Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Cover of the book

2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Introduction: Comics, Fatherhood, and Autobiographical Representation

Author : Mihaela Precup

Published in: The Graphic Lives of Fathers

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

This is an introductory chapter that situates this book in the current conversation on several intersecting issues: fatherhood, autobiography, and graphic representation. It surveys the recent critical literature in these three fields and points out the productive ways in which they converge. Besides positioning the selection of comics chosen for this volume in the North American context of relevant autobiographical comics (which includes authors such as Debbie Drechsler, Phoebe Gloeckner, Nicole Georges, Joe Chiappetta etc.), this chapter also clarifies the wider context of autobiographical comics on fatherhood, by embedding the conversation in the international comics scene (by discussing relevant works by Mary Talbot, Marzena Sowa, Riad Satouf, Asaf Hanuka, Guy Delisle, Antonio Altarriba etc.).

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
next chapter “A good and decent man”: Fatherhood, Trauma, and Post-War Masculinity in Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart
Footnotes
1
The webcomic was translated into English and published by The Guardian in 2017.
 
2
In Emma’s other feminist comics about domestic work, collected in The Mental Load (2018), some of which are autobiographical, she also tackles other related issues—such as the father putting a noble spin on spending unnecessary time at work instead of rushing home to help take care of the children—where the father comes off as self-indulgent and purposefully dense about his female partner’s needs.
 
3
In an interview with Angelique Chrisafis, who observes that the creator’s “easy-to-grasp cartoon representation of it [the issue of the mental load] was a lightbulb moment,” Emma mentions that a large number of women from very different cultural spaces have written to her to confirm that they found the situation applied to them too (Emma 2018a).
 
4
“My Father Bleeds History” is the subtitle of the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, that covers the time period between “mid-1930s to winter 1944.”
 
5
This scene of traumatic transference occurs in a section of the introduction to Breakdowns titled “A Father’s Guiding Hand.” Spiegelman represents the trauma of the Holocaust as a fire-spitting dragon, complete with Hitler serpent emerging from its stomach, that chases and badly damages Dash as his father exclaims with faux delighted satisfaction: “And—just think!—someday you’ll be able to pass it on to your son!” (Spiegelman 2008). Tragedy colors the space of the Spiegelmans’ home to such an extent that even an episode as mundane as the entire family enjoying The Dick Van Dyke Show—also included in Spiegelman’s introduction to Breakdowns—only turns out to be the background for another traumatic moment: the announcement, as the phone rings, of the sudden death of Anja’s brother Herman in a hit-and-run accident.
 
6
For comprehensive readings of these two topics, see Deman (2010) and Michael (2018).
 
7
In fact, Franny is only featured in two stories titled “Sixteen” and “Friends in the Night.” In both of these she is, as indicated by the title of the first story, a teenager.
 
8
Joe Chiappetta is still self-publishing the Silly Daddy series. The latest volume, Silly Daddy Forever: Comics for All Time (2017) contains the work produced between 2005 and 2017, a similar combination of autobiographical and fictional independent cartoons.
 
9
The parenthetical information includes first the year of publication in the original language and the subsequent English translation, respectively. Burma Chronicles was published in the original French in 2007. The English translation came out in 2009. I use this dating system throughout this chapter to refer to original and subsequent English language publications of comics whose original language was not English.
 
10
According to information provided on the copyright pages of the English language versions, Hanuka started publishing The Realist in 2010 as a weekly comic in the Israeli business magazine Calcalist. His comics were first collected and published in French as K.O. à Tel Aviv, vols. 1 and 2 (republished as The Realist) and 3 (republished as The Realist: Plug and Play). The English version of The Realist also contains some previously unpublished material.
 
11
For a close reading of the child’s perspective on the communist experience in Poland as represented in Marzi, see Mihăilescu (2012).
 
12
For a useful review and critique of some of the main concepts in trauma studies in the West, see Luckhurst (2008), Rothberg (2009), and Craps (2012). For a more thorough problematization of the concept of empathy, see Pinker (2011).
 
13
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson differentiate between the “narrating ‘I’” of an autobiographical text, as the “I” who “wants to tell, or is coerced into telling, a story about himself” (2010, 59) and the “narrated ‘I’” or “the protagonist of the narrative, the version of the self that the narrating “I” chooses to constitute through recollection for the reader” (2010, 60).
 
14
Autobiography has been a recognized literary genre since the late eighteenth century, and since then it has continued to provoke heated debates on many issues such as “authorship, selfhood, representation and the division between fact and fiction” (Anderson 2001, 1–2).
 
15
This is a reference to questions such as “Is posthumous harm possible?” and suggested answers such as “The dead belong to the living” (Howes 2004, 245). These are issues raised during an October 2002 colloquium on life writing that took place at the Memorial Union of Indiana University (Howes 2004, 244).
 
16
The dadoirs Podnieks analyzes in this chapter are Housebroken:Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad by David Eddie, Alternadad by Neal Pollack, Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood by Christopher Shulgan, Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? Confessions of a Gay Dad by Dan Bucatinsky, Hear Me Roar: The Story of a Stay-at Home Dad by Ben Robertson, The Good, the Dad and the Ugly: The Trials of Fatherhood by Brian Viner, and Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood by Trey Ellis.
 
