Recent Autobiographical Comics By Jeet Heer Books in Canada (November 2003). Review of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Mar jane Satrapi; Blankets: An Illustrated Novel by Craig Thompson; I Never Liked You: The New Definitive Edition by Chester Brown; Epileptic 1 by David B. As a marketing label, the "graphic novel" is shaping up to be a big success, but as a useful literary category it is a real mess. Graphic novels, as anyone who follows publishing will have heard, are long form comic books, often aimed at adult readers. Over the last few years, despite the general doldrums of the book business, graphic novels have been winning a larger following, with titles like Dan Clowes's Ghost World and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan earning a place on the shelves of mainstream bookstores as strong and persistent sellers. Justly praised for their fine writing and art, these particular works are critical as well as commercial triumphs. Yet the term "graphic novel" remains gratingly inexact. For one thing, the word graphic has connotations of not just the visual but also the sensational and even pornographic ("graphic sex and violence" read warnings on movie posters). The second half of the term "novel" is also not quite right: many graphic novels are works of fiction but some of the most distinguished achievements in the genre are actually comic books that deal with history, autobiography, or journalism. The most successful example of the "graphic novel" is Art Spiegelman's Maus, which has sold more than a million copies and won the cartoonist a Pulitzer Prize. Yet Spiegelman's work is fictional only in form and not in content. Although told in the form of an animal fable, with talking mice and cats, Maus is in fact an acutely accurate account of how Spiegelman's father, a Polish Jew, survived the Second World War. As it happens, four of the most interesting "graphic novels" of the season follow Spiegelman's formidable lead in using comic book storytelling techniques to examine personal history. In background, the four cartoonists are all over the map: David B. was born in Orlean, France in 1959, Chester Brown in Montreal, Canada in 1960; Marjane Satrapi in Rasht, Iran in 1969; Craig Thompson in Traverse City, Michigan, U.S.A in 1975. Despite this geographical diversity these four artists, all relatively young, are united in their use of cartooning to explore their disparate childhoods. Why are so many contemporary cartoonists drawn to the autobiographical form? In some ways, this is a surprising development: historically comics have achieved their greatest popularity in the realm of fantasy, ranging from the pow-bang heroics of Superman to the more whimsical Disney universe of talking ducks and two-legged mice. Even the relatively naturalistic world that Charles Schulz created for his Peanuts characters had a dab of fey make-believe: think of Snoopy using his dog-house to wage war on the Red Baron. The idea that comics could be a vehicle for introspective and naturalistic storytelling only really developed in the 1960s, a curious byproduct of the cultural ferment of the era. In those heady days, the hippy counter-culture had its own artistic wing: artists like Robert "Fritz the Cat" Crumb and Gilbert "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" Shelton produced comics that were rife with anti-establishment attitude, featuring characters not afraid to use foul language or engage in psychedelic excess. At first, the undergrounds were content to simply shock. But by using comics, which had long been a heavily commercialized and censored artform, as a forum for self-expression, underground cartoonists paved the way for the turn to autobiography. Adopting the let-it-all-hang-out ethos of the sixties, some of the best underground comics were frankly confessional. Perhaps influential comic in this vein was Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), an intense and obsessive examination of childhood lived in the shadow of Catholic guilt. By crafting this singularly powerful tale, Green directly influenced the development of other cartoonists, notably Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar, whose piquant comic book stories of working class life have just been adapted in the much-praised film American Splendor. The continuing vitality of the underground comics tradition (now going by the more genteel rubric of "alternative comics") can be seen in the works of two North American cartoonists Craig Thompson and Chester Brown. Although dubbed an "illustrated novel," Craig Thompson's Blankets is in fact a lightly fictionalized memoir of his life growing up in a fundamentalist family in the American mid-west. Craig, the hero of Blankets and clearly the cartoonist's alter ego, is alienated in school, his skinniness and shyness making him an easy target for loutish jocks. Needing a haven from his tormentors, he finds solace in the simple-minded promise of post-mortem bliss preached at his church. As a teenager at Christian camp, Craig meet Raina, who shares his combination of spirituality and adolescent angst. Smitten with puppy love, Craig