Hybrid traces of fact and fiction in graphic autobiography

Autobiographical comics make use of a unique subjective register in which every mark communicating the narrative represents the embodied trace of the autobiographer. How theories of trace and embodiment in drawing can be integrated into the narratological analysis of autobiographical comics, is an undertheorized area.
This paper will explore the ways comics use their materiality to collapse hierarchies of imaginative storyworld and tactile real world. I will discuss handmade self-published autobiographical comics in order to clarify how auratic traces and tactile materials problematise these boundaries through metaleptic transgression of author into storyworld.
I will then apply this discussion to the analysis of three graphic novels with different relationships to autobiography. Drawn Together (2012), by Robert and Aline Crumb, in which the drawn traces of husband and wife compete for enunciative dominance, My Favourite Thing is Monsters (2017), in which Emil Ferris presents the storyworld through the re-presentation of a fictional autobiographical notebook, and Nora Krug’s Heimat: A German Family Album (2019) in which the author’s family past is explored through the scrapbooking of historical documents and photographs.
I will argue that these ‘real’ materials and traces, which are often digitally manipulated before being mechanically reproduced in the object of the comic, create a complex ecology of ontologically ambiguous surfaces in which autobiography and the construction of autobiography become intractable.
This analysis is important to the understanding of how the traces of embodied drawing and re-presentations of materiality affect truth claims and performances of authenticity in autobiographical comics.