“When Comics Meet Biography: Drawing the Lives of Others”

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In the past two decades there has been an efflorescence of graphic life writing, but much more attention has been paid to comic book autobiographies than biographies. My research begins by asking why this is the case and then explores a group of North American alternative graphic biographies in order to answer a central formal and aesthetic question: how can comic books construct and deconstruct the biographical illusion of a knowable, linear, coherent life? I argue that graphic biography is a contemporary form of knowledge production that asks crucial questions about whose lives are worth remembering and recording, what constitutes ‘greatness,’ how to represent an individual on the page and as part of collective histories, and how to draw a coherent life narrative from leftover traces, testimonies, and texts.

Candida Rifkind is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, where she specializes in graphic life writing, Canadian literature, and popular modernisms. Her book, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2009. She has also published numerous articles on modern and anti-modern Canadian literature, cultural memory, and contemporary graphic narratives. She is currently co-editing a scholarly collection with Linda Warley titled Canadian Graphic Life Narratives (forthcoming in the Life Writing Series of Wilfrid Laurier University Press) and working on a book titled "Preoccupied Lives: Graphic Biography and the Subject at Work." A section of this project, on scientific graphic biographies about Robert Oppenheimer, is forthcoming in a special issue of Biography, “Auto/biography in Transit.”

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Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

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808-956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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