THE GRAPHIC LIVES of FATHERS Memory, Representation, and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

THE GRAPHIC LIVES OF FATHERS Memory, Representation, and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics

Mihaela Precup Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Series Editor Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and his recent research into nineteenth-century comics is award-winning. He serves on the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643 Mihaela Precup The Graphic Lives of Fathers

Memory, Representation, and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics Mihaela Precup English Department Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures Bucharest, Romania

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-030-36217-1 ISBN 978-3-030-36218-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Getty images. Credit: MirageC.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Dragos ̦ Manea and in memory of Horia Precup Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to a lot of people who made this book possible, but first and foremost to Roger Sabin, who invited me to submit a proposal, and whose advice and incredible knowledge of the field made this book a very different and much better project. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer, who gave me plenty of notes, corrections, and useful suggestions that turned this into a substantially better book. I am also very thankful to Camille Davies, Liam McLean, and Shaun Vigil at Palgrave, for their assistance with the manuscript, as well as their patience. In many ways, this book started taking shape once I found my academic home, thanks to the tireless efforts of Ian Hague and the wonderful team behind Comics Forum, where I presented some of my initial thoughts on this project. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the organizers of the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conferences I attended over the years—David Huxley, Chris Murray, Golnar Nabizadeh, Joan Ormrod, and Julia Round—where I also presented papers that later became part of this book. The community of scholars I met through these and other events has always been incredibly well-informed and kind. I thank them all for their incredible generosity. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the staff at the JFK Library, Freie University, Berlin, for their support over the years. The Central University Library in Bucharest was also a work space without which I would not have been able to finish this book. I am very grateful to my students and colleagues from the American Studies Program and the English Department at the University of Bucharest. I would like to extend a special thank you to my students from

vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS the graduate seminar on Memory and Representation in Graphic Memoirs. Dana Mihăilescu has always given me unwavering support, patience, and kindness. Dragos ̦ Manea, whose understanding of comics is humbling, kindly read my project in its various stages and provided a lot of great advice. Professor Rodica Mihăilă took a chance on my dissertation back when the subject sounded quite risky, and for that I am very thankful. Tirza Latimer and Laura Wexler are the two mentors who oversaw my wobbly start on this research path and taught me a lot about academic generosity and solidarity. I would also like to thank my friends and family, who have been patiently waiting for me to finish his project so that we can spend more time together. I will always be grateful to Dr. Silviu Butuc for being quite literally a lifesaver and one of the kindest people I know. A special debt of gratitude is owed to my mother, Viorela Precup, and my grandmother, Eugenia Mirescu, a formidable team that worked hard to make space for me to be able to focus on this book. A big thank you to Dragos ̦ and Eric, for more than I can possibly articulate here. My work on this project was supported by grant PN-III-P1- 1.1-TE-2016-0697, no. 38/2018, Witnessing Destruction: Remembering War and Conflict in American Auto/biographical and Documentary Narratives, offered by UEFISCDI. An earlier version of Chap. 5 and a section of Chap. 1 appeared in The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novels from the North edited by Dominick Grace and Eric Hoffman, Copyright © 2018 by University Press of Mississippi. An earlier version of a section of Chap. 7 appeared in Precup, Mihaela. The American Graphic Memoir: An Introduction. Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2013. Contents

1 Introduction: Comics, Fatherhood, and Autobiographical Representation 1 Paternal Presence in Autobiographical Comics 2 Words, Drawings, and Photographs: The Language of Autobiographical Comics 10 Autobiography, Ethics, and the Transmission of Memory 14 Fatherhood, Masculinity, and Popular Culture 17 Chapter Overview 22 References 26

2 “A good and decent man”: Fatherhood, Trauma, and Post-War Masculinity in Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart 33 Capturing the Father: From Photography to Anthropomorphic Representation 37 Reading Fatherhood through Trauma 45 Conclusion 51 References 56

3 “He was there to catch me when I leapt”: Paternal Absence and Artistic Emancipation in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 59 Autobiography and Revision 61 Paternal Pedagogy 65

ix x CONTENTS

The Present/Absent Father 69 Conclusion 75 References 80

4 “As long as he was there, I felt safe”: Fatherhood, Deception, and Detective Work in Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter 83 Engendering the Bad Daughter 84 Fatherhood, Posturing, and Imposture 88 Familiar Violence 93 Fatherhood and the Pedagogy of Deception 96 Conclusion 101 References 105

5 “To dream of birds”: The Father as Potential Perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s “August, 1977” and Fatherland 107 Imagination as Narrative Intervention in “August, 1977” 111 A Portrait of the Father as a Potential Perpetrator 114 Perpetration, Stasis, and Photography 120 Conclusion 126 References 128

6 “A doting fool”: The Limits of Fatherhood in R. Crumb’s Sophie Stories 131 Views and Revisions of Crumb’s Autobiographical Self 132 The Limits of Fatherhood 139 Conclusion 147 References 153

7 “Emasculated by the diaper bag”: Aging, Masculinity, and Fatherhood in Joe Ollmann’s Mid-Life 157 Middle-Aged Fatherhood and the Crisis of Confidence 161 “The unequal distribution of fun and responsibility”: Parenthood and Gender 169 Conclusion 175 References 180 CONTENTS xi

8 “When the monsters come jello them”: Fatherhood, Vulnerability, and the Magic of the Mundane in James Kochalka’s American Elf 183 Vulnerability and the Elf Mask 186 Learning Fatherhood: Infantilism, Adulthood, and Self-Deprecation 188 Conclusion 200 References 205

9 “You tell your father he did a good job”: Sons, Fathers, and Intergenerational Dynamics in Jeffrey Brown’s A Matter of Life 209 Masculinity and the Shaping of the Autobiographical Subject 210 Secularism and Parental Conduct 216 Religion, Paternity, and Intergenerational Transmission 221 Conclusion 226 References 229

10 Conclusion 231 References 234

Index 237 About the Author

Mihaela Precup is Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she teaches American visual and popular culture, contemporary American literature and civiliza- tion. She has co-edited (with Rebecca Scherr) three special issues of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (on War and Conflict and Sexual Violence). Her most recent publications are “Memory, Food, and Ethics in Graphic Narratives” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, Routledge, 2018) and “‘I think we’re maybe more or less safe here’: Violence and Solidarity during the Lebanese Civil War in Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows” in Contexts of Violence in Comics (edited by Ian Hague, Ian Horton, and Nina Mickwitz, Routledge, 2020).

xiii List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 One page of the “Army Scrapbook, Part III. Italy. July 1944–October 1944.” (© Carol Tyler) 42 Fig. 2.2 The past intrudes into the present in Chuck’s mind. (© Carol Tyler) 47 Fig. 3.1 “Old Father, Old Artificer” chapter heading. (© Alison Bechdel) 63 Fig. 3.2 Father and daughter silhouettes in dream sequence. (© Alison Bechdel) 74 Fig. 3.3 Father and daughter, in silhouette, contemplating a sunset. (© Alison Bechdel) 75 Fig. 4.1 The cover of Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir. (© Laurie Sandell) 90 Fig. 4.2 Childhood cartoon by Laurie Sandell. (© Laurie Sandell) 91 Fig. 4.3 Title panel to “Flight” chapter. (© Laurie Sandell) 100 Fig. 5.1 Full-page spread from “August, 1977.” (© Nina Bunjevac) 113 Fig. 5.2 Silhouettes near the end of Fatherland. (© Nina Bunjevac) 121 Fig. 5.3 Cover image of Fatherland. (© Nina Bunjevac) 123 Fig. 6.1 The last two panels from “Memories Are Made of This!”. (© Robert Crumb) 136 Fig. 6.2 The last two panels from the “Epilogue” of “My Troubles with Women, Part II.” (© Robert Crumb) 144 Fig. 7.1 Front cover of Mid-Life. (© Joe Ollmann) 163 Fig. 7.2 The volatile paternal image from Mid-Life. (© Joe Ollmann) 166 Fig. 7.3 Carol Tyler’s “Anatomy of a New Mom.” (© Carol Tyler). Joe Ollmann’s portrait of the middle-aged father. (© Joe Ollmann) 173 Fig. 8.1 August 6, 2006 entry from American Elf. (© James Kochalka) 191

xv xvi List of Figures

Fig. 8.2 December 14, 2004 entry from American Elf. (© James Kochalka) 193 Fig. 9.1 The consolation of total extinction from A Matter of Life. (© Jeffrey Brown) 218 Fig. 9.2 Conclusion of the miniature golf scene from A Matter of Life. (© Jeffrey Brown) 220 Fig. 9.3 A happy domestic scene from A Matter of Life. (© Jeffrey Brown) 221 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Comics, Fatherhood, and Autobiographical Representation

A recent webcomic titled “You Should’ve Asked,” by French cartoonist Emma, illustrates the pressures of the “mental load” that is commonly carried by the female partner in a heterosexual household, whose manager she often becomes.1 When children are added to the domestic sphere, Emma suggests, this burden becomes even heavier, as mothers often have to remember, organize, and accurately describe a large number of chores and appointments for both the children and their partner. This often leads to mothers fulfilling these tasks themselves. In Emma’s story, the father is present in the domestic space, but only performs the chores his female partner indicates, while remaining oblivious to the additional “invisible work” she has to do.2 By depicting the father as a sort of polite guest in his own home, only willing to complete those tasks that are explicitly assigned to him by the wife/home manager, the comic suggests the simple fact that the father’s mere presence in the home is not a guarantor of equal domestic labor, including child-related responsibilities. That the English version of “You Should’ve Asked” went viral, even though it ostensibly describes a situation pertinent to France, speaks to its wider cultural relevance and indicates the timely manner of its publication.3 The cartoonists I discuss in this book draw attention to some of the same issues raised in Emma’s viral comic, and attempt to identify ways in which fathers can better themselves both as parents and as partners. The definition of adequate paternal conduct is, thus, not only an important part of feminist discourse, but also, as

© The Author(s) 2020 1 M. Precup, The Graphic Lives of Fathers, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_1 2 M. PRECUP this book will show, a key subject of autobiographical writing in comic book form. In this book, I look at representations of fathers and fatherhood in North American autobiographical comics that explicitly attempt to define good paternal conduct, both from the perspective of the child and that of the father himself. The selection of autobiographical comics I discuss here includes authors whose work is preoccupied with answering the question “What is a good father?” by examining the quality and impact of paternal behavior from early childhood onward. This question prompts authors to present evidence of the quality of the father’s presence in the domestic space by focusing their attention on mundane everyday gestures and activities such as feeding, changing, playing, reading, telling stories, doing household chores, and other educational moments. This allows cartoonists to depict various levels of physical proximity ranging from affection to violence, and ponder the gendered dimension of parental conduct. These comics are also a good testing ground for the consequences of decades of feminist struggle to overcome the overwhelming identification of men with the public sphere, while the private/domestic space, particularly parenting, was for a long time—and in many cases still is—assigned primarily to women.

Paternal Presence in Autobiographical Comics The figure of the father is by no means recent in autobiographical comics, particularly considering that the genre often requires authors to examine their family background and revisit past moments when one or two parental figures are present. However, not all autobiographical comics where fathers play a significant part also prioritize fatherhood itself as a subject of contemplation, and instead of focusing on parental conduct as it occurred throughout the child’s development in the domestic space and elsewhere, they select other areas of narrative focus. Perhaps the most memorable paternal figure from the North American autobiographical comics scene is Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman, whose quirky and captivating voice vies with his son’s over the reader’s attention as he “bleeds history.”4 In Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991; complete version 2003), the father’s wartime experiences dwarf his son, who prioritizes them over a representation of his own childhood or adolescence. Maus starts with a two-page story from Art’s childhood that appears to promise that it will pay special attention to the relationship between father and son as it plays 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 3 out in the domestic space: rejected by two friends, who skate off without him after a strap on his skate breaks, Art, who is 10 or 11 years old at the time, runs to his father for consolation and finds him doing some wood- work. Vladek, however, immediately deflects the subject toward his own experience in the camps, providing an incongruously grave perspective on Art’s complaint about his friends while also showing himself to be indeli- bly marked by his trauma. The Holocaust looms so large over the family’s story that very little narrative space is provided to Art’s upbringing or various events that might help define the Spiegelmans’ domestic space. Even when it is depicted, as in the introduction to Spiegelman’s re-edited Breakdowns collection (2008), the information is scarce and generally relevant to Art’s formation as an artist and the making of Maus. In fact, Anja Spiegelman, Art’s mother, is featured more in these comics, while Vladek only makes brief appearances. In the introduction to Breakdowns, we catch glimpses of the Spiegelmans’ domestic life and Vladek’s paternal conduct becomes less abstract: Vladek accidentally contributes to his son’s future career when he buys cheaper older horror comics that the Comics Code had made otherwise unavailable; later, in a panel framed like a family photograph and ironically titled “Looking up to Dad,” we see him whipping young Art with his belt with a determinate look on his face as the narrative box provides the explanation that “it was just called child rearing in his generation” (Spiegelman 2008). In the same segment, whose title (“Pop Art”) proposes a reading of Vladek through the lens of his contribution to his son’s work, we see Art’s failed attempt to escape his father’s larger- than-life shadow. That Vladek’s statue, built by his own son, is cast in the shape of his animal representation from Maus reinforces an understanding of Vladek through his trauma as mediated by his son’s vision. In Art’s version of him, Vladek’s most important heritage is, in fact, his testimony of Holocaust survival, a transgenerational trauma that Spiegelman portrays himself passing on to his son Dash.5 We come to know more about Vladek the mouse than about him as a man; even his role as a father is overshadowed by his son’s interest in the experiences from before his birth and the way that they, through a combination of the work of memory and postmemory (Hirsch 1997), come to dominate the memorial space of the entire family. While Art and Vladek’s collaboration for Maus indicates that they had a difficult relationship (one that may have been both examined and mended somewhat by their dialogue), fatherhood itself remains only a link in the chain of transmission that transfers the trauma of the Holocaust to future generations. 4 M. PRECUP

Aside from Vladek Spiegelman, the North American autobiographical comics scene is home to quite a few other fathers, depicted from both sides of the parental experience, as they play either episodic or more significant roles. However, I have not included them as subjects of close readings in subsequent chapters of this book because, as in Spiegelman’s case, in these comics the father is central, but fatherhood itself is not. In other words, it is not their main purpose to produce comprehensive examinations of fatherhood by attempting to define good paternal conduct and/ or observing how it plays out in different time periods and in a variety of settings, from the domestic to the public. While they are all important comments on different aspects of fatherhood, they tend to single out specific issues, such as abuse, abandonment, mourning, or racial inequality. For instance, in the collection A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000), Phoebe Gloeckner’s alter ego, Minnie, is abused by a paternal figure, her mother’s boyfriend; her own father is absent throughout this troubling story whose the graphic scenes are mediated and de-eroticized through the author’s use of grotesque anatomical representation, but also literary allusion.6 Sexual abuse is also the subject of Debbie Drechsler’s 12 semi- autobiographical short stories collected in Daddy’s Girl (2008); the stories follow two narrators with similar backgrounds and physical appearance, Lily and Franny, from late childhood into adolescence.7 Drechsler’s painstaking hatching contributes to the creation of an oppressive atmosphere as the main character seems trapped in panels that often become dark expres- sionistic spaces of nightmare and mystery, home to repeated scenes of Lily’s abuse at the hands of her father and Franny’s rape by an older man. Daddy’s Girl represents sexual abuse unflinchingly, unveiling strategies of survival alongside the brutal consequences of sexual violence. The father is an ominous figure, and his physical and psychological abuse of his daughter is performed with the calm and ease of a calculated strategist bent on destroying not only his child’s present but also her future. In Nicole J. Georges’s Calling Dr. Laura (2013), the narrator’s search for her biological father, a man who she thought was dead, lays bare the flaws of her relationship with her mother, who instructs the entire family to lie to her daughter. As an adult in her late 20s who has not yet come out to her mother, and from the midst of an adopted family that includes several chickens and dogs, the narrator ponders her childhood and the dubious— sometimes violent—surrogate fathers her mother provided. Calling Dr. Laura unpacks the depth of the identity crisis that can be created when one’s past is kept secret, but also the importance of mending the broken 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 5 line of a genealogy that can offer coherence and a sense of safety. Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom. A Memoir in Black and White (2012) chronicles the author’s family’s displacement from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and their decision to settle in Marion, Alabama, in 1961. The memoir examines the intricacies of racial discrimination in both Argentina and the United States by zeroing in on the author’s father’s background and his reactions to life in the Jim Crow South. Back in Argentina, he was a “trigueño,” a person of mixed race whose marriage to a white woman, the narrator’s mother, raised eyebrows. In 1960s Alabama, where people of Hispanic ancestry were rare, he and his family occupy an ambiguous position between the neatly segregated black and white population. As the title of the memoir indicates, the autobiographical investigation focuses specifically on racial and cultural identity, through the lens of the father’s passion for photographic documentation of both family life and social struggle. Jennifer Cruté’s Jennifer’s Journal. The Life of a SubUrban Girl (2014), of which only the first volume has been published so far, is also an examination of race, intergenerational connections, and family life but from the perspective of a black woman who grows up in suburban New Jersey. Most of the stories in the book focus on the narrator’s childhood, up until her parents’ divorce, when she is eight years old. The father is depicted as an insensitive and unreliable parent who is more interested in his extramarital affairs than in the education of his children. Even though the narrator also shows her mother’s tendency of flying into a violent rage upon the slightest provocation, the father is singled out as a particularly irresponsible parent who enjoys playing cruel pranks on his children, forgets to pay the bills, and generally appeals ill-suited for a stable family life. The narrator also offers exculpatory factors for his poor paternal conduct, such as the parents’ difficult marriage or the father’s exhaustion after long work hours. A bus driver who is uncommonly proud of his work (even insisting on wearing his uniform to family events), the father is only presented as the source of more luminous memories when he takes his children to work with him. Here, as in most of the autobiographical comics that depict domestic life from the perspective of a child, the father is a problematic figure, either abusive or absent. Other North American autobiographical comics that show family life from the point of view of the father tend to be more episodic and to appeal more to slapstick humor and caricature, except when they document the loss of a child. For example, Joe Chiappetta’s first collection of his self- published Silly Daddy series (2004) contains work created during the 6 M. PRECUP

1990s that was initially motivated by his decision to record some of his experiences raising his daughter Maria. However, Joe, the autobiographical character of the Silly Daddy cartoon, does not produce a coherent narrative about fatherhood, perhaps also because the comics in this collection address a variety of topics under a title that creates the expectation that the main aspect of the protagonist’s identity will be his position as a father. Following the divorce from Maria’s mother, the comics explore other areas, move into different genres (such as comedic Sci-Fi) and points of view (from first to third person), and seem to record not so much fatherhood as family life in general. Near the end of the collection, some space is devoted to the narrator’s decision to start studying the Bible and get baptized.8 Tom Hart’s first record of fatherhood,Daddy Lightning (2012), is a collection of short stories that construct an over-the-top caricature of the trials of early fatherhood, as they portray a poet and his baby daughter wandering around, seeking various essential items such as waffles, diapers, and pacifiers. While Daddy Lightning is indeed inspired by Hart’s experience of being a father, it is not an autobiographical comic; rather, its epon- ymous character is an everyman of unclear background, who embarks on a pilgrimage to a beach that is never reached, his baby strapped to his back. The father is frequently pictured screaming and protesting his fate as everything goes wrong in a world ruled by absurdist slapstick scenarios and occasional fantastic elements. The mother’s absence is unexplained, but it seems to function as a way of testing the limits of the father’s endurance, while also hinting at mainstream bias against single fatherhood. The representation of fatherhood in Hart’s Rosalie Lightning (2015) displays a sharp change of tone and style, as this is a mourning memoir, tracing the progress of the parents’ grief after the sudden and unexplained death of their daughter shortly before the age of two. Like other memoirs that record the time after a loss, this focuses less on parenting itself, which fades into the background as the book constructs a vibrant portrait of the daughter and the parents’ struggle to survive a loss of such magnitude. Another example of family life viewed through a humorous lens is Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles (2007; 2009), which offers a light-hearted perspective of his adventures as stay-at-home father to his son Louis, who is a toddler when Guy’s wife, a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, takes a job in Myanmar (also known as Burma).9 As the couple navigates the stressful move and the mother attempts to juggle both work and domestic life, childcare initially falls to the father, and, when they find a local babysitter, he is able to work from home. In fact, little Louis finds 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 7 himself in the additional temporary care of both the house guard and various neighbors, as the community showers him with affection, something Delisle attributes to both his son’s foreignness and the local population’s more general love of children. The image on the cover, of Guy pushing a stroller with his sleeping son inside, as he is glancing at two soldiers guard- ing a house whose fence is topped with barbed wire, speaks both to the troubled situation in a country that is under a military dictatorship and to his double role during his stay in Myanmar, as both a travel journalist and as a father. A few scenes from Burma Chronicles—such as the story titled “Bad Dad Manual,” where we see Guy running out of milk for his coffee and drinking his baby’s instead—also contain the seeds of Delisle’s tongue- in-cheek bad parenting manuals, published in English as A User’s Guide to Neglectful Parenting (2013), Even More Bad Parenting Advice (2014), The Owner’s Manual to Terrible Parenting (2015), and The Handbook of Lazy Parenting (2019). The pocketbook-sized books, with one or two borderless panels per page, are collections of humorous sketches, featuring Guy, his son, and his daughter. Here, he relies on the stereotype of the bumbling father, childish and easily ruffled, who panders to his children’s whims, inadvertently terrorizes them, or puts them in the way of harm because of his limited attention span. However, every situation is predictably resolved without any damage to the children. This kind of humorous take on fatherhood—with frequent self-deprecating notes—can also be found in most of the comics by fathers that I consider in this book. By choosing authors who work in the North American scene, I plan to test the assumptions about the progress of fatherhood present in the critical literature from a few intersecting fields without over-generalizing or proposing universal frames of reference. There are, however, quite a few fascinating paternal figures in autobiographical comics from other parts of the world. Pictured by both sons and daughters, in these works the figure of the father is sometimes inextricable from the wide sweep of the social and political forces of his time. For instance, in Antonio Altarriba and Kim’s The Art of Flying (2009; 2015), a biography of Altarriba’s father based on an autobiographical manuscript he leaves behind, the Spanish Civil War is a devastating force that shatters his future. As he speaks through the double perspective of his father and himself, placing himself in his father’s body in the past as a witness, the narrator foreshadows the inevitability of his father’s suicide through a recurrent “flying” motif. In US-based Palestinian cartoonist Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (2015), the figure of the father—woven amidst traditional embroidery patterns known 8 M. PRECUP in Palestinian culture as tatreez—is proposed as emblematic of “five million people, born into a life of exile and persecution, indefinitely suspended in statelessness,” as the author indicates in the preface (2015, 12). The title of the book—the name of a refugee camp in Northern Lebanon where her father was born and raised for a while—also suggests that the book goes beyond the confines of one family’s history to open a powerful and necessary investigation of the situation of an entire population. Asaf Hanuka’s two volumes, The Realist (2015) and The Realist: Plug and Play (2017), infuse the author’s experience as a father of two with surreal elements that flesh out the frustrating and often frightening process of raising children in present-day Israel.10 Pulled into different directions by his responsibilities as a father and the complicated relationship to his home country, the father’s body is prone to a multitude of sometimes violent transformations. We see the main character liquefy, fall apart, and become a variety of objects, from a robot to a popsicle (both handled by his children’s expert hands), only to be quickly put together for the next story and repeat the absurd cycle of life as a parent in a conflict zone. Riad Satouff’s ongoing graphic memoir The Arab of the Future (2014–2018; 2015–2019), of which four volumes have been published so far, is structured by Riad’s father’s pan-Arabic vision of the future and his admiration for authoritarian leaders. These two factors prompt his decision to take his French wife and child first to Libya and then to Syria, while both of these countries are under strong dictatorships. As the narrator grows older, and a second son joins the family, his unquestioning regard for his father’s decisions begins to crumble, just as his father becomes increasingly religious and ambivalent about his own initial beliefs. Marzena Sowa’s Marzi (2008–2017; 2011) a graphic memoir illustrated by Sylvain Savoia, is also dominated by the luminous and gentle figure of the narrator’s father, who often protects her from her stern mother, with whom she has a difficult relationship. The father is the main focus of nostalgic sentiment in this book that is ostensibly about growing up in a small Polish town during the communist regime; born in 1979, Sowa depicts some of the typical experiences of a childhood lived during a time of ration cards, political unrest, censored news, and worker strikes. Sheltered as she is by her parents from these harsh realities, little Marzi’s main problems are her inability to satisfy desire (generally for food, toys, and clothing from “abroad”), assuage her fears, and find ways to deal with her maternal antagonist. The father is a supportive and comforting ally, gently building up his shy daughter’s confidence and making her childhood brighter.11 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 9

In autobiographical comics, the father is not always powerfully linked to war, conflict, and oppressive political regimes; some comics about fathers are more intimate stories about loss and memory. British author Ross Mackintosh’s Seeds (2011) is a minimalist and understated record of the rapid progression of the author’s father’s cancer diagnosis. As the father’s rapid deterioration seems to suggest that the outcome might be negative, his son begins to commemorate their close relationship even before his death. Regarded from the son’s secular perspective, the father’s disappearance remains incomprehensible and meaningless, but the book builds a memorable portrait of a vivacious and witty man who is able to conserve his sense of humor throughout a less-than-dignified experience. By contrast, a paternal figure who is both oppressively present and pain- fully distant in the domestic space presides over Mary Talbot’s 2012 Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (illustrated by Bryan Talbot), an autobiographical account structured along a parallel between the author’s relationship with her difficult father, a Joyce scholar, and that of James Joyce with his own daughter, Lucia. The book’s parallel works as a useful pretext for considering the persistent gender bias in education, as well as dispelling any illu- sions about a causal relationship between good paternal conduct and what is traditionally regarded as high intellect. Throughout the memoir, we see Talbot’s “cold mad feary father” (2012, 3) either in front of his type- writer, isolated from his children and resenting any interruption, or bark- ing orders at his daughter and screaming quite often, his face distorted with annoyance and rage at his children for disturbing him as he is trying to work. His moments of attention or tenderness read as exceptions to his general conduct in the home, in stark contrast to the warm public persona he projects. A different kind of paternal absence is pictured in Finnish cartoonist Hanneriina Moisseinen’s Isä (Father, 2013), where the author combines pencil drawings and embroidery work to tell the story of her father’s disappearance while on a fishing trip with work colleagues. Isä is a dark and delicate work of memory and mourning, but also contains elements of the detective story as it probes the unanswered question of the father’s fate. His absence and his daughter’s method of dealing with it are foreshadowed by the first image in the book, a photograph of a lone frayed towel hanging from a hook, with the owner’s position in the home, “Isä,” embroidered on it. Pictured as a warm and loving parent in the few pages devoted to the time before his disappearance, Seppo Moisseinen’s figure is inextricable from the implacable woods where he probably meets his end, while in his wake the domestic space is overpowered with grief and panic 10 M. PRECUP as Hanneriina’s mother suddenly finds herself having to raise two children by herself. The story—and, with it, the lost father—keeps being pulled back into the domestic space through Moisseinen’s shadowy embroidered panels.

Words, Drawings, and Photographs: The Language of Autobiographical Comics The wider context for my reading of the representation of fatherhood in North American autobiographical comics is the significant recent interest in the wider topic of North American life writing in comics, whose roots can be found in the American underground tradition of the 1960s and 1970s (Hatfield 2005). While some studies focus on the genre as a whole (Chaney 2011; El Refaie 2012; Kunka 2018), others address more specific topics, such as the representation of childhood in autobiographical comics by female cartoonists (Chute 2010), the contribution of Jewish American cartoonists to the graphic memoir (Lightman 2014; Oksman 2016), truth-telling in documentary comics (Mickwitz 2016), the representation of memory, trauma, and testimony (Earle 2017; Nabizadeh 2019), and genocide (in ‘t Veld 2019). These valuable works discuss important issues, among which the question of what comics contribute to autobiographical storytelling, and how it can work with other media, such as photography, to express a “truth” whose telling is complicated by factors like the unreliability of memory, the norms that police the archive, and the various cultural stereotypes that govern representation. Terminology is also an issue that comes up in various studies of the subject: cartoonist Lynda Barry concocted the term “autobifictionalography” to emphasize the intentional fictional elements in autobiographical work (2002), Gillian Whitlock argues in favor of the term “autographics” (2006); and “graphic memoir” is generally used for longer-form autobiographical comics. Since the primary sources I discuss in this book include short autobiographical stories, graphic memoirs that often contain both historical or biographical elements, as well as a graphic diary, I rely on Smith and Watson’s argument that “life writing” and “life narrative” are more inclusive than other terms of various types of “self-referential” writing (2010, 4) and I use terms such as “graphic life narratives” and “autobiographical comics” to refer to the various texts I discuss in this book, even though in subsequent chapters I also approach them individually while paying attention to their respective generic specificities. 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 11

In this book, I am also interested in joining the conversation about the modes of memorial transmission through autobiographical comics that appeal to memory in different ways, each with its set of representational challenges and degrees to which they can produce reader involvement. One of these is postmemory, famously theorized by Marianne Hirsch (1997) as a work of memory and imagination motivated by ethical responsibility to a set of persons or events. Postmemory, inherited by the subject through storytelling (usually by another family member), recalls an unwitnessed history that affected one’s family. Hirsch includes a chapter on postmemory and Art Spiegelman’s Maus in her book Family Frames in order to explain how postmemory works, and she suggests that in this case representation is based not only on storytelling, but also on research and imagination. Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (2011), the series of interviews with Hillary Chute where the author explains his process, supports Hirsch’s claims. Hirsch conceptualizes postmemory as the cornerstone of the (auto)biographical construction of absent people and unwitnessed events because the nucleus of these narratives is, in fact, not made up of the narrator’s memories, but of the narrator’s memories of other people’s stories, usually supported by photography, a visual medium Hirsch considers most apt for this specific task. Hirsch’s perspective has been critiqued for allegedly creating a possible equivalence between primary and secondary trauma and for the potential of this concept to cancel trauma-related cultural specificities, but Hirsch has defended her position (Bond et al.2017 ). Hirsch proposes that the family is the place where postmemory thrives because it has the power to create strong personal responsibility toward people and stories, and also to demand the difficult work of imagination and a “deep personal connection” (1997, 22) to a story. However, this needs to be further examined in the context of those communities of behavior or belief whose personal connections redefine the traditional family. Some communities are or perceive themselves to be disenfran- chised, and this situation often creates the premises for the revision of the concept of family (traditionally consolidated through blood ties) and its extension to include members of the same social or political group. In this context, it is possible to consider Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory” (2004) as a welcome extension of postmemory. Landsberg argues that prosthetic memory is created through texts that have the ability to generate memories of events in the consciousness of people from cultures other than the ones where they occurred. Landsberg herself acknowledges the optimism behind her demonstration—through an analysis 12 M. PRECUP of various texts, including Art Spiegelman’s Maus—that it is possible to identify “new technologies of memory” that, “despite their artificiality and manipulability, interface with a person’s subjectivity and…still can… produce real tears” (2004, 118). The corollary to Landsberg’s optimistic prosthetic memory can be found in E. Ann Kaplan’s “empty empathy” (2005), a coinage through which she reads vicarious traumatization through the media and the possibility that it may produce social action. Elisabeth El Refaie, who is similarly skeptical of the role of empathy, also points out that the particular “estrangement effect” given by the structure of comics, but especially the use of “metaphor, humor, and intertextuality, which simultaneously demand the readers’ active, critical cooperation, and their empathic engagement” (2012, 206) can ensure both the readers’ involvement and their affiliation, in certain autobiographical comics.12 Even though this book does not set out to over-emphasize what comics does differently from other media, it does consider some of the characteristics of comics relevant to graphic life narrative that have been emphasized in the critical literature, often from opposing stances. One of them is that comics has the ability of making narrative bias more legible, particularly in the case of authors who rely more on caricature and less on realism. Jared Gardner has argued that autobiographies in comic book form always have a meta element that keeps the reader from collapsing the narrator and the autobiographer into one and the same figure: “The compressed, mediated, and iconic nature of testimony (both text and image) in comics denies any collapse between autobiography and autobiographical subject (the frequent use of pseudonyms and caricatures only reinforces the split), and stylized comic art refuses any claims to the ‘having-been-there’ truth” (2012, 131). Charles Hatfield also demonstrates that irony and self- reflexivity are important factors that distance “the narrating I” from “the narrated I” (Smith and Watson 2010), who are separated by time and life experience.13 In addition to this, since autobiographical comics usually also rely on photography (both through reproductions and drawings of photographs), debates have arisen about how these media can work together to illuminate certain aspects of self-representation. Comics schol- arship thus joined the debate on the ontological status of autobiography and photography (Eakin 1985; Dow Adams 2000). Nancy Pedri, who has written extensively on the matter, argues that, in autobiographical comics, photography is “at pains to show the truth of the self” (2012, 265), while comics correspond “more closely (and thus accurately) to the subjective viewpoints, memory filters or emotive charges 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 13 operative in the graphic representation of self” (2012, 265). Pedri even claims that drawings generate “more truthful (and thus, more real)” representations than the “extradiegetic, real self” encapsulated in photography (2012, 266). While disputing the one-sided perspective whereby the role of photography in comics has been relegated solely to their documentary function, Pedri convincingly states that “the use of photography in graphic memoir functions not only as evidence or proof, aide-memoires, or markers of the passage of time, but also as commentary or critical engagement with questions of self and its representation” (2012). On the other hand, Barbara Postema argues in favor of the long-held belief that photography has a privileged connection to reality than drawing and, thus, “due to the more direct connection between the ‘real’ and the image in photographs, a sequence of photographs is more likely to imply the recon- struction of an action, rather than the creation of an action, which is evoked by a sequence of drawn images” (2015, 85). We can think about this in conjunction with Roland Barthes’s much-quoted observation about the potential of certain photographs to arrest movement by gener- ating, through the punctum, a visual shock of surprise or recognition in the viewer, who thus becomes emotionally connected to the photographic image (1981, 27). Writing as he does in the specific context where photography is a crucial part of the process of regaining access—through recognition—to his dead mother, Barthes also emphasizes the umbilical connection created by light, which he goes so far as to call “a carnal medium, a skin” (1981, 81) that is shared by the photograph and the gaze of the observer. Barthes’s comments are important in the context of autobiographical texts about absent family members; even if they do not have quantifiable scientific merit, they are valuable because they reflect contemporary beliefs about the unfolding and performance of grief that is mourning, where photography still plays an essential role, both in everyday life and in the production of life-writing. In this context, this book also considers the role of rhythm in autobiographical comics, and the way it is influenced by the dynamic between words, drawings (with varying degrees of realism), reproductions of photographs, drawings of photographs, maps, certificates, and other archival objects. Even though, as Jared Gardner claims, the medium of comics is committed to stillness, by comparison to film, which became increasingly reliant on seamlessness of movement (2012, 7), there are degrees according to which even the more traditionally static of representations in comics can be differently positioned on a scale of movement. This holds particularly if 14 M. PRECUP we consider the intervention of movement lines, photographic structures, and other elements, such as the pattern of the comics grid (Groensteen 2013) that can speed up or slow down the reading experience, and can also help reflect the passage of time and the different mechanisms of memory that generated them.

