Started: 26 December, 2012
Finished: 8 January, 2013
Pages: 290
First things first: this is not a picture book about a baby bird searching for its mother and finding a SNERT.
Or, maybe it is....kind of.
Have you heard of graphic novels? Well, this is a graphic memoir: that is, a memoir written in the form of a comic. And this version of Are you my mother? is about the author's struggle to make sense of her relationship with her mother. It's by Alison Bechdel, the creator of Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running serial comic that you could hardly have missed if you read feminist newspapers in the late 80s and 90s.
I started it at the inlaws over Christmas and puzzled my partner's mom. She wanted to know why I wasn't chuckling while I was reading. Wasn't it comics? Well, yes. But it's a natural question. Although there are now"serious" comics, our collective default assumption is that stories told with pictures are stories for children. (Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense, really. After all: movies.)
So why don't we think of pictorial stories written on paper as serious?
I don't have an answer to that. Constant advances in printing technology throughout the 20th century made printed pictures ubiquitous. And other than a few 19th century political cartoons, comics really began in the 20th century. But for the most part using pictures as well as text to tell a story was only done when the subject matter of the story was something that was hard to imagine otherwise: when the characters in the stories were talking mice, say, or the story was about a extra-strong flying man.
Which brings us to the book at hand. What is added by telling Bechdel's story in comic form?
Well, I guess the most obvious thing that the pictures add is emotional impact and immediacy. Being told that her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was 7 years old is different than watching a small and vulnerable girl pretend not to mind that her mother is walking away from her bed.
Using drawings also permits Bechdel to use compression and inference to tell parts of her story. There is a sequence of frames that recounts a year that she spent in therapy by showing her and her therapist facing each other across a room, while a tree visible in the window behind them cycles through the seasons.
Drawings also allow her to give information that would be difficult to convey otherwise. Being told that Bechdel has been in therapy for her entire adult life is different seeing a timeline that simultaneously shows both the duration of every love relationship she's ever had and the duration of every therapist she's ever had. (wow: I can't even imagine therapy playing that kind of role in my life.)
So....Bechdel could likely have told her story in text alone. But telling it as a comic definitely gives her additional tools.
So why don't we think of pictorial stories written on paper as serious?
I don't have an answer to that. Constant advances in printing technology throughout the 20th century made printed pictures ubiquitous. And other than a few 19th century political cartoons, comics really began in the 20th century. But for the most part using pictures as well as text to tell a story was only done when the subject matter of the story was something that was hard to imagine otherwise: when the characters in the stories were talking mice, say, or the story was about a extra-strong flying man.
Which brings us to the book at hand. What is added by telling Bechdel's story in comic form?
Well, I guess the most obvious thing that the pictures add is emotional impact and immediacy. Being told that her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was 7 years old is different than watching a small and vulnerable girl pretend not to mind that her mother is walking away from her bed.
Using drawings also permits Bechdel to use compression and inference to tell parts of her story. There is a sequence of frames that recounts a year that she spent in therapy by showing her and her therapist facing each other across a room, while a tree visible in the window behind them cycles through the seasons.
Drawings also allow her to give information that would be difficult to convey otherwise. Being told that Bechdel has been in therapy for her entire adult life is different seeing a timeline that simultaneously shows both the duration of every love relationship she's ever had and the duration of every therapist she's ever had. (wow: I can't even imagine therapy playing that kind of role in my life.)
So....Bechdel could likely have told her story in text alone. But telling it as a comic definitely gives her additional tools.
No comments:
Post a Comment