Graphic women Chute, Hillary
2010., 20101116, 2010, 2010-11-22, 20100101
eBook
Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, ...especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi'sPersepolisexperiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel'sFun Homemeticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past.
These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ALISON BECHDEL BECHDEL, ALISON; Chute, Hillary
Modern fiction studies,
12/2006, Letnik:
52, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Fun Home takes on as thematic and narrative filters Albert Camus' A Happy Death (the book Bruce Bechdel was reading when he died), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Henry James's Washington ...Square and The Portrait of a Lady, Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Colette's Earthly Paradise, among other literary references and allusions. ...the whole story was spawned by a snapshot I found of our old babysitter lying on a hotel bed in his Jockey shorts. ...it expedited matters, because I could draw more quickly, once I had these images. At first I was resistant to the idea to using color at all, because one whole theme of the book is how my dad was such a crazy color freak and how I became a cartoonist because it was a black and white world where I didn't ever have to think about color.
Conversations with trans organizers, artists, and others, illustrated with strong portraiture and impressionistic scenes, showcase a breadth of experience and activism. Each story is rendered in its ...own color scheme, such as the bold red, black, and white of “Martial Arts Is the Most Fluent Asian Language I Speak,” the muted golds and blues of “We Give Money to Trans People,” or the pink/taupe combo of “Everything You Love About New Orleans Is Because of Black People.” PW’s review called the book “an inspirational volume for current and aspiring queer community workers to ‘keep showing up’ to build a better world together.” more The Secret to Superhuman Strength Alison Bechdel. HMH, May
Decades of communication research have shown that the stories we humans tell ourselves about ourselves reflect and shape our identities as members of our particular culture(s). By creating texts that ...portray a group rarely made visible, lesbian comic artists both represent and define lesbian identity and community. This textual analysis of the work of four comic artists, Alison Bechdel, Diane DiMassa, Justine Shaw, and Ariel Schrag, demonstrates how lesbian comic book artists draw on and contribute to the notions of lesbian identity and community. This study of the comics and secondary sources reveals three interconnected themes: visibility, self-reflexivity, and the complex interrelation of and process of defining identity and community.
When Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic came out in 2006, the striking literary quality of the narrative was noted from her first reviews. Bechdel's memoir is positioned at ...the intersection of image, narrative, autobiography and history. But Bechdel makes an additional play for high literary status by larding her book with the influence of canonical modernist literature, not only through frequent and explicit citation and reference, but also by subtler formal, thematic and textual gestures. Of all of these references, Joyce is the most ubiquitous; Joyce frames the novel and introduces both the conflict presented and its reconciliation. Bechdel clearly states the legitimacy of the graphic narrative as inheritor of the modernist tradition, particularly as exemplified through Joyce. At the same time, her relationship to Joyce and the modernist tradition is playful and sometimes combative.
In the postwar era of the United States, as military-industrial chemicals leak into airways, waterways, and foodways in unprecedented plumes and cancer clusters, comic art forms generate diverse ...environmental imaginations. Though historically disparaged as disposable ephemera, comics provide unique access to environmental expression in this critical period. This dissertation analyzes the formal registers of two independent newspaper strips and four graphic cancer narratives for an aesthetics of equity: a set of verbal-visual moves that chart awareness of environmental devastation as determined by privilege and power. The iconicity of the drawn body—its lines, shape, and movement—grapples with complex legacies of environmental harm and exclusion. Maps of environmental risk perception generated through game board motifs, collages, and icon repetition rely on the capacity of sequential art to engage readers in recognizing and analyzing postwar risk. In form and theme, an aesthetics of equity in comics deploys environmental knowledges subordinated and sharpened by interlocking social inequities. This aesthetics revises the elisions and assumptions of mainstream environmentalisms. Ultimately, comics demand a literacy particularly well suited to environmental justice (EJ) ecocriticsm. The dissertation comprises three chapters of analysis. The first examines competing environmental discourses in Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For (1982-2008). This newspaper strip coincides exactly with the start of the contemporary EJ movement. In examining three character arcs across a quarter of a century, I track the emergence of EJ discourse in Bechdel's distinctly lesbian environmental imagination. The second chapter examines the heteronormative limits of the EJ story arc in Jackie Ormes' midcentury romance strip Torchy in Heartbeats (1953-4). Published weekly in the Comic Section of the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, Torchy chronicles its eponymous heroine's quest to end environmental racism in the fictional small town of Southville. Torchy's affect and body language revise romance genre conventions and expose sexism and racism as intersecting environmental oppressions. The third chapter examines transcoporeal exchange in four contemporary graphic cancer narratives from the early 21st century. This chapter examines the extent to which graphic cancer narratives "move out," to use Diane Herndl's phrase, to form coalitions with disparate environmental communities.
The attempt to define mythology is as varied and misunderstood as the art form of comics. Both are much broader in content and meaning than the ways in which they usually get considered. Myths are ...narratives with content that defines specific times and places through use of the structures of the imaginal and metaphorical tensions. Comics narratives also define specific times and spaces, using the structures of the comics panel and the comics page to also capture the imaginal and metaphorical tensions. Structuralism has always suggested that myths contain the oppositions of our lives in one narrative. They create unity, or non-duality, out of the opposites. The tensions that are contained thus create the power and meaning we find in mythology. Similar tensions are contained in comics in the structures of panels and pages. These create mythic power and meaning in comics. By doing so, the contents of comics can be regarded as myths. This dissertation will use examples of the comic strip (George Herriman's "Krazy Kat"), the superhero comic book, and the graphic novel, both from America (Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?) and abroad (Moto Hagio's The Heart of Thomas and Takako Shimura's Wandering Son), to describe some of the variety of myths that comics have created. As well, this survey will inform how mythology is present in human thought and consideration at all times. As a biologically dual species, humans are in many ways, nevertheless, non-dual due to the very nature of our genetic structures. Myths reflect our penchant to see the world in oppositions, even while we recognize the potential for oppositions to co-exist within each other. The ways in which our dualities actually do co-exist is expressed through the metaphors we use to create our myths. In similar ways, the panels of our comics visually express the same truth and create more myths. Keywords: mythology, comics, structuralism, Krazy Kat, superheroes, graphic novels, manga
Notable Books: The 2007 Selection of Titles Rue, Charlene R; Taffae, Sara Maxine; Ahlvers, Alicia Kathryn ...
Reference & User Services Quarterly,
06/2007, Letnik:
46, Številka:
4
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
The Notable Books Council, ALA Reference and User Services Association, has selected the titles for their significant contribution to the expansion of knowledge or for the pleasure they can provide ...to adult readers. King provides a detailed and engaging look at an evolving art movement, set against a time of French political upheaval. In this taut, spare parable, a white man tries to prevent the lynching of a black man and gets caught up in a vortex of violent reprisal. Random, $24.95 (1-4000-6379-5) Share English teen Jason Taylor's ace adventures as he takes on unforgiving classmates, a wicked stammer, and the Falklands War, emerging as an unforgettable protagonist.
