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By now we all ought at least to be aware of, if not conversant with, the growing influence of graphic literature in the culture. By "graphic" I mean "illustrated," the medium of cartoons and comics. (As writer-illustrator Marjane Satrapi jokes, "When you say 'graphic novel,' I think you mean Lady Chatterley's Lover or something like that." She prefers the term "comics." "Graphic" and "comic" will refer specifically to panels of pictures from here on.) Comic books and graphic novels have been adapted to film in movies like Batman Begins, X-Men, Sin City, From Hell, and V for Vendetta; bookstores have markedly expanded their sections devoted to graphic novels and manga; scholars study Japanese manga and Spanish photonovelas; children can distinguish readily between American cartoons and Japanese anime; and cable television carries popular channels like Toon Disney and the Cartoon Network, which has a late-night division called "Adult Swim" carrying animated shows not for children. Graphic literature has crossed into the mainstream with highly successful and critically acclaimed works like Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Daniel Clowes's Ghost World and David Boring, Craig Thompson's Goodbye, Chunky Rice, and Blankets, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen series, and Charles Burns's Black Hole. Despite the fact that all of these works are labeled as "graphic novels," Spiegelman and Thompson have actually created masterful graphic memoirs.
Graphic memoir is able to approximate the narrative elements of the traditional textual memoir, as it largely does in Thompson's Blankets, a book about adolescence and the conflicts and complications of growing up in a religiously conservative family. The verbal equivalents of these books might be works like Kim Barnes's In the Wilderness, a memoir of life in a Pentecostal family, or Blue Windows by Barbara Wilson, about growing up in a Christian Science family. Graphic memoir can also approximate the experimental or lyric forms of the memoir. Spiegelman's Maus is a memoir told in two timelines, one following the narrative of the author's parents' experiences as Jews living in Eastern Europe during the rise of Nazi power and throughout the Holocaust, the other following the author's efforts to drag memories out of his aging and ailing father and...