and Raina start a heated correspondence. Somewhat implausibly, Craig is able to convince his parents to allow him to make a visit to stay with Raina and her family for a few weeks. Amidst the disorder of Raina's shambling household, Craig is confronted with a clash between his theology and his biology. His body wants Raina but his brain is over stuffed with Biblical injunctions against sex. In telling the story of young love clashing with religious scruples, Thompson displays an impressive command of cartooning moxie. In the tradition of classic cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Thompson welds an expressive brush stroke to animate both his human characters and their landscape. For example, Thompson is observant enough to know that snow takes many forms so the many winter scenes in his story all have a distinct feel. Although filled with such decorative niceties, Thompson's art is always used in the service of fluid, fast-moving narrative. Weighing in at nearly 600 pages, Blankets has the physical heft of a phone book, yet can be gulped down in one sitting. Unfortunately, Thompson's writing skills don't match his visual acumen. While many of the minor characters (particularly Raina's troubled family) are well sketched, the hero and heroine of the weepy saga are insufferably sweet and nice. Craig and Raina display a dimpled, angelic cuteness which can only be described as cloying. A curious moral aesthetics of body-size governs their story: while Craig and Raina are thin and ethereal, their oppressors are bulky and imposing. As with many young autobiographical writers, Thompson seems a bit too close to his material. He can't look back on his first love without becoming misty-eyed. This pining over lost days spoils Blankets, despite all its other virtues. For an example of a much more successful approach to similar material, consider Chester Brown's I Never Liked You. (This graphic novel was first released in 1994, but Brown has tweaked the presentation of the material somewhat for the recent "definitive" edition released by Montreal's Drawn and Quarterly). With a fine clinical detachment, Brown's book looks back to his teenage years in the 1970s as a high school student in anglophile Quebec. As portrayed in the book, the young Chester suffers from a reticent heart. He is pals with several girls, one of whom he is sexually drawn to, but chokes up whenever there is a possibility of starting a relationship. There are hints in the background about possible sources for Chester's emotional constipation, including the fact that his family has a stoic code of silence in the face of emotional distress. Yet such explanatory factors are properly kept to a bare minimum: their force is felt in the narrative rather than stated outright. Psychological reduction is never allowed to simplify the complexity of experience. At first glace, Brown's art seems skimpy and sparse: a few tightly demarcated panels per page inside which are line drawings mainly focused on head shots or characters moving against a background as bare as a theatrical stage. When you read Brown's work, however, it quickly becomes apparent that this visual frugality is evidence of a powerfully concentrated storytelling ability. Each panel only gives us enough to move the story forward and convey essential information about the character's mode or situation. Free from unnecessary distractions, our eyes start to squeeze as much as we can from each drawing, so that seeing becomes a form of close reading. This merging of seeing and reading is perhaps the quintessential comic book experience. Few artists know how to distill this experience as effectively as Brown. If Thompson and Brown are heirs to the North American tradition of underground cartooning, David B. and Marjane Satrapi belong to the parallel French tradition of alternative comics. As in North America, Robert Crumb had a liberating effect on European cartooning, encouraging artists to do more personal and daring work. However, the sharp division between commercial and alternative art that governs the North American comics world doesn't seem to exist in the French scene, where there is much healthier interplay between the elite and popular arts. In any case, much of the best work in French cartooning in the last decade has been published by an upstart publisher called L'Association, formed in 1990 by a group of accomplished cartoonists who wanted a venue for their more outré work. David B. was one of the founders of L'Assocation, and the publisher released the original French version of his autobiographical work Epileptic (under the title L'Ascension du Haut-Mal) as well as Satrapi's Persepolis. Sharing a common aesthetic, both these works demonstrate the ability of cartooning as a medium to grapple with the inescapable and painful past. As might be guessed by the title, Epileptic 1 is the first part of a memoir of a malady. (The wise consumer should avoid this version of Epileptic and wait for the upcoming Pantheon edition, which will bring together the whole story in on volume). Growing up in Orleans, France in the 1960s and 1970s, David B. (who originally went by the