Autobiography, Ethics, and the Transmission of Memory Autobiographical comics about fatherhood are part of a productive subgenre of literary autobiography that focuses on an autobiographer’s relationship with a family member.14 Smith and Watson include it in the so-called filiation narrative, defined as life writing that “seeks to memorialize the relationship to a parent, sibling, or child” (2010, 270). David Parker argues in favor of the filiation narrative being regarded as a subgenre of life writing on account of its dynamic between autonomy and relationality, as well as “a complex sense of moral obligation” behind the writing of the family story as an ethical guide (qtd. in Smith and Watson 2010, 270–271). Richard Freadman prefers the broader term “relational auto/biography” for books (like his own Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself, 2003) that are about a parent, and thus contain a mixture between biography and autobiography (Freadman 2004, 128), but also proposes the narrower self-explanatory term “the Son’s book of the Father” (Freadman 2004, 122). In this category, which he defines more generally in terms of what he sets out to accomplish in his own memoir, he includes well-known life narratives written by sons about fathers, such as Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), widely credited to being the first such English-language book, Geoffrey Wolff’s Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (1990), Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991), Larry Lockridge’s Shade of the Raintree (1994), but also Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991). Freadman’s coinage, which has not caught on, covers a heteroge- neous number of texts that do not specifically define or assess fatherhood. In literary autobiographies, fathers have long been frustrating figures of mystery, memory, and recuperation. Roger J. Porter shows how prominent the father has become for autobiographical fiction in his book Bureau of Missing Persons. Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (2011), where he analyzes 18 autobiographical texts devoted to elusive and secretive fathers whose children find themselves in the position of detectives investigating their own families. Porter argues that these can be regarded as crime stories, 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 15

“variants of detective fiction functioning as a corrective to the parents’ nonfiction” 2011( , 3). Interestingly, the graphic memoirs I discuss in Chaps. 2 through 5 in this book also focus on fathers who hide an important aspect of their identity: Carol Tyler’s father hides his war trauma, Alison Bechdel’s father hides his sexuality and his affairs with underage boys, Laurie Sandell’s father displays such a level of imposture that it is difficult to glean what he isnot hiding, and Nina Bunjevac’s father hides the extent of his involvement in a terrorist organization. Such stories not only attempt to identify and approximate a version of the truth behind the fathers’ secretive lives, but also ask important questions about the ethics of storytelling in autobiography. In subsequent chapters of this book, I address similar questions about ethics and auto/biographical writing, such as the ownership of stories, the right to representation, the possibility of becoming trapped in simplified models of subjectivity, and the way conversations in the public space produce reevaluations of the behavior and values of the autobiographical self. Considering that, as Thomas Couser reminds us in Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, “all autobiography is necessarily heterobiogra- phy” (2004, x), in this book I also consider the ethics of representing “vulnerable subjects,” whom Couser defines as “persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust- based relationship but are unable to represent themselves in writing or to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else” (2004, xii). Considering the subject of the graphic memoirs and short autobiographical stories I analyze here, the issue of depicting subjects who are unable to consent is a recurring one. Should, for instance, Alison Bechdel, Nina Bunjevac, and even Carol Tyler to a certain extent have abstained from portraying fathers who cannot give their consent because they are dead by the time their daughters start working on/finish their projects? Who owns the stories of the dead?15 Does Laurie Sandell’s father, for instance, a person who led a double life and deceived his family, count as a vulnerable subject because he never consents to—and, in fact, he is ada- mantly against—being portrayed in his daughter’s work? In the complicated ethical maths of the book, does his betrayal cancel his rights to his own story? Do these daughters’ suffering and superior moral position as the wronged party of the father-daughter relationship become diminished in any way as a result of their decision to write the book? Similar questions can be raised about fathers who portray their children, who are unable to give a well-informed response to this process. Another issue that arises, as 16 M. PRECUP

John D. Barbour argues, when we read memoirs about parents, is the question “whether the desire to forgive a parent can negate or distort accurate moral judgment” (2004, 89). In this book, I ask this question of all the memoirs that represent parents, but particularly in connection with Soldier’s Heart, Carol Tyler’s account of her father’s (post-)World War II experiences. As Tyler engages in the momentous task of representing a member of one of the most respected generations of American veterans, I ask whether her reading of her father’s domestic conduct through his trauma may be an effect of her desire to forgive him, alongside her reluctance to genuinely critique a member of what is popularly known in the United States as “The Greatest Generation.” Certain changes in public opinion can also contribute to the reevaluation of autobiographical content, thus influencing reception in ways that the autobiographer might find difficult to anticipate. For instance, in the context of the #MeToo movement, there is evidence, as I show in this book, that contemporary reevaluations of Robert Crumb’s work—always somewhat controversial on account of its sexist and racist representations—may make the author’s much-quoted defense about his unveiling the id of America more difficult to accept than before, and (as I argue in Chap. 6 of this book) complicate the position of the comics about his daughter Sophie. In response to some of the issues raised above, Paul John Eakin draws attention to the fact that “life and life writing are messier than a traditional model of ethics centered on privacy and property can handle” (2004, 9), cautions against being drawn into “reductive molds for identity and life story” (2004, 13), and warns that it can often be difficult to separate the positive from the negative effects of life-writing (2004, 11). In The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore also points out “autobiography’s association with and participation in dominant constructions of the individual and the nation” (2001, 13) which “seem to taint it ideologically” (2001, 13). My book takes into consideration the issues raised by Eakin and Gilmore particularly in the context of the autobiographers’ understanding and negotiation of hegemonic masculinity, but also by approaching their use of the self-deprecating mode that characterized much of the underground comics movement and is still present in autobiographical comics today. While it may be too early to pronounce autobiographical comics about and by fathers about the experience of fatherhood a separate subgenre, through the topics they develop they can be affiliated with two blooming subgenres of traditional literary autobiography, the “patremoir” and the 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 17

“dadoir.” Alongside the “motherhood memoir” or “momoir,” the “dadoir” (defined as “memoirs about fatherhood written by fathers themselves”) and the “patremoir” (defined by Andre Gerard as a text that depicts memories of the author’s father) occupy important spaces of representation in autobiographical literature (Podnieks 2016, 67). By analyzing a selection of seven “dadoirs,” Elizabeth Podnieks underlines their significant similarities, which, she argues, announce the beginning of a subgenre (Podnieks 2016, 68).16 These books approach issues that bear substantial similarities to the topics explored in the autobiographical comics by fathers about fatherhood that I approach in this book: “how fatherhood has changed the man’s life and identity in terms of masculinity and manhood, and his relationship with his spouse/partner; what it means to be a ‘good’ vs. a ‘bad’ father; the authorial self in relation to his parents, especially his father; and his generational (familial and cultural) outlook” (Podnieks 2016, 69).

Fatherhood, Masculinity, and Popular Culture Feminist perspectives on fatherhood have focused either on gender differences that prevent men from providing the same level of care as women or gender equality and the necessity of revising social structures so that men and women may be able to parent equally. There is also an in-between “equal but different” approach that both challenges gender inequality around care and employment by encouraging “active fathering,” while also bearing in mind “the long historical tradition of women’s work, identities, and power in caregiving” (Doucet 2006, 30). In the preface to the second edition of his study Manhood in America: A Cultural History, Michael Kimmel notes both a positive shift toward gender equality, as men are becoming more involved in childcare and household responsibilities, but also a “growing vitriolic chorus of defensively unapologetic regression” (2005, ix). R. W. Connell, who has proposed a view of “masculinities” in the plural to draw attention not only to the different versions of the concept but also to how interpretations of masculinity can vary in different contexts, defines hegemonic masculinity as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the domination of men and the subordination of women,” gay men and men perceived to be effeminate (2005, 77–79). However, hegemonic masculinity is difficult to circumscribe because of the fact that few 18 M. PRECUP men practice it to such an extent as to make their conduct entirely normative; instead, as Connell argues, most men simply profit from the “patriarchal dividend, the advantage men in general gain from the subordination of women” (2005, 79). Thus, Connell underscores the insidiousness of hegemonic practices of masculinity, which are difficult to separate from nonhegemonic practices, as complicity with hegemonic masculinity can play out “without the tensions or risks of being the frontline of patriarchy” (2005, 79). Carabí and Armengol also argue against a neat separation between “hegemonic masculinities” and “alternative masculinities,” which, they argue, “often exist side by side” (2014, 4). Definable as “diverse male subjectivities that challenge dominant gender hierarchies” (2014, 4), alternative masculinities are nondominant practices that aim toward ensuring gender fairness “in profeminist ways” (2014, 5). My book also looks at some of the manifestations of hegemonic and alternative masculinities in the practice of fatherhood, particularly in the work of male cartoonists who depict their experiences as parents, by examining the balance between work and domestic life, but also how fathers express affection, aggression, and bond with their children. While none of the male cartoonists I discuss here align themselves willingly with the practices of hegemonic masculinities, their works often show how insidious these are. Fatherhood has been analyzed as a social construct through a variety of lenses: anthropological (Marsiglio 1995; Dienhart 1998; Spaas 1998), sociological (LaRossa 1997, 2011; Hobson 2002), psychoanalytic (Kalinich and Taylor 2008), biological (Raeburn 2015), and literary (Porter 2011). Some critics diagnosed a “crisis of fatherhood” in the early years of the twenty-first century (Hobson2002 , 1), based on the number of men who fathered children but did not practice fatherhood, as well as the economic vulnerability of men in certain sectors of work worldwide. Other, more recent, viewpoints are more optimistic, but not in a uniform or uncomplicated manner. For instance, sociologist Gayle Kaufman identifies a positive change as fathers become more actively involved in childcare. She defines three categories of men according to the amount of time they spend at work and at home after the birth of their children: “old” dads, who are not necessarily older but do display old-fashioned or more traditional attitudes toward fatherhood; “new” dads, who find it difficult to negotiate between their desire to spend time with their children and the fact that they do not get sufficient help from work-related structures (including legislation), and “superdads,” fathers 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 19 who “significantly adjust their work in order to have more time with their families” (2013, 2). This does not mean that there is by any means a linear development in the practices of fatherhood from the post-war period up until the present day. Instead, as Ralph LaRossa demonstrates, the cele- bration of the concept of “New Fatherhood,” which started in the 1970s (1997, 6) is a manifestation of the revival of an older model of involved fatherhood, which was promoted with some success in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, but was quickly changed by the post-war social dynamic that produced a more distant model of fatherhood.17 The experience of combat shattered the connections between many men and their families; during the 1950s (defined more broadly as the period between 1945 and 1960), the modernization of fatherhood from before the war was replaced by a more traditional view, even though it is arguable that “men in the fifties were uniformly deplorable dads” (LaRossa 2011, 7). Fatherhood has undergone and is still going through tremendous change, as the many studies on post-war American masculinity and paternity show, but motherhood is also in flux. According to a Pew Research Center statistic published in 2018 (Livingston and Bialik), mothers are now more educated than ever before and more of them are employed, but the share of stay-at-home moms has also increased. In addition to this, in 2015 more mothers were in the workforce (a 47% rise from 1975), in 2014 more women with higher education decided to have babies (up 25% from 1994), and in 2016 mothers spent 14 hours a week on childcare (up from 10 hours in 1965) and 18 hours a week on domestic work.18 It is significant that most Americans (71%) believe that mothers and fathers should spend equal time with the baby, even though that has yet to happen. A Pew Research Center statistic focused on fathers (Parker and Livingston 2018) shows that, of those men who still live with their partners, most of them are more actively involved in childcare, but also that more children now grow up without a father. In 2016, fathers spent 10 hours a week on childcare (up three times from 1965), and 10 hours a week on household chores. In addition to this, fewer fathers (39%) than mothers (51%) feel that they are doing a “very good” job as parents, and 45% of Americans feel that mothers and fathers do an equally good job. Declines in marriage also produce a rise in the number of children who live with a single parent, and although in 2018 (Livingston) the number of single fathers has gone up to 4% (from 1% in 1968), most children raised by only one parent are cared for by their mothers (21%). While equality in gender distribution of childcare and household work has not 20 M. PRECUP yet been reached, there is some recent progress in the amount of time men spend on both. So far, the recent interest in representations of fatherhood in popular culture (Tropp and Kelly 2016, Podnieks 2016) has focused on media such as popular literature, film, television, advertising, and blogs, producing classifications and categories such as the “deadbeat dad,” the “bumbling dad,” the heroic father, the good father and so on. Tropp and Kelly (2016) demonstrate that recent media portray fathers as more present in the home and in their children’s lives than ever: since before birth, thanks to ultrasound equipment, and into their early and later lives. The number of involved fathers has increased in recent American sitcoms, such as Two and a Half Men (NBC, 2003–2015), Parenthood (NBC, 2010–2015), Modern Family (ABC, 2009–), Black-ish (ABC, 2014–), Fresh off the Boat (ABC, 2015–), and Marlon (NBC, 2017–2018). These include many examples of improvable but loving and committed fathers who are valuable parts of their children’s lives; they approach topics such as the equality of domestic labor, both during marriage and after divorce, the differences between paternal conduct determined by age, financial and social status, and the way parenthood influences marriage. Animated TV series like The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–), King of the Hill (1997–2010), and Family Guy (Fox, 1999–) also feature various models of fatherhood, like the “deadbeat dad,” the conservative but mild-mannered father, and the bumbling dad. In a chapter where she discusses these three animation series, Rebecca Feasey concludes that these fathers are “ineffectual but not absent” (2008, 43). Feasey also points out that, while critiques of working-class family life were initially cutting-edge, particularly interactions between the incompe- tent—albeit physically present—fathers and their children, now this has become “formulaic”; and instead, Feasey convincingly argues that it is in less mainstream shows like South Park (Comedy Central, 1997–) that the more revolutionary examinations of gender roles in the home occur (2008, 44). More recent reexaminations of gender roles in popular animation series, such as Big Mouth (Netflix, 2017–) and Disenchantment (Netflix, 2018–) have not focused as much on parenthood, as on the children themselves and their discovery of gender and sexual identity and insubordination. There are also a growing number of how-to books dedicated to teaching fatherhood. Volumes with slightly alarmist titles like The Expectant Dad’s Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know (2010) and The New Dad’s Survival Guide: What to Expect in the First Year and Beyond by 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 21

British author Rob Kemp (2014) attempt to help new fathers become more involved in childrearing and more adept at its various chores. Both follow the chronological structure of pregnancy and childrearing staples such as Heidi Mirkoff’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Other publications use the language of football or combat to spell out the duties of fatherhood to men who, as authors presume, would otherwise have trouble integrating their paternal duties amidst their other traditionally male pastimes. Books such as Commando Dad: Basic Training and Commando Dad: Raw Recruits by Neil Sinclair (in the latter, the mother- to-be is referred to as the Commanding Officer and the future child is the “baby trooper”) coat practical advice in the language of combat, thus relying on and consolidating a reading of masculinity as combat-ready, out- doorsy, and muscular. At the same time, by including childrearing among other more traditional male occupations (such as football), they attempt to normalize activities that are traditionally assigned to women. Fathers are also becoming increasingly interesting for the advertising industry, where the multiplicity of campaigns that portray fathers less ste- reotypically and more realistically has even given rise to the term “dadvertising,” a trend that was noticed during the 2015 Super Bowl, when the commercial break featured a large number of less stereotypical representations of fathers (Bukszpan 2016). This trend is also confirmed by studies from advertising companies that show that they are beginning to understand that purchasing decisions for the home are not the exclusive domain of mothers, and that companies need to adjust their campaigns to meet the needs of a majority of fathers who are dissatisfied with the way they have been portrayed in commercials (Sherwood 2016, Fleck 2018). Public service advertisements have also begun to redefine pejorative coinages such as “the dad joke,” alongside clips that are meant to provide additional encouragement and guidance to fathers who want to be present and helpful to their children within and without the domestic space.19 Recent internet phenomena that comment on the culture of fatherhood include “dadcore,” “dad-rock,” or the series of fake magazine covers for the equally fictitiousDad Magazine (Kornhaber 2015). The most successful seems to be the problematic coinage “dad bod,” which became viral when a Clemson University sophomore, Mackenzie Pearson, published a short article that began by defining it as a body that has “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out” that women supposedly find attractive primarily because it does not intimidate them (Pearson 2015). Critiqued for locating the attractiveness of the man in the woman’s 22 M. PRECUP

insecurities (Hess 2015), as well as for creating more permissive standards for fathers while maintaining impossible standards for mothers (Hu 2015), the ongoing popularity of the term has ensured its place in the conversation about contemporary fatherhood.

Chapter Overview The structure of this book reflects the fact that fatherhood is examined primarily either from the point of view of the child or from that of the father himself.20 Thus, the first four chapters focus on the figure of the father in graphic memoirs penned by daughters (Carol Tyler, Alison Bechdel, Nina Bunjevac, Laurie Sandell). These are all problematic paternal figures who could be broadly described as absent from their children’s lives. I am using the term “absent” here to refer to fathers who have either passed away and are the subjects of autobiographical works of recuperation and reevaluation (as in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland and “August, 1977”) or are not part of their children’s lives in a manner that would qualify their presence as valuable to the child, through parental support or constant and respectful involvement (as in Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart and Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter). In this part of the book, I argue that the focus on the representation of absent paternal figures also reflects the narrators’ own desire to be seen; the absence of the father affects the visibility of the children, who are thus prompted to fashion new ways of making themselves visible, through an interplay of words, drawings, and photographs. The next four chapters of my book examine autobiographical comics written by fathers themselves about their own experiences as fathers: Robert Crumb’s short stories about his daughter Sophie from The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, My Troubles with Women, and Drawn Together (some written with Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Sophie Crumb), James Kochalka’s American Elf, Joe Ollmann’s Mid-Life, and Jeffrey Brown’s A Matter of Life. These stories possess a stronger slapstick quality, the father often portraying himself as a bumbling fool, panic-stricken and in distress, an overgrown child himself, repeatedly apologetic about his own inadequacy as a father and partner. Here, fathers are not towering figures of authority, cold, threatening or absent. Most importantly, their actions in the domestic space suggest their intention to support their partners, but also educate and offer protection to their children. At the same time, their occasional self-portrayal as distressed infants inevitably positions their female partners in the role of chastising adults who still bear the brunt of the housework and childrearing. 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 23

There is a marked difference in the way this second group of authors approach their autobiographical selves: they purposefully mix realistic and fantastic elements (Crumb), they draw the readers’ attention to the pur- poseful introduction of fictitious elements (e.g. the Sherri Smalls section of Joe Ollmann’s Mid-Life), and they employ animal masks and alter egos (Crumb, Kochalka, Ollmann). By contrast, the autobiographies written by daughters about their fathers produce versions of their “narrated Is” that appear to be significantly closer to their “narrating Is,” much more invested in unraveling the mysteries of the father figure than in constructing elaborate masks for the narrators themselves. This does not diminish the authority of the account of the fathers who depict themselves, but it marks these texts as more interested in performing social satire and elicit- ing laughter and leniency for the character’s perceived flaws rather than producing scrupulously accurate self-representation. In these texts, the autobiographical fact often becomes a pretext for reflecting on contemporary mores and customs. At the same time, the overwhelming use of the confessional mode in conjunction with self-deprecation and other expressions of self-hatred and shame often make the fathers/narrators of these comics appear to be testifying in a court of public opinion where they both accuse and defend themselves. Although self-deprecating humor has been lauded for its therapeutic potential and for eschewing self-aggrandizing narrative perspectives (Critchley 2002), in this book I argue that self- deprecating humor, at least in the case studies I examine, obscures both the narrators’ laudable paternal conduct and their less commendable behavior, functioning as a moral leveler that blocks, instead of advancing, the narrators’ self-examination. This book asks questions about the contribution made by the vocabulary of graphic narration to the representation of fatherhood, the manner in which hegemonic masculinities influence paternal conduct and often exist in the same space as alternative masculinities, as well as the gendered and generational dynamic of parenthood. As this chapter has shown, autobiographical comics about fatherhood belong to a wider literary subgenre of “filiation narratives,” autobiographies about family members, which come up against a specific set of ethical problems, such as the implications of representing subjects who either cannot agree or do not wish to be portrayed, the ownership of trauma, and the fact that the desire to forgive a family member may compromise the author’s moral judgment. These graphic narratives also belong to a wide array of representations of fathers in popular culture forms like television series, how-to manuals, advertisements, and online campaigns. These, alongside recent statistics, often send 24 M. PRECUP optimistic messages about present-day fatherhood: men are more involved and present in the space of the home, playing with and taking care of their children, and asking to be represented as such. However, women still spend more time on childcare and household tasks, and critics like Ralph LaRossa rightly warn against prematurely applauding “New Fatherhood” (the likes of which the world may already have seen before), and ask that fathers not be applauded for just about any contribution to the domestic space. Still, fatherhood in comics is a good testing ground not necessarily for how far present-day fathers have come, but for how paternal conduct is constructed, and how it determines the way children represent themselves both as individuals and as parents. The authors I discuss in this book return to fatherhood with mixed emotions, in works that look back to ask how fathers could have done better by their children, but also simply to memorialize parenthood, and even, once in a while, celebrate it.

Notes 1. The webcomic was translated into English and published by The Guardian in 2017. 2. In Emma’s other feminist comics about domestic work, collected in The Mental Load (2018), some of which are autobiographical, she also tackles other related issues—such as the father putting a noble spin on spending unnecessary time at work instead of rushing home to help take care of the children—where the father comes off as self-indulgent and purposefully dense about his female partner’s needs. 3. In an interview with Angelique Chrisafis, who observes that the creator’s “easy-to-grasp cartoon representation of it [the issue of the mental load] was a lightbulb moment,” Emma mentions that a large number of women from very different cultural spaces have written to her to confirm that they found the situation applied to them too (Emma 2018a). 4. “My Father Bleeds History” is the subtitle of the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, that covers the time period between “mid-1930s to winter 1944.” 5. This scene of traumatic transference occurs in a section of the introduction to Breakdowns titled “A Father’s Guiding Hand.” Spiegelman represents the trauma of the Holocaust as a fire-spitting dragon, complete with Hitler serpent emerging from its stomach, that chases and badly damages Dash as his father exclaims with faux delighted satisfaction: “And—just think!— someday you’ll be able to pass it on to your son!” (Spiegelman 2008). Tragedy colors the space of the Spiegelmans’ home to such an extent that 1 INTRODUCTION: COMICS, FATHERHOOD, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL… 25

even an episode as mundane as the entire family enjoying The Dick Van Dyke Show—also included in Spiegelman’s introduction to Breakdowns— only turns out to be the background for another traumatic moment: the announcement, as the phone rings, of the sudden death of Anja’s brother Herman in a hit-and-run accident. 6. For comprehensive readings of these two topics, see Deman (2010) and Michael (2018). 7. In fact, Franny is only featured in two stories titled “Sixteen” and “Friends in the Night.” In both of these she is, as indicated by the title of the first story, a teenager. 8. Joe Chiappetta is still self-publishing the Silly Daddy series. The latest volume, Silly Daddy Forever: Comics for All Time (2017) contains the work produced between 2005 and 2017, a similar combination of autobiographical and fictional independent cartoons. 9. The parenthetical information includes first the year of publication in the original language and the subsequent English translation, respectively. Burma Chronicles was published in the original French in 2007. The English translation came out in 2009. I use this dating system throughout this chapter to refer to original and subsequent English language publications of comics whose original language was not English. 10. According to information provided on the copyright pages of the English language versions, Hanuka started publishing The Realist in 2010 as a weekly comic in the Israeli business magazine Calcalist. His comics were first collected and published in French as K.O. à Tel Aviv, vols. 1 and 2 (republished as The Realist) and 3 (republished as The Realist: Plug and Play). The English version of The Realist also contains some previously unpublished material. 11. For a close reading of the child’s perspective on the communist experience in Poland as represented in Marzi, see Mihăilescu (2012). 12. For a useful review and critique of some of the main concepts in trauma studies in the West, see Luckhurst (2008), Rothberg (2009), and Craps (2012). For a more thorough problematization of the concept of empathy, see Pinker (2011). 13. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson differentiate between the “narrating ‘I’” of an autobiographical text, as the “I” who “wants to tell, or is coerced into telling, a story about himself” (2010, 59) and the “narrated ‘I’” or “the protagonist of the narrative, the version of the self that the narrating “I” chooses to constitute through recollection for the reader” (2010, 60). 14. Autobiography has been a recognized literary genre since the late eighteenth century, and since then it has continued to provoke heated debates on many issues such as “authorship, selfhood, representation and the division between fact and fiction” (Anderson 2001, 1–2). 26 M. PRECUP

15. This is a reference to questions such as “Is posthumous harm possible?” and suggested answers such as “The dead belong to the living” (Howes 2004, 245). These are issues raised during an October 2002 colloquium on life writing that took place at the Memorial Union of Indiana University (Howes 2004, 244). 16. The dadoirs Podnieks analyzes in this chapter are Housebroken:Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad by David Eddie, Alternadad by Neal Pollack, Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood by Christopher Shulgan, Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? Confessions of a Gay Dad by Dan Bucatinsky, Hear Me Roar: The Story of a Stay-at Home Dad by Ben Robertson, The Good, the Dad and the Ugly: The Trials of Fatherhood by Brian Viner, and Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single- Fatherhood by Trey Ellis. 17. LaRossa also mentions that Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous childcare bible, Baby and Child Care, is sometimes used as an undeniable argument that social change is real when some invoke the argument that Spock, whose book first came out in 1946, revised it 30 years later and indicated that men should not only help mothers “occasionally,” as he had previously advised, but that both partners should work together in a spirit of domestic equality (1997, 193). LaRossa is vehemently against the idea of linear progress also because, by denying previous models of engaged fatherhood, New Fatherhood can make it “possible for today’s fathers to receive accolades for not doing much” (2011, 9). 18. The Pew Center Research shows that most of the babies born now have Millennial mothers (defined as those born between 1981 and 1996). 19. See the official Ad Council YouTube page and their website,adcouncil.org 20. Sometimes assessment and self-assessment overlap as some authors also reflect on their own double position as parents and children.

