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Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 38, Number 3, 2008,pp. 399-427 (Article)

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Drawn fromMemory:Comics Artists andIntergenerational Auto/biographyCandida Rifkind

Abstract: This article examines the dynamics of father–son relationshipsand the problems of intergenerational collaboration in Art Spiegelman’sMaus I and II, Seth and John Gallant’s Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea:Memories of a Prince Edward Island Childhood during the Depression, andChris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. All three authorsare critically acclaimed cartoonists and graphic novelists who use themixed medium of verbal–visual narratives to tell stories about biologicaland symbolic fathers. These works reject dominant notions of masculinityand fatherhood through various forms of collaborative auto/biographyand intergenerational semi-auto/biography that gravitate towards anaesthetics of smallness. The article concludes that, even as these threeprojects stage a reconciliation between fathers and sons, past and present,public and private, they nevertheless question the politics and practices ofrepresenting self and other in popular graphic form.

Keywords: collaborative auto/biography, memory, father–son, graphicnovels, smallness

Resume : Le present article jette un regard sur la dynamique des relationspere-fils et les problemes de collaboration intergenerationnelle dans Maus Iand II, d’Art Spiegelman ; Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea : Memories of a PrinceEdward Island Childhood during the Depression, de Seth et John Gallant ;et Jimmy Corrigan : The Smartest Kid on Earth de Chris Ware. Les trois sontdes bedeistes ou des auteurs de romans graphiques de renom qui utilisentle multimedia des recits verbaux-visuels pour raconter des histoires surdes peres biologiques et symboliques. Ces ouvrages rejettent les ideesdominantes de la masculinite et de la paternite par le truchement dediverses formes d’auto/biographies collaboratives et de semi-auto/biographies intergenerationnelles qui gravitent vers une esthetique de lapetitesse. L’article conclut que, meme a mesure que ces trois projets mettent

�Canadian Reviewof American Studies/Revuecanadienned’e¤ tudesame¤ ricaines38, no. 3, 2008

en scene la reconciliation entre les peres et les fils, passes et presents,publics et prives, ils remettent neanmoins en question les politiques et lesmethodes de representation du soi et des autres sous une forme populairegraphique.

Mots cles : auto/biographie collaborative, memoire, pere-fils, romansillustres, petitesse.

Since at least the 1986 publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: ASurvivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, comic books and graphicnovels have been an ascendant cultural form in North America.1

Spiegelman’s work, a ground-breaking graphic form of collabora-tive auto/biography, paved the way for a next generation of alter-native and experimental cartoonists, including two whose criticallycelebrated works I discuss here: Seth’s collaboration with his father,John Gallant, titled Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea: Memories of aPrince Edward Island Childhood during the Depression (2004), andChris Ware’s graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid onEarth (2000). These authors represent a larger group whose comicbooks, picture and sketch books, and graphic novels have madetheir way onto bestseller lists, recommended reading lists,and even university courses. While Spiegelman has accrued thegreatest symbolic capital in the academic and publishing industries,Seth’s oeuvre has gained press and critical attention in Canadaand beyond, and Ware has been awarded numerous Americanand international book and cartooning prizes.2 Clearly, this is amedium experiencing a transition from ignoble beginnings to artis-tic legitimacy. Whether or not these increasingly respectable comicsare a truly popular art form is difficult to determine, however, sincethe majority of works and cartoonists receiving attention come fromthe restricted-scale production of the underground and alternativecomics scenes, not from the more widely distributed fantasy-comicsindustry associated with superheroes and formula fictions.3 Indeed,one thing that unites Spiegelman, Seth, and Ware is their critique ofmass culture and their self-reflections on the struggles and aliena-tions of the cartoonist in contemporary society. So, if they are‘‘popular,’’ it is in the sense of the word that Stuart Hall prefers:cultural objects that constantly examine the social relations betweendominance and subordination, ‘‘the question of cultural struggleand its many forms’’ (235). In what follows, I examine how thesecartoonists represent cultural struggle as an intergenerational nego-tiation of the legacies of past failures in the present. I am particu-larly interested in how these male cartoonists reject dominant

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notions of masculinity and fatherhood through various forms ofcollaborative auto/biography and intergenerational semi-auto/biography that gravitate towards an aesthetics of smallness. Thesenarratological and thematic terms will become clearer shortly, but atthe outset I want to clarify the uniqueness of the comics medium inrelation to questions of collaborative auto/biography. This is impor-tant because Spiegelman established the terrain of this sub-genreonto which Seth and Ware have wandered, but each of the youngerauthors’ intergenerational experiment with the representation offather–son stories takes a different path towards both collaborationand auto/biography.

The most studied form of collaborative auto/biography is the told-to story (including the Latin American tradition of the testimonio), inwhich a usually print illiterate or relatively uneducated informantnarrates his/her life experiences to a writer or an intellectual. In herwork on Canadian mediated oral histories, Roxanne Rimsteadfocuses on the dynamics between the teller and the writer oforal histories and, in particular, on ‘‘the covert power relationsbetween oral subject and writer in a scriptocentric culture thatwould subsume complex experience and orality to the conventionsof writing and autobiography’’ (142). Mediated oral histories of lifestories ‘‘from below,’’ told by ‘‘ordinary’’ or culturally marginalizedsubjects to a writer or intellectual, perform a different kind of expe-rience of the past from that documented in official history.However, as Rimstead notes in her discussion of the differencesbetween oral and written narratives, the transcription of an orallife story that produces an alternative cultural memory inevitablyleaves behind all of the gestural, performative, and paralinguisticelements present in the embodied oral transmission (142). Laughter,facial expressions, hand movements, and other forms of physicalcommunication cannot be transcribed adequately, just as the oralnarrator’s use of vocal patterns, rhythms, accents, and dialectsescapes the written form of the tale. This shortcoming, whichRimstead sees as a problem is, at least in part, why comics aresuch a productive and engaging site of collaborative auto/biogra-phy: the visual–verbal medium of sequential comics adds thedimension of drawing, and an established cartoon iconographyof emotion, to the ‘‘scriptocentric’’ culture of prose narrative.4

Drawings cannot recover the embodied moment of storytellingin its entirety, but they can mobilize another sign system to supple-ment the prose auto/biography. Just as the collaborative processbetween informant and cartoonist opens up visual possibilities

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unavailable in prose auto/biographies, it also accommodatesself-reflexive representations of the process of making the comic.As a result, an emerging convention in comic book collaborativeauto/biographies is to frame the informant’s narrative with ameta-narrative of the cartoonist’s receiving and representingthis story.

