Autographics are autobiographies in the form of comic strips or graphic novels. They present a brand new level of autobiography to consider-- the aesthetic portion. Smith and Watson encourage readers of autographics to think about how the font, images, gutter spacing, captions, colors, juxtaposition of frames, and other similar visual factors effect the author's ability to convey his/her life narrative and our ability as readers to understand it and be effected by it.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is our most relevant example of this. Bechdel's graphic novel combines artifice and authenticity (art and life) to present aspects of her life, predominantly her relationship with her father and her relationship to her sexuality. It also makes the reader think about how her process effected her ability to understand her memories and retell them in comic format. Not only did she have to remember them and write them down in the form of a narrative, she had to spend seven years creating drawings to accompany her story, with the effect that the drawings become the story in addition to the text.
Personal Take:
For our blog posts that week, we had the option to create an autobiographical comic using a free trial of Comic Life, a program designed by a College of Charleston professor's husband. Mine is shown as the picture for this blog post. I had a lot of fun doing it and I'll admit that while I stretched the truth a little bit, it can still be considered a form of autobiographical truth-- just a farfetched one.
- Mary Alice Miller
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