This book explores the representation of fatherhood in contemporary North American autobiographical comics that depict paternal conduct from the post-war period up to the present. It offers equal space to autobiographical comics penned by daughters who represent their fathers’ complicated and often disappointing behavior, and to works by male cartoonists who depict and usually celebrate their own experiences as fathers. This book asks questions about how the desire to forgive or be forgiven can compromise the authors’ ethics or dictate style, considers the ownership of life stories whose subjects cannot or do not agree to be represented, and investigates the pervasive and complicated effects of dominant masculinities. By close reading these cartoonists’ complex strategies of (self-)representation, this volume also places photography and archival work alongside the problematic legacy of self-deprecation carried on from underground comics, and shows how the vocabulary of graphic narration can work with other media and at the intersection of various genres and modes to produce a valuable scrutiny of contemporary norms of fatherhood.
The ultimate companion to the expanding world of the "literary comic book" is written by comic industry insider Fingeroth and includes the medium's history, from sequential art in Egyptian tombs, through the superhero boom of the 1940s to the birth of the graphic novel movement and the latest online offerings.Rough Guides
Birdville School opened in 1922 on the corner of two dirt roads at the edge of a fallow farm. Over the next 67 school years it witnessed, and influenced, the unfolding story of the town that grew up around it, amid flood, brushfire, blizzard, tornado, and earthquake; poverty and prosperity; war, peace, and cold war; and even the collapse of the earth beneath its foundations. Its auditorium and cafeteria hosted PTA meetings, plays, movies, concerts, basketball tournaments, holiday parties, Girl Scout and Boy Scout meetings, polio vaccination clinics, and war-time rationing registrations and scrap-collection drives. Local sand-lot softball, baseball, and football teams competed in the same surrounding fields that swarmed with gleeful children at recess, and that echoed with the roar of low-flying aircrafts snagging mailbags on their tail hooks. Among its staff were thespians, musicians, firemen, outdoorsmen, and athletes, including a singer who performed in the Coolidge White House, a candidate for the state legislature, an army medic, and a ball player who faced off against the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Pirates. By the time classes concluded for the last time in 1989, thousands of children - including the author - had benefitted from the care, instruction, and example of the Birdville School family. This book is a feeble tribute to those who made us who we are.