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Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sandell, Laurie. 2009. The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir. New York/ Boston/London: Brown and Company. Satouff, Riad. 2015. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978–1984. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York: Metropolitan Books. ———. 2016. The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984–1985. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York: Metropolitan Books. ———. 2018. The Arab of the Future 3: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985–1987. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York: Metropolitan Books. Sherwood, I-Hsien. 2016. From hapless to hero: The changing face of dads in advertising. Campaign, July 11. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/hapless-hero-changing-face-dads-advertising/1401797. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Shulgan, Christopher. 2010. Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood. Toronto: Key Porter Books. Sinclair, Neil. 2012. Commando Dad: Basic Training. Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd. ———. 2014. Commando Dad: Raw Recruits. London: Yellow Kite. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Sowa, Marzena and Sylvain Savoia. 2011. Marzi: A Memoir. Trans. Anjali Singh. New York City: Vertigo. Spaas, Lieve, ed. 1998. Paternity and Fatherhood: Myths and Realities, A Second Edition. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Spiegelman, Art. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2008. Breakdowns. London: Viking Penguin Group. ———. 2011. MetaMaus. London: Viking Penguin Group. Talbot, Mary, and Bryan Talbot. 2012. Dotter of her Father’s Eyes. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books. Tropp, Laura, and Janice Kelly, eds. 2016. Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture. London: Lexington Books. Tyler, Carol. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. A Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Viner, Brian. 2013. The Good, the Dad and the Ugly: The Trials of Fatherhood. London: Simon & Schuster. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics. Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4): 965–979. Wolff, Geoffrey. 1990. The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father. London: Vintage. CHAPTER 2

“A good and decent man”: Fatherhood, Trauma, and Post-War Masculinity in Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart

Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart is an investigative tour-de-force of the author’s veteran father’s experiences during World War II, and an important contribution to the conversation on the factors that shaped fatherhood in the 1950s and beyond. Initially published as three large landscape-format hardback volumes titled You’ll Never Know (2009, 2010, 2012),1 Tyler’s memoir was reissued in 2015 in a single smaller-format paperback volume that collected all three books, renamed Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. A Daughter’s Memoir.2 The new title of the memoir, for which Tyler reworked a substantial number of pages, and also added new material, appears to propose a broadening of the book’s audience by repositioning it as a testimony of combat and survival that connects the Tylers to an entire genealogy of Americans who suffered because of war.3 By relying on a phrase used during the American Civil War to describe what we now understand as PTSD, the new title suggests an intention to refocus the reader’s attention from the narrator’s ultimately unsuccessful investigation of the events that led to her father’s war wound to an understanding of her impressive research as working toward inserting Chuck Tyler into an imaginary family of war veterans whose origins goes back to the Civil War. The author’s signature also changes from the non-gender specific “C. Tyler” of the first edition to “Carol Tyler,” a decision that helps create a clearer separation between the two main points of view from the book, the father’s and the daughter’s, whose identical initials had perhaps suggested a common perspective.4

This chapter looks at Soldier’s Heart as illustrative of Tyler’s understanding of what qualifies as good paternal behavior by examining the connection she makes between the father’s conduct in the home and the consequences of his experiences during the war.5 In some respects, as this chapter is going to show, the book’s narrative arc suggests that Chuck Tyler’s evolution as a father is halted by his trauma, and only peripher- ally influenced by other social and cultural factors. Tyler constructs this argument—whose strength she does question occasionally—through a negotiation between the referentiality of photography and the anthropomorphism and caricature of comics. However, it is not so much who the father is as why he performed so poorly as a father that the memoir attempts to explain and eventually forgive. This chapter also asks whether the narrator’s desire to forgive her father interferes with her assessment of the father’s conduct, particularly his sexist behavior. This is a common question in autobiographical texts where the author’s judgment may be “distorted by the desire for forgiveness” (Barbour 2004, 89). Certain aspects of Chuck Tyler’s attitude—such as his remoteness, his silence about the war, and his reluctance to emote—can be related to the way the Greatest Generation managed their war-related traumas. Chuck Tyler’s understanding of gender roles displays signs of the “male panic” that was deeply felt during the 1950s, as a result of the fear that the “femi- nization” of American society would produce unwanted transformations (Gilbert 2005, 2–3), but also stemming from an attempt to restore older models of masculinity to mainstream America (Gilbert 2005, 7). A working-class man born in the Midwest in 1919, Chuck Tyler displays a view of women that mirrors what Betty Friedan describes in The Feminine Mystique as a post-war shift in women’s representation in the media, from the pre-war prevalence of independent women in search of their own path (which included a career) to the post-war image of “the happy housewife heroine” (Friedan 2001, 38). Thus, when Carol announces her intention to go to college, Chuck laughs it off and refuses to support her financially, since higher education for women, in his view, is a wasted investment, and merely a stepping-stone toward marriage. Chuck is portrayed as stuck in a post-war mind frame that was already showing significant signs of change by the late 1960s-early 1970s, when Carol announces her decision to pre- pare for college admission. Thus, even though Chuck Tyler’s behavior as a father is depicted from his first daughter Anne’s birth, when he is still deployed overseas, and up to the year 2004, his progress appears to be quite stilted, and mainly representative of what Ralph LaRossa has 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 35

identified as a reexamination of masculinity in the wake of the war (2011, 3–4), as well as “the traditionalization of fatherhood” in the 1950s (LaRossa 2011, 6). By placing Chuck Tyler’s paternal conduct side by side as his daughter Carol’s own dramatically different parenting style, Soldier’s Heart helps underline the gendered and generational dimension of parenthood. There is a sharp contrast between Chuck Tyler’s distant and abrasive behavior in the home and his daughter Carol’s self-portrait as a warm and resilient single mother that fits the popular model of the “juggling” mom, able to deftly handle both work, family life, and many other responsibilities (Beach 1989, 9–10). Tyler, however, does not glorify her own maternal experiences; instead, she emphasizes the overwhelming weight of her multiple responsibilities, while also drawing a causal connection between fathers like her own, who bought into the “male panic” of the 1950s, and their daughters, who became either the “supermoms” of the 1970s or the “jug- glers” of the 1980s and beyond.6 Throughout her career, Carol Tyler has constructed an autobiographical work centered on the examination of the family: her own, but also more generally the working-class American family of different generations with its specific dynamic of gender roles. Tyler’s first published book is a slim volume titled The Job Thing (1993), which recounts her history of quite unpleasant or downright nightmarish jobs. She had already started publishing short—mostly autobiographical—comics in the late 1980s, some of it published in magazines that collected the work of important alternative American cartoonists, such as Weirdo, Wimmen’s Comix, and Twisted Sisters. Most of these pieces are included in a volume tellingly titled Late Bloomer (2005), introduced by Robert Crumb. In the fore- word, Crumb, who is a longtime friend, praises her work not only for her technique and use of color, but also for the humor, brutal honesty, and unflinching self-investigation. Crumb depicts Tyler’s comics as “unpreten- tious, funny, self-deprecating, highly individualistic,” thus enumerating qualities that have become essential to any description of American underground comics, a genre over which Crumb presides. In fact, Crumb is careful to point out the connection between Tyler’s work and that of Harvey Pekar, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Justin Green,7 with the possible intention of positioning the—as he puts it—“lesser known” Tyler in her rightful place among her more famous and already widely published peers. You’ll Never Know, followed by Soldier’s Heart, consolidated Tyler’s reputation. Her most recent work, Fab 4 Mania, features some of the 36 M. PRECUP characters from Soldier’s Heart, including her father, whose behavior is consistent with earlier portrayals. Composed in a hybrid form that combines graphic narration with hand-written pages, it is a recreation of the author’s diary from seventh and eighth grade, when she was consumed by Beatlemania. Carol Tyler’s work is full of plucky women in distress, who fight and struggle, cry, kick, and scream, but rarely become pitiful victims. Their predicament often arises from living in a world where traditional gender roles produce very specific—and repetitive—distressful situations. InLate Bloomer, Tyler places her own stories and those of other women, both from within and without her family, side by side, and constructs not only the image of a community of endurance and survival, but also a fragmentary account of her delayed career. One-page stories like “Anatomy of a New Mom,” and stories such as “Migrant Mother” and “The Outrage” may sound all-too-familiar nowadays, when publications about maternal regret are beginning to emerge, but at the time they were rare.8 However, it is only in Soldier’s Heart that she is able to also trace her own hardships back to her father’s PTSD and its effects on a household where every task was dictated by the gender parameters of the day. As the complex back- and-forth narrative of the memoir unfolds, Chuck emerges as a physically present but indifferent father, overly focused on complex DIY projects that reclaim most of his attention but also reveal his resourcefulness and resilience. He is quite quick-tempered, often dismissive of other people’s feelings, and his angry outbursts often seem to take his daughter by surprise; however, he is also shown in lighter moods, making jokes, enjoying music, and dancing to popular songs from the 1940s and 1950s. It is the unpredictability of his—and his wife’s—suddenly switching from “jolly” to “mad” that often creates a tense atmosphere for the children.9 Throughout the process of writing the book—while also managing multiple family crises—Tyler shows her autobiographical self to be as stub- bornly resilient as the other female role models from her work. Often anxious and defeated, the narrator keeps picking herself up by her boot- straps, with renewed energy that she attributes to her early education, when she was a daily witness to two extremely active parents who were working through their anxieties and traumas. While the cause of Chuck’s trauma can be examined by his daughter with straightforward research methods, such as work in public archives, the assessment of his behavior as a father requires a more circuitous investigation. Even though the two are explicitly related, the narrator’s 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 37

ambivalence about her father’s conduct in the home produces a contradictory portrait of Chuck Tyler. He remains a paradoxical character, both volatile and stable, present and absent, violent and vulnerable; this makes him unreliable as a source of protection and support for his daughter and other children. In fact, the two main father figures from the book are Chuck Tyler and Justin Green, but while the main focus is explicitly on the former, the latter is considered less for his performance as a father, and more for his involvement as a husband. Chuck thus remains the key parental figure of the book, overshadowing even his wife, who is an important, beloved, but ultimately secondary character. The narrator finds Chuck’s conduct as a father both comprehensible and mysterious, and as a result she enlists an impressive array of representational tactics, from the first photorealistic portrait on the cover of Soldier’s Heart to anthropomorphic depictions that have him morph into a fox, a tree, a shark, and a wasp. His indifference, however, is consistently pointed out and deplored throughout the book, visually rendered through depictions of Chuck Tyler turning his back on his daughter even when she is at her most vulnerable. We see him frequently sitting in his armchair, usually watching television, oblivious to his daughter’s reactions and feelings. He is also rarely shown to be affectionate to his daughter; instead, most of his affection is lavished upon his wife, with whom he forms an energetic and sometimes volatile team whose solidarity makes their daughter Carol feel insignificant and ignored.

Capturing the Father: From Photography to Anthropomorphic Representation In one of the many lists included in the memoir as attempts to classify and order her experiences, Tyler summarizes her father’s paternal flaws as follows: spending insufficient time with his children, being verbally abusive, being unwilling to accept reality, having unpredictable “jolly-mad” mood swings, and making his daughter feel unloved (2015, 136). The last item on the list is exemplified and discussed at some length as the reader sees the considerable extent to which it negatively affects Carol’s romantic relationships and faith in her ability to succeed. Soldier’s Heart is thus not merely a substantial labor of love, a hefty book whose bulk indicates the weight of the story it contains, but also a dogged attempt to find a confirmation of paternal affection by portraying Chuck Tyler from different angles, time periods, and by appealing to a variety of visual media. As the 38 M. PRECUP narrative progresses, the father’s love becomes increasingly difficult to pin down, as Tyler resentfully shows Chuck’s unrelenting anger, directed primarily at herself, but also embeds his conduct more and more firmly in his war trauma. Tyler’s portrait of her father is not only the result of accessing her parents’ personal archive (such as the family album or her father’s somewhat reluctant testimonies), but also substantial research of World War II events and memorabilia. The manner in which she draws this important archive easily shifts from photorealism to caricature and anthropomorphic representation. Caricature and anthropomorphism work toward building stories that photography cannot tell, both in the Tylers’ family album and in the father’s army photographs, which are recreated in six sections titled “Dad’s Army Scrapbook and Tour of Duty Highlights.” Throughout this process, Tyler keeps tugging at the referential strings of photography in order to both document and imagine a history she did not witness, and parts of which her father cannot remember. At the heart of this unwitnessed history is the figure of the young Chuck Tyler, whose luminous smile presides over the cover of Soldier’s Heart and invites sympathy for the young man in his early 20s, in a uniform, by suggesting that what he has seen forever freezes his identity in the traumatic moment, as his gaze is focused somewhere outside of the frame, to a place that is not visible to the rest of the audience. Throughout the memoir, Carol Tyler suggests that her father has always remained, on an important level, the severely traumatized young man from the cover, a light blue shade under his left eye resembling a tear, overshadowed by his conventional smile. The book is divided into two main memorial spaces: the space of postmemory (Hirsch 1997) that uses narration, photography, and imagination to reconstruct the unwitnessed past of Chuck Tyler’s participation in the war—represented in the book as the six “Dad’s Army Scrapbook and Tour of Duty Highlights” sequences that are evenly distributed (two per volume)—and that of memory, moving back and forth between childhood and adulthood, but centered around Carol Tyler’s relationship with her parents, as well as her husband and daughter. Panel bleeds and differently shaped and colored panel borders explicitly separate or connect the two spaces, particularly when the father’s trauma invades the present, transforming even domestic spaces into battlefields. The three-part structure of Soldier’s Heart follows the chronology of the first three hardback volumes of You’ll Never Know. The first, titled “A Good and Decent Man,” is an incipient investigation of the possible cause of the father’s frequent 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 39 outbursts of rage and absence from anything in his family’s life that did not require his impressive DIY skills. The main investigative drive behind Tyler’s memoir is sustained by her interest in unearthing the mystery behind a six-month gap in her father’s war memories, a gap that followed a war wound and an untimely release from hospital. Tyler’s investigation continues through parts two and three, titled “Collateral Damage” and “Soldier’s Heart,” but it unfortunately fails to unearth the missing documents that would have explained the events erased by her father’s amnesia. Photography is introduced from the beginning as a staple of this graphic memoir, and even though some of the many reproductions of photographs from the book’s first edition do not appear in the second, they remain essential to Tyler’s work, pointing as they do at something that is present, but remains out of reach: the father, on the one hand, and his war wound, on the other. Thus, the three covers of each volume of You’ll Never Know feature a small drawing of a tilted photograph: the only two subjects are Chuck and Carol Tyler. Chuck Tyler’s photograph on the cover of You’ll Never Know. Part One, which is the only one of the initial three still included in Soldier’s Heart, establishes him as the undisputed focus of the memoir. For this portrait, Tyler uses the same color palette as that from the “distant past” sections of the book, a comforting light to dark brown.10 It is probably based on a photograph of the father taken sometime during his 20s, short hair neatly combed, with a side parting, smiling and following the protocol of studio photographs of the day by looking somewhere to the side.11 The background that renders the color and texture of a plank of wood is a nod to Chuck Tyler’s impressive wood- working skills, but also Carol Tyler’s own genuine love of carpentering and manual labor.12 It also beckons to the first of the four metaphors C. Tyler chooses for the father figure: the solid but unaffectionate tree. Wood is also later used as a background for some of Chuck’s speech bubbles and it appears to function as a counterpart to what appears to be an embroidered tablecloth that functions as a background for the second volume of You’ll Never Know, titled “Collateral Damage,” which features a drawing of a photograph of a little girl in school uniform who is probably the author herself as a schoolgirl. The photograph is partly covered by a “seven steps to hell patch,” a yellow rose and pencil, references to Carol Tyler’s own substantial work of memory (Tyler 2015, 117–118). The wood and the tablecloth also point out the division of labor in the Tyler household, but also explicitly draw attention to the effects of the father’s PTSD on his daughter’s childhood. The second volume of You’ll Never 40 M. PRECUP

Know (2010) is tellingly dedicated not to the people who, like the author’s father, served in World War II, but to the “loved ones of those who served,” who are also referenced in the subtitle of the book as “collateral damage.” The focus thus shifts from primary to secondary witnessing of the war, that is, from those who actually participated in the War to those family members whose lives were forever changed by an experience they not only never witnessed, but also from which they were kept at a distance. The cover of the third volume, subtitled “Soldier’s Heart,” features a drawing of a photograph of Chuck Tyler dressed in combat uniform, with empty eyes that make him appear startled and vulnerable, against a background that reproduces the marble background of the World War II Memorial that he visits together with his daughter later in the book, where his memory of the “rivers of blood” from the war finally becomes translated into “rivers of tears.” The transition from this photograph—which is not included in the reedited version of the trilogy—to the luminous photorealistic portrait of Chuck that essentially replaces it as the new cover of Soldier’s Heart seems to promise a refocusing of the father’s story as a tale of heroic conduct bathed in nostalgic light. The back cover corrects this possible misperception by including references to some of the darker things hidden behind the conventional portrait of the soldier: combat, the hustle and bustle that masks his trauma after the war, and his daughter’s conflicting emotions about her father. The suggestion behind the drawings of photographs placed on the covers of these books is, on the one hand, that photography has finite narrative abilities, and, on the other hand, that the connection between father and daughter is made not through affection, but through trauma. The many other photographs Tyler draws build a portrait of the father as a man of his time who did not question the contemporary gender norms and performed masculinity accordingly. For instance, four drawings of snapshots of Chuck offer a brief chronological introduction to character- istic gestures and behavior stretching from the 1950s to the year 2000. We see him fishing in Wisconsin with his father in 1950, posing next to his wife on their 25th wedding anniversary in 1968, celebrating with some friends, beer in hand and a bra on his head, “descending a fancy staircase he made from scratch” in 1974, smiling and grumbling about Y2K with Carol (Tyler 2015, 11). Family photographs such as these serve the main purpose of providing a quick visual overview of Chuck Tyler along the decades, but they are drawn with much less photorealistic care than Alison Bechdel shows for drawings of her own family album in Fun Home. In 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 41 fact, these images grow less and less photorealistic as it becomes apparent that their purpose is not evidentiary (in the sense that Tyler does not examine them for evidence of her father’s secrets, as in Bechdel’s case), but rather to hint at the way in which photography can, in fact, mask Chuck’s trauma. Like other photographic references from the memoir, and in keeping with the conventions of family photography, these images reproduce the “jolly” side of Chuck Tyler’s persona. The purpose of the inclusion of these drawings of family photographs thus appears to be in keeping with the title of this section and of the book as a whole: providing a series of visual proofs and shortcuts to back up the fact that there was nothing about the domestic activities of her father that could have prompted anyone to see him as an army veteran who is still haunted by the shattering trauma of war.13 Even the images from the “Army Scrapbook” sections do not initially provide Carol or the reader with more than the anecdotic flavor of photographs of young soldiers carousing, images where Chuck Tyler exception- ally “looked like he was having fun.” Most of them are, in fact, evidently not reproductions of actual photographs, but reenactments of the father’s stories recorded by his daughter and told either in the third or first person. This collaborative product, a remaking of an original album of army photographs Tyler finds in her parents’ house, contains panels with dark mounting corners that spell out the connection to the initial army album. The narrative potential of the initial photographs is limited, since they contain neither captions nor other text except for the stories of a reluctant and sometimes unreliable witness. On the one hand, Tyler’s intervention in the initial album works to provide a narrative layer to the silent archive and, on the other hand, it offers a visual alternative to the widely circulated representations of the masculine body at the time. Introduced through government posters and pamphlets and picked up by the popular press, these portraits adhered to “a rhetoric of muscles” (Jarvis 2004, 44) that did not have its roots in the Greek tradition, like the Nazi aesthetic, “but in the more contemporary ideals of bodybuilding, 1930s representations of brawny workers, and, most especially, comic book superheroes” (Jarvis 2004, 52). By contrast, Tyler’s exhausted, dejected, and confused soldiers from the “Army Scrapbook” have clumsy bodies engaged in sometimes macabre slapstick, so that they often look like helpless puppets, more Private Snafus than Supermen. Here, photography does not work as a tether to lived experience, or as proof of presence. Rather, the formal elements that Carol Tyler uses to signpost that this is a photography-based 42 M. PRECUP segment function as reminders of what photography cannot, in fact, nar- rate. Thus, the process of drawing on top of her father’s photographs does not showcase photography’s allegedly privileged connection to the real, but rather draws attention to drawing’s richer narrative abilities. What these drawings help emphasize, in this case, is the vulnerability and youth of the American soldiers, whose own possible acts of perpetration are only mentioned in passing. For instance, on one page of the “Army Scrapbook, Part III. Italy. July 1944–October 1944” (Fig. 2.1), Chuck mentions that the convoy of American army trucks knocked over the carts of the Italian civilians, but he does not specify whether there were any actual civilian casualties, deflecting attention from individual agency through a reference to the banality of suffering during war: “So many people out on the roads! They wouldn’t get out of the way! We’d honk and they’d just stand there, so we had to knock ‘em over… No stopping

Fig. 2.1 One page of the “Army Scrapbook, Part III. Italy. July 1944–October 1944.” (© Carol Tyler) 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 43 the army convoy. We must have knocked over a hundred guys. They didn’t listen to us. Things of war, I guess” (Tyler 2015, 152). At this point, the narrator intervenes in her father’s story (rendered in inverted commas) to provide an additional sympathetic view of the plight of Italian civilians, but the drawings do not completely disambiguate the story: in one half of the bottom panel from this page we see a mother holding her dead child in her arms, as a horse also lies dead at her feet; in the second half of the panel, three US soldiers kneel in front of a priest who has placed a crucifix on the hood of a truck and is performing a service. His words, “Mea Culpa Mea Culpa Mea Maxima Culpa” suggest a causal connection between the actions of the soldiers and the death of the child and the horse. One of the kneeling soldiers (possibly Chuck himself) mutters a prayer: “Dear God. Please get me the hell outta here!”; this further complicates the reading of American soldiers as perpetrators by suggesting that they too are victims of the war and find the situation unbearable. It follows that Chuck’s initial photography album, with its many images of camaraderie and conviviality, camouflages rather than reveals the soldiers’ terrible combat experiences. In spite of introducing references to possible acts of perpetration by American soldiers, Tyler does not produce an actual critique of the Greatest Generation, but instead proposes a view of such moments as more generally illustrative of the hor- rors of war. This reluctance of engaging more critically with her father’s generation becomes part of the book’s rhetoric of paternal exculpation. The father is a figure whose mobility and elusiveness prompt the author to also engage in anthropomorphic representation in order to fix his identity, but even within this conceit he has multiple identities. While at first he is pictured as a tree trunk because he is “a little rough around the edges” and “kinda distant” (Tyler 2015, 54), we next see him as the “wily and quick” fox (Tyler 2015, 55), the sharp shark, and the biting wasp.14 The chronology of the father’s anthropomorphic apparitions sees Chuck Tyler dwindling in size, stability, and poise from the unsympathetic but dignified and steady tree trunk to the cruel tiny wasp that the frustrated narrator attacks with bug spray (Tyler 2015, 314). As the he diminishes in size and becomes less a feared father and more a spiteful vulnerable figure that his daughter struggles to respect, the narrator herself begins to wonder whether war trauma can fully function to justify his paternal conduct: “It’s not WAR. It’s not HITLER. ‘I’m just an ornery bastard’ he said in Book I. Sadly, I’m starting to agree” (Tyler 2015, 316). However, this interpretation is pushed into a corner of a panel, while the introduction 44 M. PRECUP of Hitler as a main antagonist occupies the space of several whole pages at the end of both part one and part two of Soldier’s Heart. Considering the fact that Carol Tyler did revise the book before it came out, but decided to keep the Hitler references, it follows that the war remains the main explanation for Chuck’s behavior as a father, while other motivations are secondary. It is quite telling that, of the four anthropomorphic guises of the father, the fox is the most frequently employed and the most useful for providing the daughter with a modicum of power in her confrontations with her father. The choice of animal, together with the timing preferred for the transformation of the father into a fox, allow the daughter to position herself in a rare position of control. From Tyler’s loving but clearly anthro- pocentric perspective, the father is seen as non-human whenever she needs to explain cruel or irrational behavior. For instance, in the third part of the book, Chuck transitions from human to animal quite suddenly when his daughter discovers with dismay that he has tried to remove the asbestos from the pipes in the basement without asking for professional help. The father’s irresponsible behavior also has the effect of turning the mother temporarily into a manatee. The only human left on the scene is the narrator herself, exasperated by her father’s irresponsibility and her mother’s passivity, hosing down the diminutive fox—still in his ever-present cap and overalls—despite his curses. This temporary superior position of power works as a counterpart to the many moments when the father makes the daughter feel diminished and powerless herself. As a fox, Chuck has the playfulness of a trickster and an unsympathetic sense of humor that he displays in human form as well. Even though the expectations of fathers that circulated in the mainstream media during the 1950s, when the Tyler children are young, emphasized not only men’s role as economic provid- ers, but also as pals, disciplinarians, and role models (LaRossa 2011, 101–114), we never see Chuck playing games with his children, reading to them, or teaching them how to use his tools, as the media often advised (LaRossa 2011, 104). Instead, he tends to play jokes at their expense, and even though his daughter Carol clearly shares his enthusiasm for tools and working with her hands, we do not see him passing down his substantial knowledge to her.15 At the same time, the fact that fathers were advised to be both disciplinarians and pals without much further guidance may have also been a contributing factor to Chuck’s abrupt transitions from “jolly” to “mad” that cause tension in the home. 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 45

Reading Fatherhood through Trauma Soldier’s Heart provides a valuable documentation of a veteran’s struggle with PTSD at a time when there was little vocabulary for his suffering and when “the ventilation of emotion” was not considered effective in treating “battle exhaustion,” for which no treatment was deemed necessary beyond rest, “the control of fear and restoration of physical well-being” (Jones and Wessely 2006, 218). This was part of a wider social context and cannot be separated from those images that circulated in the post-war American media that were meant to lead to a “remasculinization of America” (Jarvis 2004, 185). These representations could be found in popular post-war films such as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Men (1950), which suggested that veterans regard their wounds with pride, as badges of honor, and swiftly move toward repairing the image of wounded masculinity that their traumas—psychological and physical— produced. Carol does note that her father’s friends also keep silent about their experiences during the war, to such an extent that she wonders: “Did they make a pact of secrecy? Why don’t the Victory boys discuss?” (Tyler 2015, 21). This silence was partly motivated by the fact that veterans lacked the vocabulary needed to tell stories about their experiences, but also by the particular context in which they found themselves upon return: “Because of social pressures urging veterans to obtain employment, further their education, and return to their former social roles in postwar America, few servicemen wanted to publicly dredge up the horrifying memories of war or to relive a process that threatened the masculine wholeness of their bodies” (Jarvis 2004, 93). By showing that Chuck Tyler’s behavior is part of a bigger pattern, Soldier’s Heart embeds his paternal conduct in a wider conversation about trauma and post-war masculinity.16 Soldier’s Heart follows a narrative logic that makes it difficult for readers to understand the particulars of the father’s wartime experiences beyond a more or less general notion that witnessing death and destruction has devastating effects on the psyche. The father’s mysterious war wound is not inflicted until March 1945, as depicted in a section included in Part Three of Soldier’s Heart, which is the point when Chuck loses his memory of the following months. Thus, the parallel chronology of Chuck Tyler’s paternal conduct unfolds faster and provides more detail than that of his war trauma, which remains somewhat mysterious. The interspersion of the smaller army sequences throughout the significantly more detailed 46 M. PRECUP narrative of Chuck’s domestic life functions rhetorically not in Chuck’s defense, but to the detriment of his daughter’s attempts to defend him. The suggestion that it is not Chuck Tyler himself but, in fact, his trauma, that hurts the people that are closest to him, is a recurrent theme of the book. This is quite evident in a scene placed at the end of the first part of the memoir, where Hitler, first depicted in recognizable human form only to later turn into a black bird, is identified as the key character behind Chuck’s trauma (Tyler 2015, 104–105). The bird is briefly perched on the shoulders of a delirious Chuck Tyler, obliterating his head, in a scene that suggests that his identity is taken over by his trauma. Within the space of a few pages, the father moves from the present, where he is pictured as a sly insensitive fox who swishes hurriedly past his daughter to spend time with his wife, to the helpless figure who faces Hitler in a no-man’s-land where the past has invaded the present. There, he becomes a sympathetic figure, exposed and diminutive in his casual work clothes and red suspenders. The transgenerational transmission of trauma is not only suggested through Hitler’s speech, where he expresses his satisfaction that Chuck’s trauma will also be visited upon his children.17 This episode unfolds across six pages as Tyler explicitly draws the connection between herself and her father’s trauma. On one page (Tyler 2015, 106) three upper panels show Chuck’s daughter and his granddaughter in the present; the tier-wide panel underneath, that occupies two thirds of the page, transports Carol not into Chuck Tyler’s past but into an imaginary third space where past and present meet (Fig. 2.2). In the third of the top panels, Carol contemplates her own reluctant participation in her father’s suffering by imagining herself, in a thought bubble, ankle-deep in a river of blood. This is a reference to her father’s memory of a river that turned red with blood during his deployment in Italy, an image that prompted his sudden revelation about his war trauma. The daughter’s immersion in the space of her father’s trauma is not complete though, as the panoramic panel at the bottom suggests: we see Carol as a force of reason that attempts to pull and anchor her father back into the present. His back is turned to her, as in many other instances from the memoir, and he is isolated from her, caught in the black-and-white world of the war that is slowly infused with color coming from his daughter’s side. The fact that—as in many renditions from the book—the father has once again turned his back on his daughter is here rewritten not as mere indifference, but as absorption into another world. It is not the world of memory, but that of hallucination, that Chuck Tyler revisits 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 47

Fig. 2.2 The past intrudes into the present in Chuck’s mind. (© Carol Tyler)

periodically and that transforms even ordinary buildings into Nazi headquarters. Even though we never see Chuck visiting his daughter in the apartment building where she lives with daughter Julia in Cincinnati, in this image he is in her home, gazing out of her window, gun in hand, clad once more in his field uniform, a helmet on his head, pointing his gun at the power lines. This kind of brutal intrusion of the past into the present is continued in a separate scene from Part Two, where we see Hitler as a bird attacking both Carol and her daughter (Tyler 2015, 218–221), thus making the father’s trauma appear as an outside element that separates the man from his actions. By proposing that it is, by extension, Hitler who attacks family members while Chuck is helplessly standing by, caught up in his own PTSD-induced delirium, the author exonerates the father and places him alongside his loved ones, also victims of the German dictator. In such moments, the victim-perpetrator binary places Hitler firmly in the 48 M. PRECUP second category as Chuck joins the first. In these examples, Tyler uses comics’ ability of “layering temporalities” (Chute 2010, 5) to place the past and present onto the same page to deflect attention from what she herself identifies as Chuck’s sub-par conduct as a father to his sacrifice to his country during World War II. This strategy of interpretation also postpones an actual reckoning between the father and daughter that might have led to “a more satisfactory, healthy resolution,” as Harriet Earle notes (2017, 111).18 Soldier’s Heart provides an ambivalent interpretation of the father’s many violent outbursts, as the narrator hesitates between explaining them as part of his PTSD and understanding them separately from his trauma, as a manifestation of his being, in Chuck’s own words, “an ornery bastard.” There are many scenes where the father becomes verbally aggressive or hurtful, and many of them are also embedded in situations where he asks for confirmation of his authority as head of the household. In one of the first pages, we see him knocking his fist against the table because he feels he has been waiting for a spoon for too long, while in the background a startled teenage Carol is rushing to deliver it (Tyler 2015, 18). Tyler’s detailed panels often manage to also insert a dose of caricature which suggests that these situations, albeit not humorous in themselves, do possess a certain slapstick quality: in this case, the dog, to whom Chuck has only finished speaking, also looks startled and perhaps even comically judgmental, while the spiral under Carol’s feet suggests that she literally springs into action. This kind of point- less agitation around a mundane task that the father could have performed himself—something that the patriarchal rules of the household render unthinkable—exemplifies the general atmosphere in the Tyler home not only as the children are growing up, but also later, when they are already adults who visit the parents in order to provide much-needed help. The volatility of the Tyler household, where the parents also have numerous arguments, is shown to have damaging effects on all of the children, and young Carol in particular; in one scene, as a result of her father’s unkindness and the explosive tension in the house, we see her being literally cut up and disappearing. However, the narrative text that accompanies this erasure provides an excuse for his unkind behavior by explaining that the father, possessed by his wartime experiences, is “still living out of a duffel bag” (Tyler 2015, 121). The causal connection between Chuck Tyler’s behavior and his war-related PTSD is also reinforced through the capitalized and underlined phrase “MACH SCHNELL!” placed in a word bubble above the children’s heads, even as the narrator herself labels his conduct “callous.”19 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 49

Tyler’s work draws attention to the daughter’s struggle to be seen and acknowledged as a person with valid sentiments and opinions. Chuck is often depicted either insulting or ignoring her, in spite of her providing substantial help to both her parents. Tyler identifies Chuck’s sexism as an important factor of this behavior, but also interprets his distance as a post- traumatic survival mechanism. Sexism, however, is one aspect of Chuck’s world view that is difficult to read through his war trauma. Throughout the memoir, we see him not only as relentlessly cold and unmoved by his daughter’s problems, but also openly sexist, as when he refuses to provide financial support to Carol because he thinks a college education is point- less for a woman since, as he argues, she will just become “somebody’s wife” (Tyler 2015, 138) or when he makes plans to move closer to his sons because “girls don’t matter” (Tyler 2015, 164). Chuck Tyler makes the first statement in the late 1960s and the second in the early 1990s, showing that his thinking on the subject remains grounded in the mind frame of 1950s “male panic.” Carol’s reactions are also telling: in the first situation, she is furious, and decides to hide her preparations for college from her parents. In the second, she quickly moves past her father’s statement, even though she does question it and labels his decision to relocate a “tes- tosterone affirming adventure” (Tyler2015 , 164). This indicates that perhaps during the three decades that pass between the two recorded insults, the father’s sexist comments have been so frequent as to become banal, and the only significant change is that Carol has learned to dismiss them more easily. The trauma of the war is compounded with the trauma of the loss of the Tylers’ first child, Ann, who dies because of hospital neglect when she is two years old. We see Chuck demanding stoicism from his wife in the wake of Ann’s death by asking not only that the family’s loss not be discussed, but also that Hannah should abstain from expressing or perhaps even feeling grief. In “The HANNah Story,” we see a grieving Chuck literally trying to “slap some sense” into his wife, who is distraught by grief. This is the only moment when we see Chuck engaging in physical violence; his gesture is given practical justifications, such as the fact that the couple has other children who need their attention. His own tears disappear into the righthand gutter as he turns away from his wife. The imperative to “forget” also slips into the gutter right below the panel that makes the connection between the space of the past (the top part of the page, with scalloped edges of old family photos) and the present (the bottom part, a red line that seals the panel). Introduced as a traumatic episode 50 M. PRECUP that has come to define the narrator’s mother, as the lettering of the title also suggests (emphasizing the nesting of the dead child’s name, “Ann,” inside her mother’s, “Hannah”), by the end of the memoir Ann’s death is also proposed as the main source of the father’s radical transformation. In the only instance when we see Chuck mentioning his firstborn’s death, he identifies it as the pivotal moment of his unraveling: “You see, war drove me to the gates of hell but Ann’s death—pushed me in. And I’ve been fighting my way out ever since” (Tyler 2015, 336). This confession is placed at the end of the book after Chuck cries “rivers of tears” that Carol hopes might indicate a breakthrough; in this context, the death of the first child is offered as an explanation for Chuck’s subsequent inadequate parental conduct.20 The memoir also suggests that trauma keeps the father immobilized in a state of youth and immaturity to which he reverts periodically. For instance, in the pages that recount the climactic scene of the visit to the World War II Memorial in Washington D.C., Chuck is portrayed realistically as an elderly man tormented by experiences that are summarized in large slabs of text inserted behind him. However, after the failed catharsis of the “rivers of tears” episode, the lines on his face disappear and he once again—as in many other places in the book—looks like a lost young man, disconnected from his surroundings. Carol initially consoles him as his features dissolve behind his tears, and laurels of victory appear above them both, suggesting that she is both contaminated by her father’s trauma and illuminated by the aura of his sacrifice. This panel also seems to propose a sanctification of Chuck through his grief, a popular and problematic misperception that suffering makes survivors virtuous (Rothe 2011). This moment, however, functions as a failed climax, particularly as Carol later realizes that she has misinterpreted it as “a milestone moment of transformation and the chance that, at last, closeness and a friendship with him was possible” (Tyler 2015, 361). When she returns by herself to the World War II Memorial, the text—which works as a de facto conclusion to Tyler’s story—once again emphasizes the perpetual presence of trauma, “for as long as there is breath” within its subjects (Tyler 2015, 362). However, in keeping with the author’s general ambivalence about this topic, the last image of the book is that of a mother happily swinging her child close by the Memorial; this choice suggests that a more hopeful version of the future is possible, and it also positions the mother, not the father, as a playful and protective companion for her child. 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 51

Tyler’s memoir relies on the belief that trauma is transmissible transgenerationally, both in the sense that the consequences of a father’s damaging paternal conduct have detrimental effects on future generations (which is an undisputable point), and in the view that trauma can perpetuate itself across generations, beyond understanding and irrespective of the subjects’ different background, age, or gender. This latter approach is more problematic, as the memoir even draws a causal connection between Chuck Tyler’s war injury and his granddaughter Julia’s mental illness. This reading of trauma helps illustrate the problems of this approach of transgenerational memory. As Bond, Craps, and Vermeulen show, this perspective of the transgenerational transmission of trauma—which some theoreticians, such as Ernst van Alphen and Gary Weissman also suggested is true of Hirsch’s description of “postmemory”—has been criticized for conflating the trauma of the person who experienced it and that of his descendants, but also for allegedly negating the cultural specificity of traumatic events (2017, 9–10). By repeatedly portraying her father, herself, and her daughter as subjects of Nazi perpetration, Tyler exonerates her father for what she herself demonstrates is the damaging influence that his parenting had on her self-worth and her ability to form healthy relationships. However, what readers witness of Chuck’s violent and sexist behavior does complicate the suggestion that trauma can be easily used as a paradigm through which to read and excuse poor paternal conduct, and in fact gives more strength to the ambivalence Carol Tyler herself expresses on occasion about this interpretive frame.