Spiegelman’s Maus I and its sequel, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: AndHere My Trouble Began, set the standard for this metanarrative repre-sentaton of father–son collaboration in which both content and formbecome crucial as the self writes the father in order to also write theself. There are at least three levels of narrative in the Maus volumes:the story of Vladek’s experiences during the Holocaust (narrative);the story of his narration of these experiences to his son Artie(metanarrative); and, Art’s story of composing the narrative(meta-metanarrative). Spiegelman mobilizes the visual languageof comics and transforms it into a vehicle to convey the multi-layered process of listening, imagining, visualizing, drawing, andnarrating a collaborative auto/biography of father and son. RickIadonisi argues that any usual distinction between informant andghost writer in a collaborative auto/biography collapses in Mausbecause the emotional entanglements between father and son—andtheir difficult relationship, which is represented at the meta-meta-narrative level—create a collaborative tension.5 This tension, inturn, produces the multiple selves of Spiegelman in the texts: theHolocaust historian, the artist, and the son are three selves definedby their relationship to Vladek, but there are also the multiple selveswho emerge out of the conflicts in the ongoing relationship thebooks chronicle, namely the split subjects of the second-generationsurvivor coping with his own psychological traumas and obstacles(Iadonisi 44–9). These multiple selves in the collaboration raiseinteresting questions about past and present that have been thefocus of much Maus criticism.6 Without rehearsing too many ofthose arguments here, I want to consider how Spiegelman’svolumes open up spaces in contemporary alternative sequentialcomics to investigate the violence of representation for the multiplesubjects of collaborative auto/biography.

In his analysis of the ‘‘cartoon self,’’ Charles Hatfield sets outwhy comics operate according to a set of relations betweenreferentiality and representation that is different from that ofprose auto/biographies. A comic auto/biography requires thatthe cartoonist externalize an image of her or himself in a graphic

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image, a ‘‘self-caricature’’ that allows readers to see andscrutinize how the author imagines her or himself (114). This self-objectification demands that the cartoonist externalize an interiorsense of self in a visual sign at once intimate and drawn at acritical distance, both expressive and descriptive. According toHatfield,

[I]t is the graphic exploitation of this duality that distinguishesautobiography in comics from most autobiography in prose.Unlike first-person narration, which works from the inside out,describing events as experienced by the teller, cartooningostensibly works from the outside in, presenting events from an(imagined) position of objectivity, or at least distance.(115; original empahsis)

As a result, the cartoon self ‘‘enacts a dialectic tension betweenimpression and expression, outer and inner, extrinsic and intrinsicapproaches to self-portrayal’’ (117).

It is important to recognize, moreover, that comic auto/biographiesrely on the sequential repetition of this self-image: the cartoonistmust draw multiples of her- or himself to create continuity over aseries of frames. Each discrete image substitutes for the one before itand a comic narrative depends upon this ‘‘representation of timethrough space, and the fragmentation of space into contiguousimages’’ (126). What this means, ultimately, is that there are literallyhundreds of selves drawn by the cartoonist assembling a sequentiallife narrative. Hatfield summarizes the significance of this syntax ofcomics to auto/biography:

The interaction of word and picture—that basic tensionbetween codes—allows for ongoing intertextual or metatextualcommentary, a possibility that threatens the very idea of aunified self. Complex, multi-valent meanings, irreducible to asingle message, are possible in comics precisely because of thisvisual–verbal tension, which enables the author to representsimultaneously various aspects or readings of him or herself.(127)

A single frame may contain multiple selves, just as, over thesequence of frames, that self may mutate. The cartoonist, unlikethe prose writer, works in a medium the very syntax of whichdemands that the subject always be split and frequently bemultiple.

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It has become a critical commonplace to note that both volumes ofMaus shift between past and present to suggest that the past notonly constitutes much of the characters’ understanding of the pres-ent but that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two.Taking the attention to temporal representation one step further,Erin McGlothlin argues that the interconnections between the twotemporal planes work at the level of storytelling, so that, whilethe past bleeds into the present, the present moment of verbalstorytelling by Vladek is also superimposed on the past (178).This happens at the visual level in the sequence in Maus II whenVladek is drawn rotating his body left and right, as he re-enacts hiscamp memory of turning around before Joseph Mengele, who willdecide whether or not he will be sent to the gas chamber (58). In thissequence, Artie the son stands on the left side of the panel, drawinghis father, just as, four panels later, Mengele stands observingVladek; both characters hold a notepad and pen and watchVladek, in two different time periods, turning around in front ofthem. For McGlothlin, this set of panels suggests that ‘‘the paststory that is narrated bears the visual traces of the act of storytelling.The present, both visually and metaphorically, thus ‘turns’ intothe past’’ (179). Spiegelman uses the visual grammar of aturning figure (two circular lines frame Vladek’s body to signalmovement) and the substitution for his own body of Mengele’s torepresent the moment of storytelling as a replication of the momentof experience. While McGlothlin’s attention is to how Vladek’sphysical turn is important to a narratological understanding ofthe text, I want to stress the substitution of one documentarianfor another. In a gesture of visual irony that is also a searingself-criticism, Artie, the note-taking son, is replaced by Mengele,the record-keeping Nazi. The visual substitution of Nazi-as-execu-tioner for son-as-historian at once highlights the differencesbetween Vladek’s two observers and draws a comparison acrosstime between two very different drives to document Vladek’sbody. Spiegelman’s visual comment here, then, is not just thatpast and present inform each other. It is also that the compulsionto record his father’s physical appearance and to enter him intothe historical record destabilizes the son’s identity because all actsof record keeping, regardless of intention or medium, bear traces ofthe Holocaust.

This visual suggestion that the real experiences of violence at thehands of the Nazis have parallels to the violence inherent in the actof representation itself replays later in Maus II. The disruptive

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effects of probing his father’s memories and interrogating hisactions during the Holocaust, in order to understand what hemust draw, itself becomes part of the narrative of familial conflict.At the end of chapter two, ‘‘Auschwitz (Time Flies),’’ Spiegelmanretreats from the gruesome images of Jews being burned alive inopen graves into the scene when his father had told him about thisat a cottage in the Catskills in 1979. As Vladek realizes that it islate in the day and they have dishes to clean, Artie and his wifeFrancoise are visibly shaken by his story. They begin the mundanetask of washing dishes, but Artie asks his father, ‘‘I don’t get it . . .why didn’t the Jews at least try to resist’’ (73). Vladek replies,‘‘It wasn’t so easy like you think,’’ and explains that the Jewishprisoners were starving, frightened, and in disbelief at what theywere witnessing (73). He goes on to explain that the Jews lived inconstant hope of a Russian victory over the Germans and, at thatinstant, drops his favourite dish to the floor with a loud crash.Vladek is upset both about the broken dish and about the state ofmind that has made him so careless, insisting two panels laterthat Artie must not throw the dish out because he can ‘‘glue stilltogether that plate’’ (73). Spiegelman includes many references tohis father’s stinginess throughout the metanarrative and impliesthat it is a sore point with Artie both because it is financially unnec-essary and because it is a manifestation of the traumas that haunthis father and inevitably irritate Artie. When Artie offers to do thedishes as his father picks up the broken pieces, Vladek turns downthe offer because ‘‘you would only break me the rest of my plates’’(73). Vladek blames Artie for the broken plate, which, while irratio-nal, betrays the larger tension of collaboration: if Artie had notquestioned his father about the Jews’s perceived lack of resistancein the camps, Vladek would not have experienced the psychicdisruption that led to the physical accident. The father’s refusal tolet his son touch any more of the dishes is an attempt to protect hisprized possessions but also to close down the work of narration.The broken plate is a symptom in the present of the pain of retriev-ing the past and, as such, it signifies the disruptions of psychic andfamilial unity that can result from collaborative auto/biography.

