Comics Form and Narrating Lives

Abstract

“Comics Form and Narrating Lives” explores why the medium of comics inclines itself to historical and life narrative. The essay focuses on two recent graphic narratives that consider archives both thematically and formally: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a memoir, and Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, a work of comics journalism. Fun Home meditates on and incorporates a family archive, suggesting the author’s embodied relation to her family history through her redrawing of paper archives. Footnotes in Gaza, an investigation of two 1956 massacres in Palestine, visually materializes a previously unarchived set of oral testimonies from survivors of each event. Both works show how experiments with space and time—including diagramming a life on the page and overlaying past and present moments, along with comics’ intense focus on locating bodies in space—allow the form to urgently address itself to the project of narrating lives. (HC)