Conclusion Carol Tyler’s memoir is not only a tribute to her father, but also a gift of visibility to herself, as both a daughter and an artist, since the book is evidence of her substantial skill and resilience. Much like her father, the author is a tinkerer; hence, the book she has produced is a solid heavy object (one that, in the initial format, would not fit comfortably on bookstore shelves), the result of painstaking do-it-yourself labor, as readers can see in the many metafictional elements that spell out the author’s creative process. It is by no means a smooth and perfectly finished artifact: through formal elements, Tyler draws attention to the fact that the story of her relationship with her father is patched-up, broken, and non-linear. Soldier’s Heart is not merely a loving and sometimes ambivalent tribute to a deeply flawed father, but also a time capsule of her youth, whose objects are 52 M. PRECUP meticulously drawn and labeled. The author preserves fleeting memories, objects, events, and people during a time when they are disappearing and her own life is in constant flux. During the lengthy process of memorialization, drawings of photographs both rely on the referential strength of photography and depart from it. Through the “Army Scrapbook” segments, Tyler both pays tribute to the documentary value of photography and unveils its insufficient narrative abilities. The original album is used as an important visual prop that allows Carol to imagine an unwitnessed history. At the same time, the presence of photography as a blueprint upon which the father’s war story unfolds through drawing shows how placing graphic narration on top of photography can make an important statement about knowability—that we can only know a limited amount about another person’s trauma, in spite of emotional engagement, substantial research, and imagination. This is particularly true when the story of that trauma is blocked by amnesia and the absence of a complete archive. By being framed in the format of the war memoir, photography is instrumentalized here not for its documentary value, but rather in the interest of Tyler’s wider exculpatory thesis.21 By inserting the “Army Scrapbook” sections throughout the book, Tyler interrupts and fragments the accumulation of her father’s more questionable behavior and proposes a reading of that conduct through the lens of his contributions to American post-war prosperity and peace. At the same time, this approach is undermined by the fact that the post-war chronology of the father’s life advances faster and in more detail than the wartime events presented in stingy prose by Chuck Tyler himself. The use of trauma as an exculpatory factor has additional limitations when it comes to behavior that does not seem to be immediately relatable to Chuck’s PTSD. The choice to end the memoir on a conclusion that once again emphasizes the ability of trauma to perpetually haunt its subjects reinforces the idea of trauma as a blanket justification for Chuck Tyler’s flawed paternal conduct. I am here referring more specifically to his sexism, which manifests itself both as indifference toward his daughters and as his repeatedly expressed belief that girls are less important than boys. Chuck consistently expresses uncomplicated approval of the notion that women are inferior; this perception is also associated with his conviction that it is unhealthy and unconstructive to express strong emotion, particularly affection and grief. The behavior that derives from this is damaging both to his family and to himself; still, through the disproportionate emphasis on trauma as a generator of hurtful behavior, the memoir fails to 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 53 consolidate the causal connection between tropes of masculinity popular during the 1950s that Chuck Tyler embraces (or at least aspires to) and his performance as a father and a husband. Tyler’s complicated ethical position is influenced by her desire to forgive her father, but she also introduces enough material to undermine her own (ambivalent) argument. One apparently peripheral but evidently important counter-argument is her own admirable conduct as a parent. Even though she often uses self-deprecating humor and harsh self-criticism to portray her performance as a mother, what transpires through her text is that she is a warm, loving, and present parent. Placed side by side as Chuck’s conduct as a father, Carol’s parenting indicates not only differences that could have been predicted by gender and age difference, but also the fact that trauma does not, in fact, function as a great leveler to the extent that some parts of the book seem to suggest. Soldier’s Heart thus shows that, even if in the wake of traumatic events that may impair one’s performance as a parent, there are many other social and cultural factors that need to be taken into account to assess parental conduct, not least ideologies that teach parents to disregard and belittle their children.

Notes 1. Carol Tyler’s work on her father has been quite well received. The New York Times called You’ll Never Know I “remarkable” and praised the author’s “artistic virtuosity” and “magisterial sense of color” (Wolk 2009). Publishers Weekly commended You’ll Never Know II for not only the art, calling it “a lavishly prepared kaleidoscope of watercolors and finely etched drawings, all composed to look like the greatest family photo album of all time,” but also the language, which has “a winningly self-deprecating Midwestern spareness to it” (2010). The LA Review of Books called Soldier’s Heart “arguably one of the twenty-first century’s best comics” (Dueben 2016). 2. In an interview with Derek Royal of Comics Alternative, Tyler explains that it was her original intention to publish the entire story in one book, but she decided in favor of the three-volume format for practical reasons such as her parents’ advanced age. Thus, during the ten-year process of the creation of the book, both her parents saw the publication of You’ll Never Know I and II (2009, 2010), but her mother died before the publication of You’ll Never Know III (2012) and her father, sister, and brother-in-law did not live to see Soldier’s Heart (2015). Tyler goes on to explain that the smaller size of the reedited trilogy was also chosen because of practical 54 M. PRECUP

considerations raised by distributors, such as the book fitting more comfortably on bookstore shelves (Tyler 2016b). 3. Despite Tyler’s best efforts, Soldier’s Heart has not yet been officially recognized by the United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) as a book that could help returning soldiers with their combat-related mental health problems (Tyler 2016b). 4. Throughout this chapter, I use “Carol” to refer to the autobiographical persona created in the comic, and “(Carol) Tyler” to refer to the author of the book. 5. While this chapter looks primarily at Soldier’s Heart, it also makes brief references to relevant content from You’ll Never Know, particularly the covers to Books II and III, which were not included in Soldier’s Heart. 6. There are a few related stories from the Late Bloomer collection that delve into the matter of how little progress seems to have been made from Carol’s mother’s generation to her own in terms of spouses sharing the workload. In fact, the collection’s title also spells out the additional pressure that “juggling” mothers of Tyler’s generation feel to also be successful in their own professional fields. 7. Justin Green is also Carol Tyler’s partner and the protagonist of some difficult narratives about marriage and co-parenting in bothLate Bloomer and Soldier’s Heart. 8. For a review of some of the recent confessional literature about maternal regret, see Kingston (2018). 9. The title of Chapter 6 is “Jolly or Mad” and it focuses on the many instances when both parents suddenly change their moods from light- hearted to angry, with little justification, to the children’s distress and exasperation. While Tyler indicates the time period for this particular fluctuation of moods as the 1950s (Tyler 2015, 120), later interactions with her parents suggests that at least her father maintains the same unpredictable mood swings. 10. My description of Tyler’s use of color is quite general, particularly considering Tyler’s profound passion for color, which led to her custom-mixing a total of 53 shades for the creation of Soldier’s Heart (Hart and Tyler 2016). 11. The tradition of asking subjects of photographic portraits to gaze either to the right or to the left has its origins in painting. For more about the left/ right-hand bias in portraiture, see Krulwich (2014). 12. In one of the many metafictional references to the process of creation, Carol Tyler draws herself as she is fashioning a cover for the first finished draft of her book out of a scavenged piece of wood, using her father’s tools, a loving tribute that does not appear to be immediately appreciated by Chuck, who becomes verbally abusive when he discovers that his daughter used his tools in his absence and without asking (Tyler 2015, 311). 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 55

13. For an in-depth inter-cultural analysis of the practice and conventions of family photography, see Rose (2016). 14. Only one animal is chosen to represent Carol Tyler’s mother: the manatee, to suggest her mother’s slower and more malleable personality after her stroke. 15. Tyler does mention that she learned such skills when she worked for a museum, from a male co-worker, not from her father (Tyler 2016a). 16. Trauma, understood in the memoir as a destabilizing force that cannot be contained even though for a while Chuck numbs himself to his experiences, also seems to function as the guiding principle of the formal storytelling elements of the memoir. Panel borders are tellingly unstable: they often do not encapsulate the story to the full; they are full of movement, color, and their shapes indicate shifts in mood and time period; they break and bleed, thus reflecting the family’s turmoil. In this manner, Tyler points out the difficulty of framing a story whose telling remains somewhat incomplete. 17. The line attributed to Hitler is provided in generally correct but somewhat labored German: “Ich Verletze Damit Ihre Kinder Leiden!!..und ihr Leid erfüllt mich mit stolz!!” (Tyler 2015, 104), and its translation, offered by Tyler in a subsequent panel, is the more stylistically refined: “That your children suffer because I’ve damaged you fills me with pride!” (Tyler 2015, 106). Overall, the use of German—in a typeface that evokes Fraktur, commonly understood as a Nazi script—is not intended to lend more authenticity to the scene, but rather to enhance the horror of Chuck’s time-traveling episode. I would like to thank Andrei Nae for his assessment of the use of German here. 18. Even though it is not the purpose of Soldier’s Heart to examine fatherhood transgenerationally, when it comes to the assessment of Justin Green’s conduct as a partner, Tyler once again suggests that trauma—more specifically, the trauma of Green’s brother’s death—could partly explain the fact that her spouse leaves her. However, by showing the magnitude of the challenge of raising a teenage daughter as a single mother, she also emphasizes the gender-specific inequalities of parenting that also appear in several stories from her Late Bloomer collection. 19. Even though both parents are portrayed as relatively cold, Hannah is more tactful throughout; we see her, for instance, reassuring Carol that her father loves her (Tyler 2015, 141) and trying to preserve the harmony of the home when Chuck’s behavior disturbs it, a possible expression of the traditional model of motherhood she embodies. 20. There are ways in which Tyler offers reparation to her mother for her suffering and enforced silence. For instance, “The Hannah Story,” as the title indicates, is primarily about Hannah’s experience of motherhood as her 56 M. PRECUP

husband is still on the front, the difficult life in her mother-in-law’s home, but also a short period of independence and happiness when she visits her parents together with baby Ann. The entire story is connected to the rest of the narrative with what looks like small pieces of duct tape, to point out not merely the fact that it was written at a different time (in 1994), but also that it was inserted in the book to mend the broken genealogy imposed by the father’s silence. 21. Here I reference Judith Butler’s conclusion to her take on Susan Sontag’s view of photography and narrative as expressed mainly in Regarding the Pain of Others. Butler concludes that photographs “can be instrumentalized in radically different directions, depending on how it is discursively framed and through what form of media presentation it is displayed” (2009, 92).

References Barbour, John D. 2004. Judging and Not Judging Parents. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 73–98. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Beach, Betty. 1989. Integrating Work and Family Life: The Home-Working Family. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps, and Peter Vermeulen. 2017. Introduction. In Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, ed. Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Peter Vermeulen, 1–26. New York: Berghahn Books. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London/New York: Verso. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. Dueben, Alex. 2016. Carol Tyler: Soldier’s Heart, 23 May. https://lareviewof- books.org/article/carol-tyler-soldiers-heart/. Accessed 5 Aug 2018. Earle, Harriet. 2017. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Friedan, Betty. 2001. The Feminine Mystique. New York/London: W.·W.·Norton & Company. Gilbert, James. 2005. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Hart, Tom and Carol Tyler. 2016. An Evening with Tom Hart and Carol Tyler. Society of Illustrators, March 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me_ X2N3Jf4M&t=3304s. Accessed 30 Aug 2018. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2 “A GOOD AND DECENT MAN”: FATHERHOOD, TRAUMA, AND POST-WAR… 57

Jarvis, Christina S. 2004. The Male Body at War: American Masculinity During World War II. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Jones, Edgar, and Simon Wessely. 2006. Psychological Trauma: A Historical Perspective. Psychiatry 5 (7): 217–220. https://doi.org/10.1053/j. mppsy.2006.04.011. Kingston, Anne. 2018. ‘I Regret Having Children’: In Pushing the Boundaries of Accepted Maternal Response.... Maclean’s, February. https://www.macleans. ca/regretful-mothers/. Accessed 17 Dec 2018. Krulwich, Robert. 2014. Draw My Left! No, No, My Other Left! A Hidden Bias in Art History Revealed! NPR, May 7. https://www.npr.org/sections/ krulwich/2014/05/07/309828787/draw-my-left-no-no-my-other-left-a- hidden-bias-in-art-history-revealed?t=1553150830495. Accessed 7 Nov 2017. LaRossa, Ralph. 2011. Of War and Men: World War II in the Lives of Fathers and Their Families. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Review of You’ll Never Know: A Graphic Memoir—Book Two: Collateral Damage. 2010. Publishers Weekly, April 10. https://www.publishersweekly. com/9781606994184. Accessed 7 Aug 2018. Rose, Gillian. 2016. Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment. London/New York: Routledge. Rothe, Anne. 2011. Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Tyler, Carol. 1993. The Job Thing. Seattle: Fantagraphics. ———. 2005. Late Bloomer. Seattle: Fantagraphics. ———. 2009. You’ll Never Know Book One: A Good and Decent Man. Seattle: Fantagraphics. ———. 2010. You’ll Never Know Book Two: Collateral Damage. Seattle: Fantagraphics. ———. 2012. You’ll Never Know Book Three: Soldier’s Heart. Seattle: Fantagraphics. ———. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. A Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle: Fantagraphics. ———. 2016a. An Evening with Tom Hart and Carol Tyler. Society of Illustrators, March 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me_X2N3Jf4M. Accessed 6 Aug 2018. ———. 2016b. Comics Alternative Interviews: Carol Tyler. Interview by Derek Royal. Comics Alternative, September 20. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eCyjzSCLGg8&t=693s. Accessed 5 Aug 2018. Wolk, Douglas. 2009. What Did You Do in the War, Dad? New York Times, June 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Wolk-t.html. Accessed 10 Aug 2017. CHAPTER 3

“He was there to catch me when I leapt”: Paternal Absence and Artistic Emancipation in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

The intricate multi-layered and impeccably researched narrative of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is not a raw work of mourning but rather a cerebral examination of the enigma represented by the narrator’s father both during his lifetime and after his death. Bechdel’s passionate archival work, some of which relies on a journal she started keeping when she was ten years old, and some of which is spent scouring public archives and her family’s own collection of photographs, letters, and other memorabilia, has received substantial critical attention (Cvetkovich 2008; Bauer 2014). In fact, almost every aspect of Fun Home has been dissected by comics scholars, from—to give only a few examples—its complex narrative strategies (Watson 2011; Warhol 2011; Smith and Watson 2018) to its contribution to the genre of autobiographical comics (Gardner 2008; Pizzino 2016), its use of digital photography (Bernstein 2017) to its representation of trauma (Chute 2010; Nabizadeh 2014), its queering of the space of (autobiographical) comics (Gardiner 2011, Kelley 2014), and other topics. After Fun Home became an award-winning musical in 2013, critics also began to turn their attention to the implications of adapting Bechdel’s work into a new medium (Mansbridge 2017). In this chapter, I am reading Fun Home as a space of memory that provides access to a sample of paternal conduct during a certain time, space, and cultural background: a white middle-class environment from rural Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this apparently neatly circumscribed site fails to completely define the father figure, mainly

© The Author(s) 2020 59 M. Precup, The Graphic Lives of Fathers, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_3 60 M. PRECUP because Bechdel’s memoir provides a reparative queer extension of this memory space which works both geographically, stretching into the Castro and Christopher Street, and temporally, as its chronology pulls together the Stonewall Riots, the AIDS epidemic, and the crisis of truth of the Bush administration.1 The socio-cultural bubble of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, both protects the family and oppresses it by creating pressure to conform. This is particularly significant for the Bechdels in the context of Bruce’s closeted homosexuality or bisexuality, which becomes a source of frustration, deception, and erratic behavior. In Fun Home, Bechdel produces a highly mediated portrait of an elusive father, his narrative emerging from under multiple layers of words and images. This palimpsestic representation mirrors the father’s own art of camouflage: instead of rendering him more accessible, the heavily metafictional Fun Home unveils the multiplicity of his masks. Bechdel delivers a very tightly bound package of a story, every coincidence sought after, researched, and pointed out; this works both to bring him closer and to distance his daughter from him as she constructs an artistic manifesto of emancipation from her father’s tyranni- cal guidance. While other graphic memoirs whose central narratives are structured around the death of a loved one, but also go beyond it to show how life progresses after the event (Streeten 2011; Hart 2015), the chronology of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home stops shortly after her father’s death. Even though the text in the narrative boxes is provided by a narrating “I” who speaks from the present, it does not provide any information from this timeframe; it only reflects on the past. By doing this, Bechdel places her father, his death, and the unfolding of that final “catastrophe,” as she puts it in the book, at the heart of her autobiographical labor, instead of fore- grounding her own grief or the process of mourning.2 The decision to leave out long-term developments creates a story whose main characters remain forever stuck in the small space where the family tragedy unfolds. Bechdel builds an argument for the father’s untimely death as an a priori fact, so that even when she imagines an alternative timeline (such as the possibility of her father living as a gay man), the only denouement she can envisage is still tragic. Always somewhat aloof, Bruce Bechdel is both present and absent in his family’s life, both legible and mysterious. “Was he a good father?” is one of the central questions of the book, and, while the narrator does make a point of asking it (2006, 22), she also demonstrates how difficult it is to give a clear-cut answer. Bechdel provides a substantial amount of 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 61 information in an attempt to recreate but also critique her father, but she remains ambivalent about measuring and qualifying his conduct as a whole. This is a useful perspective, as it allows her to depict a complex portrait of a man whose paternal and other conduct cannot be easily labeled. Bechdel’s investigation of her father’s life and death is, I suggest in this chapter, not merely a work of mourning and an attempt to reconnect with the dead, but also a profound examination of the ways fatherhood as a cultural construct is inevitably policed by social norms that are of their time and place. Fun Home also shows that there is a set of funda- mental expectations of fathers that cannot be dismissed as fluctuating social constructs.

Autobiography and Revision Fun Home exists within the wider autobiographical space of Bechdel’s work, a space that extends both before and after her two autobiographical memoirs, where she creates a more complex version of her narrated “I” that matures over time, but still retains a few defining features, such as her sharp intellect, quirky personality, understated sense of humor, and, of course, her queerness.3 Bechdel has developed this persona by also providing clarifications and interpretations for certain aspects ofFun Home in numerous lectures, interviews, her personal blog, and other social media, but also her subsequent graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? (2012a). An early version of Bechdel’s autobiographical self from Fun Home can be found in a short comic titled “Coming Out Story,” initially published in Gay Comics (1993) and available on the Oberlin College LGBT Community History Project web page, as its action takes place there. This story, introducing the Alison character4 at an earlier stage of creative development, also provides valuable insight into what Bechdel’s autobiographical persona might have been had she opted for a different register. In Fun Home, the comedy is more understated and muted by other difficult issues like the father’s death and his sexual transgressions, whereas “Coming Out Story” relies more on slapstick and exaggeration for comedic delivery, its main source being the protagonist herself, a wide-eyed young woman whose hair is pictured literally standing on end as she inadvertently sabo- tages her first sexual experience. “Coming Out Story” does not include Alison’s parents’ reaction to her sexual awakening; it is a less tightly structured and more playful version of Bechdel’s coming out from her memoir. The title is written in the sort of dripping font that was popular with 62 M. PRECUP

horror publications like Tales from the Crypt and Haunted Horror, and promises to deliver a terrible first sexual experience whose “horror,” in fact, never fully materializes. In the first panel, we are approached by a welcoming but slightly manic Alison, a frenzied look in her eye, accompanied by a tense aggressive-looking cat. The realization that she is a lesbian, boldly typed in a letter to her parents in Fun Home, is here given a more dramatic prequel as “a startling new realization” that literally stops traffic when its clueless young recipient is nearly hit by a car. The atmosphere and protagonist of this story are closer to the tone of Dykes to Watch Out For and Mo, respectively, than to the narrated “I” from Fun Home. I find that this early version of Alison (in a world where parental intervention has been edited out) offers more space for Alison’s vulnerability, as it no longer has to compete with her father’s mood swings or her mother’s palpable exasperation. Are You My Mother? also contains a certain shift of mood and pace compared to Fun Home, but Alison is consistent with the version of her autobiographical persona from Fun Home. Are You My Mother? unpacks the arduous therapeutic process that Bechdel has repeatedly identified in interviews as crucial throughout her creation of Fun Home too. Both books end on conciliatory scenes that depict each parent’s positive contribution to Alison’s wellbeing: the father is there to catch her when she jumps into the pool and the mother helps her get up from the floor. These scenes of reconciliation replace the natural endpoint of each timeline, that is, the parents’ deaths, with moments of play and companionship, while also suggesting that the parents did, in their own way, offer Alison support and a certain practical and emotional survival kit. Bechdel does go back to Fun Home two years after its publication by providing some additional substance in a two-page comic she contributes to a 2008 (#104) special issue of Granta Magazine, dedicated to the subject of fathers. Titled “Wrought,” the story returns to her father through an examination of photography, this time on a distinctly Barthesian note. This is a metafictional extension of Fun Home, where Bechdel gives readers an insight into the making of the photograph of her father that functions as a heading to the first chapter, “Old Father, Old Artificer,” from Fun Home (Fig. 3.1).5 This photograph, chosen because it “sums up” her father “at a glance” (Bechdel 2008, 54), is Bechdel’s version of Roland Barthes’s famous Winter Garden photograph of his mother from Camera Lucida. While Bechdel decides to share the photograph with her readers, by publishing it in full color here (as well as showing it at various talks),6 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 63

Fig. 3.1 “Old Father, Old Artificer” chapter heading. (© Alison Bechdel)

Barthes refuses to do so. As he is “looking for the truth of the face” of his beloved deceased mother (Barthes 1981, 67), Barthes claims to finally be able to recognize her in a photograph taken when she was five years old, where she poses with her brother in a conservatory, or, as it was known at the time, a “winter garden.”7 In “Wrought,” the family archive is explicitly set as a stage that offers the opportunity for the performance of return and reconciliation. Here, we find a version of Barthes’s attempt to reconnect with the dead through recognition in Bechdel’s preoccupation with rendering Bruce Bechdel’s uniqueness through drawing: “[M]y drawing is a crude schema of the color photo as perhaps the photo is of the raw, unspooling life it purports to capture” (Bechdel 2008, 54). Bechdel’s photorealistic rendition of her father’s photograph may initially seem like an eccentric act of remediation that, instead of appealing to new technologies or media, resorts to drawing, 64 M. PRECUP a recording process that precedes the technological progress signaled by photography. However, as Bechdel’s seasoned readers know, she uses digital photography to capture her performances as various characters from her work, thus creating an important comment on truth-telling by “craft- ing a different kind of truth: one based on neither the performative effects of empire nor analog photography’s apparent claim of mimetic indexical- ity, but instead on the movement-based, processual combination of digital photography with the bodily actions of posing and drawing” (Bernstein 2017, 143). For readers who arrive at this story after reading Fun Home, Bruce is already a familiar character, the opus of a graphic tour-de-force and the object of his daughter’s profound investment in truth-telling. In “Wrought,” we see both father and daughter in the process of contributing to the family archive by taking photographs of each other in the garden that surrounds the family home. In an atmosphere that, for Bechdel, evokes “an eternal, Jamesian teatime” (55), Bruce takes two pictures of Alison: one as she is sitting and reading and the second one where she is posing for him on a wrought iron bench. The process seems to evoke some of the familiar scenes from Fun Home where the father interrupts his children’s more pleasurable activities in order to redirect them; however, here Alison participates willingly and even takes the initiative of spontaneously producing the father’s “Mick Jagger shot” (Bechdel 2008, 54). In this series of pictures, Alison is posing, but her father is not: caught off guard by his daughter, his right arm is blurred by the movement as he is turning around. Bechdel’s drawing does not capture this, but it does emphasize Bruce’s languid detachment, a certain sense that he is elsewhere, lost in thought, turning but not really seeing the daughter who interpellates him. In fact, neither photographer can see the other directly: their gaze is mediated and hidden by the lens of the camera. One eye closed, one eye behind the camera, their exercise in mutual self- representation is both blocked and supported by analog photography. In the last three panels, Bechdel attempts to “interpolate” a “mutual gaze” (Bechdel 2008, 55) by cutting out two slim panoramic shots of only their eyes, one from the Mick Jagger shot and the other, from a photograph of herself (probably the one of her on the wrought iron bench). She places them one under the other (that is, as much “in front of each other” as the medium allows) as the captions indicate how they are meant to be read: “My father looks at me. I look at him. For a moment, we see each other” (2008, 55). Bechdel’s choice of tense brings this encounter into the present. As a post-mortem act of intervention into a lived history, it 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 65 changes nothing: Alison and Bruce are not looking at each other, but at us. This is Bechdel engaging in a rhetorical exercise that amounts to Barthes’s claim, at the end of the rather eccentric argument from Camera Lucida, that he has managed to pierce the photographic surface and embrace the dead (Barthes 1981, 117). These two gestures of reparation and recuperation cannot be judged literally, by the measure of their success, but as expressions of the same kind of admittedly irrational hope. Neither can they be contemplated as impeccable intellectual exercises, but rather as good examples of how even failed interventions into a past that cannot be changed can create points of contact. In Bechdel’s case, the artificiality and circuitousness of this staging of mutual glances is acknowledged in the title (“Wrought”) and it captures the core of her momentous autobiographical undertaking: the acute need to be seen. This story sup- plements the “queer moments of recognition” represented through “crossing gazes” from Fun Home (McBean 2013, 115). Bechdel keeps looking back, seeing again and for the first time, in order to capture both the ghostly father and recover something of herself by giving them both a confirmation of presence, while at the same time acknowledging the limitations of this process.

Paternal Pedagogy Throughout Fun Home, Bruce Bechdel’s paternal conduct is introduced at length through his daughter’s reflections on his pedagogical abilities. These are often on display, but his aloofness and commanding manner make it difficult to separate between the act of teaching his children a lesson and that of giving them an order, or between imparting knowledge and stifling creativity. His largely failed pedagogical efforts produce situations that add to the rich inventory of scenes of “splitting” (Watson 2011, 125–132), where the narrator and her father are both separated and connected as they mirror each other. Bechdel does not picture her father as a good pedagogue even when she portrays him at his job as a high school English teacher. When we first see him at work, Bruce appears detached from his students, sitting down at his desk, one foot unconventionally propped up against it, reading Architectural Digest as his students complete a task in silence, their heads bent over their desks. In another scene in the classroom, he is calling the roll without looking at his students, from behind his desk. However, when Alison becomes his student, Bruce is portrayed on the other side of his desk, closer to the students and 66 M. PRECUP

interacting with them, even if his lack of respect for most of them is palpable.8 Seeing in Alison the potential for creating “an intellectual companion” (Bechdel 2006, 198), he eventually proves unable to maintain a balance between his own enthusiasm for the subject at hand and his daughter’s need for intellectual and creative space. Bechdel represents the timely end of this intellectual collaboration in two panels situated at the bottom of a page; in both of them, Alison is in seated in profile, on the phone with her father, listening to his latest literature-related lecture and reading advice. The expression on her face changes from a sort of listless stupor to an almost imperceptible frown as her father’s enthusiasm, encapsulated in large speech balloons with jagged edges, almost erases her from the panels. As winter turns into spring, Alison, tethered to an invisible telephone cord, goes from wearing a long-sleeved shirt to a T-shirt, and the people passing her by are either returning from or about to engage in season-specific pastimes such as skiing and tennis. The easygoing manner of the tennis player who tosses a ball in the air just as she passes Alison conjures up the possibility of enjoying pleasurable occupations without being encumbered by overbearing paternal enthusiasm. There are other moments where the father proves unable not to colo- nize his daughter’s creativity. When, around the age of seven, she composes a short poem and shows it to him, he accidentally stifles all such future attempts by swiftly and competently improvising a second stanza. Bechdel depicts him staring at the piece of paper that screens him from his daughter who, “limp with admiration” (2006, 129), subsequently types her father’s masterpiece and promptly abandons poetry, dwarfed by his superior skill. The fact that Bruce is pictured holding a beer also makes this episode read like an insignificant interruption of his leisure time. In another similar situation, when he corrects her use of color in a Wind in the Willows coloring book, Bruce seems once again unaware that, instead of working with his daughter, he has displaced her, both physically and creatively. Seated in her chair at the desk as she gazes in shock at his intervention upon her artwork, Bruce engages in a “crayonic tour de force” to make sure the correct canary yellow is featured on Mr. Toad’s caravan as she turns away toward the television, her back slightly slumped with disappointed resignation (2006, 131).9 These are failed teaching moments not only because they stem from a disingenuous affective place (the father is unaware of what his daughter is feeling), but also because they are less about what the student learns and more about the teacher’s display of skill and knowledge. They are also 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 67 failed moments of closeness: even when he appears to get closer to his daughter, the father eventually creates distance between them by pushing Alison away from their initial space of common interest.10 In this context, Hillary Chute reads the father’s fall as marking his daughter’s rise as an artist through a reading of the last page as a suggestion that “when he dies she leaps, or when she leaps he dies” (2010, 214). Thus, Chute proposes an interpretation of Fun Home as a somewhat retaliatory coming-of-age artistic manifesto. The parent-child role-reversal is indeed suggested in the book several times, and sustained throughout by the Icarus-Dedalus sym- bolism, which Chute reads in the context of its Joycean reinterpretation. However, I would like to suggest that the role-reversal is also naturally produced by Bechdel’s position as a mature autobiographer, “with greater knowledge, narrative experience, and linguistic competence” (Smith and Watson 2010, 75) than both her father and her much younger narrated “I.” Hard-earned hindsight gives Bechdel—who was 40 years old when she started writing the book and two years older than her father when she finished it (Bechdel 2018c, 77)—a clarity that allows her to both accurately pinpoint her father’s transgressions and forgive them. In a recent interview with fellow cartoonist MariNaomi, Bechdel expresses gratitude for her father’s artistic legacy:

I feel like I got a lot more empathy for my father [after writing Fun Home]. I researched the circumstances of his life, I understood him better. I wanted to write an honest book about both my negative feelings about my father and my positive feelings. In the end, my feelings were more positive. I had a friend who thought it was too sentimental, that I kind of copped out at the end. [But] I felt like it was pretty genuine. I do feel like I learned from my father something about being an artist, and I’m very grateful for that. (Bechdel 2018b, 68)

There are also many tender moments that depict activities in which Bruce engages with his children, “bursts of kindness” when he sings or reads to Alison (2006, 21). Within the wider narrative of parental and spousal tension present in the Bechdel home, these gain a somewhat nostalgic tint, but also emphasize the gendered dimension of parental labor. While the father is a somewhat erratic figure, the mother anchors the home in a routine whose daily gestures might be somewhat cold, but they are at least reliable. Not even these moments appear to be devoid of ambiguity though, as they are placed side by side as the father’s violent outbursts. Are You My 68 M. PRECUP

