associate professor of gender studies and cultural studies cross-appointed to English at Queen's University. Find her at http://www.queensu.ca/gnds/tolmie.php