The disruptions and conflicts that are part of Spiegelman’s meta-narrative and meta-metanarrative are rendered through thelanguage of comics as much as through the text’s use of prose innarrative boxes and speech balloons. The ‘‘CRASH!’’ in the abovescene exceeds the panel frame, interrupts Vladek’s speech balloonswithin the frame, and draws on the onomatopoeic language of

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superhero comics. The language of comics opens up possibilities torepresent the split self of the cartoonist and the disruptive processof his cartooning that are unique to the form. As well, VictoriaElmwood connects Spiegelman’s choice of medium to the kind of‘‘history from below’’ that Rimstead identifies with many mediatedoral histories. The form of the comic is itself typically a denigratedone, a medium tainted by its various historical connections to cheapmass production, formulaic plots, and working-class male, youth,and underground subcultures. Elmwood suggests that, insteadof receiving this work as a sign for the transmission of Holocausthistory, the notion of ‘‘transformation’’ is a ‘‘more appropriatedescriptor for the narrative work done in Maus because it carriesthe implication of transmission as well as change in the process ofthat transmission’’ (692). This change, she suggests, is a practicalway to understand how the parents’ biography shapes the writer’sauto/biography: ‘‘[H]e uses the graphic novel to demonstrate thebenefits of using the medium in such a way that official, historicalaccounts of the Holocaust are brought into conversation withindividual, private accounts of its survivors’’ (692).

In a metaphorical sense, Maus is also a ‘‘history from below’’because it embraces an aesthetic of smallness as a way to contendwith the violence of representation in collaborative auto/biogra-phies. One of the most innovative and controversial visual elementsof Maus is Spiegelman’s animal iconography: Jews are representedas mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and Americans as dogs.This animal iconography has various resonances in Americancomics history, from the slapstick violence of George Herriman’scelebrated Krazy Kat strips to Tom and Jerry in the MGM animatedshorts of mid-century. Although the animals refer in some ways tothe ‘‘eternal’’ battles in comics between the species and to theNazi belief that Jews were actually vermin, the animals in Mausare also appropriate to the character’s identity even as this identityis a tension between competing narrativizations of history as waysto understand the self.

Unlike the classic cat-and-mouse cartoons, Spiegelman does notdraw his animals to relative scale, as the mice, cats, and dogsare all of relatively equal size. There is a notable exception to thisconvention in Maus II, when Art the cartoonist shrinks to the infantsmallness of a baby mouse under intense pressure from thesuccess of the first volume of Maus (42). Art is being hassledby an intrusive press, including a reporter who asks him why

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young Germans should feel guilty about crimes they did notcommit, another who asks him what kind of animal he woulduse to draw Israeli Jews, and an agent who wants him to sign alucrative licensing deal (42). As the panels progress, Art shrinksunder the pressure of public success and scrutiny as well as ofthe imminent birth of his daughter. ‘‘I can’t believe I’m going tobe a father,’’ little Art says as he climbs up onto his chair, ‘‘Myfather’s ghost still hangs over me’’ (43). How can he fulfil a rolethat he has not yet come to terms with from his own childhood?To answer this question and work through these crises of father-hood, a shrunken Art goes to see his psychiatrist, a Czech Jewand camp survivor, to talk about his guilt in enjoying professionalsuccess and his father’s guilt in having survived the camps. Fromthese psychological confessions, Art and his psychiatrist move on toa problem of representation: how to draw the tin shop in Auschwitzwhen no visual records of it remain (46). The psychiatrist, whoworked in a tool-and-die shop in Czechosovakia, helps Art with afew suggestions, and this dissolves his artistic block. The psychia-trist is a symbolic father, helping Art to work through his psycho-logical and artistic dilemmas with the very idea as well as with thereal tensions of fatherhood. Spiegelman’s representation of Art inthese panels as a little mouse renders the cartoonist’s anxieties, bothcreative and familial, in an image of regression and dimunition. Heshrinks so that his outward appearance matches his internal feel-ings and, in this way, Spiegelman highlights how comics can unitecontent and form in ways quite different from those of prose auto/biographies. The self-portrayal of the diminished cartoonist in thesepanels signifies the violence that his attempt to represent his ownand his father’s stories can inflict on the subjects of collaborativeauto/biography. Like the broken plate and the replacing of self byMengele in the turn to the past, Spiegelman’s shift to an aesthetic ofsmallness in these confessional panels illustrates the burdens of thecollaborative project for the multiple selves of both father and son.The two volumes of Maus that launched a new way of using comicsto tell life stories suggest that, for all that such projects can reconcilefathers and sons, past and present, public and private, they can alsothrow each of these into fundamental unease.

Spiegelman’s work opened multiple avenues for subsequentcartoonists and graphic novelists, including the political journalismof Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–1995(2000), Mariam Katin’s Holocaust memoir, We Are on Our Own(2006), and Alison Bechdel’s intergenerational family portraits,

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). Despite the quite differenthistorical experiences they describe, there are also a number ofsimilarities between the Maus books and John Gallant and Seth’scollaborative auto/biography, Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea:Memories of a Prince Edward Island Childhood in the Great Depression(2004). In both content and form, the scale of Bannock, Beans, andBlack Tea is much smaller than that of Maus, but these two projectscan be read together as different ways in which the mediumof alternative comics gravitates towards auto/biography, and espe-cially intergenerational collaborative auto/biography betweenfathers and sons. Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea combines collabora-tive auto/biography, picture book, and comic strip to tell a lifestory of the Depression in a marginalized region of Canada. Thetitle refers to the most common meal in the Gallant family, whenthey were in the happy position of being able to afford any food atall, and signposts the text’s concern with food scarcity and theeveryday domestic struggles of a teenage John Gallant, ‘‘JohnnyWilfred.’’ The work of oral storytelling and literary transcriptionin this text is not evenly divided between informant and writer:John Gallant wrote down his own stories and sent them to hisson, Seth, who heard them in oral form throughout his childhood.Seth, a widely acclaimed cartoonist, graphic novelist, and bookdesigner, edited and arranged his father’s anecdotes, supplementedthem with illustrations, and created a comic strip describingthe process of collaboration and its origins in his childhood.As the character of Seth the cartoonist tells readers in the foreword,‘‘I have tried to be sensitive in my meddling. It’s importantto me that my father’s ‘voice’ be retained in the writing’’ (4).John Gallant’s anecdotes and reflections that appear in this prosenarrative are often angry and bitter, revealing deep social conflictsin Depression-era Prince Edward Island which intensify the familydysfunction caused by his father’s lack of education, ambition, andsense of familial duty.

