The Comic Book As Biography

There’s a good article in today’s Guardian about Fun Home, the graphic novel written and drawn by Alison Bechdel. The tagline to the title is "A Family Tragicomic" – a punningly apt description, for it’s a biography of her family, in particular her father – dead by age 44, done in the form of a graphic novel.

 

It turns out, according to the Guardian article, that the success of the book has been something of a mixed blessing to Bechdel, who created the book almost as a way to write about issues beneath the surface in her childhood. She, and her family, was totally unprepared for the level of attention that the book has created. I found the book surprisingly moving. It is certainly worth getting hold of a copy. Fun Home takes its place on my bookshelves alongside three other examples of this genre, biography told via the format of the graphic novel. Art Speigelman’s Maus I and Maus II, and Raymond Briggs’ Ethel and Ernest. The two Maus books deal with the life of Speigelman’s father, Vladek, and his life as a Jew under the Nazi regime. They are, as you can imagine, quite harrowing to read, but worth it. Briggs’ Ethel and Ernest spans almost the same period as Maus, but this time we are far away from the death camps of Auschwitz. Briggs tells the story of his parents, a pair of decent, ordinary people. This book is the one that invariably brings tears to my eyes each time I read it. An apparently simple tale about simple folk, told by a master storyteller and illustrator. The result is almost unbearably moving. My favourite of the bunch.