By You, I mean your story. Your life. Its hardships, its successes and its minutiae. Your idiosyncrasies. Your fetishes. Your day-to-day encounters and your once-in-a-lifetime experiences. The highs, the lows and the status quo. Your traumas, your victories and your journey. Your wisdom, its growth and its pretentiousness. Your adolescence. Your adulthood. And, good God, your anxieties. If I ever get my hands on R. Crumb, I’ll beat him silly with a hefty girl’s thigh bone for having unleashed your floodgate of neurosis all over me.
I will never write an autobiography or an autobiographical comic. There are three reasons for this:
1. My life isn’t that interesting.
2. I will never write this uninteresting life as interestingly as Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel or Craig Thompson.
3. I don’t want it compared to others who have proven they have neither the life nor skills as interesting as Spiegelman, Bechdel or Thompson.
(Note to aspiring writers: “Interesting” is a poor choice of adjectives. Use it sparingly. Or hammer it into readers’ heads so hard that they lose the ability to count, much less keep track of your usage.)
Three sound reasons. I could come up with more. Yet, I wish—I really wish—more would-be comics autobiographers could come to these conclusions as well. They could have prevented themselves from becoming You.
Writing comics is hard enough. Storytelling, in all its forms, is hard enough. Plots, acts, characters, motivations, conflict, crises, climax, themes, moods, motifs, subtext, context, setting, scenes, drama, humor, pathos, bathos, denouement, closure, coda, aftermath and Joey Campbell putting the little sucker back to bed.
Stories are hard. You really think your life’s up to the challenge.
Few people do autobiography well—anywhere. Ever. Frederick Douglass did a nice job. Mark Twain’s was okay, too. Gandhi, Helen Keller and John Stuart Mill get a pass. And because even I don’t have the huevos to say otherwise, Malcolm X and Christopher Reeve can also join the team
That’s it: the Seven Great Autobiographies of the English Language. Your autobio JLA. Picture them in spandex together and thank me
All this illustrates: You’re nowhere close. (And don’t get cute with me: We all know that “memoir” is code for “sloppy autobiography.” Call it your “life journal,” your “reflections” or your “super-secret diary.” You’re writing about yourself.
Few people do anything really well—that’s a truism. There are few great operas and a tonnage of lousy ones. There are few great ballplayers and plenty of wannabes. For every Cronkite, there are many Geraldos. One Spielberg, many Schumachers. Alec—soon followed by Daniel, William, and Stephen.
It may be a fluke that the comic book medium has so many quality autobiographers. It may be just a statistical coincidence that comics have a better return-on-investment than other creative forms when it comes to telling one’s life story. We have, among others, Harvey Pekar, Marjane Satrapi, Tom Beland, Joe Matt and even some who might occupy fringe positions like Phoebe Gloeckner (is it prose or is it comics?), Joe Sacco (is it his life or the lives of those on whom he reports?) and Jennie Breeden (is it a whole life story or is it just silly, individual comic strips?). It could be a fluke.
It could also be the history of the medium. What was once considered a solely juvenile product, then mainstream pop art, then a counterculture arena and then a Hollywood cash cow has special nooks and crannies for this kind of work. It could be the enduring legacy of the ’70s underground comix, or it could be their commodification. Or it could be the power of voyeurism. Comics are a visual medium, and we love to watch. Watching someone’s real misery, sexuality and violence—as illustrated by their own two, life-scarred hands. Well, that could be even better than reading Daredevil!
That’s leaving out all the “autobiographically inspired” works that take the mantra of “write what you know” the way I think it was meant to be taken: “Write what you know,” but don’t write only what you know. Take the conclusion of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man or Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison, for example. They know to infuse fiction with their life, not Your life with artifice.
We know there’s a power to autobiography in comics—is it deniable?—but why are so many of You susceptible to it? I go to conventions (fewer by the year), and I pick up Your books (far fewer by the year), and, once again, I get the portrait of the artist as a young wannabe. I read the story of a life neither well-told nor well-lived. I don’t even experience the pleasure of finding a kindred spirit, one who comfortingly has “gone through it,” however that might be defined, like me. They’re not that honest. Nor are they that creative. They’re an exercise in egotism and solipsism. Hell, they don’t even draw themselves that honestly. For real, You don’t look like that!
Am I alone in this? Does this glut of terrible, self-produced, self-centered autobio bother no one else? Is there nobody else who has started to avoid Artist Alleys because of the likelihood of guilt-trip sales and pleading please-read-my-life eyes?
Is this all just me?
Fine.
Then just for me: stop it.
A. David Lewisis the cocreator ofThe Lone and Level Sandsand the forthcoming Some New Kind of Slaughter with mpMann. Currently, he is working on his Ph.D. in REligion and LIteratureat Boston University and will be hosting the first "Religion in Comic Books & Graphic Novels" conference in 2008. His blog is http://captionbox.net/loosepages.