The refrain throughout this life narrative is that both real and sym-bolic fathers have failed Johnny. In the chapter titled, ‘‘Johnny’sFather,’’ Gallant conveys that he finds it ‘‘difficult to write anythingabout my father. I guess I have nothing good to say about him.. . .I don’t think I could forgive my father for not providing the properclothing to get an education. I only completed grade two.’’7

His father’s laziness and dereliction of his duty as a parenthaunts the narrative, as Johnny suffers repeated humiliationsand cruelties during the Depression because of his father; these

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memories have not dulled over time, and Gallant refuses to forgivehis father in the present moment of narration. As he writes in hisintroduction,

It is unfortunate that we cannot select our own parents and thetime and place of our birth. If we could, I would never havepicked my parents nor would I have been born and raised inSt. Charles in the 1920s and 30s. Whoever made that decisionmade an awful mess of it for me and he should have been fired.

Gallant wittily, but also bitterly, uses the language of workplacemanagement to blame his father for staying on the job when helacked the qualifications.

Just as his paternal grandfather and father abandoned Johnnyfinancially and emotionally, so does the village priest representanother kind of failed father. During a time of widespread povertyand scarcity, the parish priest remains well off and, particularlygalling to an always hungry John, well fed. In ‘‘Picking Potatoesfor the Priest,’’ Gallant narrates the injustice of ten children beingforced to spend a Saturday picking the priest’s potatoes on anempty stomach. This story sets the context for another anecdote afew pages later, ‘‘Going to the Priest for Help,’’ in which Johnny issent by his father to ask the priest for a handout. Johnny walks overfive miles in cold snow to arrive at the priest’s comfortable home.After being rebuffed, Johnny fears his father’s wrath so much thathe knocks again and the priest grudgingly gives him a dollar’sworth of nickels. When he returns with this small amount,his father curses the priest and then sends Johnny out again tothe store to buy bannock, beans, tea, and lamp oil. The anecdoteconcludes with a typically ironic comment: ‘‘I got my exercise thatday. At least five miles to the priest and back and then two miles tothe store and another two miles back.’’ In a sly reference to contem-porary culture’s exercise obsession, Gallant narrates the involuntaryexercise forced on an under-fed young boy by two disappointingfather figures, in a series of anecdotes that, to add yet another layerof irony, has formed the basis of his relationship with his own son.

One similarity between Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea and otherpopular auto/biographies of childhood poverty, notably FrankMcCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, is its setting in a region frequentlyimagined in the dominant culture as a site of the pre-modern,even bucolic, folk. McCourt’s Limerick of the 1930s and 1940s has

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the effect, numerous critics have noted, of appealing to both Irishand American desires for Ireland to stand as a superstitious placeof delayed economic and social development onto which today’sreaders can project a fantasy of the authentic folk (Mitchell; Foster).Although on a much smaller scale, Bannock, Beans, and Black Teafulfils a similar function when it locates a narrative of 1930s depri-vation and cruelty in a rural Acadian community on Prince EdwardIsland (PEI) in Eastern Canada. In this way, Seth and Gallant at oncetap into a popular mythologization of PEI as the apple-blossomland of L.M. Montgomery’s famous fictional character, Anne ofGreen Gables, and undercut this cultural fantasy with grimimages of the hardships of farming, the grind of fishing-industryfactory production, and the even worse fate of mass unemploy-ment. The enduring international success of L.M. Montgomery’schildren’s series has elevated its PEI setting of Avonlea to theposition of a popular landscape in the international circulationof ideas, images, and goods. It is a site to which tourists continueto flock and which has been marketed, since Montgomery’s day, asboth a specific location and an ideal place.8 Absent from either thebooks or the popular mythology are the narratives of contest andstruggle over this landscape, from the contact between indigenousMi’kmaq people and French fur-traders, to the expulsion of theAcadians from Charlottetown in 1758, to the government policiesto eradicate the Mi’kmaq from the island (Fiamengo 236). Neitherviolence nor dispossession are part of the popular imagining ofPEI. Thus, the ways that PEI has been imagined and commodifiedwithin the dominant national culture, largely on the basis ofMontgomery’s stories and their international success, is as a peace-ful pastoral home that is both specifically the place of the island anda non-place of the imagination (Fiamengo 237).

In many ways, Seth and Gallant fight this popular imagining andinsist on representing PEI as a space of poverty, conflict, violence,work, and familial dysfunction. The spatial world of the bookis highlighted by the insertion of three kinds of maps on the twopages before the foreword. On the left-hand page appears a splitframe: the top third shows the outline of a map of Canada andthe bottom two-thirds zoom in on the outline of Prince EdwardIsland, with all locations mentioned in the narrative identified.The mid-century-style maple leaves either side of ‘‘Canada’’ onthe top map, the lettering, and the absence of the ConfederationBridge between PEI and the mainland (completed in 1997) on thebottom map are visual cues that this is a map of a space of the past.

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On the right-hand page is a ‘‘Map Drawn by Author’’ that appearsto be a hand-drawn representation of St. Charles, on yellow, linedpaper, indicating the town’s farms, homes, and stores as well astheir owners’ names. This double page echoes both the children’sexercise to locate the self in ever-decreasing circles (Canada, PrinceEdward Island, St. Charles) and the cinematic trope of zooming infrom a birds-eye view to a close-up of a location map, a sequencewidely used in post-war National Film Board of Canada documen-taries.9 The juxtaposition of the official-looking maps on the leftand the personalized sketch of a map on the right also providesa visual language for the competition between objective and sub-jective cognitive maps, between two different ways of knowing aplace. The general and specific, official and unofficial play withand against each other in this mapping of the father’s and son’sdifferent relationships to St. Charles.

Following these maps, Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea presents acomic strip foreword by Seth about the book’s genesis that is alsoa meditation on the role his father’s stories have played at variousstages of Seth’s life. This six-page foreword contains its own meta-metanarrative, as an adult Seth, introduced in the first panel whenhe announces that his ‘‘real name is Gregory Gallant,’’ explains thathe heard the stories reprinted in this book when he was a child (1).The next panel cuts to a young Seth listening to his father at thekitchen table while a narrative box functions as a voice-over by theadult Seth. This adult narrator emphasizes his younger self’s desireto hear the stories again and again, ‘‘hundreds of times’’ and con-cludes that he has ‘‘simply always known them’’ (1). Any particularmoment of childhood storytelling is obscured by an entire child-hood shaped by the son’s absorption of the father’s stories of hischildhood. Yet another version of Seth appears in the second panelgrid, when the narrative box explains, ‘‘Only when I was older didI come to see them for what they really were—tales of awful des-peration’’ focused on ‘‘shame and food’’ (2). From the viewpoint ofthe present self represented in the narrative boxes, Seth draws ayounger self, thirsty for his father’s stories, and writes about anintermediate older self who recognized the social circumstancesshaping his father’s tales of adventure and risk. This temporalmap of his own maturing in relation to his father’s stories leadsto a significant regret: ‘‘Reading the written accounts is entirelydifferent than hearing him tell them’’ (2). Seth identifies his father’sMaritime vernacular and honing of the stories over many retellingsas their primary ‘‘charm’’ (2). Two panels later, he confesses that,

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when compiling the stories into a book, he had to cut thosemost dependent on his father’s physical humour or use of dialect,even though those were the ones he ‘‘enjoyed most as a child’’ (5).The pleasure of the physical experience of oral communication isconnected to the cartoonist’s past and is lost in the professionalworld of his adult life.