17
LaRossa also mentions that Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous childcare bible, Baby and Child Care, is sometimes used as an undeniable argument that social change is real when some invoke the argument that Spock, whose book first came out in 1946, revised it 30 years later and indicated that men should not only help mothers “occasionally,” as he had previously advised, but that both partners should work together in a spirit of domestic equality (1997, 193). LaRossa is vehemently against the idea of linear progress also because, by denying previous models of engaged fatherhood, New Fatherhood can make it “possible for today’s fathers to receive accolades for not doing much” (2011, 9).
 
18
The Pew Center Research shows that most of the babies born now have Millennial mothers (defined as those born between 1981 and 1996).
 
19
See the official Ad Council YouTube page and their website, adcouncil.​org
 
20
Sometimes assessment and self-assessment overlap as some authors also reflect on their own double position as parents and children.
 
Literature
Abdelrazaq, Leila. 2015. Baddawi. Charlottesville: Just World Books.
Altarriba, Antonio and Kim. 2015. The Art of Flying. Trans. Adrian West. London: Jonathan Cape.
Barbour, John D. 2004. Judging and Not Judging Parents. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 73–98. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Barry, Lynda. 2002. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle: Sasquatch Books.
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps, and Peter Vermeulen. 2017. Introduction. In Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, ed. Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Peter Vermeulen, 1–26. New York: Berghahn Books.
Brown, Jeffrey. 2013. A Matter of Life. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions.
Bucatinsky, Dan. 2012. Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? Confessions of a Gay Dad. New York: Touchstone.
Bunjevac, Nina. 2014. Fatherland. London: Jonathan Cape.
Carabí, Àngels, and Josep M. Armengol. 2014. Introduction. In Alternative Masculinities in a Changing World, ed. Àngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chaney, Michael A. 2011. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Chiappetta, Joe. 2004. Silly Daddy. New York: Reed Press.
———. 2017. Silly Daddy Forever: Comics for All Time. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Connell, R.W. 2005. Masculinities. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Couser, Thomas G., ed. 2004. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Craps, Stef. 2012. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Houndmills/Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge.
Crumb, Robert. 2000. My Troubles with Women. San Francisco: Last Gasp.
———. 2006. The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb. London: MQ Publications Limited.
Crumb, Aline, and Robert Crumb. 2012. Drawn Together. London: Knockabout Limited.
Cruté, Jennifer. 2014. Jennifer’s Journal. The Life of a Suburban Girl, Volume 1. Greenbelt: Rosarium Publishing.
Delisle, Guy. 2009. Burma Chronicles. Trans. Helge Dascher. London: Jonathan Cape.
———. 2013. A User’s Guide to Neglectful Parenting. Trans. Helge Dascher. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly.
———. 2014. Even More Bad Parenting Advice. Trans. Helge Dascher. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly.
———. 2015. The Owner’s Manual to Terrible Parenting. Trans. Helge Dascher. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly.
———. 2019. The Handbook of Lazy Parenting. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Deman, Andrew. 2010. The Intervening ‘I’: Phoebe Gloeckner’s Comics Memoir and the Destruction of Visual Pleasure. In American Visual Memoirs after the 1970s: Studies on Gender, Sexuality, and Visibility in the Post-Civil Rights Age, ed. Mihaela Precup, 155–166. Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press.
Dienhart, Anna. 1998. Reshaping Fatherhood: The Social Construction of Shared Parenting. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.CrossRef
Doucet, Andrea. 2006. Do Men Mother?: Fathering, Care, and Domestic Responsibility. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.
Dow Adams, Timothy. 2000. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill/London: The University of North Carolina Press.
Drechsler, Debbie. 2008. Daddy’s Girl. Seattle: Fantagraphics.
Eakin, Paul John. 1985. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2004. Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 1–16. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Earle, Harriet. 2017. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.CrossRef
Eddie, David. 1999. Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad. Toronto: Random House Canada.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2012. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.CrossRef
Ellis, Trey. 2008. Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood. New York: Modern Times.
———. 2018b. The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Feasey, Rebecca. 2008. Masculinity and Popular Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRef
Freadman, Richard. 2003. Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself. Melbourne: Bystander.
———. 2004. Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father’s Life. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 121–146. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Georges, Nicole J. 2013. Calling Dr. Laura: A Graphic Memoir. Boston/New York: Mariner Books.
Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gloeckner, Phoebe. 2000. A Child’s Life and Other Stories. Berkeley: Frog Ltd.
Gosse, Edmund. 1907. Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments. London: Heinemann.CrossRef
Groensteen, Thierry. 2013. Comics and Narration. Trans. Ann Miller. Jackson. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.
Hanuka, Asaf. 2015. The Realist. Los Angeles: Archaia.
———. 2017. The Realist: Plug and Play. Los Angeles: Archaia.
Hart, Tom. 2012. Daddy Lightning. Philadelphia/Washington: Retrofit Comics.
———. 2015. Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hobson, Barbara, ed. 2002. Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Howes, Craig. 2004. Afterword. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 244–264. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