Mother? offers additional details that show how, during the children’s early years, Helen was a de facto single mother with a partner who not only did not rejoice at the news of her pregnancies, but was also visibly angered by things as mundane and predictable as the fact that babies cry. Bruce Bechdel’s abrupt transitions from kindness to remoteness are markers of tension, and one of the ways in which his secrets seep into the space of the home. Thus, Alison’s time growing up in her family cannot be qualified easily as happy or sad; Bechdel does not disambiguate this, and thus successfully renders both the unreliability of memory and the precarity of meaning-making. For instance, in a panel where Bruce teaches young Alison about gardening, it is not clear whether we are witnessing a teaching moment or simply yet another sample of the father giving his children orders; that his daughter is not excited to be there is obvious from her candid remark as she is thoughtfully examining a bulb: “I hate flowers” (2006, 90). The narrator’s general exasperation with the father’s penchant for drenching the house and its surroundings in floral patterns seems to indicate that this is yet another activity in which she did not wish to be involved. Bechdel portrays Bruce as a solitary commanding figure whose children are witnesses and props, but not respected co-workers or students being passed on his vast knowledge about interior decorating and other subjects. Bruce’s image as a father is negatively affected from the beginning of the memoir by him frequently offering his children a spectacle of absurd engagement in matters that do not regard them. Some moments that the narrator suspects might be intended as didactic, such as Bruce asking Alison to walk into the room where he preps a dead person, turn out to be both shocking and confusing, their didactic purpose unclear.11 Instead of benefiting them in a practical manner, such engagements instead require their effort and a level of skill or understanding that, as children, they do not possess. The children’s moments of clumsiness, which result in damage done to the father’s “curatorial onslaught” (Bechdel 2006, 14), generate outbursts of anger that Bechdel reads as expressions of frustration and disappointment in the imperfection of his offspring. While this may have been Bruce’s way of connecting with his children, in Fun Home the way he recruits them in the service of his domestic pursuits is either aggravating or, at best, difficult to interpret. During one Easter holiday, when the children hunt for the eggs Bruce adorns with great concentration and imagination, we see him standing somewhere to the side, observing them from a distance, his posture somewhat stiff, his 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 69 hands in his pockets, as they are running around the garden with baskets and appear to enjoy themselves. A sympathetic reading of these scenes provides an interpretation of Bruce’s creative work as an expression of affection for his children, whom he observes delightedly from a distance, unwilling to spoil their fun. On the other hand, the father’s satisfaction could be reduced to his successful completion of yet another creative task. Both interpretations are possible; it is this ambiguity that elicits sympathy for both Bruce Bechdel and his family. In both Are You My Mother? and Fun Home, Bechdel suggests that her parents’ most important contribution to her education is that they were able to provide her with the necessary tools for mental and emotional survival through their encouragement of reading and creative pursuits. For young Alison, reading also becomes a form of self-parenting and, as she seeks confirmation of her sexual identity, it is also “a way of constitut- ing epistemological agency” (Smith and Watson 2018, 43). During her childhood, her mother’s copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care provides not only definitions and descriptions to her set of compulsions, but reading it also places Alison in “a self-soothing, autistic loop,” where she is both parent and child (Bechdel 2006, 139). Similarly, writing is a useful survival tool given to her by her parents, who are otherwise unable to provide comfort and tenderness, in Bechdel’s own interpretation: “I feel like there is something really intense [that] got transmitted to me through my parents and each of their handwriting in my diary during this period of time when I was ten or eleven… I also feel like it was keeping these records that really helped me to survive my childhood. And to become someone who could write about it” (Ruddick 2014, 210). Such statements indicate the generosity of Bechdel’s interpretation of her parents’ inability to provide a more stable home environment.12

The Present/Absent Father There are several stages where Bruce Bechdel’s paternal conduct plays out, but the main location is the town of Beech Creek, PA, which boasted a population of 634 in 1960, when Alison Bechdel was born.13 Even though most of the action takes place within the confines of “mildly autistic col- ony” (Bechdel 2006, 139) hosted by the eccentric Bechdel house and its surroundings, and the family’s interaction with the outside world is downplayed, it can easily be inferred that the Bechdels are visible and active members of the life of the town: they are both teachers, the family 70 M. PRECUP business is a funeral home, and every now and then we see glimpses of their participation in communal activities such as going to church or taking part in local theater productions. Bechdel provides a bird’s eye view of the “narrow compass” that encapsulates, on a local map, the place where her father was born, the house where he subsequently settled down, the place where he died, and finally his grave, all within “a circle a mile and a half in diameter” (2006, 30). A close-up of this map provides an even better idea of the amount of privacy to which one could gain access: eight of the houses from the vicinity of the Bechdels’ gothic revival home belong to first-degree family members. It is, in fact, not the town itself that is represented as aggressively intrusive or threatening to the peace of the family, but rather the Bechdels’ incompatibility with the community that seems striking. The eccentricity of the Bechdels is inextricable from Bruce’s closeted homosexuality and the air of secrecy that permeates the home. The father’s secrets also create a visible distance between him and his family, who live in an “arctic climate” (Bechdel 2006, 67), with few physical tokens of affection or warm companionship.14 This is suggested through the father’s limited range of facial expressions and an air of absent-mindedness compounded by a limited number of additional nuances, usually rendered through mouth variations. Rarely a little more than a dot, Bruce Bechdel’s mouth occasionally stretches into a pout or a smirk, but rarely into a smile; this contributes to his general air of detachment from his family. Even though the home bears his “monomaniacal” artistic signature (Bechdel 2006, 2), various appendages interpose themselves between him and his family: books, cameras, curtains, pillows, vases, and various tools, as his attention seems to generally be drawn toward these objects and less to the human beings around them. The domestic space, which can be a source of comfort and warmth, thus becomes a gothic museum whose master—the father—is both a curator and a visitor, but never a permanent fixture. His body language also supports this interpretation: we rarely see him making eye contact with other family members; he is instead frequently engrossed in a book or a domestic task, examining his work or the male babysitters. When he does look at his family, it is either to assess them aesthetically, to give an order, or to point out a flaw; his preference for such actions ensures that there is no excessive physical proximity between him and them.15 There are only two scenes where Bruce Bechdel appears to be thoroughly enjoying himself, but the narrator revises them both in light of subsequent information about her father’s secrets. In one, he is watching Wile E. Coyote 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 71 and the Road Runner with his children. While the narrator’s brothers smile and watch the predictable struggle between bird and coyote, Alison, who is almost 14, does not participate; instead, she observes her father warily, as the caption above the scene reads: “The real accusation dared not speak its name” (Bechdel 2006, 174–175). Here, Bechdel mediates the allusion to her father’s affairs with some of his high school students through a reference to Oscar Wilde’s defense during his trial against the Marquess of Queensberry, a timely association considering Wilde’s well- documented sexual encounters with underage boys (Hext 2018). Bruce Bechdel’s reluctance to be more forthright with Alison even after her own coming out taints a second moment of conviviality introduced later in the book, when we see him playing the piano with Alison. Bechdel devotes an entire page to this scene, which is a depiction of the last time she sees her father alive, during a visit home with her then-girlfriend Joan. Seated side by side in front of the piano, Bruce and Alison are playing the popular duet “Heart and Soul” as Joan is chatting with a family friend. The page adds to the substantial inventory of scenes where father and daughter mirror each other, but it also provides a happy resolution to a fraught relationship: a rare moment of playful artistic collaboration. However, in a caption to the final panel, the narrator deems this closeness insufficient, particularly in the context of the father’s reserved coming out and his possible suicide. The father’s de facto absence from the life of the family is camouflaged by his interest in surfaces. Bruce Bechdel’s “remarkable legerdemain” (Bechdel 2006, 5), which enables him to produce expensive-looking objects and décor that make other children think of Alison’s family as rich also helps produce the illusion of authenticity that many families, in fact, create as they mimic convention. As an “alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Dedalus of décor” (6), Bruce Bechdel’s DIY magic is not, like Chuck Tyler’s from Soldier’s Heart, mainly functional, but also aesthetic. The usefulness of his talents is threefold: they make the home more beautiful, they help create the illusion of convention while camouflaging the truth, and they preserve the distance between himself and his family. Bechdel explicitly invites readers to interpret Bruce Bechdel’s assiduous labor during the renovation of the family’s 1867 gothic revival home as an extraordinary effort to harmonize appearance and essence.16 It may be worth noting that, given the unprecedented recent popularity of TV shows that focus on home repairs, had Bruce Bechdel performed his restoration projects today, when HGTV maintains a high viewership in the 72 M. PRECUP midst of general cable network decline (Blas 2016), he might not have cut such a singular figure. On the contrary, his passion might have been given more credit as a popular art form and perhaps even regarded as inspiring and—and as it may also have been in reality—a form of self-therapy (Barger 2018). Bechdel’s own retrospective respect for her father’s talent and assiduous effort placed in service of his creative pursuits can be observed throughout the memoir, often existing at the same time as exasperation and resentment. For instance, on a page from the first chapter, where we see Alison as a discomfited and even begrudging witness to her father’s labors, the caption expresses her awe, which coexists with her irritation: “My father could spin garbage…/…into gold./ He could transfigure a room with the smallest offhand flourish./ He could conjure an entire, finished period interior from a paint chip./ He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of decor” (2006, 6). The alliterative critique from the last sentence, a caption to a panel where Bruce smiles to himself as he is putting the finishing touches to a room he deems “slightly perfect” as his family is watching TV without him in an adjoining room, deflates the praise by inflecting it with the negative terms that foreground his superficiality instead of his talent. At the same time, Bechdel’s carefully wrought alliteration mirrors the father’s assiduous perfectionism, suggesting family resemblance in the obsessive minuteness of artistic pursuits. The effect of the father’s absence from the domestic space—paradoxically encapsulated in his excessive but object-oriented presence—is augmented by his death, which revises Bechdel’s narrative and taints it with the prescience of anticipated mourning:

It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty./ But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him…/ He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials…/smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne./ But I ached as if he were already gone. (Bechdel 2006, 23)

In the five panels that accompany this narrative text, we see Bruce teaching Alison how to use a lawn tractor. The first and the last panel are united through a common bird’s eye view perspective: in the first, we see the father and daughter both on the tractor, and in the last, she is driving away from him, moving in self-contained rectangular patterns toward a center that will indicate the completion of her task. They do not make eye 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 73

contact, as Bruce is obliviously engaged in another task, but we see Alison gazing at him as he is wiping sweat from his brow, right before she turns to continue her movement. The distance she slowly creates between them foreshadows the distance between their bodies from the very last page of Fun Home. It is a necessary exercise in autonomy that the father himself facilitates. Bruce Bechdel’s spectrality is enhanced by his depiction in silhouette form throughout the narrative. In moments of tension, he looks either ominous or furtive, as he is either threateningly towering over his daughter, who has just accidentally snapped a precious glass cork in two or in the background, sliding around like the house ghost. During luminous moments of companionship, as when he suddenly bursts into song as he puts Alison to bed, the use of the silhouette anticipates not only his disappearance as he is ready to exit the room, but also predicts a possible sudden darkening of his mood. In addition to this, as Golnar Nabizadeh demonstrates, in such scenes, the silhouette also “hints not only at the unknown component…in Alison’s perception of her father, but also at the strong emotional charge that this unknown amalgam presents” (2014, 180). Bechdel also suggests that Bruce’s phantasmatic nature extends itself to the other family members, transforming the family home into a Victorian haunted house. When the entire family also appears in silhouette in a large panel, the cartoonist’s X-ray vision produces iris shots of each inhabitant’s most emblematic elements (one brother collects model air- planes, the other plays the guitar, Alison draws, her mother plays the piano, and the father is tinkering with some painting frames). The use of the silhouette not only suggests that Bechdel pictures what is most essential to a shorthand description of each family member, but it is also fitting in the context of the recurrent gothic motif in Fun Home by implying that this is a house of secrets. Here, Bechdel makes her own contribution to the restoration of the gothic revival home that is no longer inhabited by her family: she layers gothic mementos of each family member upon the surface that the father had preserved so lovingly. Bechdel’s use of the silhouette cannot, however, be reduced to its reliance on characteristics inherited from eighteenth-century interpretations of the form; instead, the silhouette is part of the strategy of artistic emancipation from the father’s artistic dominance.17 This becomes clearer upon two occasions: in one panel that concludes a dream sequence (Fig. 3.2), where Bruce and Alison are portrayed in silhouette, side by side, as Bruce has just missed the fleeting beauty of the sunset, and a second time 74 M. PRECUP

Fig. 3.2 Father and daughter silhouettes in dream sequence. (© Alison Bechdel)

(Fig. 3.3), when they both watch “the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset—from salmon to canary to midnight blue” (Bechdel 2006, 150). Upon a first reading, such images simply appear to be memorials to moments of human connection and quiet companionship: father and daughter both appear to contemplate the same object, the variety of colors in a beautiful sunset, in a reverie to which their artistic inclinations make them particularly suited. But the context of these two images shows that they are, in fact, moments of failed connection: in the first one, Bruce has only just missed the entrancing tableau of the sunset that Alison witnessed, and they both stare at colors that have already transitioned into other, less impressive hues; in the second one, Bruce is motionless, “speechless” in his rapt admiration of the countless nuances of color before him, but the way young Alison is leaning toward her father suggests that human contact would be preferable. As the caption that describes this scene indicates, Bruce is entranced by colors that readers cannot find on Bechdel’s spartan page, and this indicates a supplementary, more subversive purpose. Bechdel’s use of variations of blue in these panels that explicitly reference the father’s passion for color is a gesture of artistic emancipation from the paternal tyranny of color suggested by the “canary-colored caravan” episode discussed above. The retaliatory use of the blue is somewhat camouflaged not only by the “maudlin” association between sunset and death, which works on the level of the image even as it is exposed by the 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 75

Fig. 3.3 Father and daughter, in silhouette, contemplating a sunset. (© Alison Bechdel) script, but also by the particular use of the silhouette, which may contribute to a simplified interpretation of such images as simply nostalgic com- memorations of past companionship.18

Conclusion Fun Home is a “filiation narrative” (Smith and Watson 2010, 270) in which Bechdel both separates herself from her parents’ dramatic relationship and reenters the complicated space of her past home by reading multiple clues about her father’s inappropriate behavior and by revealing his 76 M. PRECUP secrets, or at least what she is able to find out about them. As Roger Porter suggests in his book Bureau of Missing Persons, where he looks at autobiographical texts where authors reveal their parents’ often shocking secrets, in such cases children act as detectives empowered by the disclosure of their findings, through the creation of “counternarratives that occupy contested spaces in the family history” (2011, 4). Bruce Bechdel’s inacces- sibility, which manifests itself as a detached presence which becomes pain- fully irreversible after his sudden death, is foreshadowed from the beginning of the narrative. Throughout the memoir, even banal scenes where the father plays with his daughter read like impressions of gestures and postures that might be found in a conventional family. Physical contact, desired by the child,19 remains chiefly a projection: we repeatedly see the father and daughter side by side, mirroring each other from a distance. On the first and last page ofFun Home, they face each other in poses that anticipate a full embrace that never takes place: their arms are extended as Alison hovers above her father, at first in a game of “airplane” and then as she prepares to jump into a pool. In both cases, Bruce Bechdel is impas- sive, his face unsmiling but focused with gravity on his daughter, promis- ing stability but not overt affection. While on the first page we see their bodies overlapping as the child hovers above her father, on the last page they are separate, even as Alison is once again suspended above her father as he is waiting to catch her in the pool. This distance is suggestive of the narrating “I’”s emancipation from her father “the artificer,” even as he has, somewhat inadvertently, passed on his creative heritage. Bechdel’s impeccably constructed memoir pulls readers inside its multi- layered web of autobiographical representation, and uses multiple techniques of persuasion that allow the narrator to construct the convincing portrait of a difficult father while also building a case for his redemption. In their insightful chapter on contrapuntal reading in Bechdel’s Fun Home and Ellen Forney’s Marbles, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue that the “extreme states” from which the narrating “I”s of both books speak, linked as they are “to their urgent permanent crises” (2018, 45), place readers in positions where “they must decide whether and where to trust these narrating ‘I’s” (2018, 45). Bechdel herself questions how her leniency may be compromising her moral judgment, more specifically when she discovers the compromising photograph of Roy, the underage babysitter with whom her father had a sexual relationship, according to Alison’s mother. While Bechdel does not convey details of this and other possible sexual encounters between his father and some of his underage students, 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 77 her moral judgment is clear and her anger, palpable. Her intention to assess the impact of her father’s unethical behavior upon his paternal conduct transpires from the first chapter of the book, when a narrative text box provides a sharp revision of an otherwise quiet and boring church service that the entire family attends: “He appeared to be an ideal husband and father, for example. But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys?” (Bechdel 2006, 17). Bechdel makes an important contribution to the conversation about whether a person’s secret offenses—in this case, sexual acts with a minor—can be kept outside the domestic space, by showing that they often appear as something else entirely. The shining surfaces and gothic perfectionism, alongside the darkness and mystery of the silhouette, show that the evidence of bad behavior can sometimes be as innocuous as a manicured lawn. In subtle ways, Fun Home answers its own question about the quality of Bruce Bechdel’s paternal conduct by placing him inside a loop where his morally compromising behavior translates as problematic conduct in the space of the home, and where his domestic unhappiness is a factor in his sexual transgressions. By connecting her father’s life to both the AIDS crisis and the Watergate scandal, Bechdel also proposes an interpretation of his deception as a symptom of a contemporary American crisis of truth that creates reverberations between the personal and the political.

Notes 1. In her insightful article on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Robin Bernstein convincingly argues that the book is animated by the necessity of resisting the “truthiness” of the Bush era. By reading Fun Home against the political references incorporated in Bechdel’s work from Dykes to Watch Out For, created during the same time period as when she was working on Fun Home, Bernstein demonstrates that the combination of drawing, digital photography, and performance employed by Bechdel in service of truth- telling “is a political act of resistance” (2017, 145). In a short note appended to the article, Bernstein also draws attention to the fact that the Oxford Dictionary declared the term “post-truth” to be the 2016 Word of the Year, which makes endeavors like Bechdel’s labor behind the creation of Fun Home even more important. 2. That the narrator speaks from a point in a relatively distant future is evidenced not through any specific cultural and political references, but through the evidently time-consuming magnitude of the research that went into the making of Fun Home (exhibited in the book through drawings 78 M. PRECUP

of letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, books, and other items), as well as the meticulous logic that orders the events that led up to the father’s death. 3. Life writing, particularly in marginalized communities, is an act that bestows value upon the stories it tells by establishing personhood, “a value affirmed precisely by any life story’s implicit claim that it is worth telling and hearing” (Eakin 2004, 5), but also by simply articulating the story of a self in a society where this ability “confirms the possession of a working identity” (Eakin 2004, 6). Bechdel has related her lifelong interest in autobiography to her Catholic upbringing (Bechdel 2018d, 92), and has referred to her decision to publish life writing as “a kind of religious practice,” based on a conscious choice of believing that her life has meaning (Bechdel 2018a, 63). 4. Throughout this chapter, I use “Alison” to refer to the different autobiographical selves produced throughout Bechdel’s career, and “(Alison) Bechdel” with reference to the author of the comics. 5. “Old father, old artificer” is a direct quote from the last line from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, whose full text is “Old father, old artificer, stand me now in good stead.” InGraphic Women, Hillary Chute discusses the Joycean references in Fun Home at length, and interprets the ending as a successful role-reversal during which the daughter, “while giving credence to her father’s status as artificer, his ‘inventive bent,’ yet separates from him and takes this inheritance to become the father, the progenitor: the artist he never was and will never be” (2018, 213). 6. See Bechdel (2009). 7. Barthes’s motivation is well known to scholars of photography, and he provides it by using the terminology he defined in Camera Lucida: studium for the general interest in a photograph and punctum for the piercing detail that disturbs, “wounds” the gaze. Barthes’s intense reaction and personal connection to the Winter Garden photograph of his mother makes him protective of its precious content: “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture…at most, it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound” (1981, 73). 8. Bechdel portrays her father referring to his students as “twits” both in the classroom (2006, 199) and in a letter to her (2006, 200). 9. Bechdel draws a direct connection between this moment and her abandonment of full color in her work (2006, 130). 10. In fact, both parents are aloof and their work on various creative projects is depicted as “intent and separate” (Bechdel 2006, 133) as their children either watch from a distance or find themselves recruited to participate in chores where they are allowed little to no input. 3 “HE WAS THERE TO CATCH ME WHEN I LEAPT”: PATERNAL ABSENCE… 79

11. Such moments later become more common, but the narrator does not clarify Bruce’s reasoning any further. For instance, when a car accident kills three people whose bodies are brought to the funeral home, we see Bruce unveiling in front of his three children the dead body of a boy who had died from a broken neck in a car accident (Bechdel 2006, 148). As Alison stares at the dead body with her back to the readers, it is only the slight stoop of her back that gives a hint of her mood. The look of shock on her brother’s face helps translate the children’s reaction, and Alison’s diary entries from that particular weekend—one of which specifies that their father, in fact, showed them “the dead people,” hence presumably everyone who had died in that specific accident—speak more to her consterna- tion, as they are “almost completely obscured” by the symbol that expresses her epistemological crisis triggered by OCD (Bechdel 2006, 148). 12. Bechdel casts some light on this matter in an interview with Terry Gross, where she discusses her mother’s belated plans for divorce: “Well, my mother is a complicated person and a very, very duty-bound person. She— people didn’t get divorced in our small Pennsylvania town. It just—I mean, it was starting to happen culturally in the broader country, but no one we knew did it. And she wasn’t prepared to break up our family. I feel like my parents really are—they’re kind of tragic figures…They both came of age before the women’s movement, before Stonewall. They weren’t able to take advantage of those liberation movements. They were already stuck, married, living, you know, in this tight-knit, little community” (Bechdel 2018c, 77). 13. See “Population of Beech Creek, PA” (2016). 14. Bechdel remembers her own surprise at seeing her parents display affection upon two occasions: when they kiss good-bye before Bruce has to leave for a trip and when, one evening as they are watching TV, Helen places her hand on her husband’s back. That these are remarkable and memorable moments supports Bechdel’s observation about the general atmosphere in the Bechdel family, whose members do spend much time together, but without showing affection. 15. In fact, both parents are physically distant. When Bechdel describes her OCD and mentions one of her many bedtime rituals (kissing each and every one of her stuffed animals), she motivates it stoically, without complaining or blaming her parents, through her yearning for affection: “Though it verges on the pathetic, I should point out that no one had kissed me good night in years” (Bechdel 2006, 137). 16. This is also apparent in his stubborn choices for his daughter’s environment and clothes: he picks wallpaper with a floral pattern for her room and forces her to wear traditionally feminine clothes, despite her clearly stated objections. This effort to establish visible normative gender patterns in his 80 M. PRECUP

tomboyish daughter’s life can be read as an attempt to change and to protect her by making her conform to contemporary standards of femininity, in an attempt to erase her—and his own—love of masculinity. As Julia Watson argues, the father’s multiple attempts to monitor the expression of Alison’s gender identity expresses his own “need to mask his own closeted homosexual desire and to preserve a public image of respectability” (Watson 2011, 139). 17. This interpretation stems from the conceptualization of the silhouette during the eighteenth century as a form of portrayal that dispensed with unnecessary details and offered a person’s most important characteristics that could then be interpreted through the (racist) typology of physiog- nomy (DuBois Shaw 2004, 20). 18. In an interview with Katie Roiphe, Bechdel mentions that she intended not to use color at all in Fun Home, “as a ‘fuck you’” to her father, and to demonstrate that “you could tell a nuanced story in black and white,” but the publisher’s art department were able to work on the initial grey ink- wash shade and the result convinced her (Bechdel 2012b). 19. On one occasion, we see Alison being so unfamiliar with physical affection that she kisses her father’s hand “as if he were a bishop or an elegant lady, before rushing from the room in embarrassment” (Bechdel 2006, 19).

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———. 2012a. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcour. ———. 2012b. Alison Bechdel Talks with Katie Roiphe. Strand Book Store, October 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_xQdGhM_JM. Accessed 5 Oct 2018. ———. 2018a. Writers on the Fly: Alison Bechdel. Interview by Iowa City Unesco City of Literature. In Alison Bechdel: Conversations, ed. Rachel R. Martin, 61–63. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 2018b. The Rumpus Interview with Alison Bechdel—Sections II–X. Interview by Mari Naomi. In Alison Bechdel: Conversations, ed. Rachel R. Martin, 64–71. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 2018c. Lesbian Cartoonist Alison Bechdel Countered Dad’s Secrecy by Being Out and Open. Interview by Terry Gross. In Alison Bechdel: Conversations, ed. Rachel R. Martin, 75–90. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 2018d. Stuck in Vermont—Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway. Interview by Eva Sollberger. In Alison Bechdel: Conversations, ed. Rachel R. Martin, 91–95. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Bernstein, Robin. 2017. ‘I’m very happy to be in the reality-based community’: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Digital Photography, and George W. Bush. American Literature 89 (1): 121–154. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3788741. Blas, Lorena. 2016. Sold! HGTV flips over big ratings growth. USA Today, July 27. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2016/07/27/hgtv-big-ratings- growth/87401088/. Accessed 10 Oct 2018. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2008. Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36 (1/2): 111–128. https://doi. org/10.1353/wsq.0.0037. DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn. 2004. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham: Duke University Press. Eakin, Paul John. 2004. Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 1–16. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 2011. Queering Genre: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Contemporary Women’s Writing 5 (3): 188–211. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpr015. Gardner, Jared. 2008. Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007. Biography 31 (1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.0.0003. Hart, Tom. 2015. Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hext, Kate. 2018. Just Oscar. The Times Literary Supplement, November 20. https:// www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/just-oscar-wilde/. Accessed 23 Jan 2019. 82 M. PRECUP

Kelley, Michael J. 2014. Mirrored discourse in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5 (1): 42–57. https://doi.org/10.1080 /21504857.2013.826263. Mansbridge, Joanna. 2017. Adapting Queerness, Queering Adaptation: Fun Home on Broadway. In Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige, ed. Coleen Kennedy-Karpat and Eric Sandberg, 75–94. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McBean, Sam. 2013. Seeing in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Camera Obscura 28 (3): 103–123. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2352167. Nabizadeh, Golnar. 2014. The After-Life of Images: Archives and Intergenerational Trauma in Autographic Comics. In Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives, ed. Dana Mihăilescu, Roxana Oltean, and Mihaela Precup, 171–191. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Population of Beech Creek, PA. 2016. Population.us. https://population.us/pa/ beech-creek/. Accessed 5 Oct 2018. Porter, Roger. 2011. Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Ruddick, Lisa. 2014. Public Conversation: Alison Bechdel and Hillary Chute. Critical Inquiry 40 (3): 203–219. https://doi.org/10.1086/677373. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2018. Contrapuntal Reading in Women’s Comics: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Ellen Forney’s Marbles. In Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself, ed. Valérie Baisnée-Keay, Corinne Bigot, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, and Claire Bazin, 21–47. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Streeten, Nicola. 2011. Billy, Me & You: A Memoir of Grief and Recovery. Brighton: Myriad Editions. Tyler, Carol. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. Fantagraphics: A Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle. Warhol, Robyn. 2011. The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. College Literature 38 (3): 1–20. Watson, Julia. 2011. Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A. Chaney, 123–156. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. CHAPTER 4

“As long as he was there, I felt safe”: Fatherhood, Deception, and Detective Work in Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter

When Laurie Sandell decided to have a child, she was pleasantly surprised to receive unconditional support from her mother, whose help gave her “a sense of groundedness” and a feeling that she was finally being parented (Sandell 2014). Sandell’s surprise is understandable in the context of her fraught relationship with her family, particularly her father, after it emerges that he fabricated almost his entire identity, and that he persuaded various acquaintances and family members to engage in dubious money-making schemes at the expense of their financial security. Laurie Sandell grows up in what she believes is a regular family whose only extraordinary aspect is her father’s stories about his many accomplishments. A one-time university professor, multiply decorated Vietnam veteran, friend of various lumi- naries (including the Pope), William Sandell dazzles his daughter with stories of heroism and exciting adventure. He also loses his job for unclear reasons, moves the family around, disappears on mysterious work-related trips, and appears to have several aliases. The family does not question even the more outlandish of these stories until the author herself receives an invitation to write an article about her father. Her interviews with him and other sources, as well as additional research soon demonstrate that a large part of the father’s life story is, in fact, a work of fiction. In spite of her family’s strong opposition, Sandell writes an anonymous article titled “My Father the Fraud,” exposing the extent of her father’s deception, and publishes it in the June 2003 issue of Esquire magazine. A journalist for glossy magazines such as Marie Claire, Glamour, New York, and others,

© The Author(s) 2020 83 M. Precup, The Graphic Lives of Fathers, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_4 84 M. PRECUP but also a cartoonist for some of the same publications, Sandell decided to continue her investigation of her father’s lifelong deception and publish it in 2009 as the Eisner-nominated The Impostor’s Daughter. Writing about her father despite his objections has been, Sandell claims, not an act of vengeance, but “a huge struggle,” and yet, at the same time, liberating (Sandell 2009b). After working on this painful subject, she was invited to write another non-fiction book on a similar topic, Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family (2011a), by Andrew Madoff and his fiancé, Catherine Hooper, who saw her as “a comrade of sorts” (Sandell 2011a). This chapter begins by asking how Laurie Sandell’s autobiographical investigation fits into the wider sub-genre of filiation narratives about secretive fathers, but also how the story is embedded in other popular literary genres such as chick lit and priv-lit. It further examines Laurie Sandell’s representation of her autobiographical self as a “bad daughter,” a trope that allows her to disconnect her own life story from her family’s decision to condone her father’s deception. This process also entails Sandell’s acknowledgment of her own collaboration in her father’s vast web of deceit. In this context, her option to use comics instead of traditional writing allows her to employ a wide range of visual- verbal cues—including excerpts from her personal archive of childhood cartoons—that speak powerfully about her own implication in her father’s fabrications.

Engendering the Bad Daughter Even though all of the fathers discussed in this book up to this point have important secrets that have negative effects on their families, none of them reach the scope and consistency of William Sandell’s deception. From this perspective, The Impostor’s Daughter fits comfortably into the category of memoirs about parental deception analyzed by Roger Porter in Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers. Like other life narratives about paternal secrets, the plot of The Impostor’s Daughter is also partly structured by the detective work meant to correct the father’s inac- curate version of the truth (Porter 2011, 3). Revealing the father’s secrets to the world or obtaining retribution for his objectionable behavior are not, as Roger Porter argues, the main purposes of such books. Instead, as in The Impostor’s Daughter, the revelation of the father’s secrets shows how they “confused, regulated, and compromised” the child’s “self- understanding” (Porter 2011, 188). Of the case studies included by Porter 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 85 in his book, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception (1979) comes closest to Sandell’s work thematically, not only because the father engages in a similar kind of fraudulent behavior, but also through its ambivalence about the father’s intrepidness and the way his deception became mirrored in his son’s own dishonest conduct. Wolff’s forgiveness of his father and his final awareness that he still loves him are vastly different from Sandell’s own clean break from her family’s tolerance of her father’s fabrications. This positions her as an outcast, a rebel in a family whose unwavering allegiance to the lies of the patriarch ends up excluding her from their circle of companionship and collaboration. Laurie Sandell becomes a “bad daughter” for daring to disentangle and make public the father’s web of lies, and thus marches into a wider category of “bad girls” with an important legacy in Western culture, “transgressive women” who “challenge, ignore, or cross over the patriarchal limits intended to circumscribe them” (Young 2017, 1). From this standpoint, the daughter’s main obligation is to the truth of her autobiographical account; by embedding the family’s everyday life (and, in fact, the family’s history) in a lie, William Sandell loses the ownership of his own story. This chapter considers these issues as it examines the manner in which William Sandell’s deception affects his daughter’s self- perception and self-representation, but also how the disintegration of the father as a trustworthy and reliable figure impinges on his daughter’s own sense of ethics, her ability to forge stable relationships, as well as her mental health. The ethics behind the telling of a story that does not entirely belong to the author is something every autobiographer needs to examine, but this is perhaps more evident when the author is repeatedly discouraged from writing by all the members of her immediate family. When Laurie Sandell’s mother calls to ask her not to pursue her project, crying and arguing that “parents have the right to take certain things to the grave” (Sandell 2009a, 174), the latter is unmoved and unsympathetic, and, in a panel where her mother reminds her that loyalty to her family should come first, Laurie looks closely in the mirror of her bathroom cabinet, carefully applying mascara.1 This image indicates that she has already performed sufficient self-reflection and is unruffled by her mother’s use of both emotion and logic. By the end of a family story where the father never takes full responsibility for both his actions and their effect upon those around him, the mother does express some regret, as she implicitly apologizes to her daughter for not protecting her enough when she was a child, but she never delimits herself completely from her husband’s fabrications. The last 86 M. PRECUP family meal represented in the book shows a surreal scene where nobody confronts the father as he embarks on yet another one of his grandiose rants, in a wide panel where his speech bubble is so large that it nearly obliterates half the people seated around him. In the bottom half of the page, two panels show the other family members quietly listening and even encouraging him by pretending to believe stories which have already been proven false. By ceasing to collaborate with her father in the creation of his fantasies, the author is disqualified as a daughter and becomes a stranger in her home. In this context, her book is seen by some family members not as the first step toward healing, but as total betrayal. The father plot is not as straightforwardly followed as in, for instance, Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland, where the story gives very few details of the daughter’s personality, relationships, and career. Instead, The Impostor’s Daughter also contains several narrative patterns—such as the search for romantic fulfillment—that appear to align it with the premises of chick lit, particularly since the book features a white middle-class female protagonist who works in the media and is conventionally beautiful and slim. However, the book’s apparent affiliation with chick lit does not diminish its scope and purpose. As Joanne Knowles demonstrates, chick lit fictions are not entirely conservative and, in fact can be found to oscillate “between second-wave feminist concerns and postfeminist ones, in a way that is more ambivalent about both than criticism has recognized” (2017, 97). Knowles’s demonstration focuses specifically on scenes of “domestic disarray” produced around protagonists who ignore household chores custom- arily attributed to women, and are thus perceived to be “performing femininity inadequately, indeed, embodying ‘bad’ femininity—as bad partners and daughters, in particular” (2017, 98). Sandell is a member of a generation who matured after the second feminist wave and for whom finding a partner is still an important part of self-definition. Such a purpose, as expressed in a variety of literary genres written by and targeting women, stems from a variety of social pressures as well as from personal aspiration (Ferriss and Young 2006, 9), two sources that are difficult to disentangle. However, these expectations become secondary in The Impostor’s Daughter, which keeps returning to the search of a complete story of the father. This is meant to facilitate Laurie forming a more genuine relationship with him but also disambiguating her sense of her own identity. Identifying the “real” father is the key goal of the book, mainly because it can unlock the narrator’s own self-definition. 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 87

There are a few other plot elements, such as the narrator’s four-year journey through several countries as part of a chaotic attempt at self- realization, or her successful battle against alcohol and Ambien addiction after an eye-opening interview with actress Ashley Judd that may create expectations that The Impostor’s Daughter bears generic affiliations with soul-searching self-help bibles such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2006), part of a blockbuster autobiographical genre that has been pejo- ratively called “priv-lit” (Sanders 2010). Defined as “literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial” (Sanders 2010), priv-lit’s name is a reference to the financially privileged position from which such authors often speak. Priv-lit encourages people (particularly women, who are the core audience of this genre) to spend not only energy but also substantial sums of money to achieve spiritual enlightenment. The subtext of such self-help memoirs is “the antifeminist idea that women should become healthy so that people will like them, they will find partners, they’ll have money, and they’ll lose weight and be hot” (Sanders 2010). But in spite of its author’s relatively privileged financial situation that enables her to have access to a high-quality recovery facility that quite possibly saves her life, Laurie Sandell’s memoir steers clear of the self-enlightenment-through-consumerism doctrine preached by projects like Eat Pray Love and others.2 It does so by revealing the limitations of some of the recovery techniques from the clinic, particularly the family therapy sessions whose staged catharsis turns out to be superficial. I believe that it is also Sandell’s decision to opt for the medium of graphic narration that allows the author to pointedly distance her memoir from self-help literature.3 Through its choice of colors, the book’s aesthetic also borrows from that of glossy magazines and chick lit covers, but Laurie Sandell’s deceptively delicate and bright colors paint harsh truths about her father’s long history of deceiving his family, his theatrical larger-than-life persona, as well as his quick temper. The memoir boasts a rich color palette, and even the captions have backgrounds in its dominant colors, which I would broadly describe as appealing to contemporary conventions of femininity: various shades of purple, pink, orange, light green and blue. Laurie’s intimate spaces are painted purple (her room when she is living with her parents and her bedroom in New York); the father’s work space at home is a 88 M. PRECUP comforting pale green, while other domestic spaces are orange; the background for Laurie’s anti-climactic spiritual quest is light blue but also works as a background for Laurie’s work space and various revelations. Laurie’s longest-standing relationship—with Ben—is depicted in browns and a shade of terre verte and backgrounds which suggest that he is too down-to-earth, compared to the model of hot-and-cold masculinity she learns from her father. All in all, the choice of colors in the context of this subject may also suggest that dark secrets can and will hide even behind candy-colored spaces that seem to belong more in a children’s storybook than in a memoir about fatherhood and deception.