Seth’s ten-year struggle to edit the stories, design the book, andproduce the artwork, in between his personal projects and commer-cial jobs, is, he reveals, a ‘‘labour of love’’ haunted by that which hecannot represent in words or pictures (5). Yet, this self-deprecatingadmission seems undercut by the final panel grid, in which themetanarrative of the book’s genesis gives way to a micro-narrativeof a single childhood event (Figure 1). The adult Seth narrates a‘‘particularly vivid memory’’: one of many stops with his father atan historical site, an activity that allowed his father to spin yetanother kind of yarn based on the historical events they learnedabout (6). Although nothing momentous takes place, Seth remem-bers the quality of light as he and his father walked through thewoods and recalls that, in that moment, ‘‘he felt genuinely happyand secure’’ (6). The split self of the panels about his father’s oralstories relieves itself of the anxieties of omission and burdens ofrepresentation in a final recollection of unity. The reader mustpiece this final panel back together with the preceding metanarra-tive to understand this moment of childhood connection as theengine driving the work of making the book. The drawings andnarrative suggest the emotional and physical closeness of fatherand young son as they share a peaceful moment contemplatingthe historical past, just as they have also formed a ‘‘real bond’’over their shared interest in the father’s childhood (5). This singlememory closes the comic strip and offers the only moment of child-hood security and happiness represented in the text. As the father’sprose narrative unfolds, his childhood miseries and the failures ofhis own father, the cartoonist’s grandfather, acquire even greaterpathos in contrast to Seth’s preliminary representation of a happyboyhood moment. What Seth enjoyed in this scene, his father didnot. This contrast between the two generations is implicit, in thisinstance, in the contrast between the media linked by the book—comics and prose—and recognizing that contrast depends upon thereader connecting the cartoon foreword and the main prose narra-tive. However, it also appears in explicit comparisons within thefather’s auto/biography between past and present.

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Throughout the prose narrative there are several kinds of visual anddiscursive interruptions, which bring the past into the present andsuperimpose the present moment of storytelling back onto the past.There are six times when the anecdotal narratives give way to liststhat summarize John’s physical experiences of the Depression,some of which are contrasted explicitly to the material comfortsavailable in the present moment. In an almost Brechtian strategy

Figure1: Seth’s childhoodmemories; courtesy of Drawn &Quarterly

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of alienation, Gallant and Seth break the illusion of narrative con-tinuity to address the reader directly and bring the argument to aclear point of recognition. Since these are pages on which Seth’sintervention through the transition to a different page design isapparent, they mark a visual as well as a temporal and stylisticinterruption of the father’s narrative. The double page that lists‘‘Changes in Society’’ in two columns, ‘‘Today’’ and ‘‘Yesterday,’’is bittersweet in its juxtaposition of the deprivations of the past withthe luxuries of the present. Like much of the prose narrative, the listschematizes the connection between food scarcity and publicshame. The differences Gallant notes in these lists, however,move beyond personal experiences into larger socio-technologicaldevelopments that mark the temporal gap between his younger andolder selves. Today, Gallant tells the reader, ‘‘you’’ can enjoy a warmbath, an automatically starting car, ploughed roads, undergroundheated garages, and an elevator to take you to the restaurant whereyou can ‘‘eat whatever you want.’’ In the past, ‘‘you’’ enjoyed noneof these pleasures, and if ‘‘you’’ even managed to find the clothesto go out, survived the freezing cold riding your horse throughsnowdrifts, and arrived at a restaurant, this whole enterprise wasrendered unlikely by point seven in the list: ‘‘Even this is a luxury.Where did you get the money?’’ The irony and dark humour of thisnarrative interruption lies in the impossibility of repeating presentexperiences in the narrator’s past. Today is so fundamentallydifferent from yesterday that the narrating self cannot project hispresent experiences back into the Depression. In this way, both thetext and the narrator split open to reveal the disunities inherent intrying to tell the story of Johnny: the narrating subject is irrevocablysplit between today and yesterday, as the selves of the storyare incommensurate on the plane of basic experience. Moreover,the direct address and formal break of this narrative interruptionsuggest the chasm between self and other, John and the ‘‘you’’who, since it may be Seth but also the reader, is also a splitsubject. If this list invites contemplation, in the Brechtian sense ofidentifying with the issues the characters face rather than withthe characters themselves, then it is a visual–verbal performanceon the page in which the actors as well as the audience distancethemselves from the emotions of the story to achieve criticaldistance.

Another distancing technique that highlights the constructed natureof the father–son collaboration is the texture of the illustrationsthemselves. The distinctive style of Seth’s comics, indebted to the

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clean contours and fluid brushwork of 1920s and 1930s cartoonsand graphic design, carries over into the visual epigraphs andfull-page images placed throughout the prose narrative. Thehand-lettered text of each new Gallant chapter begins at least athird down the page to accommodate the oval frame of a Sethdrawing. These small graceful drawings picture the setting ofeach chapter but not its characters. Over the course of the narrative,they accumulate into an array of miniature architectural and land-scape portraits. These pictures are, therefore, place-markers inthe literal sense that they signify setting, but they are alsovisual epigraphs that introduce each anecdote, and the visualvocabulary of Depression-era advertising and souvenir postcards,into the prose auto/biography. The visual harmony and clean linesof these drawings undercut the discord and confusion expressedby the prose of Gallant’s anecdotes. For instance, the chapter‘‘Button Boots’’ starts underneath an oval drawing of a fishingtrawler floating on calm water beside a dock. The content of thisanecdote is much darker than this image of a regional clicheimplies: Johnny has no shoes to wear to go to work in the lobsterfactory during a snowy winter so his grandmother lends himher high white leather button boots. The gender anxiety and humil-iation Johnny feels at this outward sign of his poverty is in directcontrast to the drawing’s representation of a touristic version of thefishing industry. Similarly, the occasional full-page drawings serveas counterpoints to the messages of the written text. For instance,the chapter titled ‘‘I Walked All the Way to the Lobster Factory Justto Get Fired’’ begins with the visual epigraph of a lobster trawlerfloating idyllically on gentle waves. The first two pages of this chap-ter describe Johnny’s ordeal of walking at least ten miles with hisfather to try and sign on at the lobster factory in North Lake, only tohave his father sabotage the effort by arguing with the boss so thatneither of them gets a job. The voice of Gallant enters the anecdoteto speculate on what happened in the past: ‘‘No food, no rest, andon the road again for another four hours to get home. What waswrong with my father? Was he too lazy to work? Would he ratherwalk eight hours for free? Was he just a stubborn fool?’’ The illus-tration accompanying these thoughts, however, betrays neitherinternal doubt nor interpersonal conflict (Figure 2). Seth offers avisual rendering of this anecdote that focuses on the fair weatherat the beginning of the walk and uses a familiar set of rural icons:gentle hills, fence posts, fluffy clouds, bulbous trees and shrubs, andthe road winding before the father and son as they walk togetherin the foreground.