name Pierre-Francois) found his family's life turned upside down when his older brother Jean-Christophe started suffering from epileptic seizures. Searching for a remedy, the family desperately tries out a host of semi-quack curies, including joining a zen-macrobiotics commune. To their frustrations, they find that while some of the cures temporarily work, there is no permanent solution. Slowly, the members of the family fall into a variety of mental refuges, ranging from sister Florence's dabbling in spiritualism to Pierre-Francois catatonic fascination with drawing military pictures. It is frustrating to have only the first half of a work to read, yet based on Epileptic 1, it is clear that David B. is a major cartoonist. What distinguishes this memoir is the remarkable way that it traces the ripple effects of a medical disorder. Jean-Christophe suffers from epilepsy but he is not defined by it. The variety of strategies he and his family adopt to overcome the illness sharply define their characters as well as the shape of their society. For example, their sojourn into the world of zen-macrobiotics is wonderfully evocative of the dippy New Age culture of the 1970s. Most importantly, David B.'s stark, inventive visuals constantly limn the emotional distress of his characters. As a young artist, David B. retreated into drawings of knights and military battle. "My brother is far away," he recalls. "I lock myself ever more tightly in my armor." In re-creating the pictures he drew as a child, David B. is able to conjure up his earlier emotional state. But this simple recreation soon merges with something more remarkable: recurring and unsettling scenes of surrealistic monsters that give form to the emotional turmoil felt by Jean-Chrisophe and his family. In creating a rich repertoire of visual images to parallel psychological mood, David B. has considerably expanded the emotional range of cartooning. His work on Epileptic is already having a profound impact on European comics, and will undoubtedly be equally revolutionary in North America as his readership grows. One artist who has already felt the influence of David B. is Marjane Satrapi, whose memoir of her Iranian girlhood is perhaps the most talked-about graphic novel of the year. The topical interest of Satrapi's work is not hard to discern: born to a wealthy and secular Iranian family, Satrapi witnessed some of the most bitter years of her country's recent history. In the seventies, Satrapi's family stoutly opposed the decadent repressions of the Shah. One of Satrapi's uncles, a communist, was even a political prisoner of the Shah. Welcoming the overthrow of the Shah, the Satrapi's family are shocked by the rapid ascent of fundamentalist mullahs, who prove even more tyrannical than the previous regime. Pointedly, after a brief spurt of freedom, Satrapi's Marxist uncle is re-arrested and executed. The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war leads to a descent into real social madness, as teenage "martyrs" are sent off to die with the visions of paradise as their only consolation. The historical events Satrapi portrays will be familiar to alert newspaper readers. What makes the book fresh, indeed unforgettable, is the way that Satrapi shows how these remarkable events looked through the eyes of a child. As with many kids, Satrapi took the raw material of the adult world and re-created it on her own level. Political and religious disputes became fantasies where Satrapi turns into either the last prophet (her spiritual phase) or Fidel Castro (her Marxist period). When Satrapi hears stories about torture in the Shah's prisons, she and her neighborhood buddies invent games where the loser is tormented with mock brutalities. For the teenage Satrapi, one of the worst thing about the fundamentalists is that they curb her budding taste for Western fashion. A piquant humor accompanies all these little vignettes. By showing how the big events of history impacted her girlhood, Satrapi does the important work of humanizing history. If we just went by media accounts, we wouldn't guess that Islamic revolutionary Iran was and is filled with people who bristle against the everyday indignations of the regime. Our sense of the diversity of Islamic culture is immensely aided by attending to books like Persepolis. Of the four cartoonists reviewed here, Satrapi does the most in expanding our horizon. Satrapi's blocky and stark style, all black and white with no shading, follows the example of David B. More importantly, like David B., Satrapi doesn't limit herself to representing just what the eye can see. In describing her religious fantasies, she often indulges in the mixture of dream logic and dry wit that David B. showed in his work. In considering four cartoonists from four parts of the world, what is striking is how different they are from each other. Although childhood and youth are a common subject, the approach taken in each case is personal and idiosyncratic. Although they may all be mistakenly lumped together as graphic novels, each of these books should be savored for its own particular merit, its own local weather and individual style.