Hillary L. Chute

Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb shows women's everyday lives especially through the lens of the body, Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work while Lynda Barry uses college and empty spaces to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapis Persepolis experiments with visual witness and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home meticulously incorporates family documents to re present the past. These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions particularly through the depiction of sex gender and lived experience Hillary L. Chute explores their interplay of words and images and counterpoint of presence and absence Intertwining aesthetics and politics these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse. "In the pages of her Graphic Women Hillary L. Chute shows in engaging unflinching prose the accomplishment of five key figures from a generation of women graphic novelists who have used this medium to record history testify about the cross-currents of life and memory and draw and write against silence about abuse dislocation and sexuality. We have today no more important or gifted writer on the graphic novel than Chute: read the book and you will be plunged headlong into the riveting world of comics today."---Peter Galison, Harvard University "If you are not yet convinced that comics is the avant-garde genre par excellence and that it has provided feminist writers with a prime medium for telling life narratives then read this book. Read it also to learn a critical vocabulary with which to appreciate and discuss the layered sophistication of the hybrid form and to discover a powerful and diverse tradition of graphic women whose haunting works are beautifully elucidated in this powerful book."---Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University "Elegantly written and profusely documented, Chutes breakthrough Graphic Women is a remarkable and original book that relentlessly pursues verbal/visual details of graphic narrative. Through constant invention, intervention of powerful interpretive strategies the volume reveals how gender trauma and autobiography are uniquely embodied in the fundamental material dimensions of the comic book form. It will become a new starting point for future comics studies."---Donald Ault. Founder and editor of Image Text Interdisciplinary, Comics Studies University of Florida "An exciting and theoretically sophisticated gender and genre study, the kind of book that interpellates its reader defines its territory, and stakes its claims immediately."---Bella Brodzki, Sarah Lawrence College

Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics

Graphic Women

We are living in a golden age of cartoon art. Never before has graphic storytelling been so prominent or garnered such respect: critics and readers alike agree that contemporary cartoonists are creating some of the most innovative and exciting work in all the arts. For nearly a decade Hillary L. Chute has been sitting down for extensive interviews with the leading figures in comics, and with Outside the Box she offers fans a chance to share her ringside seat. Chute’s in-depth discussions with twelve of the most prominent and accomplished artists and writers in comics today reveal a creative community that is richly interconnected yet fiercely independent, its members sharing many interests and approaches while working with wildly different styles and themes. Chute’s subjects run the gamut of contemporary comics practice, from underground pioneers like Art Spiegelman and Lynda Barry, to the analytic work of Scott McCloud, the journalism of Joe Sacco, and the extended narratives of Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, and more. They reflect on their experience and innovations, the influence of peers and mentors, the reception of their art and the growth of critical attention, and the crucial place of print amid the encroachment of the digital age. Beautifully illustrated in full-color, and featuring three never-before-published interviews—including the first published conversation between Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware—Outside the Box will be a landmark volume, a close-up account of the rise of graphic storytelling and a testament to its vibrant creativity.

Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists

Outside the Box

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics have shown a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Hillary Chute explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.

Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form

Disaster Drawn

The massive impact that comics have had on our culture becomes more and more clear every day, from the critically acclaimed musical Fun Home, based on Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking comic, to the dozens of superhero films hitting cinemas every year. What is it that makes comics so special? What can this unique art form do that others can’t? In Why Comics?, comics scholar Hillary Chute reveals the history of comics, underground comics (or comix), and graphic novels, through deep thematic analysis, and fascinating portraits of the fearless men and women behind them. As Scott McCloud revealed the methods behind comics and the way they worked in his classic Understanding Comics, Chute will reveal the themes that Comics handle best, and how the form is uniquely equipped to explore them. The topics Why Comics? include: • Why Disaster: with such major works focusing on disasters, from Art Spiegelman’s work, which covers the Holocaust and 9/11 to Keiji Nakazawa’s work covering Heroshima, comics find themselves uniquely suited to convey the scale and disorientation of disaster. • Why Suburbs: through the work of Chris Ware and Charles Burns, Chute reveals the fascinating ways that Comics illustrate the quiet joys and struggles of suburban existence. • Why Punk: With an emphasis on DIY aesthetics and rebelling against what came before, the Punk movement would prove to be a fertile ground for some of the most significant modern cartoonists, creating a truly democratic art form. Chute has created an indispensable guide to comics for those new to the genre, or those who want to understand more about what lies behind their favorite works.

From Underground to Everywhere

Why Comics?

Patrick Jagoda

Comics and media

Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis experiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home meticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past. These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.

The past decade has seen the medium of comics reach unprecedented heights of critical acclaim and commercial success. Comics & Media reflects that, bringing together an amazing array of contributors--creators and critics alike--to discuss the state, future, and potential of the medium. Loaded with full-color reproductions of work by such legends as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Lynda Barry, the book addresses the place of comics in both a contemporary and historical context. Essays by such high-profile figures as Tom Gunning, N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and W. J. T. Mitchell address a stunning range of topics, including the place of comics in the history of aesthetics, changes to popular art forms, digital humanities, and ongoing tensions between new and old media. The result is a substantial step forward for our understanding of what comics are and can be, and the growing place they hold in our culture.

Hillary L. Chute

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