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Like countless illustrated fairy tales and children’s books, thisimage draws on the archetypal journeys of young men, aided bya helper character or father figure, making their way on the road ofadulthood. Indeed, it is a parallel image to the one of young Sethand his father walking through the woods in the final panels of thecomics metanarrative that introduces the auto/biography. The splitverbal–visual meanings communicated in this chapter, however,

Figure 2: ‘‘Wewere at the start of a long walk’’; courtesy of Drawn &Quarterly

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result from the collision of sign systems and the temporal tensionsbetween them. Whether the picture book relationship betweenwords and illustrations is understood as a system of ‘‘relaying’’so that each form completes the other (Nodelman 223) or as akind of ‘‘synergy’’ in which the total effect results from the transac-tions between them (Sipes 98–9), it is clear, in this case, thatthe two forms are telling different stories and the result is ironic.Moreover, they are telling different stories about the authorsthemselves. The temporal tensions between words and pictures,the drive forward in linear time pushed by written texts and thedrive to stop and gaze pulled by drawings, ‘‘results in the impulseto be recursive and reflexive in our reading of a picture book’’(Sipes 101). Picture books invite recursive reading strategies, asthe illustration interrupts the narrative flow and may have abearing on previous or successive pages. Gallant’s anecdote aboutJohnny describes a miserable experience that Seth’s drawingrenders beautiful.

Earlier, I suggested that a contribution of the comics form to colla-borative auto/biography is the medium’s ability to substitute visualimages in ways that both augment and acknowledge the limitationsof writing down an oral story. Here, the visual image referencesnot the father’s physical performance but rather a history of illus-tration, in order to draw on an iconography of bucolic childhood.This visual vocabulary is so different from the content of the prosenarrative that the competing epistemologies of this collaborativeproject become evident in the disjunctions between words andimage. Gallant knows the story from memory of personal experi-ence; Seth knows the story from the point of view of a child auditorand an adult cartoonist. His decision to draw this ironic image is asmuch a comment on his own present and the visual past informingthat present as it is on his father’s memories. In his responseto an interview question about the nostalgia that runs throughhis oeuvre, Seth conveys his deep ambivalence about the era ofhis father’s youth:

I have no illusions about the superiority of the past. People havealways been miserable and life has always been difficult.However, I can honestly say that I don’t think much of thispresent time. Certainly, here in North America, things couldn’tbe cheaper, uglier or more vulgar than they currently are(well, they could, and probably will be—in the near future).I think that the early to middle 20th century was an

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aesthetically more pleasing time period. While I personally haveno desire to live through the Depression or World War II, I dothink that culturally, the quality of many things was superior,especially design. Things were created for actual humans(with genuine care and effort).. . . I don’t want to live in 1932,but I sure wish some of the elements of that time had survivedinto this time. (qtd. in Miller)

It is the representations produced in the past, not the real experi-ences they reference, that hold an allure for Seth. If the son’s guilt inMaus is largely about the burden of representing his father’s pastexperiences and then making a profit from these representations,in Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea, the son’s guilt is visible in hisdrawings, which betray an anxiety about romanticizing past experi-ences that should not be romanticized. The disjunction betweenwords and images, and between Gallant’s and Seth’s differentways of knowing the past, suggests the gaps between real experi-ences of the 1930s and the objects produced in that historicalmoment. Like the protagonist of Seth’s 1996 ‘‘picture novella’’ andfictionalized auto/biography, It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken,who is on a failed search for a forgotten 1940s New Yorker cartoon-ist, the cartoonist in this collaborative auto/biography turns tothe visual world of his father’s generation only to discover theineffability of that which it references.

Whereas nostalgia is usually associated with socially conservativeor dominant forces, as an attempt to locate stable meaning andvalues in order to deal with an unstable present, in Bannock,Beans, and Black Tea, nostalgia functions to recognize the continuitiesbetween an unstable past and present. The visual nostalgia ofSeth’s cartoons and drawings may seem to retreat into fantasiesabout his father’s youth as a prelapsarian and pastoral ideal, buttheir placement between pages of the prose narrative undercuts thissurface meaning, so that father and son, cartoonist and informant,transform memories of the past into critiques of the present.As Stuart Tannock observes in his argument that nostalgia is notalways reactionary,

This return to the past to read a historical continuity of struggle,identity, and community, this determination to comb the past forevery sense of possibility and destiny it might contain—diggingaround central structures to find the breathing-spaces of themargins, spinning up old sources into tales of gargantuanepic—is a resource and strategy central to the struggles of all

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subaltern cultural and social groups. Nostalgia here works toretrieve the past for support in building the future. (458–9)

Seth and John Gallant collaborate through pictures and words on anarrative about a marginalized region of Canada and a counter-memory of the Depression that refuses any mythologization ofthis turbulent period as either politically exciting or sociallygenerative. The divided selves of the cartoonist (child auditor,adult son, professional cartoonist) and the informant (teenager,young father who tells stories, elderly father who writes stories)are enclosed in a book that yearns in its very form for the objectsof the father’s youth and the graceful promise of their harmoniousdesign.

If an aesthetics of smallness emerges in Spiegelman’s representationof Art shrinking under the burdens of guilt attendant on his collab-oration with his father, here it appears in the material object of thebook itself. Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea is a small hard-cover book,approximately five by six inches, produced in keeping with thedesign aesthetics of early twentieth-century children’s and picturebooks (Figure 3). The stories it contains are small anecdotes, shortmicro-narratives that focus on single events in the everyday life of ayoung man diminished by social circumstances. Ironically, thepublic ugliness and private shame the book describes are framedin an object of aesthetic beauty, which Seth explains is one of thebook’s gifts to its readers:

A well designed book is one of the most perfectly beautifulthings in the world. The arrangement of cover to endpapers totitle page, etc. is such a marvelous set of elements to play with.When done well they are a terrific mobile of things in balance.I love a well designed book. (qtd. in Miller)

The expense and care taken to produce the book yield an object thathas the aesthetics of a gift; just as Gallant gave Seth the oral storiesin his childhood and then the written versions of those stories inhis adulthood, Seth returned those paternal gifts in the form of abook that is a small object of beauty designed to be cherished. Thisvisual–verbal parcel is thus nostalgic for the harmonious visualvocabulary and elegant book design of an earlier period whenobjects, if not people, were less disposable than they are now.Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea itself is a pocket-sized object thatcontains micro-narratives of a life made small; yet, this very series

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of aesthetic and formal diminutions is as much a critique of thepresent as it is of the past. The violence of representation doesnot disappear in this ‘‘mobile of things in balance’’ but instead isvisible in the gaps between the visual and the verbal, form andcontent, through which Seth betrays the larger aesthetic historiesand the smaller paternal memories that haunt him. In this way,

Figure 3: The cover of Bannock, Beans, and BlackTea; courtesy ofDrawn &Quarterly

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a deceptively simple picture book folds readers into the gapsbetween the real and the representational, raising intricate episte-mological questions about how a life can be shown, but also abouthow it can be known.