Fatherhood, Posturing, and Imposture Throughout The Impostor’s Daughter, Sandell constructs the image of a family that revolves around the father, whose frequent mood swings dominate the atmosphere of the home, but who also anchors the home in a (false) sense of security. William Sandell’s flaws do not completely cloud his good qualities; instead, it is his uneven performance as a father, oscil- lating between effusive praise and verbal abuse, that comes to define him. As the eldest of three daughters, Laurie has privileged access to her father, whom she sees as a larger-than-life figure, “strong and handsome—like an Italian tenor—with his generous gut and his thick black hair swept into a pompadour” (Sandell 2009a, 5), and we often see her listening to his stories riveted for hours. Introduced as a professor of economics at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California (a position he obtained by forging his credentials, as his daughter comes to realize), William Sandell’s talents as a pedagogue are focused on lecturing his daughter about geography, history, music, and many other subjects, without offering her the opportunity for much feedback. His posture often emphasizes the fact that he is in a position of authority: arms akimbo, furrowed brow, pound- ing his fist on the lectern. We often find William Sandell suddenly placed in the same panel as objects that would be more at home in a fairy-tale or adventure story, such as a large diamond or a 200-year-old wooden sword from the Peruvian jungle. However, as the narrative moves forward, his less heroic side also becomes apparent, particularly after he loses his teaching position and becomes a stay-at-home father. In this capacity, instead of taking care of the children, he embraces more traditionally male household tasks, such as home repairs, as Laurie has to cook, read detailed presentations about his 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 89 newest business schemes, and console him when he falls “into a black, unreachable hole for the day” (Sandell 2009a, 30). The Sandell household is thus organized according to a patriarchal hierarchy that places the father’s needs and intellectual abilities above those of the female members of the household, who idolize him and cater to his needs. The father is introduced as a trickster from the very beginning of the book, which loses none of its suspense for having revealed its premise up front. In fact, William Sandell’s very first and last lines from the book are fabrications; his daughter’s search for truth throughout this memoir is thus bracketed by the father’s devotion to his deception. At the beginning of the memoir, when he provides a confusing explanation as to why he has the mail stopped every time he leaves home on a trip, the dubious quality of his argument makes it easy to understand that he is not telling the truth. At the end of the book, when we see him presiding over a family meal and telling yet another fabricated tale, both the readers and everybody gathered around him know him to be dishonest. Still, the book is surprising not only because so is the inventory of fabrications offered by the father, but also because it shows to what extent other adults can be either unaware that they are being deceived or unwilling to investigate his statements more closely. As in Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland (discussed in this book in Chaps. 2, 3, and 5), the book’s cover (Fig. 4.1) contains the one visual element that is ubiquitous in all of the memoirs discussed in this book so far: a drawing of a photograph of the father. These cover images pay tribute to the important role of photography in the creation of intimate family stories, while also hinting at the difficulty of fully disambiguating the stories of the subjects they represent. On the cover of The Impostor’s Daughter, the edges of the picture indicate that it is a polaroid, hence a snapshot of William Sandell, taken more or less spontaneously. There are medals on his chest, one of which is a purple heart; pinned to a shirt that does not appear to be part of a military uniform, they look out of place in the context of the polaroid, which indicates a certain everyday- ness. The fake medals are only a few of William Sandell’s masks, as the title itself suggests. The man’s earnest gaze, pointed directly at the camera, blocks all access to the daughter’s facial features, and spells out the book’s main premises: that the father’s larger-than-life personality erases her own, and that his fabrications screen the daughter from her own identity. Placed at the bottom of the polaroid as a handwritten caption, the subtitle “A True 90 M. PRECUP

Fig. 4.1 The cover of Laurie Sandell’s The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir. (© Laurie Sandell)

Memoir” both emphasizes the word “true” and suggests its corrective function by inserting it through a V-shaped sign that conventionally introduces later additions to a text. However, with the exception of the cover image, Sandell’s use of the family archive does not show the same reliance on photography as the other memoirs about elusive fathers discussed in this book. Instead, she relies on a different archive: the comics she created 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 91 about her father as a child. As this chapter will show, Sandell’s childhood comics facilitate access not to past events per se, but to an interpretation of events and behavior that she witnessed as a child. In a chapter titled “Visions,” Sandell reproduces eight one-page cartoons of her father that she drew as a child, a small part of a 200-image series she created throughout her childhood.4 Most of these black-and- white reproductions of old caricatures are embedded in full-color segments that otherwise portray the father as a hero, idealized and idolized by his daughter. These are caricatures that often expose him as a lazy vacu- ous man, ridicule him for his weight, and one even suggests that he may be having an affair with his secretary (his father’s infidelity is later confirmed). In one of them (Fig. 4.2), Laurie has given him an oversized head perched on a disproportionately tiny body, lazily half-opened eyes, and a

Fig. 4.2 Childhood cartoon by Laurie Sandell. (© Laurie Sandell) 92 M. PRECUP hairy wart on his enormous nose. He is hunched on all fours, and even though it appears that perhaps someone (maybe his wife) has thrown a chair at his head, he seems placidly unaffected. Everything around him is in complete chaos: there is a large spot on the wall labeled “Karyn did this,” next to an almost finished exclamatory sentence, “Daddy is fat!!!” that one of his daughters is in the process of adding to the wall while another little girl is looking in from a window, laughing out loud and pointing. There are scraps of paper taped to the wall alongside a reproduction of the Mona Lisa torn in half and a large scroll that seems to contain unreadable scribbles about “how to understand your mother in 3 easy steps” (Sandell 2009a, 18). There is nothing about the figure of the father, on all fours, appearing to ask for forgiveness from his irate wife, that reminds readers of the well-respected figure of the patriarch that emerges from the rest of the narrative. There is also nothing about his carnivalesque environment, full of characters who wreak havoc around him, that reminds one of the atmosphere otherwise depicted in the Sandell home. In the other childhood cartoons reproduced in The Impostor’s Daughter, the father remains a character in a slapstick comedy full of private references: he is either in a dog cage about to be fed “dog mush” (an object of ridicule as a little girl laughs at him and points), ogling half-dressed women in the shower in what is perhaps a locker room, sweating profusely as he is lifting a heavyset woman, or engrossed in his own filing business, oblivious to the messy apartment or its other inhabitants. The cartoons produced by Sandell are not only humorous and clearly the work of a talented and observant child, but they are also an uncensored peek at the author’s perception of life behind the curtain of the Sandell family. Moreover, they are means of communicating with the father that offer some agency to the daughter, by positioning the conversation outside of their regular dynamic, where he talks and she listens. Here, the father is both the laughable target of the jokes and the beloved recipient of this substantial work. In fact, Sandell tells us, he relished his daughter’s cartoons and kept them all, in an archive that ironically came to haunt him. These images seem to indicate that the daughter was able to grasp some hidden element underneath her father’s daily posturing, and these are attempts to portray him without a mask as a lazy lascivious man who should be punished for his transgressions. They are also safe attempts to disclose barely articulated truths, since they remain confined to the private space and are sanctioned by the father himself.5 There are several visual metaphors that Sandell uses for her father, and they suggest both that her love for him elevated him above his actual 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 93 merits, and that they temporarily clouded her judgment about the extent of his deception. For instance, he is depicted as the Wizard of Oz, taken aback when Laurie-as-Dorothy pulls back the curtain and stares in shock at the master manipulator. The open curtain also reveals an incomprehensible mechanism with a large lever placed behind the father, an image that suggests that his secrets are nested one inside the other like Russian dolls. In fact, so powerful is Laurie’s adulation that in one image William Sandell is pictured as an angry god clad in a purple robe, a halo on his head and a gold scepter in his hand, against a throne with jagged edges that match his rage. Another larger-than-life representation of the father is from a childhood cartoon, where a little girl looks at a large statuesque representation of William Sandell and wonders if she is looking at Mount Rushmore. By the end of the book, as the narrator decides to end her quest and embarks on a better-rounded life, the father returns to human proportions, if somewhat diminished by the extent of his continued deception.

Familiar Violence In the Sandell household, psychological, verbal, and even physical violence is normalized, and depicted in scenes where Laurie appears to be the main recipient of her father’s many outbursts. Such moments are usually introduced in wider and larger panels, with bigger captions and word bubbles, as the father’s facial features are magnified and distorted by the passion of his rage. The father’s abusive conduct is initially attributed to his “angry Argentine DNA” (Sandell 2009a, 5), a stereotypical reading of his personality that does not pass the test of time. Upon one such occasion, he is pictured screaming and hurling insults as well as various objects at Laurie, while her mother is upstairs, peacefully practicing the cello after having asked the father to “take it to the basement” (Sandell 2009a, 31). The subsequent scene, where he angrily throws a plastic bottle of Tab at Laurie’s head as she manages to avoid getting hit, is evidence of the routine manner in which every member of the household treats such violent episodes. The structure of the page replicates that of the house: a narrow panel at the top depicts the “odds ‘n’ ends” in the attic; two panels below (one pink, the other purple) represent Laurie and Sylvie’s respective rooms. Even further below, the mother practices the cello as Karyn draws something on a sheet of paper. The mother looks peaceful, apparently oblivious to the violent scene unfolding in the basement, but both of Laurie’s sisters look apprehensive, and Sylvie is wearing headphones (which suggests that 94 M. PRECUP she needs to block out the sound of the argument). The only connection with the scene from the basement, placed in a wide panel at the very bottom of the page, is made by the musical notes that emerge from the mother’s instrument and travel all the way down until they almost collide with the projectile flying above Laurie’s head. As it is clear that the notes are able to make their way down, one cannot help but wonder, with the narrator, why the reverse movement (of the sound of the father’s violent behavior) does not seem to register: “Once we went downstairs, my mother seemed not to hear it at all, though I could still hear her music; it was a soundtrack to our fights” (Sandell2009a , 32). The mother’s placid lack of involvement legitimizes and facilitates her husband’s behavior. As Laurie’s development as an adult demonstrates, this type of emotional and physical abuse has predictable and serious repercussions.6 The familiarity of violence haunts the narrative, even though not much is said about the content of the fights. However, the panels where the father’s anger is represented are among the largest in the book and testify to the magnitude of his emotion and the powerful impact it had on his daughter. One of the detrimental effects the narrator herself identifies is the fact that she tends to place herself in potentially dangerous situations and endures abusive behavior because “naïve stoicism in the face of peril” is “second nature” (Sandell 2009a, 57). Leigh Gilmore points out the destructive consequences of the normalization of familial violence in a chapter on Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart (1994), the renowned memoir where the author attempts to dig through the deception and violence at the heart of his family: “The ongoingness of violence within families, its incorporation into a family culture, renders it all too familiar. The endless- ness of this trauma is frequently represented as haunting, in which the present feels stalked by a past that will not stay properly buried; or as dis- sociation, where the boundary between past and present, dead and living, is overwhelmed by a sense of their interpenetration, mutual incorporation, and simultaneity” (2001, 92). The trauma of William Sandell’s early abusive conduct does not manifest in the more familiar materializations of PTSD—such as hallucinations, nightmares, or flashbacks—but in more discreet insidious ways that can generate other forms of violence, such as self-harm through drug and alcohol abuse. The father’s anger is not merely troubling because it results in verbal abuse, but also because it is usually accompanied by more or less veiled threats. In a scene during their last confrontation, when the father attempts to presumably cast doubt over incriminating information Laurie obtains 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 95 from his half-sister Elsa, he suggests that it is possible that his own father did not commit suicide, but was in fact poisoned by his wife and daughter. In a wide panel that occupies a third of the page, his suddenly angry, bloodshot eyes emerge from a cropped close-up of his face that allow enough space for his upper teeth to show. The words in his speech bubble are quite large, to suggest that he is shouting or speaking emphatically. “I could have liquidated them both” (Sandell 2009a, 181), the father claims, to Laurie’s alarm; while he rapidly reassures her, with tears in his eyes, that he loves her and would not attempt to harm her, his professed love appears to be limited by his refusal to detach himself from his own fabricated narrative. As she tries again and again to give him “one last chance to be a father” by taking responsibility for his deception and confessing the truth, all she is able to obtain is more anger. William Sandell justifies some of his fabrications, particularly those related to his education, by presenting them as attempts to bypass a flawed system of higher education that supports privilege: “I’ll tell you who I really am: I am one of the most erudite, educated, and cultured men you will ever meet. I know people who have FIVE PhDs who aren’t as smart as I am” (Sandell 2009a, 182). His temporary academic success does, in fact, indicate some of the flaws of the academic system where he manages to teach without degrees. While the narrative logic of the book does not condone them, Laurie’s Argentinian investigation supports the theory that part of the motivation for her father’s conduct was his sense that he was unfairly placed in an inferior social position through circumstances outside of his control. The Impostor’s Daughter shows that it is possible to perform a successful investigation of a person’s destructive behavior to understand—but not condone—the factors that contributed to its creation. The issue of mental health is never fully approached when it comes to the father’s conduct, and, in fact, in the absence of a diagnosis given by a professional, it is only possible to generally classify his behavior as consistent with either psychopathy or narcissism.7 However, instead of attempting to diagnose her father (which would have pushed the narrative toward guesswork and speculation), Sandell employs the working methods of her trade. As a journalist, she understands that she needs to investigate the source of the story as far back as possible. Thus, she not only hires a private investigator and personally calls every person her father might have wronged, but also takes a trip to Argentina to interview his father’s stepsister. It is here that she discovers several possible factors that may have contributed to her father’s conduct: after his parents’ divorce, he was raised by his mother, an 96 M. PRECUP indifferent parent who preferred the company of men to her son. As a consequence, the child spent most of his time with his new family in a house whose exterior, when Laurie visits, points out their vastly different standard of living: “All I saw, when I looked at the house, was everything my father had been denied. It was a house—and a life—that made him pretend to be everything he wasn’t” (Sandell 2009a, 173). Following an incident that anticipates future unlawful behavior (he cleans out one of his father’s bank accounts), he is disinherited, even though his father still protects him and helps him flee the country after he deserts from the army. These details suggest that William Sandell’s conduct is at least in part attributable to his early education, but the moral logic of the book does not work this argument into a proposed exoneration. The realization that the father’s family background may have been responsible for his lifelong addiction to deceptive behavior prompts the daughter to offer compassion, but not forgiveness. There is no final reconciliation in The Impostor’s Daughter, not because the daughter does not seek it, but because the father refuses to acknowledge and apologize for the damaging effects of his actions. Instead, in a scene that takes place three and a half years after their initial confrontation, during which time they do not speak, he appeals to stale techniques of persuasion and manipulation: he brings a cane and sits down with some difficulty, reproaches her with sullying his good name, claims to have been/might still be suicidal, and finally turns to threats. Other attempted moments of reconciliation are debunked as theatrical, their catharsis a false promise as the daughter reads her father’s dishonesty as evidence that his professions of affection for her may also be insincere.

Fatherhood and the Pedagogy of Deception William Sandell’s deception implicates his children in his lies not only by teaching them moral relativism but also by asking them to confirm them as truthful. Sandell’s memoir inventories and revises her father’s lies in an attempt to investigate her family’s credulity. One of the factors that may have contributed to their obliviousness is that these vary in degree and kind, and their sheer volume is overpowering, a strategy that helps con- fuse his interlocutors, who are—as family members who love him—already biased in his favor. For example, while it sounds plausible that he may have received a law degree from NYU and a PhD from Columbia, it is perhaps less believable that he wrote position papers for Kissinger and sat 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 97 on the National Security Council, or that he is able to identify “every piece of classical music” (Sandell 2009a, 7). This information is placed side by side as an overwhelming amalgamation of what might have been truths, half-truths, and lies. When Laurie begins to interview her father for the Esquire story she writes about him and has to make a few phone calls to fact-check her source, the enormity of his lies begins to present itself.8 During the recorded interviews that Sandell quotes from in her book, her father mentions that he spent some time with Henry Kissinger, who later offered him a position as a consultant to the National Security Council (2009a, 65), that he “parachuted into the Vietnamese jungle with General Westmoreland,” “become [sic] pan pals with Pope John Paul II” (2009a, 66), but also that he was once in a duel in Argentina, as well as other stories of adventure and even bloodshed. In one panel, we see her shrinking as she is listening to these stories, once again in awe of her father’s exploits, reverting to her younger wide-eyed self, perched on the edge of her seat, listening to her father with her mouth open in anticipation, covering her face with her hands. In the next panel, adult Laurie returns, arms akimbo and a skeptical look in her eye, reserved but still enjoying their rediscov- ered comradeship. As she postpones checking her source, it becomes evident that, at this stage, their closeness does depend on complicity. There are several self-deprecating humorous hints in the text that may suggest to readers that the father’s deception could have been easier to detect. The most shrewd and jaded observer of William’s suspicious activities seems to be the family’s cat, the only unbiased witness of the Sandells’ daily life. For instance, when the father proclaims his above-average intelligence to an awe-struck young Laurie, who is sitting on his lap and gazing up at him lovingly, the cat perched on the arm of the sofa behind Laurie rolls its eyes just as William boasts about being a member of Mensa “by quite a few points” (Sandell 2009a, 6). On another occasion, when he says good-night to Laurie after regaling her with stories from his latest trip and she protests loudly at his premature departure, the cat curled up in Laurie’s bed looks both unmoved and skeptical. The cat also seems disdainful when the father laments his lack of success after he loses his teaching job. When it comes upon two drawings taped to a door, the bottom one a drawing of a cat door and the top one labelling the bottom one as a cat door, the cat gazes at this latest home improvement project with a knowing look that suggests it might not materialize. The cat is not the only indicator that there are clues about the father’s deception, as Sandell constructs scenes where she drops hints that create 98 M. PRECUP humorous moments at the expense of her own past self. These are not recollections, but revisions of her past, where she sometimes uses period detail to critique her family’s naiveté. For instance, in a panel where father and daughter are in Laurie’s room, demonstratively reconciling after a fight, there is an element that playfully suggests that the father’s conduct is not examined sufficiently by the other members of the household: out of the upper right hand corner of the panel, from the screen of a TV smiles the mustachioed face of Tom Selleck in an intro sequence from Magnum, P.I. A similar instance that combines references to items of contemporary popular culture with potential hints at the family’s inadequate detective skills is a T-shirt Laurie is wearing in a scene where she and her sister Sylvie discover the fact that their father has written and published an article in Sylvie’s name in a school magazine. The T-shirt is inscribed with the name of The Thompson Twins, a band that was popular in the 1980s, but it is also an allusion to two bumbling detectives from Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin (Puterbaugh 1984). In another scene, as father and daughter are able to have lunch in the Delegates Dining Room at the UN Headquarters as a result of yet another ruse of the father’s (who claims she is two years older), they are literally portrayed as starry-eyed romantics who gaze lovingly at each other as the father lifts his glass to one of the people at a nearby table, whom he identifies as “ambassador Youssef Mahmoud of Burundi” (Sandell 2009a, 28). As William Sandell salutes the ambassador, the reader—but not Laurie—can see the man is slightly embarrassed, attempting to avoid the interaction, and not touching his glass, which is still on the table. This is a scene of seduction, like several others in the book, as its denouement sees Laurie and William taking a carriage ride through Central Park. A close-up of the carriage under the stars—looking as if it were flying through the sky—shows the father smiling contentedly as he cradles his sleeping daughter in his arms, enjoying the false sense of security: “As long as he was there, I felt safe” (Sandell 2009a, 28). Such scenes are also instantly already rewritten for the reader by the narrative voice of an older, more experienced Laurie, so that they acquire a sinister air. Some of these instances are clearly more deliberate authorial choices than others, but they are all part of a visual representation of fatherhood that requires that the reader cultivate a particular kind of attention to backgrounds, corners, and other apparently marginal elements of the panel. The medium of comics does encourage rereading and cultivating a detective gaze, but this is compounded here by the father’s secrecy and dissimulation. 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 99

With the father as intermediary and facilitator, the children learn to use deception even as they attempt to resist and control the situation. For instance, Laurie takes credit for science school projects that her father makes, but also accomplishments she does not earn, as when she joins the Brownies and her father convinces her that she does not need to earn badges, but can simply display them. On all occasions, but to varying degrees, the father abuses his position of power to such an extent that he forces the children to be accomplices to his deceptiveness: when Laurie asks for help with an assignment on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, he simply writes it himself and, when she protests, he angrily hurls her notebook at her. In a different situation, he surreptitiously publishes an essay in a sixth-grade student magazine in his daughter Sylvie’s name, and attempts to clear up any questions about the dubiousness of his action by adding a mortifying note that reads: “My daddy helped me write this story” (Sandell 2009a, 38).9 These are also failed teaching moments, much like the scene from Fun Home when the father sits down to correct his daughter’s use of color in a Wind in the Willows coloring book, a gesture of creative control that has a long-term effect on Alison Bechdel’s future work. Another result of being in the presence of the father’s psychopathic behavior during her formative years is Laurie’s inability to meaningfully connect to people whose position or personality does not require her to use the extensive set of skills she acquires from her interaction with him. This helps her work as a celebrity interviewer, where she relies on her lifelong practice of listening to her larger-than-life father speak at length, as well as offering validation to fabricated public personas. While these skills may temporarily work in her favor, her (related) inability to truthfully project her own opinions and sentiments ends up negatively affecting her other interactions, most notably her romantic relationships. The representation of the damaging long-term effects of the father’s conduct upon the narrator does not, however, scapegoat him by proposing a narrative where the daughter, as an adult, is completely absolved from responsibility. At the same time, the gravity of some of these consequences makes the father’s stubborn adherence to his fraudulent tales (even after Laurie’s article) more difficult to comprehend. Tethered to such a precarious and volatile role model, Laurie eventually becomes unmoored, unable to identify long-term goals, desires, or pin down her own personality and even sexual identity. In a chapter titled “Flight,” she depicts some of her international travels right after college, with particular focus on a two-year time period spent in Israel, during which she becomes 100 M. PRECUP

Fig. 4.3 Title panel to “Flight” chapter. (© Laurie Sandell) involved in an experimental same-sex relationship, and a trip to Japan, where she works briefly as a hostess and an exotic dancer. The title panel of this section is reminiscent of a “chick lit” cover,10 and seems to announce “priv-lit” content (Fig. 4.3). The Laurie character is white, slim, stylish, and in her 20s; she is walking knee-deep in a light blue sea, dressed in a short orange dress, purple highlights in her bob, and gazing backward—a standard posture for contemplation and/or abandonment of a past life. This, together with the use of pastel colors, and, finally, the objects that float around the title character (featuring a bottle of 1992 Clos Erasmus wine, a pack of Marlboros, a thong with two green bills inserted in the front, among others) suggests that this is a section of the book at the end of which the narrator is meant to emerge more spiritually advanced and ready to confront her past. However, through the text in the narrative 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 101 box, this chapter undermines the well-circulated idea that international travel can guarantee some form of enlightenment: “The next four years were an exercise in self-destruction. I was willing to be anything, try anything, as long as it didn’t resemble the life I was living before” (Sandell 2009a, 53). Instead, the narrator’s decisions are damaging to herself and others, and yield no special insight or other significant benefits. As she fashions a public identity that she can use to bond with potential romantic partners, she uses her father’s many stories as a business card: “If I held onto any sense of self at all, it was the story I kept in my back pocket—the one I told about my father. I used it to bond with men” (Sandell 2009a, 61). The father’s fabricated identity thus obscures her own and this episode is only the beginning of a series of events that could have proved fatal. Thus, the author’s investigation of her father’s real life story is also part of her struggle to stay alive.

Conclusion The Impostor’s Daughter is dedicated to “all the truth tellers”; both the subtitle and the dedication show that, in this context, it is important for the author to emphasize “truth” above the well-theorized idea that “fictions and the fiction-making process are a central constituent of the truth of any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to the presentation of that life” (Eakin 1985). Sandell’s main objective is that she obtains a recitation of a version of her father’s life where he would be able to rectify his many fabrications. It becomes apparent, however, that, while the father is unable to be honest, he is the very definition of sincere, for at least part of the narrative, in the sense of “confronting one’s innermost thoughts or emotions and relaying them to others straightforwardly, no matter how relevant to the topic, injurious to one’s own reputation, or embarrassing—or however correct or incorrect” (Magill 2012, 13). William Sandell bears the verbal and gestural markings of someone who is emphatically and declaratively sincere, as he also seems to believe some his own falsehoods. At the same time, he often expresses unfiltered feelings to a captive audience with no regard for reality or consequences. By requiring honesty, instead of sincerity, the narrator loses access to a father who had never, in fact, been available or fully present for his family.11 In his many autobiographical recitations, where he composes an outlandish version of himself as a hero, martyr, and adventurer, William Sandell betrays the much-quoted “autobiographical pact” theorized by 102 M. PRECUP

Philippe Lejeune, since his signature does not coincide with the name of the protagonist and the narrator of his narrative. He has even changed his name from Schmidt to Sandell, allegedly because it was “too difficult to pronounce” (Sandell 2009a, 40). It is only much later that Laurie, in a conversation with his stepsister Elsa, discovers that the change of name is attributable to yet another dubious scheme of her father’s, “something to do with a bank he was working for in New York” (Sandell 2009a, 169). As it turns out that there is no overlap among “the author, the narrator and the protagonist” (Lejeune 1989, 5), his ultimate refusal to reclassify his so-called life stories as fictional products of his rich imagination both blocks Laurie’s access to his life story and incentivizes her to start writing The Impostor’s Daughter. The Impostor’s Daughter is also a project about the harsh consequences of the work of writing an autobiography that is so focused on a parent, because, as a “relational” genre (Freadman 2004, 128), it implicates many willing and unwilling subjects. By the end of the memoir, Sandell is a lone voice of reason, a “bad daughter” who insists on uncovering the truth even as other family members choose to remain the father’s collaborators; it is only by offering this unquestioning allegiance to his blatant non- truths that they can obtain his love and retain access to him. From this perspective, Sandell’s book is a rare window into that complicated subject position that lies somewhere between victim and offender12: the bystander. It shows one possible explanation why so many bystanders accept to look away and learn to silence their curiosity, particularly in the presence of an offender who is also a family member: the knowledge that they have always been less important to that person than his ability to commit the offence without consequences. This is the role played to a certain extent by all Sandell family members, but primarily by Laurie’s mother, whose allegiance is always to her husband, even though she does have reservations. In this case, the daughter’s insubordination produces a critique of her family’s adherence to a patriarchal logic that labels her investigation as vindictive and unreasonable, and marks her as an outsider. Sandell’s narrator appears to belong to a model of insubordination of the “bad girl” as detective, but her book’s aesthetic sensibilities—borrowing from chick lit and glossy magazines—also draw attention to the feminist potential of popular culture genres and media that are often dismissed as irrelevant or reactionary. The book’s detective work is important not only because of the results it yields—which are, in fact, quite impressive acts of detective and journalistic 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 103 investigation—but also because it severs the connection between the father’s deeds and the daughter’s ethics. By not presenting the process as cathartic, but instead as tortuous and frustrating, Sandell distances herself from the premises of priv-lit that some plot points appear to indicate, and is able to produce a nuanced portrait of both the father and her own predicament. The book’s final revelation provides a definition of the good father as everything that William Sandell is not: “I knew then I was never going to have a father who would ask me how I was doing, listen to my opinions, or worry about my emotional well-being” (Sandell 2009a, 244).13 This short list of modest expectations suggests how entrenched the father’s resistance to change is if it prevents him from meeting even such reasonable standards. At the same time, it hints at the fact that parenthood—particularly when the child is already an adult—needs to be based on consistent care and compassion rather than spectacular self- projections meant to keep the child forever in awe of her elders.

