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As a medium, comics relies on both words and images to create a narrative form which can be reduced to neither of its elements. In juxtaposing verbal and visual tracks, comics maps time onto space. This capacity to use the space of the page to engage with temporality has led to a proliferation of historical and life narratives in the form of graphic novels. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama take part in that trend, making the complex relationship between words and images both their form and their actual subject. Both novels are structured by acts of engaging different archives (photographs, diaries, literature, etc.) with the aim of constructing coherent (auto)biographic narratives. Visual representation of those archives, which often function as intertextual references, allows Bechdel to weave a narrative which functions as a continual revisiting of a layered traumatic event. The represented archival objects serve a dual purpose in her narration. On the one hand, their materiality seems to corroborate the authenticity of the verbal life narrative. On the other hand, however, the fact that those objects are drawn by the author’s hand, rather than directly reproduced, draws our attention to the medium through which the narrative is filtered, thus emphasising its status as fiction. |