Any discussion of intergenerational paternal narratives and anaesthetics of smallness would be remiss if it did not concludewith Chris Ware’s elaborate project, Jimmy Corrigan: The SmartestKid on Earth. Given the immensity and richness of Ware’s text,I will focus here on how its deployment of an aesthetics of small-ness to represent intergenerational father–son relationshipslinks it to Maus and Bannock, Beans and Black Tea. Jimmy Corriganis not a collaborative auto/biography. Rather, it is what Ware termsa ‘‘semi-autobiographical work of fiction’’ about four generations ofCorrigan men: Jimmy, his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather (Corrigenda).10 The present-day narrative focuses onthe eponymous character, a lonely and isolated man in his mid-30s, who meets his father for the first time when he travels to aMichigan town over the Thanksgiving weekend. This narrative,which includes meeting an adopted African-American sisterhe did not know about and his new-found father’s sudden death,is interrupted by episodes from Jimmy’s active imagination as wellas flashbacks to stories of the troubled relationships of previousCorrigan men with their fathers. The most extended flashback isto the story of Jimmy’s grandfather, James—how, as a small boy, hewas abandoned atop the tallest building at the 1893 ChicagoWorld’s Columbian Exposition by his abusive father. As the narra-tives of paternal cruelty and disappearance accrue over the genera-tions, Jimmy Corrigan develops a series of visual motifs and formalexperiments that hearken back to the early twentieth-century inno-vations of modernist comics, including Krazy Kat and Frank King’sGasoline Alley, but most notably Winsor McCay’s surreal and darkchildren’s fantasy newspaper strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland(1905–13). Like McCay, Ware experiments with page layout, framesizes, vivid colours, and intricate architectural detail to combinedizzying visual spectacle with a psychoanalytically informed rep-resentation of the melancholy feelings and fantasies of a young boy.An aesthetics of smallness characterizes Jimmy Corrigan on anumber of levels, not least in Ware’s use of large half-page framesto draw daunting urban buildings on top of which miniature malecharacters seem about to plunge to their deaths. In one of his earlyworkplace fantasies, adult Jimmy imagines that he looks out thewindow to see a Superman figure about to jump over the ledge

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of an office building. Much later in the book, Ware uses the samesize frame for a panel in which Jimmy’s grandfather, James, has asymbolic dream that his father pushed him off the top of the tallestbuilding at the 1893 Fair, rather than just abandoning him there, ashe did in ‘‘real’’ life. These parallel panels reference the comicstrope of the superhero leaping off tall buildings in a visual imagethrough which both Jimmy and his grandfather work through theirfeelings of abandonment and alienation. The presence and absenceof fathers becomes what Brad Prager identifies as the definingstructural motif of the book: ‘‘Ware uses superhero tropes todepict a gap between the ideal and the real—between fantasizedhappy families (the utopian escapes that Freud referred to as‘family romances’) and actual familial dysfunction’’ (200). In thisway, Ware references a visual history of comic-book fantasies andsuperheroes and suggests their importance to Jimmy’s repetition ofJames’s unconscious desires to resolve Oedipal conflicts through hisown death.

That this complicated narrative is a quasi-auto/biography is widelyknown among the comics cognoscenti, in part because of the eerieconnections between the comic narrative and the cartoonist’s life.Like Jimmy, Ware’s father abandoned him and his mother whenhe was a toddler. When, at least twenty years later, Ware began todedicate himself to composing Jimmy Corrigan, which begins withJimmy receiving a letter from his father calling him to a meeting,Ware was contacted unexpectedly by his own father. DanielRaeburn explains how the real and the representational collided:

At first Ware thought it was a joke, but it was in fact his realfather, and they did face each other, and their conversation wasas pained as the imaginary one Ware had already written.The two finished their dinner and agreed awkwardly to meetagain some day. Ware went back to work on his book and endedit, years later, with the death of Jimmy’s father. Within onemonth Ware learned that his own father had just died. Wareappended to his novel a corrigendum in which he noted that thefour or five hours it takes to read his book is the same amount oftime that he had ever spent with his father. (15)

In this corrigenda, Ware refers to the impetus behind JimmyCorrigan as an exercise ‘‘to hopefully provide a semi-autobiograph-ical setting in which I could ‘work out’ some of the moreembarrassing problems of confidence and emotional truthfulnessI was experiencing as a very immature, and not terribly facile,

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cartoonist.’’ Jimmy, then, is Ware’s alter ego, through whom he ini-tially hoped to prepare himself to meet his real father. Then, oncethey had actually met, he hoped to publish the comic serials aboutJimmy as a book and gift this work to his real father. Unfortunately,he notes in the corrigenda, his father died of a heart attack before hecould do that. Ware concludes this account of the book’s conceptionand development with a self-deprecating admission of ‘‘the chasmwhich gapes between the ridiculous, artless, dumbfoundedly mean-ingless coincidence of ‘real’ life and my weak fiction—not to men-tion my inability at knitting them together.’’ Like Spiegelman andSeth, Ware is profoundly anxious about the role of auto/biographerand the insuperable divides between the real and the representa-tional, experience and documentation, father and son.

Not only is the time it takes to read Jimmy Corrigan approximate tothe amount of time Ware spent with his real father, but he alsoobserves that the final printed size (a small thick book about 8 by6.5 inches) is similar to the size of the urn containing his father’sashes. Raeburn punningly calls this a ‘‘grave metaphor’’ for Ware’sart that implies comics are a futile exercise (16). At the same time,however, it is also a comics metaphor that imagines experiences ofliving and dying through the material object of the graphic novel.Ware has written a veiled account of his real experiences and pro-duced a comic book the very smallness of which stands in for thesmallness of his relationship with his father. Whereas Seth designeda beautiful small book to package his father’s micro-narratives andrepay the gift of oral storytelling with miniature illustrations,Ware’s dense little book never reached its intended audience.In his examination of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’and analysis of the delays and deferrals that threaten to keep aletter from arriving at its destination, Jacques Derrida proposesthat ‘‘when it does arrive its capacity not to arrive torments itwith an internal drifting’’ (489). The ‘‘internal drifting’’ of JimmyCorrigan—the Derridean notion that, in its possibility of not arriv-ing, a letter opens up to split subjects, narrative doublings, anduncanny repetitions—resonates with the narrative and visual struc-tures of this intergenerational quasi-auto/biography. The splitsubjects of father and son, the multiple selves, uncanny repetitions,and narrative doublings over four generations of men’s lives, arecontained in a book tormented by the fact that it never arrived atthe real father who haunted its composition. Thus, Ware writes inhis own limitations and failure to gift the book to his father inan apology that identifies the relays between the real and the

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representational as much as it signposts a conceptual and visualopen-endedness.