Notes 1. Throughout this chapter, I use “Laurie” to refer to the autobiographical persona created in the comic, and “(Laurie) Sandell” to refer to the author of the book. 2. By the end of the book, the narrator ceases to rely on her father as a source of self-definition and is attempting to forge her own path, partly inspired by advice she receives during her stay at Shades of Hope, a recovery center recommended to her by actress Ashley Judd. There are subjects the memoir does not approach, such as the financial side of the narrator’s recovery and spiritual enlightenment, or the matter of her father’s many business casualties. While it is clear that the narrator is financially comfortable because she has a well-paying profession, the memoir does not mention the state of her parents’ finances after the bank forecloses on their home or, in fact, what William Sandell may have done with the impressive amounts of money that he received from well-meaning investors. It is suggested that he lost it on imprudent schemes and that some people received financial compensation. 3. In a YouTube presentation of the memoir, a short audio clip plays her father’s voice, a fragment from a series of recordings of his (false) life story. William Sandell sounds a lot like the bombastic and riveting storyteller pictured in The Impostor’s Daughter. In the same clip, Sandell also describes her creative process: she first wrote a traditional book, but decided to give it up, realizing that she needed “the buffer of cartooning” instead of “just 104 M. PRECUP

this naked prose on the page.” She does not think of herself as a cartoonist, but as “a writer who happens to be able to draw”; however, she feels that, “in this case, the story dictated the form” (Sandell 2009b). 4. In an interview, Sandell likens them to the caricatures one would get at Bar Mitzvahs as party favors (Sandell 2011b), but throughout the book she does not embed them—or any other elements from her past—in the way her family may have practiced Judaism. Sandell does mention that her family belongs to Reform Judaism, but that her father seems to know “next to nothing” about his faith (Sandell 2011b). 5. Sandell has repeatedly referred to this archive as contributing to her decision to write a graphic memoir instead of a traditional book (Sandell 2009b, c). 6. The extent of William Sandell’s emotional abuse becomes evident as the narrator shows that he is unwilling to apologize after such scenes, and instead manipulates his daughter to apologize to him. In one such scene of tearful reconciliation, the daughter apologizes because she guesses she may have provoked her father in some manner and because she “didn’t have his stamina for holding a grudge” (Sandell 2009a, 33), while the father provides the confusing explanation that the reason he is verbally abusive of Laurie in particular is because they are “so alike” (Sandell 2009a, 33). It appears to be more likely that, as his eldest child grows older, he feels threatened and fearful of the moment when his answers to her questions might prove insufficient. 7. For more information on the definition of psychopathy, see Hare (1993) and Kiehl (2014). Although William Sandell’s conduct as it emerges from her daughter’s memoir appears to check many elements off the list used to diagnose psychopathy, outside of the frame of a professional assessment, it is impossible to assess this with any degree of certainty. 8. Even though Esquire is not named in the book, and neither are other magazines she worked for, presumably for legal reasons, the list of publications from Sandell’s website, lauriesandell.com, lists her anonymous article about her father as having been published in Esquire. 9. As the children grow up, the father simply stops asking for permission and places his entire family in situations that can and do have long-standing effects on their future: he takes out multiple credit cards in all of his immediate family members’ names, something that negatively affects their credit score and places them in unpleasant situations. 10. In the introduction to their collection of essays about chick lit, editors Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young provide a link to a checklist that can help readers assess whether they have purchased chick lit or not. The first element is the book cover: “1) Does the book’s cover: a) feature a shot of a woman’s legs or torso, b) present the book’s title in a loopy script, c) 4 “AS LONG AS HE WAS THERE, I FELT SAFE”: FATHERHOOD, DECEPTION… 105

contain bright, appealing, Easter-egg-like pastels or d) otherwise appear an irresistibly delicious confection?” (qtd. in Skurnick 2003). 11. For more on sincerity and authenticity, see Trilling (1973) and Haselstein, Gross, and Snyder-Körber (2010). 12. Based on Laurie Sandell’s discoveries, her father broke the law on more than one occasion; even though he was not arrested, there is evidence that his behavior was unlawful and hurtful to many. Even though by the end of the book we do not find out the outcome of several lawsuits against him and even his wife, these are some of the actions that the daughter’s investigation reveals: one family gives him 340,000 dollars for investments (Sandell 2009a, 87), a family friend gives him 13,000 dollars (Sandell 2009a, 143), and there is evidence that various other people Laurie approaches have been tricked into giving her father money but refuse to provide details about the outcome of their investments. 13. The resolution to write and publish the memoir appears on the very last page of The Impostor’s Daughter, not as a means of liberating herself from any expectations that her family might embrace her ethical perspective, but as a result of the fact that her expectations for positive change simply expire.

References Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Eakin, Paul John. 1985. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self- Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young. 2006. Introduction. In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, ed. Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Freadman, Richard. 2004. Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father’s Life. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 121–146. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Hare, Robert D. 1993. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York/London: The Guilford Press. Haselstein, Ulla, Andrew Gross, and Maryann Snyder-Körber, eds. 2010. The Pathos of Authenticity. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Kiehl, Kent A. 2014. The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience. New York: Broadway Books. Knowles, Joanne. 2017. The Dirty Secret: Domestic Disarray in Chick Lit. In Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, ed. Julie A. Chappell and Mallory Young, 97–117. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 106 M. PRECUP

Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Magill, R. Jay, Jr. 2012. Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars | modern art | hipster chic | and the curious notion that we ALL have something to say (no matter how dull). New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. Porter, Roger. 2011. Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Puterbaugh, Parke. 1984. Why the Thompson Twins Don’t Add Up. Rolling Stone, July 19. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/why- the-thompson-twins-dont-add-up-40761/. Accessed 17 July 2018. Sandell, Laurie. 2009a. The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir. New York/ Boston/London: Little, Brown and Company. ———. 2009b. My Father the Fraudster. Marie Claire, June 22. https://www. marieclaire.com/culture/news/a3137/imposters-daughter-laurie-sandell/. Accessed 17 July 2018. ———. 2009c. Laurie Sandell discusses her new graphic memoir, THE IMPOSTOR’S DAUGHTER. lauriesan01, November 27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxAKTBPJsFk. Accessed 17 July 2018. ———. 2011a. Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family. New York/ Boston/London: Little, Brown and Company. ———. 2011b. Graphic Details: Interview with Laurie Sandell. Jewish Women’s Archive, March 29. https://jwa.org/blog/graphic-details-interview-lauriesandell. Accessed 17 July 2018. ———. 2014. When Baby Comes Before Happily Ever After. Real Simple, August 17. https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/family/kids-parenting/lauriesandell. Accessed 17 July 2018. Sanders, Joshunda. 2010. Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream. Bitch Media, May 14. https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/ eat-pray-spend. Accessed 17 July 2018. Skurnick, Lizzie. 2003. Chick Lit 101. Orlando Weekly, November 20. https:// www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando/chick-lit-101/Content?oid=2260390. Accessed 17 July 2018. Trilling, Lionel. 1973. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, Mallory. 2017. Introduction: Bad Girls in Popular Culture. In Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, ed. Julie A. Chappell and Mallory Young, 1–11. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. CHAPTER 5

“To dream of birds”: The Father as Potential Perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s “August, 1977” and Fatherland

Nina Bunjevac’s work occupies an important place in both the Canadian and the Serbian community of alternative comics not only because of the author’s double national allegiance,1 but also because she is deeply invested in exploring topics that foreground crucial aspects of both cultural spaces, with a focus on the marginal and the displaced. Part of the second generation of Canadian alternative cartoonists, alongside creators like Joe Ollmann (whose work I discuss in Chap. 7 of this book), Kate Beaton, Jillian Tamaki, Sarah Leavitt, Jeff Lemire, and others,2 Bunjevac acknowledges the influence of underground American cartoonists such as Drew Friedman, Kim Deitch, Basil Wolverton, and Charles Burns (Bunjevac 2015), but also film directors Lindsay Anderson, Dušan Makavejev, François Truffaut, and Elia Kazan (Bunjevac 2013). Trained as a painter and sculptor, Bunjevac has been creating comics since 2004, and her initial contributions were mainly published in independent magazines such as Mineshaft, where she introduced some of the diverse and eccentric characters that populate her first collection of short stories,Heartless (2012).3 At the same time, she also became active in the Serbian alternative comics scene, where she participated in various events and co-edited (with Irena Jukić Pranjić) the English version of the first collection of comics by female artists from former Yugoslavia, titled Balkan Comics: Women on the Fringe, which is yet to be released (Jukić Pranjić 2012). Bunjevac’s second book, the critically acclaimed graphic memoir Fatherland (2014), which has already been translated into several languages, is the space where the

© The Author(s) 2020 107 M. Precup, The Graphic Lives of Fathers, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_5 108 M. PRECUP author attempts to piece together the puzzle of her father’s identity, a task made more difficult by the fact that he was part of a Serbian ultranationalist group active in Canada and the United States and died in 1977, together with two other men from his “saboteur unit,” in an accidental explosion as they were preparing for an attack. His actions were apparently part of a planned series of attacks on Yugoslav outposts in Toronto, Hamilton, New York, Chicago, and other North American cities (Bunjevac 2015). Peter Bunjevac’s political involvement makes his identity difficult to disentangle, as it places him somewhere in the maze of the many threads that compose the complicated network of political and cultural factors that have made former Yugoslavia such a contested space.4 Unlike Heartless, which is a collection of mainly fictional short stories, Fatherland is part autobiography, part biography, and part history lesson. A few issues may have complicated the author’s creative process and are also the premise of my own analysis in this chapter: Bunjevac does not remember her father, as she was only one year old when she last saw him and three years old when he died; her father was a man who would have taken lives had he not died himself; and, finally, it is not possible to extricate the life of a person who became a potential perpetrator from the historical events and political forces that contributed to his (un)making. In other words, Fatherland is a memoir about an absent father, written by a daughter who does not remember him, and who has to rely on family members’ stories, the family archive of letters and photographs, as well as substantial research into Yugoslav history in order to be able to piece together not only the coherent image of an absent family member, but also a levelheaded investigation into the making of a perpetrator. As a consequence, Fatherland is less a book about identity than it is about cause-and-effect; less a loving portrait of a father who is missed in spite of his problematic conduct (as in Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home) and more a deliberately unemotional meditation on the effects of history on the individual, and the power of ideology to separate a man from his family. In this sense, it also belongs with other graphic memoirs that investigate family members involved in perpetration, such as Dutch cartoonist Peter Pontiac’s Kraut (2000)—where he attempts to understand his father’s involvement in the SS—and, more recently, German-American author Nora Krug’s Heimat (2018)—an examination of her uncle’s and her maternal grandfather’s allegiance to the Nazi Party. Like Fatherland, such books are important attempts to find answers about a troubled past through the use of personal and public archives, but also 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 109 evidence of the limitations of research, particularly when it comes to reconstructing the moral justification of family members’ involvement in a culture of perpetration. For the most part, Fatherland relies on visual props such as maps and photographs that suggest its allegiance to realistic representation. As a consequence, at first sight, the book bears the visual markings of something between a travelogue and a history book, where the domestic scenes are overpowered by external factors. The careful explanations of various chains of events and biographical data that accompany drawings of photographs make the historical sections of Fatherland read less like sequential narration and more like a scrapbook that documents the making of a national and personal tragedy. In this chapter, I attempt to answer a few questions: What is the contribution made by Bunjevac’s graphic memoir to the rich autobiographical tradition of North American alternative comics more generally, and to the representation of paternal absence more specifically? What does the author’s extensive use of drawings of photographs say about memory in a comic where she uses photorealism to represent unwitnessed events? What is the role of predominantly static visual elements and a slow and steady narrative rhythm in a graphic memoir about displacement, loss, and violent national upheavals? Because of the father’s involvement in an organization whose ramifi- cations go back to World War II, the biographical and the historical seem to overpower the autobiographical in Fatherland. Still, these dimensions are also deftly connected, and the book’s blend of several autobiographical subgenres generates contributions to the portrait of the author’s lost father and country. In fact, it becomes apparent early on that Fatherland is not, like other more straightforwardly autobiographical texts, primarily focused on the recovery of the signature of the main narrative “I.” This happens because the book is placed at the intersection of—to use Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s catalogue—a few related genres: auto/ biography; autothanatography, which focuses on illness and death “by performing a life at a limit of its own, or another’s, undoing” (2010, 188); the collaborative life narrative, where the story is told by more than one narrator; the survivor narrative, for which an alternative term is “trauma narrative;” and, last but not least, the memoir. Throughout this chapter, I rely on the last term not only because it is more inclusive, but also, in this specific case, because the memoir can be defined as a type of life writing that “historically situates the subject in a social environment, as either observer or participant,” and that “directs attention more 110 M. PRECUP toward the lives and actions of others than to the narrator” (Smith and Watson 2010, 198). Considering the subject of Fatherland, I also place Bunjevac’s book in the wider conversation about how Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (1997) can be reconceptualized when utilized by the children of perpetrators. In Germany, this kind of literature—related to the Holocaust—is also known sometimes as “Väterliteratur, or the literature of fathers” (McGlothlin 2006, 14); this term suggests not only the male- dominated Nazi culture of perpetration, but also the deeply personal family connection of those who choose to write about this experience. While Hirsch herself indicated that the term could be applied to experiences outside of the range of the Holocaust, it is only recently that some critics have started paying attention to how children of perpetrators may experience postmemory. Dealing with a history of violence that is often “unin- tegrable” in the wider family history (McGlothlin 2006, 10), this kind of literature deals with the “unacknowledged crimes” of the parents (McGlothlin 2006, 9). One of the concerns that have been raised about this type of work is whether it can avoid positioning the children as victims of their parents’ ideology in a discourse that produces “lamentation,” instead of a substantial reflection on the past (Berberich2011 , 268). Eva Hoffman reinforces this point by proposing that, instead of being considered through the lens of trauma, perpetrators and their children should be viewed through the tragic mode (qtd. in McGlothlin 2006, 6). However, a more recent take on this subject suggests that it is necessary to consider the fact that perpetrators (and, by extension, their children) can be traumatized by their crimes, that trauma is not a psychological reaction of victims only, that ignoring this aspect can prevent efforts of rehabilitation and reconciliation, and encourage a reading of any perpetrator as a monster instead of an ordinary person who was caught up in a series of circumstances whose better understanding can prevent similar future acts of perpetration (Mohamed 2015). This is in keeping with the view that evil, definable as “the deliberate harming of humans by other humans” (Waller 2002, 12) is committed by “ordinary individuals, like you and me” (Waller 2002, 18), which opposes the stance that perpetrators are social aberra- tions and that any attempt to humanize them runs the risk of making their crimes forgivable and insulting the memory of their victims. This chapter examines the representation of the father as a potential perpetrator by also considering these issues. 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 111

Imagination as Narrative Intervention in “August, 1977” The seeds of Fatherland can be found in two previous short comics: “August, 1977,” an 11-page semi-autobiographical story from Bunjevac’s first collection,Heartless , and “Left, Right, Left,” a two-page autobiographical story initially published in ArtReview (2012) and later reproduced (with an accompanying interview) on paulgravett.com (2013). These stories need to be read together with Fatherland because they complete each other as they speak in different ways about memory, trauma, and self-representation; more specifically, they speak differently about the relationship that autobiography has with “what constitutes truth in that discourse” (Gilmore 2001, 3). “Left, Right, Left” is an autobiographical story in which Bunjevac describes, among other things, the early days of her relocation to Canada from Yugoslavia, when she could not speak English, wanted to learn more about her father, and was very pleased to hear his Serbian friends describing him as a hero. Bunjevac now admits to having been initially duped by the Serbian Canadian community’s nation- alist ideology because of various factors, including the absence of information provided by her family from Yugoslavia, who initially led her to believe that her father had died in a car accident (Bunjevac 2015). “August, 1977” is not a straightforward autobiographical story, but rather a complicated work of mourning for an absent father. Its references to Serbian politics might make it obscure to some, and some readers may not even understand it as autobiographical, since the English-language version does not indicate that it might be. In “August, 1977,” Bunjevac imagines the last three hours of her father’s life. The main figure is a man who is addressed by two disembod- ied voices: his wife’s (speaking from a letter) and his daughter’s (reflecting, as an adult, on her father’s political convictions). He is alone and, at first, he appears to be engaged in a mundane task, particularly considering the domestic setting created by the wife’s words, “dear husband,” followed by several practical everyday matters. In fact, he is quietly and carefully working on a bomb, his sleeves rolled up, sitting at a desk, bent over his work in a dark space that seems to be a basement, taking a break to read the letter, smoke a cigarette, drink, and look at the photograph his wife has included, of herself and their young daughter. Throughout the story, the father is silent, and his wife’s voice is sad but firm, speaking from the letter that the husband reads, in a panel that contains a close-up of his hands as 112 M. PRECUP he is holding the envelope. It appears that she has left him to move to an unnamed country together with their daughter, while leaving their son behind to live with his father. She speaks of poverty and hardship, asks the husband to provide for his family on a more regular basis, and responds to his probable accusations of unfaithfulness by assuring him that she is an “honorable woman” (Bunjevac 2012, 100). At the same time, she makes it plain that she will never return to him, for reasons that can be inferred from the context, even though she does not mention them as such. The daughter intervenes abruptly midway through the story, and her voice also brings a change in the structure of the comic: the initial pages, divided into two to five panels, populated by family members of the man who is building a bomb, are replaced by splash pages inhabited by figures from outside the family circle. In the foreground of one such splash page, we see a group of ultranationalist activists shouting and waving their fists in the air, in the middle of a demonstration where we can spy the Nazi salute amid large signs that read “Gypsies out of Serbia,” “White Serbian Power,” “Kosovo Is Serbia,” and “Death for Fags” (Fig. 5.1). On the same page, in the background, the main female character from Liliana Cavani’s controversial film The Night Porter (1974) towers against the background of tear gas clouds or perhaps smoke from a fire or explosion. Covering her breasts with hands covered in black gloves that go all the way above the elbow (as in a still from a scene in The Night Porter, where the female camp prisoner is performing a striptease for the Nazi officers), her figure is brought into the Yugoslav space through the insertion of a Christian-Orthodox priest’s hat placed on her head, the cross replaced by the sign and inscription of the name of the ultranationalist Serbian organization “Obraz.”5 The reference to The Night Porter spells out the connection between German fascism and Serbian ultranationalism, but only for readers who are familiar with Cavani’s film. The daughter, whose voice is placed in captions to these violent images, speaks decisively against her father’s political ideals: “Dad, this is the blood of the innocent on their hands. They call themselves patriots…They are terrorizing their own people. They shout: ‘Kill the gypsies’ and ‘Death to fags’ all in the name of a Serbian fatherland and the Orthodox Church. … Is this the future you fought and died for?” (Bunjevac 2012, 103–105). These details, together with the introduction to the Serbian edition that identified the story as autobiographical, made “August, 1977” understandably controversial in Serbia, and the subject of significant online “badmouthing” (Bunjevac 2015). The daughter’s voice is—the reader realizes at the end of the 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 113

Fig. 5.1 Full-page spread from “August, 1977.” (© Nina Bunjevac) story—a chastising postmortem speech to the father who died while he was building a bomb, in the month of August 1977, as the title indicates. “August, 1977” is a work of imagination and emotion in which narra- torial objectivity and strict historical accuracy are not the main objective. 114 M. PRECUP

Neither is it an accurate family story in the sense that we have been trained to expect accuracy in autobiography: for instance, the father was not really alone when he died, but accompanied by two other men who also died manufacturing the bomb (something we learn from a newspaper clipping included in Fatherland). “August, 1977” also reads like a much more dynamic and personal story than Fatherland. Even if they both begin and end with images of birds, in the short story the last image is of birds flying away from the debris of the explosion, and the image constructs a metaphor of the daughter’s liberation from her father’s political goals.6 Although “August, 1977” may leave the reader in possession of fewer facts about Yugoslavia and the history of the Bunjevac family than Fatherland, there is more emotion and possibly even compassion for the man who is about to die in the 11-page short story than in the 150-page graphic memoir. It also creates ambiguity around the interpretation of the father’s death as accidental, as he seems to have set the timer, deliberately waiting for the bomb to detonate.7 The cramped space around him suggests a claustrophobic lack of options; it only widens when he is portrayed for the last time in a larger panel, his eyes closed against the world, tenderly hugging his daughter good-bye while sharing the page with what is not, sadly, a package to send home to his family, but neatly packaged dynamite and a ticking clock. The little girl is a phantom of the father’s imagination; in this rewriting of Peter Bunjevac’s last moments, she provides the solace, support, and tenderness that are offered to dying family members under less extraordinary circumstances. In Fatherland, which contains the more factual good-bye story, when the father is separated from his children, he does not seem to care that he may lose his daughters when his wife goes to Yugoslavia, as long as he keeps his son as leverage. “August, 1977” is thus an intervention in the family history and the father’s patriarchal logic, to which it adds an imaginary but plausible moment of tenderness and regret between a father and the daughter that he, in fact, abandoned.

A Portrait of the Father as a Potential Perpetrator Unlike “August, 1977,” Fatherland is a treasure trove of information not only about Bunjevac’s father, but also about her family and national genealogy. Bunjevac emphasizes the connection between two histories, her family’s and her country’s; she thus reconstructs her father’s biography by pinpointing not personal quirks or hobbies, but those elements from his 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 115 past that contributed to his becoming a potential perpetrator. In the absence of actual memories of lived experiences with her father, Bunjevac investigates the factors that led to her growing up without him: a family history of domestic violence and neglect, on the one hand, and a troubled and brutal sequence of events that directly affected ordinary citizens, on the other. This creates a bridge between contemporary ultranationalist sentiment in Serbia and events from World War II. The book is divided into two parts and follows Bunjevac’s parents’ separate trajectories across the Atlantic. The first, titledPlan B, privileges Nina Bunjevac’s mother’s perspective. It begins in 1975, when Bunjevac’s mother leaves her husband in Canada with her eldest son and returns to Yugoslavia with her two younger daughters, to live with her parents. She does so because she realizes that her husband has become involved in an ultranationalist Serbian organization, and after the bombing of a Croatian community center. The “Freedom for the Serbian Fatherland” is planning attacks on “diplomatic outposts in major North American Cities” (Bunjevac 2014) by relying on carefully recruited “saboteur units” made up of three people whose potential desertion was prevented through death threats. Unable to convince her husband to leave the organization, Bunjevac’s mother tricks him into thinking that she simply intends to go away for a short time, to visit her parents. He reluctantly agrees, but on condition that she leave behind their firstborn, Petey. After two years of separation and intense accusatory letter-writing, Peter Bunjevac is overwhelmed by the stress of his involvement in the organization, feels trapped because he cannot return to Yugoslavia, where he would have been imprisoned for deserting the army and defecting to Canada, and tries to take his own life by slashing his wrists in the bathtub. Finally, in August 1977, he dies in an explosion while he and the other two men from his unit are manufacturing a bomb. Part two, entitled Exile, is to a large extent a historical account of the making of the father/land, but also an implicit meditation on how, in Peter Bunjevac’s case, exile generates a tug-of-war that he is unable to escape. Divided into three parts (“Childhood,” “Dissident Years,” and “Exile”), its purpose is to piece together a “semi-complete picture” of the father (Bunjevac 2014) alongside relevant information about Yugoslav history. The first page of this section includes a panel where the image of the father is made up of blank puzzle pieces, but also maps meant to put together the puzzle of Yugoslav history and national identity. Bunjevac traces a history of the territory of former Yugoslavia that goes back to 500 AD, as well as a genealogy of the Bunjevacs that 116 M. PRECUP goes back to Peter’s grandfather. The two timelines work together to tell terrible tales of death, torture, warfare, and unmotivated hatred between slightly different but related ethnic groups. Out of this emerges not so much a detailed portrait of a person, the narrator’s father, but the always partly enigmatic figure of a potential perpetrator. Peter Bunjevac is depicted as an indifferent and absent father even before his separation from his wife and daughters. We often see him either leaving the house with a packed bag or by himself, in profile, drinking too much or absent-mindedly reading a newspaper in a manner that suggests to his timid wife that she should approach him with caution. He often leaves on overnight trips, neglects his family, and is clearly involved in activities that terrify his wife. The memoir does not provide much detail of Peter Bunjevac’s activities with his children when they live in Canada, suggesting that perhaps they were few and far between. In the domestic space, Peter seems to act according to an older model of masculinity: we see him sitting by himself, reading the newspaper, drinking, or overwhelming his wife with political rants. As a stay-at-home mother, she spends more time with the children, and we see her putting them to bed or, when her mother visits, sitting outside with her elder daughter, Sarah, in her arms as her mother plays with her son, Petey. Such moments of harmony are darkened by the intrusion of the father’s illicit activities: one of his associates ruins a family visit by insulting Nina’s grandmother because she is a communist; Nina’s mother feels compelled to barricade the children’s windows at night, in case someone tries to throw a bomb inside their room.8 In this context, it is important that Peter’s portrait from this part of the book comes from his wife, who is thus offered control over the narrative of a time in her life when she was terrorized by her husband. Even though she regrets his death, she does not provide a nostalgic view of the man who was not easy to live with, as he was “emotionally abusive, drank every day, talked politics incessantly” (Bunjevac 2014). The conversation about and around the father’s death unfolds across four pages that consist mostly of depictions of the mother (and thus privilege her perspective). She is sitting at a table, having finished her coffee, empty cup in her hand; her posture— head slightly bent, hunched shoulders—indicates both the weight of her traumatic memories and the fact that she is a resilient survivor. There are only three images in the entire memoir of the father engaging in paternal conduct or direct interaction with his children. In the first one, he is portrayed tenderly holding not his own child, but his aunt Mara’s son. The little boy is born out of wedlock to a mother who is turned away 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 117 by her entire family except for her nephew Peter. The two are shown together in a posture that is uncharacteristically tender for the way the father is portrayed throughout the book: Peter is cradling the baby boy in his arms, watching him lovingly as the baby grabs his thumb with one hand and tries to put his hand in his mouth. Mara is, in fact, the one family member who appears to show affection for Peter irrespective of circumstances, even when, as a boy, he is beaten and rejected by other family members, who react poorly to his erratic behavior after his parents’ death. The second such image is also one of contemplation, instead of active participation in the child’s day-to-day care: it shows the Bunjevacs together, under a caption that explains that they are “on top of the world” because they have just had their firstborn child in 1968), a baby boy, after a series of unsuccessful pregnancies. The mother is propped up in bed, holding her son as the father gently touches his hat. This image of peace and happiness appears on a page that foreshadows the young family’s future misfortunes. While the panels in the upper half of the page include images of domesticity (the second one is a drawing of the house they acquire in Welland, where Nina Bunjevac herself is born), the two panels from the bottom half hint at what ultimately destroys the family: their decision to participate in activities organized by the Serbian diaspora, and the father’s choice to align himself with the “royalist” faction that idealized convicted war criminal Draža Mihailović. The third image of the father interacting with any of his children is a depiction of the last time he sees his two daughters, and his daughter Sarah embraces him. Her last words to her father, “I love you, daddy!” remain unreciprocated, which is perhaps to suggest that, in keeping with his wish that only his male child remain with him, he was not as warm toward his daughters. Bunjevac’s memoir offers few redemptive scenarios for the father’s destructive behavior. It never suggests, for instance, as in Alison Bechdel’s examination of her father’s death from Fun Home, that Peter Bunjevac may perhaps have killed himself. According to the facts presented in the book, there were no survivors to tell the story of the last moments in the garage before some apparently faulty dynamite exploded. In Fatherland, Bunjevac does not revisit her father’s last minutes; she does not offer him any humanizing hypothetical final moments as she did in “August, 1977.” For instance, if Peter Bunjevac had detonated the bomb on purpose and killed himself and his two other collaborators, he would potentially have prevented other deaths.9 It is not completely inconceivable that a man who had already attempted suicide, who appeared to be having qualms 118 M. PRECUP about his involvement in the organization (at least according to the letters to his wife, in which he claims that he would leave, but that he is “in too deep”) might have decided to take his own life and those of his other two unit members in order to save many more. Even though the book offers no excuses or redemption for Peter Bunjevac, his biography, brief and incomplete as it is, does contain a few background details that offer a sense of how the family man who worked two shifts became a potential perpetrator. Fatherland points at several key events from his life, profoundly tied up with events from Yugoslav history, that end up dogging Peter Bunjevac’s footsteps around the world. The telltale signs of future disaster are embedded in a story where domestic and national violence preceded Peter’s birth: he is born into a family where he witnesses domestic violence; his father is a hard-drinking abusive man who dies in the brutal Jasenovac concentration camp, and his mother dies of tuberculosis soon after. After becoming an orphan, he starts displaying signs of neglect and possibly PTSD, and becomes violent himself. When he begins torturing domestic animals, he is in turn beaten by his caretak- ers. He is then sent to military school, arrested because of insubordinate behavior during the Stalinist period (1945–1948), and later defects. Before arriving in Canada, he spends three ill-fated months in an intern- ment camp in Austria, where he meets Nikola Kavaja, a man who later recruits him. The logical chain created by this story suggests not only that violence and hatred produce disastrous effects across borders and generations, but also that these are embedded in deeply patriarchal social structures like the traditional family and the military. Even if Fatherland’s Canadian geography does not, at first, seem to display the presence of elements “that speak to Canadian differences” (Rifkind and Warley 2016, 8), Bunjevac provides a useful corollary that may illuminate this matter. According to information she obtains after she finishes the memoir, her father received a Canadian visa quite swiftly (after a three-month wait) because INCO, the Canadian mining company that hired him, located in Thompson, Manitoba, actively sought out anti- communist immigrants from Eastern Europe. Their purpose was to curb union protests and related activities. It thus appears that Peter Bunjevac’s trajectory was influenced not only by Yugoslav politics but also by the dynamics of Western capitalist exploitation (Obradovic 2015; Bunjevac 2015). It follows that Fatherland also needs to be read as the story of an immigrant who arrives in Canada in 1959 and who, for reasons only partly touched on in the memoir (such as the large amount of work that prevented 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 119 him from having a social life, or the language barrier), is unable to fully integrate in his adoptive country. Bunjevac’s story “Left, Right, Left” also sheds some light onto this matter by depicting the early days of her own return to Canada, at a time when she did not speak the language and everything felt foreign to her. Her initial decision to seek companionship and shelter in the familiar and apparently warm space of the Serbian diaspora mirrors her own father’s initial involvement in the ultranationalist organization he finally joins. It is in autobiographical reflections on the events from Yugoslavia, written by female authors who expose the extent of the manipulation of the facts through propaganda (such as Dubravka Ugresic’s A Culture of Lies and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and Jasmina Tešanović’s The Diary of a Political Idiot) that Bunjevac finds a way out of her initial involvement with Serbian nationalism (Bunjevac 2015). This also suggests that her father’s political credulity may have been circumstantial, class-related, and also stemming from his inability to separate propaganda from fact at a time when crises of truth were perhaps more difficult to investigate. Bunjevac’s involvement in her unremembered father’s story is analyti- cal rather than sentimental. It is very different from Bechdel’s difficult but affectionate relationship with her own father; in Fun Home, the narrator is even willing to suggest that her own coming out is responsible for her father’s death, in order to preserve “that last, tenuous bond” to him (Bechdel 2006, 86). In Fatherland, the narrator’s emotional distance has produced a book where autobiographical representation is influenced by history-writing to such an extent that the personal almost completely overwhelms the political, and most characters appear to play the part of illustrations in a disheartening textbook. Affect prompts Alison Bechdel to linger on the six versions she cleverly concocts for the possible cause of Bruce Bechdel’s death; lack or suppression of affect motivates Nina Bunjevac to push the moment of Peter Bunjevac’s death into a corner of a page, where he disappears with the other two conspirators in a minutely stippled cloud of smoke. The father vanishes swiftly, perhaps to suggest that he was never entirely present to begin with, at least for his youngest daughter, or to indicate that his wife and daughters did not receive sufficient information about his passing, since nobody attended the funeral.10 However, Bunjevac does make an important gift of recognition and commemoration to both her father and Mara, her father’s aunt and the person who is shown to have suffered deeply when he died. Bunjevac does this by providing a visual translation of the words Mara used to describe 120 M. PRECUP her feelings upon hearing the news of her beloved nephew Peter’s passing. Bunjevac explains:

The ending, those four pages of silhouettes…I remember doing that and crying…because I wanted to give some form of mourning to my father’s death because if you see [sic!] through the book, he had a terrible life. The only person that loved him dearly, unconditionally was his aunt and this is the woman who experienced his loss profoundly…and I really did…I did that for her, for that feeling…Her exact words were interpreted as images… ‘I felt like the ground had opened up and I fell and I’ve been falling ever since and then the boy fell and we’ve been falling ever since.’ (Bunjevac 2015).

The last pages of the book thus contain the silhouetted image of a woman falling through a hole that suddenly opens up in the ground (Fig. 5.2), testifying, in fact, to the inability of mourners to protect their dead, and— in this case—the adults’ inability of forever extending their protection over the children once in their care. The memoir thus opens and closes on images of failed maternal protection: Nina’s mother is unable to save all of her three children (as suggested through the drawing of the nest with three eggs in the first pages of the book) and Mara cannot save Peter. However, the book’s narrative logic places responsibility on an interplay of forces outside of these women’s reach. One of these forces is Peter’s hegemonic understanding of paternity and patriotism, visible when he assigns more value to his male child and associates himself with (military) aggression and ultranationalism.

