Filial Lines : Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form

This book considers the significance of the filial relationship to the graphic narrative oeuvres of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel. Bringing to bear a wealth of previously undiscussed texts and materials, it offers a lively, theoretically eclectic framework for reading along the lines of the comics form.

This is the first book to place the autobiographical projects of canonical comics authors Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other, focusing on new and neglected works (and with an epilogue on the Pulitzer Prize-winning tour-de-force debut of Tessa Hulls). The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes-boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs-through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Built around rich close readings, it shows what makes the comics form particularly suited to negotiate complex familial and creative inheritances and manage layered, relational identities. Interweaving accounts of Jewish identity, female embodiment, legacies of modernism, and feminist practice, the book traces how contemporary graphic memoirists visually work and rework their filiations and affiliations through form, situating the medium as a privileged site and staging ground for arguments about the enabling possibilities of form now.