In this paper I will discuss why autobiographical sequential art has been and remains popular, as well as what functions they may serve in the realms of visual art and literature which are unique to sequential art, and why autobiographical comics are important in the realm of storytelling. Primarily, I will be looking at Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, and Ken Dahl’s Monsters, but the ideas I present may be applied to all autobiographical comics.

Autobiography in literature serves the purpose of connecting the reader to the personal history and circumstances that make up another individual human being, and in so doing gives the reader a greater understanding of humanity as a whole and allows them, hopefully, to become more sympathetic to the problem of the human condition.  This is true also for autobiography in comics, but the tandem visual and literary dynamic of sequential art gives the author a greater ability to control the experience of the reader and guide them in the way that they wish through their story. Why, though, does this matter? Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home could easily have been presented as a literary memoir of Bechdel’s life growing up in a funeral home, her realization that she was gay during college, and the suicide of her closeted gay father.  However, with the addition of Bechdel’s visual account of her personal history she is given the option to display human emotions visually to greater effect. A reader of prose would only be able to imagine the letters and family photographs that Bechdel painstakingly recreates in her drawings. These documents could be scanned and presented along with the prose, but they would then serve solely as documentation, while Bechdel’s drawings aren’t the documentation itself, but rather her own experiences with this documentation. It is a way of showing the subjectivity of the author which is an underlying theme of Fun Home as a whole. The visual subjectivity of Bechdel is echoed in the story when she reveals that it actually isn’t clear that her father committed suicide when he was hit by a truck on the side of a road while doing housework on a property that he was repairing. Storytelling, historically, was done in person by an older member of a community to impart wisdom and life lessons to younger members of the community. The storyteller was providing a visualized version of the story they were telling through their body language, placing emphasis through action on certain parts of the story and by guiding the listener through the tale visually as well as verbally.  What autobiographical comics creators like Bechdel are doing is similar and an avenue that would be unavailable in a story told using prose alone.

While Fun Home contains themes that, I believe, would appeal to a large audience even were it to be presented in prose alone, Ken Dahl’s Monsters does not have that same widespread appeal. Monsters describes a period of the author’s life after he tested positive for the herpes simplex virus and his subsequent transgressions committed while withholding that information from women that he was dating and/or slept with.  When the underground comics creators of the sixties and seventies began bucking the system and the Comics Code Authority, they often did so autobiographically by telling mundane stories in a visceral way. They told stories that showed how gross the human body is and how many mistakes people make as they navigate through life. The appeal of this to many was that it elevated the mundane aspects of everyday life to a higher level of importance by pointing out that while these everyday screw-ups and scatological events seem like nothing when viewed on an individual level, the fact that they are a shared experience marks them as invaluable to understanding who and what we even are as a species.  While no long form comic is made without substantial effort and investment of time, Ken Dahl’s Monsters is significantly shorter than something like Maus by Art Spiegelman or Blankets by Craig Thompson. It is this shortness that appeals to autobiographical comic creators in many instances and contributes to the relatively low barrier of entry to this form of personal storytelling.  A story like Monsters doesn’t have the wide content appeal that some other autobiographical comics have, nor would it have the length in prose form to warrant a book, and so would be relegated to an article or as part of an anthology which it would then be sharing space with other author’s work. In comic form, such a story has more physical presence in that it is a five-inch square book, and more literary importance in being presented by itself and not surrounded by the work of others. There is also a greater element if intimacy in a story presented in a comics format.  Since the content of Monsters deals with adult sexual relationships, a visual representation of this brings the reader in closer to the situation.  It is a different sort of effect and connection with the reader that can be achieved through a graphic depiction of sex than with a purely literary account of a sexual act.  These sorts of choices allow the creator far more control over the experience of the reader and how their story is presented and this is a major draw for storytellers. Self-caricature is another mechanism which exists in the medium of comics that exists only to a muted degree in traditional literary autobiography. Ken Dahl portrays himself in an unpleasant physical light in Monsters and often shows himself turning into or being bombarded by a squirming, translucent, that represents an idealized herpes virus.  Charles Hatfiled is referring to Alison Bechdel when he says “The cartoonist projects and objectifies his or her inward sense of self, achieving at once a sense of intimacy and a critical distance.  It is the graphic exploitation of this duality that distinguishes autobiography in comics from most autobiography in prose.” [2]