If comics are a medium in which the self is always multiple, thenintergenerational auto/biographies compound this multiplicity inanother way. Although they take quite different formal approachesto telling the stories of fathers and sons, the texts I have discussedhere share a complicated meeting of form and content in which themedium of comics and the process of intergenerational representa-tion result in experiments defined by a series of dualities betweenthe visual and verbal, narrative and metanarrative, and self(s)and other(s). Moreover, since Spiegelman, Seth, and Ware work invarious ways with the stories and images of fathers, their texts alsohinge on the dualities of past and present, duty and desire, andguilt and forgiveness about the very act of telling paternal stories.Spiegelman himself recognizes that his work extends beyond ghostwriting for his father and into ‘‘re-inhabiting my father’s life on amoment-to-moment basis, on a panel-to-panel basis . . . as a way ofreconstructing what happened’’ (Spiegelman; qtd. in Iadonisi 43).This notion of ‘‘re-inhabitation’’ opens up a new set of metaphors todescribe the process of collaborative auto/biography. It suggeststhe play between presence and absence—the various narratives ofpaternal appearance, disappearance, and reappearance—thema-tized in these texts. As well, it is possible to extend the notion of‘‘re-inhabitation’’ to all three cartoonists as a metaphor for theirintergenerational and variously collaborative auto/biographiesbecause it opens up concepts of dwelling as well as narration.The relationships between these three sets of fathers and sons arecharacterized by quite different life experiences and storytellingobligations; yet, they can be read together as struggles to re-inhabitthe past, to move into its visual architectures and live in its traumas,as a way to dwell more easily in the present lives of the malecartoonists. The aesthetics of smallness that shape the visualworlds of Spiegelman’s mice and cats, Seth’s small picture book,and Ware’s miniature men is as much a sign of the medium’sflexibility in accommodating counter-narratives of fathers who arenot superheroes as it is of a visual sensitivity to the burdens ofauto/biographical representation itself.

Notes

1 The terminology to describe long-form sequential comic narratives iscontroversial, freighted with debates about literary merit, conditions

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of production and publication, serial versus one-time publication, andthe gentrification of an underground, alternative medium into themainstream (see Hatfield on alternative comics; Witek on comix;Spiegelman). I use the term ‘‘graphic novel’’ here because of itsassociations, however ironically intended, with the texts by ArtSpiegelman and Chris Ware under discussion.

2 Among the many accolades and prestigious commissions Seth hasreceived are an exhibit of his work at the Art Gallery of Ontario(29 June–23 October 2005), the New Yorker cover of 20 March 2006, andthe commission to design the ten-volume Fantagraphics reprint,Charles Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts, for which he won a 2005Eisner Award for Best Publication Design. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corriganwon numerous 2001 awards, including the American Book Award,the Guardian First Book Award, and two Eisner Awards. Ware wasone of fifteen artists selected to represent the canon of influentialtwentieth-century comics artists in the Masters of American Comicsexhibit (20 Nov. 2005–12 March 2006) co-organized by the HammerMuseum and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

3 This is not to diminish the complexities of superhero comics, on whichalternative cartoonists like Seth and Chris Ware frequently draw, norto underestimate the extent to which fantasy and mass-producedcomics investigate questions of politics, history, and representation;see Carney.

4 See ‘‘The Vocabulary of Comics’’ in McCloud for an explanation of thevisual iconography and emotional vocabulary of comics. McClouddraws on Marshall McLuhan’s identification of only two popularmedia, television and comics, as ‘‘cool’’ media that ‘‘commandaudience involvement through iconic forms’’ (59).

5 Iadonisi engages with Philipe Lejeune’s argument in On Autobiographythat

a ‘‘told-to’’ story foregrounds the negotiation between thesource of the story, the model, and the writer of the story, theghostwriter (Lejeune 187).

6 The most comprehensive summary of these arguments is by ErinMcGlothlin (179–80), who cites the agreement among James Young,Dominick LaCapra, and Keith Harrison that the past and presentconverge and blur into each other by the end of Maus II. However,McGlothlin also indicates that some critics, including Marianne Hirschand Alan Rosen, disagree with this dominant reading of Spiegelman.For them, ‘‘the distance between past and present is unbridgeable,despite the easy temporal blurring that appears to take place throughthe process of reading the comic frames’’ (McGlothlin 180).

7 The main text of Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea does not includepagination, but the cartoon foreword by Seth is paginated. I am

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grateful to Peggy Burns at Drawn and Quarterly for permission to usethe images from Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea.

8 Janice Fiamengo argues that Montgomery’s fictional Avonlea ‘‘becamea portable landscape, one whose enchanting details could be adaptedto many regions of the world’’ as a metaphor for pastoral innocenceand the rejuvenating powers of non-threatening natural environments(228). Clarence Karr also notes that ‘‘concepts of the idyllic ‘GardenProvince’ featured in tourist promotion for modern Prince EdwardIsland originate, to a significant degree, with Lucy Maud Montgomeryand her fiction’’ (128).

9 The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was founded in 1939,underthe directorship of British documentarian John Grierson and continuesinto the present as the state-funded, federal government filmmakingorganization. Building on the strengths it developed in wartimenewsreels and documentaries, the NFB developed an internationalreputation in the post-war years for documentaries about Canada andCanadians, as well as innovations in animation.

10 Jimmy Corrigan does not include pagination.

Works Cited

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Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Elmwood, Victoria. ‘‘Happy, Happy Ever After’’: The Transformation ofTrauma Between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’sTale. Biography 27.4 (2004): 691–720. 3 Dec. 2008 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/biography/v027/27.4elmwood.html>.

Fiamengo, Janice. ‘‘Towards a Theory of the Popular Landscape in Anne ofGreen Gables.’’ Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture.Ed. Irene Gammel. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 225–37.

Foster, R.F. ‘‘Tisn’t: The Million-Dollar Blarney of the McCourts.’’New Republic 221 (1999): 29–31.

Gallant, John, and Seth. Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea: Memories of a PrinceEdward Island Childhood in the Great Depression. Montreal: Drawn andQuarterly, 2004.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson:UP of Mississippi, 2005.

Iadonisi, Rick. ‘‘Bleeding History and Owning his [Father’s] Story:Maus and Collaborative Autobiography.’’ CEA Critic 57.1 (1994): 41–56.

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Karr, Clarence. Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the EarlyTwentieth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000.

Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Theory andHistory of Literature 52. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York:HarperPerennial, 1994.

McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. London: Scribner, 1999.

McGlothlin, Erin. ‘‘No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in ArtSpiegelman’s Maus.’’ Narrative 11.2 (2003): 177–98.

Miller, Bryan. ‘‘An Interview with Seth.’’ Bookslut. Jun. 2004. 4 Jan. 2007.<http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_06_002650.php>.

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