in ‘t Veld, Laurike. 2019. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRef
Kalinich, Lila J., and Stuart W. Taylor, eds. 2008. The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry. London: Routledge.
Kaplan, Ann E. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick/New Jersey/London: Rutgers University Press.
Kaufman, Gayle. 2013. Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century. New York/London: New York University Press.CrossRef
Kemp, Rob. 2010. The Expectant Dad’s Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know. London: Vermilion.
———. 2014. The New Dad Survival Guide: What to Expect in the First Year and Beyond. London: Vermilion.
Kimmel, Michael S. 2005. Manhood in America: A Cultural History, A Second Edition. New York: Free Press.
Kochalka, James. 2004. American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka October 26, 1998 to December 31, 2003. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions.
———. 2007. American Elf, Book Two: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions.
———. 2008. American Elf, Book Three: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2007. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions.
———. 2012. American Elf, Book Four: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2011. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions.
———. 2014. American Elf 2012: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions.
Kunka, Andrew J. 2018. Autobiographical Comics. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press.
LaRossa, Ralph. 1997. The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 2011. Of War and Men: World War II in the Lives of Fathers and Their Families. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.CrossRef
Lightman, Sarah, ed. 2014. Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc..
Lockridge, Larry. 1994. Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge Jr. New York: Viking.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. Abingdon/London: Routledge.
Mackintosh, Ross. 2011. Seeds. London: Com.x Ltd..
Marsiglio, William, ed. 1995. Fatherhood: Contemporary Theory, Research, and Social Policy. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRef
Mihăilescu, Dana. 2012. The Legacy of Communism through a Child’s Lens: The Thrusts of Emotional Knowledge Out of Marzi’s Poland. In Literary and Visual Dimensions of Contemporary Graphic Narratives, ed. Mária Kiššová and Simona Hevešiová. Nitra: Constantine the Philosopher University Press.
Moisseinen, Hanneriina. 2013. Isä. Kreegah Bundolo: Hämeenlinna.
Nabizadeh, Golnar. 2019. Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels. Abingdon/New York: Routledge.CrossRef
Oksman, Tahneer. 2016. “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRef
Ollmann, Joe. 2011. Mid-Life. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Pedri, Nancy. 2012. Cartooning Ex-Posing Photography in Graphic Memoir. Literature & Aesthetics 22 (2): 248–266.
———. 2017. Photography and the Layering of Perspective in Graphic Memoir. ImageTexT 9 (2): n. pag. 23 March 2019. Web.
Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.
Podnieks, Elizabeth, ed. 2016. Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the New Man. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pollack, Neal. 2007. Alternadad. New York: Anchor Books.
Porter, Roger. 2011. Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.CrossRef
Postema, Barbara. 2015. Establishing Relations. Photography in Wordless Comics. Image [&] Narrative 6 (2): 84–95.
Quintero Weaver, Lila. 2012. Darkroom. A Memoir in Black and White. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Raeburn, Paul. 2015. Do Fathers Matter? What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We’ve Overlooked. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Robertson, Ben. 2012. Hear Me Roar: The Story of a Stay-at-Home Dad. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Roth, Philip. 1991. Patrimony: A True Story. London: Vintage.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sandell, Laurie. 2009. The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir. New York/Boston/London: Brown and Company.
Satouff, Riad. 2015. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978–1984. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York: Metropolitan Books.
———. 2016. The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984–1985. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York: Metropolitan Books.
———. 2018. The Arab of the Future 3: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985–1987. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Shulgan, Christopher. 2010. Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood. Toronto: Key Porter Books.
Sinclair, Neil. 2012. Commando Dad: Basic Training. Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
———. 2014. Commando Dad: Raw Recruits. London: Yellow Kite.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Sowa, Marzena and Sylvain Savoia. 2011. Marzi: A Memoir. Trans. Anjali Singh. New York City: Vertigo.
Spaas, Lieve, ed. 1998. Paternity and Fatherhood: Myths and Realities, A Second Edition. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Spiegelman, Art. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books.
———. 2008. Breakdowns. London: Viking Penguin Group.
———. 2011. MetaMaus. London: Viking Penguin Group.
Talbot, Mary, and Bryan Talbot. 2012. Dotter of her Father’s Eyes. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books.
Tropp, Laura, and Janice Kelly, eds. 2016. Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture. London: Lexington Books.
Tyler, Carol. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. A Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle: Fantagraphics.
Viner, Brian. 2013. The Good, the Dad and the Ugly: The Trials of Fatherhood. London: Simon & Schuster.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics. Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4): 965–979.CrossRef
Wolff, Geoffrey. 1990. The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father. London: Vintage.
Metadata
Title
Introduction: Comics, Fatherhood, and Autobiographical Representation
Author
Mihaela Precup
Copyright Year
2020
Book
The Graphic Lives of Fathers

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36217-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-36218-8

Copyright Year: 2020

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_1