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Hillary L Chute. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. 297 pp. ISBN 978-0231150637, $26.50.
Over the past few years, Hillary Chute has become one of the best-known authors of academic articles on "graphic narratives" (a term she rightfully prefers to the famous misnomer, "graphic novel," as first pointed out in the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies she co-edited with Marianne DeKoven in 2006). Graphic Women is her first collection of essays on the topic. Her volume is most welcome, as there are currently very few studies on the prolific but little-discussed production of contemporary comics by women. It is a book written with enthusiasm, clarity, and the ability to condense an obviously exhaustive body of literature that the author has gone through and considered before putting pen to paper. On top of this, Chute neither simplifies nor envelops her prose in all-too-heavy academic lingo, which is one important reason why her book should gain a wide readership, from undergraduate students to established scholars. Another point in favor of this publication is that the author has managed to keep the size of the comics reproduced as close as possible to the originals, and has also included a well-chosen selection of color plates near the end of the book (all of which had already been reproduced in black and white). It is quite important that Chute has interviewed four of the five comic book authors she is discussing (Marjane Satrapi is the exception), and was thus able to pose some of the most pressing questions that have been tormenting both critics and artists involved in the production and discussion of comics for a long time now.
The critical investigation from Graphic Women moves along many interconnected lines which could, for the purpose of this review, be condensed into two main directions. One of them follows the innovative representation of the female body by feminist women cartoonists in a narrative language which, as Chute often remarks, "puts the body on the page" (26). The second main direction of these essays investigates "what comics does differently" (3) as a medium that has tended to produce a predominantly autobiographical, predominantly post-traumatic tradition after the underground revolution that started in the US in the...