The Graphic Lives of Fathers

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.).

In this chapter I argue that Alison Bechdel’s investigation of her father’s life and death is not merely a work of mourning and an attempt to reconnect with the dead, but also a gesture of artistic emancipation and a profound examination of the ways fatherhood as a cultural construct is inevitably policed by social norms. I propose that Bruce Bechdel’s ultimate inability to abide by the contemporary definition of a good father shows the limitations of the way fatherhood is understood in a certain time period, but also the fact that there is a set of fundamental expectations of fathers that cannot be dismissed as fluctuating social constructs.

Laurie Sandell’s colorful and deceptively delicate watercolors paint harsh truths about her father’s long history of deceiving his family, his theatrical larger-than-life persona, as well as his quick temper. At some point during her adulthood, Sandell, now a successful journalist, discovers that her father is a fraud who fabricated most of his past, forged his academic credentials, and made such poor investments that he nearly bankrupted the entire family. The shock of this realization not only unveils the fragility of the family’s stability, which had always been threatened by the father’s frequent outbursts, but also destabilizes Sandell’s own sense of self. In this chapter, I examine how the disintegration of the father as a trustworthy and reliable figure may negatively impact his children’s own sense of ethics, their ability to forge stable relationships, as well as their mental health.

This chapter examines Serbian Canadian cartoonist Nina Bunjevac’s portrayal of her father in one short story, “August, 1977” (included in her first book, Heartless) and her graphic memoir, Fatherland. Her creative process is complicated by a few factors: she does not remember her father, as she was only one year old when she last saw him; her father was affiliated with an extreme right-wing Serbian organization and died as he was planning a terrorist attack; and, finally, it is generally difficult to extricate the life of a person who becomes a potential terrorist from the historical events and political forces that contributed to his (un)making. Consequently, Bunjevac has to rely on family members’ stories, the family archive of letters and photographs, as well as substantial research of Yugoslavia’s history in order to be able to compose what becomes not so much the coherent image of a father she mourns, but rather a levelheaded investigation of the making of a perpetrator.

In A Matter of Life (2013), subtitled “An autobiographical meditation on fatherhood and faith,” Jeffrey Brown examines fatherhood both as a son and as a father himself. This intergenerational examination of fatherhood inevitably produces a contemplation of the frailty of human bonds and the difficult fact that blood ties do not protect anyone against dying. Brown’s representation of his own experience is a hopeful example of involved fatherhood: he is a calm, helpful, and supportive father, and his own distance from his minister father’s faith offers him a serene perspective on life and death. This chapter focuses not only on the two models of paternal conduct depicted by Jeffrey Brown in A Matter of Life, but also on related issues such as alternative masculinity, intergenerational conflict, and the apparent contradiction between a positive worldview and the inevitability of the final extinction of human life.

This book has shown that depicting and assessing paternal conduct—whether from the perspective of the child or that of the father—test the limits of autobiographical narration in comic book form and make compelling statements about the contemporary construction of fatherhood. The texts I read here offer multiple ways of thinking about fatherhood by showing the impact on paternal conduct of various factors such as trauma and precarious mental health (Carol Tyler, James Kochalka), radicalization (Nina Bunjevac), problematic sexual conduct (Alison Bechdel, Robert Crumb), aging (Joe Ollmann), fraudulent acts (Laurie Sandell), and religion (Jeffrey Brown). These cartoonists attempt to define what a good father might be, as well as answer important methodological and ethical questions about (auto)biographical representation and archival work, the employment of humor, caricature, and the grotesque in self-representation, the ownership of the stories they tell (and how that can be gained or lost), and their rights as self-appointed storytellers (sometimes in spite of open opposition from family members, as in Laurie Sandell’s case, or in the absence of the actual possibility of obtaining permission, as when the autobiographical subject is either dead or too young to be able to comprehend and provide consent). The answers these cartoonists implicitly or explicitly give to these issues reflect contemporary beliefs and expectations about paternal conduct, the therapeutic power of self-representation, confession and closure, and the ethics of autobiography.