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Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012). 192 pp. 37 b/w ill. ISBN: 978-1-61703-613-2 (hardcover, $55.00, £57.95); ISBN: 978-161703-614-9 (e-book, $55.00).
The aim of El Refaie's book is to propose an in-depth reading of a new genre, which has emerged at the crossroads of comics and autobiography: the autobiographical memoir ( for good reasons, the author does not deem it very useful to pigeonhole this genre in terms of either comics or graphic novel). Based on a corpus of eighty-five different works, both European and North American, and covering the whole field from its beginnings in the underground and post-underground 'comix' era of the 1970s to the most recent variations of a genre that cannot be reduced to a single format or formula, El Refaie's work should be welcomed by students, scholars and all those interested in the medium, as an interesting and useful contribution to the study of a new way of storytelling that is as different from traditional autobiography as from certain moulds of visual storytelling in comic form.
This book's appeal lies not only in its presentation of the burgeoning research on a booming genre in a more systematic way than was the case in other, more case study-oriented or more theoretically specialized publications (mainly, Hillary Chute's Graphic Women and Graphic Subjects, edited by Michael Chaney), but also in its very balanced and well-informed approach to the two larger fields that the...