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Discussions of autobiographical graphic narratives have unveiled multiple layers inherent in this form of life writing. In their 2008 introduction to a special issue of Biography, Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti deploy the term "autographics" to describe both a product and a practice. As a product, they explain, autographics may be defined as a "Life narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials" (v); as a practice, it "emerges in and through specific attention to the phenomenology of reading these multimodal cross-discursive texts, and this is accompanied by self-consciousness about the process of interpretation that distinguishes this work of textual criticism. This deliberate attention to 'what happens as I perceive this' marks autographical criticism" (vi-vii). A third factor to be considered, I suggest, includes the social history of the comic book, and how the relationship between the industry and its shifting market influenced the artists' aesthetic choices and thematic concerns. These autographical texts, thus, might also reflect "the way market forces, organizational structure, technology, laws, and government or industry regulation shape the aesthetics and content of an art form. It is also about the logics of cultural production and consumption: how artists and others approach its appreciation and consumption" (Lopes xvii).
These perspectives on graphic autobiographies are particularly salient frames for a discussion of Will Eisner's Life, in Pictures (2007) and Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life (2009), which foreground the intimate connection between their lives, their craft, and the cultural context that made them graphic artists. Eisner and Tatsumi, generally recognized as the forerunners of alternative comics/manga in their countries, therefore deploy autobiography not only to describe their lives in the early to mid-twentieth century, they also use the graphic form to illustrate the development of graphic art, incorporating the story of their artistic trajectory with a critical look at the development of the medium in their time. The texts become exceptional documents that trace the interconnection between politics, society, art, economy, and idealism in the United States and Japan before and after the Second World War.
As I have argued in relation to academic autobiographies, the paradigms of which may be extended to examine any form of life writing that highlights the...