Graphic Novels as Autobiographies

There's one on Riel which is fantastic

Dead People, Dads and Daedalus: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
quote:Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is one of my favourite books to recommend to a non-comic reader (or I should say, new comic reader). It’s literary, intelligent and complex. It’s been recognized in mainstream press and was on the New York Times best seller list. Also, the art is real purty.

Alison Bechdel created Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running comic strip that appeared in queer newspapers. Fun Home is her autobiographical story about growing up queer, in a funeral home, with a closeted gay dad.

The real meat of the story deals with Bechdel’s relationship with her father — their constant clashes, his obsessive, controlling tendencies, his secret gay affairs with his high school students, his suicide, and Bechdel’s reflections about how she was not so different from him.

Chester Brown also wrote "I never liked you" which is a really good autobiography. I got it signed by him a few years ago. I really liked it.

Sentences : [the life of M.F. Grimm]
By: Carey, Percy.

I just stumbled across this one on my morning blogroll:

365 Days: A Diary by Julie Doucet

quote: Despite Julie Doucet's renunciation of her comics-centric lifestyle over five years ago, 365 Days is imbued with the iconic talent and studied aesthetic of her seminal comic book series Dirty Plotte, which catapulted her into being one of the world’s greatest cartoonists. This visual journal, starting in late 2002, is an idiosyncratic collision of her various creative interests, wherein personal narrative, collage and drawing begin to tell the story of her pursuits into printmaking and beyond, chronicling her maturation as a mid-career artist and her fluid extension into a broader arts community.

Though it doesn't seem to use much narrative to sew together a story, it seems to use images to fill the space where words are not enough.

i just picked up that doucet. Her stuff is great. There's a lot of people I haven't followed for some years now. Chester brown, seth, joe matt, james kochalka. I used to read all that stuff.
Have a bunch of joe sacco (palestine etc) that i have to read. Everybody used to be doing autobio comics, not so much now.

I remember when chester and charles burns and a few other artists came in for an art show and collaborated on a poster for it. Was quite cool to each of them work in their own styles. I remember burns used a brush and was real loose and flowing (he didn't like the quality of the brush someone gave him and told him so) and chester was the opposite - curled up and focused making very little movement.

I read Fun Home a while ago and highly recommend it. The only warning is that it's not anywhere near as fun and cute as Dykes to Watch Out For, her now-archived comic strip that ran for 20 years. I found the novel very sad, grim and intense, which the truth often is.

Bechdel is an amazing writer and artist and her pen and ink drawings are incredible.

I'm now, belatedly, reading Persepolis 1 and 2 as my bedtime reading. Another amazing artist and story-teller, Marjane Satrapi. 

There are practically no end of autobiographical comics out there and more coming out every day. I think, besides the obvious appeal to a highly visual generation of using words and pictures to tell their story, the low production costs of making comics are an advantage to anyone wanting to put their personal stories out there.

One of my favourites is "blankets", a beautiful heartrending account of first love found and lost, by Craig Thompson. All of Harvey Pekar's work, the "American Splendor" series, is autobiography, of course. Most of Chester Brown's work, as well as his good friends, Seth ("It's a good life if you don't weaken"), and Joe Matt ("Peepshow"). I could go on and on, but I'm writing this on the fly so maybe I'll come back later with more recommendations.

An old Japanese novel has been made into a graphic novel

it has become a best seller. Yes the novel on Riel is good. Found it in the public library. I suggested it to my sister for her class since she it teaching a history unit on the Red River resistance.

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why is it that polling booths look like cattle chutes?

Japan is so far ahead of us in comics, as is Europe. They have long considered them a legitimate art form when we're just starting to accept this in the last decade, after having them as a popular medium for over a century. I'm currently re-reading Osamu Tezuka's "Buddha" series, which uses a highly cartoony art style, like all his works, but is still one of the most spiritually invigorating works I have encountered.

Now I'm going to go off on a rant here, and please nobody take it personally. I know it's the style of the time, so it's become common practice, but I absolutely loathe the term "Graphic Novel". Instead of acknowledging comics as an art form of it's own, people have tried to lend it the legitimacy of an already respected medium (prose fiction) by tacking the term novel onto it. "Why this comic, has deep characters and complex themes! It's like it's not a comic at all. It's like a real book!". Sorry, but it's still a comic. It's just a good comic. A medium is a medium regardless of content. Quality and comics aren't mutually exclusive and you don't need a new term to describe such a beast.

The worst thing about it is that it's just plain incorrect. A comic, no matter how long or serious, is not any kind of novel, graphic or otherwise. A novel is a work of prose, constructed entirely of words. It may occasionally be illustrated (that might accurately be called a"graphic novel"), but the pictures aren't essential to the work. They can be removed without losing anything important. Many comics, on the other hand, have no words at all. How can we call something a novel that doesn't have any words in it? It makes no sense whatsoever.

To call a comic a graphic novel is akin to calling movies "filmed plays, which they aren't of course, though one could say they were treated that way early in their inception. Movies have their own technology, vocabulary, and skill set to create. They are wholely different entities from plays and are rightly treated as such. Similarly, comics have their own unique means of communicating with their audience, and many things that can be done in comics can't be done in books, movies, or any other medium. Calling them novels lumps them into a category they simply don't belong in.

Okay, I'm done.

Sorry, PB. I didn't mean that Japan and Europe were miles ahead us in the quality of their comics, though that's how it came out. I think there's a fair case to be made that this is true, actually, but that's not what I meant. I meant they are miles ahead of us in their attitude towards comics.

So yes, the vast majority of what they produce is total crap (can't believe you don't like Naruto though. What up?) which tends to be the case with every popular art form, but my point is that at the same time they don't bat an eyelash at very serious and artistic works being created in that format or feel a need to rename the medium to cure this cognitive dissonance. They understand that it is just a medium, used for both trash and serious art, whereas we, as a culture, are still trying to wrap our heads around how this "kid stuff" could possibly produce work of real merit.