Perpetration, Stasis, and Photography The father remains an elusive and static figure as Bunjevac puts together an entire archive around him, reproducing postures typical of portrait photography and juxtaposing family photographs and key political figures. This is an important choice, as it spells out the intrusion of the political into the personal, and the powerlessness of already fragile bonds of affection and loyalty to protect people from the destructive effects of ideologies that rely on hate and promote violence. Thus, the first half of the book contains painstakingly drawn copies of several family photographs, as well as several maps of Canada and Yugoslavia and drawings of the skyline of Toronto. Most of the family photographs from this part do not include the father, partly to suggest his increasing isolation from family life, and 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 121

Fig. 5.2 Silhouettes near the end of Fatherland. (© Nina Bunjevac) partly because most of them are taken by Nina’s grandfather in Yugoslavia, to demonstrate that the girls are happy and well taken care of. Part Two. Exile includes a substantially higher number of reproductions of photographs and maps that construct the father’s genealogy and the larger 122 M. PRECUP political circumstances whose reverberations lead to his demise. Even if Bunjevac does include a large number of historical facts in her book, her redrawing of photographs and the way that she embeds these events in a personal narrative point out the role of ideology in the reinterpretation of historical events. The use of photography in Fatherland thus supports both Barbara Postema’s argument that, while comics has “inherent narrative potential” (2015, 85), photographs have a “character of ‘reality recorded’” even when they are drawn (2015, 85) and Nancy Pedri’s con- tention that photography is not merely used in comics for its documentary value, but also in order to produce a comingling of “the factual” and “the subjective,” a combination that produces “the truthful” (Pedri 2012, 265). As in other graphic memoirs that focus on paternal absence, the cover features (Fig. 5.3) a drawing of a magnified portrait photograph of Peter Bunjevac, smiling and looking somewhere to his right, in accordance with contemporary conventions of portrait photography. He is fair-haired, his eyes are blue, and his closely cropped hair, neatly combed to the right, as well as his suit, would suggest that this is an official photograph, but for the wide smile that indicates the picture was probably intended for a private audience. Later in the book, the photograph is reproduced twice more: once in the section dedicated to the parents’ courtship, which unfolds through letters and “carefully staged photographs,” and a second time, when the family receives news of his death, where the portrait, with the years 1936–1977 written underneath, functions as an improvised headstone (Bunjevac 2014). On the cover, Peter Bunjevac’s smiling portrait is framed differently; it is surrounded by a black margin, bordered to the left by the red spine of the book that extends onto the front and back covers. Bunjevac’s intention was to make a reference to the Nazi flag and thus suggest the connection between her father and Nazi ideology, as well as more recent ultranationalist organizations’ beliefs (Bunjevac 2015). Peter Bunjevac, who remains to a large extent a figure of mystery to both his daughter and the audience, continues to look elsewhere—and hardly ever is his gaze directed straight toward the reader—throughout most of the book, in panels that frame him as a false hero and place him alongside controversial figures such as Draža Mihailović, whom he admired. Photorealistic representation gives the same status to witnessed and unwitnessed events, thus legitimizing both the mother’s story and the daughter’s imagination. Bunjevac’s subject and extensive use of photography and other archival elements place Fatherland alongside other autobio- 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 123

Fig. 5.3 Cover image of Fatherland. (© Nina Bunjevac) graphical projects that are works of both memory and postmemory about absent fathers, such as Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Soldier’s Heart by Carol Tyler. In Fun Home, Bechdel’s pain is much closer to the surface; the father who died when she was in college is a much more vivid and 124 M. PRECUP mobile figure. We find out a lot about his hobbies, his passion for DIY and clothes, what books he reads, and Bechdel may manage to extract some form of compassion for him from the audience. Similarly, Tyler’s book is an investigation that harnesses the power of the family archive and employs family photographs, diary excerpts, and even a reproduction of a short autobiographical story her father wrote for school. Soldier’s Heart is a book full of emotion, a labor of love performed by a daughter who both identifies her father’s poor paternal conduct and forgives him for it. Bunjevac, however, seems aware that she constructs not only a portrait of a father but also a potential perpetrator, and has to calibrate emotion accordingly. The father is a cog in the troubled genealogy of family and country that Bunjevac introduces not only through photographs but also through maps that do not, however, convey a sense of movement even if they depict social upheavals and the displacement of populations and armies. This space is where Bunjevac identifies the roots of the subsequent war in Yugoslavia and her own family’s tragedy. By imprinting a sort of stasis that suggests inevitability, Bunjevac’s use of maps in Fatherland supports the view that “the cartoon map’s portrayal of place is openly caught up in the cartoon image’s constructed and inter-pretative quality” (Pedri 2014, 100). The maps are there to clarify the painful itineraries that Bunjevac’s family had to follow, or simply the unfolding of terrible historical events: the German occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II, the creation of concentration camps, and the subsequent resistance movement divided into two sides that were ideologically at odds. However dramatic this enumeration of events might justifiably sound, the maps that encapsulate them provide a static view of them; furthermore, they are generic, and thus suggest that the family was one of many caught up in the violence of historical events.11 In Fatherland, the maps freeze and isolate extremely violent events in the indifferent geography of territories with varying name tags (Serbian, Croat, Yugoslav, German) whose change came at the price of their inhabitants’ life and sanity. In this context, the father becomes an imaginary black dot lost inside a geography of destruction. The generally static rhythm of Bunjevac’s graphic memoir is significant in the context of her attempt to tell the story of a father whose image she reconstructs not through memory, but through photography. Thus, Fatherland has very few movement lines and many moments when people sit or lie down, encircled by thick contour lines. Even the birds that frame this memoir do not suggest flight, but immobility. So do the many close-ups of hands, 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 125 in a generally uniform page structure that relies on a two- to five-panel grid: hands that type and hold letters and photographs; hands that perform various domestic tasks and gestures; the father’s hand hanging limply against the side of the tub, dripping with blood after his suicide attempt. The overall effect is that of emphasizing the vulnerability of the father and his—and other characters’—powerlessness in the face of sweeping historical events. The presence, at the beginning of the book, of the author’s hand as she draws the three eggs in the bird’s nest suggests that the most significant—and perhaps only—power that a person can have in such circumstances is to become a contributor to the construction of cultural memory. The dense and minute cross-hatching and stippling also contribute to the general air of stasis, but they also offer an additional layer of intimacy and affect to a family memoir that might otherwise seem excessively cold. Bunjevac’s trellised images, punctured by stippling, invite readers to think about the painstaking effort and time spent in such close contact with the portraits of the people in the book. Perpetrators, bystanders, and victims, some of them family members she does or does not remember, all require time and labor so that their portraits meet the photorealistic standards of the book. Of the main characters, the father is perhaps the least mobile: rarely pictured from the front as an adult, Peter Bunjevac’s face is shown either from a distance or from angles where its expression and features remain somewhat vague. This reinforces the air of mystery that surrounds him and emphasizes his unknowability even as Bunjevac’s detailed cross- hatching appears to bring him closer. The father is never fully recuperated and at the very end disappears inside the dark shape of the silhouette. Throughout the memoir, the large number of silhouettes also contributes to the creation of the ominous atmosphere of the narrative. Silhouetted characters foretell death and disasters: Peter being beaten by his grandfather in the barn; Milovan Djilas, who criticized the communist party and was then imprisoned for ten years; three men against the background of an explosion; Peter shak- ing hands with a stranger as his wife is apprehensively trying to eavesdrop on their conversation; Peter looking at the empty room where his children used to live before his wife left him; and, finally, Peter and his aunt Mara, holding each other tightly, forever plummeting through the ground. The use of the silhouette in conjunction with photography is also important because it suggests the blind spots of postmemory, a process that preserves the frames of events and contours of individuals through storytelling and photography, but through which access to the past is not complete. Thus, 126 M. PRECUP in spite of his daughter’s extensive research and painstaking drawings, Peter Bunjevac never fully materializes and finally vanishes altogether inside the space of the silhouette, swallowed by the force of the brutal events that contributed to his transformation into a potential perpetrator. In Fatherland, the association of comics, photography, and silhouette makes an important comment on a topical subject: how an ordinary person can become a potential perpetrator. The answer seems to be simple: by making wrong choices, of course, but also by becoming quite stuck inside them. The static nature of this book seems to suggest the inevitability of Peter Bunjevac’s fate: his downfall was always to have happened, and his life inevitably led to it. Movement is futile and running away, a lie. Caught between cultural spaces and allegiances, Peter Bunjevac stands still even as he appears to move forward. Afterwards, his family is itself frozen in disbelief, anger, and sadness, and the one person who loved him the most is shown arrested in perpetual fall, holding the boy she could not protect in her arms. Fatherland thus supports the argument that there is nothing extraordinary about a perpetrator except for his deeds, and that, under the right circumstances, anybody can become capable of evil (Waller 2002, 18), but also suggests that it is possible for people caught in the web of perpetration—like Mara, who does not seem to have been against Peter’s activities—to be traumatized by the perpetrator’s loss.

Conclusion In telling the story of her father as a potential perpetrator, Bunjevac both eschews lamentation and avoids a representation of her father as a monster, while also providing glimpses of his conflicted feelings around the act of perpetration. By portraying Peter as a man who is trapped by events that began to unfold since before his birth, she suggests that there are certain factors that contributed to his unfortunate trajectory. The enumeration of these events amounts to an almost complete chronology of his life: being raised in a family where domestic abuse is normalized, the death of his parents, subsequent neglect by his guardians, who send him to military school as a corrective measure, his insubordination during the early years of the crackdown on free speech in Yugoslavia, and his subsequent embrace of ultranationalist sentiment. By also representing the father’s depression in the wake of his wife’s departure, his suicide attempt, as well as his apparently reluctant involvement in the organization before his death, Bunjevac shows that acts of perpetration are preventable. In fact, as 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 127

Peter Bunjevac died before the terrorist act itself, it is impossible to assess what might have been his final decision on the subject. Throughout Fatherland, the father’s presence is not, in fact, fully desired or interpellated, as it is in “August, 1977”; at the same time, visual and scriptural representations do not make the paternal figure fully legible or accessible. The quality of being both present and absent, both repre- sentable and invisible, and of residing somewhere between speech and silence, is well captured in Fatherland through the figure of the silhouette because of its quality of being both rooted in presence and escaping mimetic representation (Saltzman 2006, 57). The silhouette, this proto- photograph, spells out the blind spots of postmnemonic representation. Postmemory provides the outline, the precise shadow of the unique undeniable event. However, the blankness of the silhouette lies palimpsestically under the photograph; while photography is more generous, the silhouette speaks more openly about the inability of gaining full access to one’s past.

Notes 1. Nina Bunjevac intentionally complicates the matter of her Serbian identity by referring to herself as belonging with “the displaced children of Yugoslavia” (Bunjevac qtd. in Obradovic 2015). In the context of the Yugoslav Wars, which were fought mainly on grounds of ethnic and national identity, this is a clear and important political statement. 2. For an overview of the evolution of alternative comics in Canada, whose first generation began creating work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, see Rifkind and Warley (2016) and Grace and Hoffman (2018). 3. For a reading of the cat figure inHeartless , see Pearson (2018). For a reading of gender and displacement in Heartless, see Precup (2013). 4. For additional biographical information on Nina Bunjevac, as well as the creative process behind Fatherland, see Bunjevac (2015). Bunjevac’s website, ninabunjevac.com, also contains relevant background information. 5. It would be difficult for those who cannot read the Cyrillic alphabet and are relatively unfamiliar with the history of the ultranationalist movement in Yugoslavia to understand the connection between the man fabricating a bomb and the fascist ideology of the men demonstrating in the midst of this short comic. At least, this was my experience, having read “August, 1977” before knowing it was autobiographical and without being familiar with Obraz. Obraz is an organization whose ideology relies on “the protection of Serbianness, family values, the Cyrillic alphabet, the orthodox faith, and national statehood. Yet, they do not perceive themselves as ultra- 128 M. PRECUP

right and extremist, but as legitimate defenders of patriotic values and nor- mality, struggling against (post)modern and deviant forms of behavior (sects, drug addiction, the gay movement, organized crime, and corrup- tion)” (Šuber and Karamanić 2012, 124). However, the initial target audience for this comic seems to have been made up of readers who are familiar with these issues, and who also possess the cinematic knowledge required to pick up on the many film references in Heartless. 6. In Fatherland, the last image is the silhouette of a bird, a motionless omen whose presence in dreams announces that the person is about to receive news, according to a Serbian superstition previously explained in the narrative. 7. I would like to thank Anca Apostol for suggesting this interpretation during our graduate seminar on Memory and Representation in Graphic Memoirs. 8. Throughout this chapter, I use “Nina” to refer to the autobiographical self from the comic, and “(Nina) Bunjevac” to refer to the author of the book. 9. Apparently, they were meant to bomb the Yugoslav consulate in Toronto, and, if successful, they would have taken many lives. 10. Living as they are with Bunjevac’s maternal grandparents, they are forbid- den by the grandmother from expressing feelings of sadness over either their separation from Peter—whom she calls a “cold-blooded killer,” even though the memoir produces no evidence that he may have killed anyone—or over his death. In this context, Nina’s older sister Sarah feels compelled to ask her mother for permission to cry for her father’s death, but only when her grandmother is not present. 11. Bunjevac’s maps do not bear the markings of the personal history of Bunjevac’s family as, for instance, those from Bechdel’s Fun Home, where she pointedly inscribes her family’s history over the geography of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, New York City, and San Francisco.

References Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Berberich, Christine. 2011. ‘We Shall Be Punished’: Positionality and Postmemory in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow. Holocaust Studies 17 (2–3): 261–282. Bunjevac, Nina. 2012. August, 1977. In Heartless. Greenwich: Conundrum Press. ———. 2013. Nina Bunjevac: Making Comics & Making Peace. An Interview with Paul Gravett. Paul Gravett, January 6. http://www.paulgravett.com/ articles/article/nina_bunjevac. Accessed 20 Jan 2019. ———. 2014. Fatherland. London: Jonathan Cape. 5 “TO DREAM OF BIRDS”: THE FATHER AS POTENTIAL PERPETRATOR… 129

———. 2015. Fatherland: A Family History/Nina Bunjevac. Stanford CREES, February 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsR1zYRLlBw. Accessed 20 Jan 2018. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grace, Dominick, and Eric Hoffman. 2018. Introduction: Comics in Canada. In The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novels, ed. Dominick Grace and Eric Hoffman, ix–xix. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jukić Pranjić, Irena. 2012. About Program ‘Between History and Personal Narrative.’ E-mail to Author. August 28. Krug, Nora. 2018. Heimat: A German Family Album. London: Particular Books. McGlothlin, Erin. 2006. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. New York/Suffolk: Camden House. Mohamed, Saira. 2015. Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity. Columbia Law Review 115: 1157–1216. Obradovic, Dragana. 2015. I Only Belong to One Tribe: The Displaced Children of Yugoslavia, May 14. http://balkanist.net/profile-nina-bunjevac-author-of- fatherland/. Accessed 10 Jan 2019. Pearson, Laura A. 2018. The Bound and Transcultural Catwoman in Nina Bunjevac’s ‘Bitter Tears of Zorka Petrovic.’ In The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novels, ed. Dominick Grace and Eric Hoffman, 224–244. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Pedri, Nancy. 2012. Cartooning Ex-Posing Photography in Graphic Memoir. Literature & Aesthetics 22 (2): 248–266. ———. 2014. Re-visualising the Map in Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang. Arborescences: revue d’études françaises 4: 99–114. Pontiac, Peter. 2000. Kraut. Amsterdam: Podium. Postema, Barbara. 2015. Establishing Relations. Photography in Wordless Comics. Image [&] Narrative 6 (2): 84–95. Precup, Mihaela. 2013. Felines and Females on the Fringe: Femininity and Dislocation in Nina Bunjevac’s Heartless (2012). In Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millenium, ed. Maria Sabina Draga-Alexandru, Mădălina Nicolaescu, and Helen Smith, 177–192. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Rifkind, Candida, and Linda Warley. 2016. Editors’ Introduction. In Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives, ed. Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, 1–19. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Saltzman, Lisa. 2006. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 130 M. PRECUP

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Šuber, Daniel, and Slobodan Karamanić. 2012. Shifting Extremisms: On the Political Iconology in Contemporary Serbia. In Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmanski, and Bernhard Giesen, 119–138. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tyler, Carol. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. A Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Waller, James. 2002. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press. CHAPTER 6

“A doting fool”: The Limits of Fatherhood in R. Crumb’s Sophie Stories

The towering figure of the underground comics movement, often criticized for some of his sexist and racist cartoons where he has claimed he was attempting to reveal the dark side of his psyche, as well as America’s id, R. Crumb has an autobiographical persona that appears to be significantly transformed by fatherhood after the arrival of his daughter Sophie in 1981. While in previous comics he had portrayed himself as a sexually frustrated man with violent fantasies, preying on women’s vulnerabilities and their susceptibility to fame, in his Sophie stories Crumb represents himself as a gentle, loving, and bumbling father, unprepared for the unex- pected toll fatherhood is taking on his physical and mental health, and pleased that his daughter’s willfulness indicates that she will not be dominated by any man. However, outside of this relatively small body of work, in stories interspersed with those comics or panels where Sophie appears, Crumb reverts to his long-standing autobiographical self, a process that reveals the limits of fatherhood as a catalyst of change. In this chapter, I argue that fatherhood re-contextualizes Crumb’s self-portrayal, as his paternal conduct casts him as “a doting fool,” but I also question the ability of this new role to revise previous representations of problematic behavior, such as sexual assault.1 In Crumb’s work, fatherhood is embedded in a narrative pieced together by three volumes of short autobiographical stories. Some of the comics that feature Robert as a father are included in The Complete Crumb Comics, a chronological collection of Crumb’s work published by

Fantagraphics,2 but for this chapter I am looking at comics initially collected in My Troubles with Women (a slim volume of work published in various magazines between 1980 and 1989), The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb (2006), and Drawn Together (a collection of work from 1974 to 2010). The last volume includes stories co-written by Robert Crumb with his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and their daughter Sophie, who is also a visual artist. To my knowledge, this is the only published collective autobiographical comic where family members draw themselves, thus offering a unique space for the understanding of family dynamics, autobiography, and representation.3 However, considering the fact that Crumb had already spent over ten years developing an autobiographical persona by the time his daughter was born, it is important to also consider how fatherhood sits with samples of his previous work, produced at the height of the construction of the comics counterculture, both lauded for its shattering of taboos and critiqued for its negative representations of women and racist portrayals of black people. In this context, this chapter also asks how fatherhood works backward to revise the reading of the Crumb character’s more controversial iconography, but also how his paternal conduct operates within the conceit of the autobiographical self as a late sexual bloomer who has come to settle down in a relatively conventional, if not monoga- mous, relationship. Throughout the chapter, I have attempted to make it clear that I do not take Crumb’s autobiographical self, to whom I refer by his first name as “Robert,” to be one and the same as “Robert Crumb,” the author, even though Crumb himself has often blurred the line between the two.

Views and Revisions of Crumb’s Autobiographical Self Robert Crumb has often been identified with his autobiographical persona, a common predicament of artists whose work is based on their life, but in this case the identification is complicated by accusations of sexism and rac- ism that extend from Crumb’s cartoon alter ego and his artwork to their creator. On this account, and particularly with reference to the storylines of characters such as Angelfood McSpade, Mr. Snoid, or stories like “A Bitchin’ Bod” (1991), to give only a few examples, Crumb has been both attacked and defended by the public, including fellow cartoonists and comics scholars. Some historians of the underground comics movement, like Patrick Rosenkranz (2002) and Dez Skinn (2004), bypass the issue 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 133

altogether. Others, like Roger Sabin, do not hesitate to label Crumb’s sexism and his grotesque racist representations (2001, 2010) and to pinpoint the fact that in the comics underground “attitudes to women…were often as unenlightened as those in the regular comics industry” (2010, 224). Among Crumb’s defenders is noted comics scholar Hillary Chute, whom Marc Singer has recently taken to task for being insufficiently critical of cartoonists, particularly Crumb, with reference to the special issue of Critical Inquiry (on “Comics & Media”) that she co-edited with Patrick Jagoda (Singer 2018, 23–24). In her first chapter from Graphic Women, for instance, Chute revisits Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s defense of her husband’s work, with specific reference to fellow cartoonist andWimmen’s Comix coordinator Trina Robbins’s highly critical standpoint, while acknowledging the realities of “the often sexist underground press” (Chute 2010, 34).4 Chute, who focuses more specifically on the various renditions of consensual sex from the Kominsky-Crumb couple’s collaborative work, draws attention to their commitment to “the comics page as an uncensored autobiographical space” (Chute 2010, 38) to conclude that: “The violence that is part of the couple’s sexual interaction is consensual; however explicit it can be, the Dirty Laundry project is essentially rather sweet” (Chute 2010, 54). While I agree with Chute’s point, I believe it is important to also examine other stories where Crumb’s character engages in violence against some of his female sexual partners where consent is neither implied nor explicitly given. In her latest book, Why Comics? (2018), Chute devotes much of her chapter “Why Sex?” to examinations of some of Crumb’s comics where he explores sexual fantasies and taboo issues such as incest. Chute upholds Crumb’s own defense of some of his problematic images from the underground period—such as, for instance, “The Family That Lays Together Stays Together!”, “Joe Blow,” and “A Bitchin’ Bod”—as part of his attempt to break taboos and satirize mainstream America, as well as explore his id. Chute is more ambivalent when it comes to Crumb’s images of black women that evoke earlier racist caricatures:

Crumb isn’t mocking black women, but rather he’s mocking a public discourse that either implicitly or explicitly itself mocks black women. And yet Crumb always makes tricky or unclear the line between the act of satirizing something and embodying it. In satirizing something, is one giving it the kind of time and space and attention that tips over into something else? Even as he mocks the fantasies of skinny white men, Crumb, a skinny white man, participates in the creation of a sexually powerful, if ridiculous, character and a set of images that are explicit and unsettling. (Chute 2018, Chap. 3) 134 M. PRECUP

Similar questions were asked during a recent round table organized by the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE), and moderated by Hillary Chute, as part of an attempt to contextualize MICE’s decision to retire the name “Crumb Room” for one of their exhibitor spaces (“Crumb, Race, and Gender”). The panel discussed various problematic representations of black people and sexual violence from Crumb’s work; it is becoming clear that—like many other cultural productions—Crumb’s work is being revised in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which also affected the world of comics. One of the panelists, cartoonist Jessica Campbell, spoke about the backlash she received after publishing a comic titled “My Body in Comics” (retitled by the editor of Hyperallergic as “The Bad Behavior of Men in Comics”), where she singled out Crumb’s work, particularly “Memories are Made of This!” (1988), as an example of a representation of rape that needs to be taken seriously instead of dismissed as satire. The entire conversation showed that recent changes in public opinion work against dismissing or ignoring Crumb’s offensive representations of women and black people as transgressive expressions of his (or America’s) id. However, Crumb has remained consistent even in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which he seems to regard as a form of punish- ing previously acceptable sexual transgressions.5 I am interested in offering a close reading of “Memories are Made of This!” not only in the context of this recent reevaluation, but also because, in Crumb’s autobiographical work, it offers a wider context for Crumb’s depiction of fatherhood, as it stands side by side as comics that feature his domestic life after his daughter Sophie is born. First published in Weirdo magazine in 1988, the story was later collected in My Troubles with Women, among other stories that, as the title indicates, provide an overview of the narrator’s emotional and sexual relationships with women. Crumb’s editorship and work for Weirdo appeared to mark a new beginning for the cartoonist, who created new characters, encouraged new creators (including Peter Bagge, Carol Tyler, Dori Seda, and others), and explored more diverse topics. As Roger Sabin argues, at the beginning of his Weirdo period (1981–1993), Crumb appeared to experience a “creative renaissance,” writing about subjects such as the environmental crisis and the experience of being a parent, creating Mode O’Day, “an acid comment on the advent of the 1980s yuppie,” and—having quit LSD— drawing more realistically, while maintaining the self-loathing rhetoric prevalent in his previous work (Sabin 2001, 193). However, in subsequent 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 135 work, Crumb returned to the well-rehearsed tropes and autobiographical persona of his earlier years. In “Memories Are Made of This!” (1988), Robert is depicted as a middle-aged man whose presence in inset panels brackets the story of a sexual conquest from 12 years before; his purpose is to emphasize his retrospective lack of regret, to frame the story in the confessional mode— which Crumb has employed to defend his more problematic comics for their therapeutic value—, and also to expose his own confession as hypo- critical. Almost half of the story is devoted to the long trip to the home of a woman that the narrator is hoping to have sex with, during which readers become privy to the man’s plot of sexual conquest, but also his doubts and fears. Crumb’s autobiographical persona is, as usual, purposefully unlike- able, self-loathing, and unattractive, his eyes invisible behind his glasses, a ubiquitous scowl on his face, slouching in the rain, at the mercy of his desire, and fearing that his wife might find out. The aesthetic mode of the story gradually shifts from the enigmatic grimness of the film noir to the comic grotesque. Judging by the first two pages alone, the narrator could be a detective at work on an urgent case sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, braving the rain and the darkness, wrapped in a long overcoat, a hat on his head, and a notebook (probably a sketchbook, in fact) under his arm. The ample text in the thought bubbles, however, creates a humorous effect by quickly correcting this misperception. The song playing in Robert’s head (“Searchin’” by The Coasters) suggests that he is on a romantic quest, but the rest of his thoughts indicate that he is on a sexual pursuit. Readers receive access to a whole inventory of contradictory thoughts and emotions: self-insults (“lunatic,” “sap”), a scornful description of the woman he is planning on wooing (a “crazy bitch,” “so hateful in so many ways,” “her brain…a cesspool of romantic slop”), and a review of their previous flirta- tion and plans to make her “loosen up” without, however, revealing his eagerness despite the fact that he usually has “no control in these situations.” As soon as he enters the woman’s home, the mode begins to shift toward the grotesque as readers remain privy to a plot of which she remains unaware: as she turns to finish a telephone conversation, Crumb draws a dotted line between his character’s eyes and the woman’s behind; through thought bubbles that amend the actual conversation, readers, unlike the woman, become aware that he is planning to make sure she is inebriated enough to agree to sleep with him. As he gets closer to his purpose, her body changes: while at first, when she opens the door, she looks surpris- ingly slim considering Crumb’s avowed preferences for strong bodies and 136 M. PRECUP

Fig. 6.1 The last two panels from “Memories Are Made of This!”. (© Robert Crumb) protruding behinds, as the story progresses and they move from the table to the couch, Crumb not only brings the image closer to the reader, but he also changes the way he represents her body to make it more muscular and lumbering, her feet bigger, her posture less inhibited, her dress tighter. In addition to this, the last page is suddenly no longer black-and-white, and grays are added as the man manages to move from initial rejection to sexual conquest (Fig. 6.1). Even if the woman’s face is flushed and she appears confused, presumably both because she has been drinking and is surprised at being touched, she rejects him forcefully and, as the speech bubble in all capitals indicates, loudly. This changes by the time we reach the two bottom panels: in the first, taking advantage of her “drunken stupor,” the man slips a finger inside her vagina while she faces the audience, as he is also rubbing himself against her leg and fondling her face; in the final panel, she is completely naked, lying on all fours on the floor as the man, almost naked save for the trademark white T-shirt, is perched on her behind, face contorted with effort and satisfaction, eyes pointing in two different directions, his thoughts between him and his readers: “Crazy ex-catholic bitch! Oh Lord this’s even better than my finest jerk-off fantasies! Oh she’s a wild animal!” (Crumb 2000). Her interjections, two of which are “Oh no,” appear to reinforce the reading of this sexual act as non-consensual. In this context, the last inset panel, featuring the older narrator in a posture 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 137 that recurs throughout his work, palms up, defenseless before the women’s wrath that he knows he deserves, is meant to function as a humorous wrap-up that draws attention away from the woman and to the man’s fear that he might not be able to find other sexual partners after his confession. This is a scene of premeditated sexual assault; Crumb’s exaggerated confessional tone undermines his purported honesty and reads rather like a thinly veiled strategy of persuasion from an unreliable narrator who attempts to make rape funny. This is a self-portrait of the cartoonist as a perpetrator that one could argue is not without merit, as it provides a rare glance into the background of a character who is able to display this type of aggression toward women. Within the wider narrative of the volume My Troubles with Women, “Memories Are Made of This!” does contribute to an understanding of the wider social context that facilitates the making of a person who believes sexual assault is acceptable: a strict Catholic upbringing, an unhappy family life, discovering one’s sexuality during the 1950s, and accumulating frustration and aggression toward women because of their preference for hegemonic masculinity. The character’s resentment toward women seems to stem from a common logical fallacy: instead of attempting to focus his attention on the social practices that caused his misery, he instead blames fellow victims. This only serves to perpetuate practices associated with hegemonic masculinity in an endless cycle: the only thing that has changed is the power position of the awkward boy who used to be unable to find a sexual partner. However, this conclusion is never drawn in the comics themselves, which leave enough room for both titillation and laughter, sometimes at the expense of the narrator, his sexual partners, or both. Crumb complicates matters further when he addresses some of these issues in interviews (Holm 2004) and in other autobiographical comics, by both defending his position and creating an overlap between himself as a person and his autobiographical persona, while at the same time blurring the line between fact and fantasy by claiming that he usually draws both. Even though Crumb has repeatedly claimed that there is a heavy dose of fantasy in his comics, which are not necessarily faithful renditions of actual events, in his interviews he also invites a reading of his work as a mimetic representation of the darker side of his psyche and even on occasion emphatically states that his character “Robert” is, in fact, himself.6 It is for this reason that, for instance, blogger Kim O reads Crumb’s work and statements together as composing “a very unsettling picture of a serial abuser and the underground comics scene that enabled him that emerges 138 M. PRECUP from even the most cursory examination of words that Crumb himself has said in interviews” (2017). In interviews, Crumb has remained largely consistent and appears to refuse to revise his perspective on “Robert,” the character he created in the 1960s, when most authors infused the confessional with grotesque and purposefully offensive self-representation, blurred the line between fact and fantasy while portraying characters who were legitimized by “the autobiographical pact” (Lejeune 1989) as autobiographical selves, and when “self-loathing” was a common strategy of distancing the author from the ideology and misdeeds of the character. For instance, in a 2015 interview with Jacques Hyzagi, Crumb refers to “Memories Are Made of This!” as “unromantic,” but does not seem to understand the sexual encounter depicted therein as rape.7 Crumb’s line of defense against his detractors is made up of a few elements: his comics need to be regarded with a sense of humor and as satire; he felt compelled to put his sexual fantasies on paper; he believes it was probably the context of other cartoonists such as S Clay Wilson and James Osborne doing similar things that persuaded him to try (2017)8; he provides an honest rendition of his darkest fantasies instead of placating women in order to obtain their admiration and perhaps extract some sexual benefits (Crumb2015 , 2017). Finally, in statements where he is referring to his own problematic conduct, such as touching women inappropriately and without permission, he briefly expresses regret, but also defends himself at length by claiming that this conduct was once the norm and that the vast majority of heterosexual men must have engaged in similar behavior at some point (Crumb 2017). This is behavior that is also represented in his comics, as in “My Troubles with Women, Part II,” which first appeared in HUP (1986), where we see Robert at a party, suddenly jumping on a woman’s back for one of his now-famous piggyback rides, and fondling another woman’s face while rubbing himself against her leg and touching her breast. The other guests look shocked and mildly amused, while the emanata around the heads of the women who are the recipients of this sudden attention show that they too are surprised, and that Robert has not asked for permission. The apparently apologetic narrative in the text box confirms that his behavior is compulsive, caused by accumulated sexual frustration, and unauthorized by the women themselves; however, the character’s regret is embedded in a narrative that invites a reading of Robert as innocu- ously and incongruously comical: “I made up for all those years of deprivation by lunging maniacally at women I was attracted to…squeezing faces and humping legs…I usually got away with it…famous eccentric artist, you 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 139 know…they made allowances for my behavior…I blush with shame to think of it!!” (Crumb 2000). The point of consent is additionally muddled by the depiction, on the remaining two thirds of the page, of a consensual act where the woman asks to be strangled and enjoys it: “I must confess… yes, I enjoy a little rough sex play with a strong woman…I’ve said it…So, am I sick? Do I feel guilty? Not very…Should I be locked up? Hey, look, I’m a sensitive guy…I only do it to the ones who like it…And guess what? Plenty of ‘em like it, don’t kid yerself!!” (Crumb 2000). By juxtaposing the unauthorized sexual advances from the top panels with the consensual sexual encounter that covers most of the page, Crumb appears to draw a causal connection between non-consensual and consensual sex, suggesting that the one precedes the other, at least in some cases. Through the structure of this and other pages, but also through the various statements where he discusses his own past misdeeds, some of which he also attributes to his autobiographical persona, Crumb muddles the issue of consent, makes his apologies sound disingenuous, and acts as a defender of his autobiographical character’s behavior.

The Limits of Fatherhood Crumb’s paternal conduct does not exist in a narrative void, and this is why this chapter has devoted so much space to embedding the Sophie stories in the wider context of his autobiographical cartoon character and his public persona, which reflect and intersect each other. Sophie is first depicted as a newborn baby in a five-panel story from the one-page Everyday Funnies series co-authored with Kominsky-Crumb. Dated November 1981, the story is subtitled “featuring the new addition to the family, the little Sophie!” and it shows the new parents and their feline companions in a state of confused and worried contemplation of the new baby. In this humorous take on the panic of new parenthood, Aline and Robert try to decode baby Sophie’s mysterious sounds with the use of a baby book out of which the worst diagnosis naturally jumps at them. After the panic subsides, the baby projectile vomits on her father’s face just as her mother has proudly produced a Polaroid camera and is taking a picture; decorum is not, as readers already know by this point, the couple’s strong suit. Their early years as parents also appear to be quite ordinary, their delight and misery rendered humorously, but also with a slightly darker undertone: they are permanently tired, dark circles under their eyes; Aline, who describes herself as “the feedbag,” claims to have “aged 140 M. PRECUP

10 yrs [sic].” The child, on the other hand, has insurmountable levels of energy, leaves the house as they are arguing about their parenting skills, and provides the soundtrack for a timid revival of the couple’s once glori- ous sex life, which results in an unwanted pregnancy (“Arline ‘n’ Bob and That Thing in the Back Bedroom”).9 Crumb often represents Sophie delightedly as a willful child, independent and somewhat oblivious of her parents, who are either in awe of her or comically terrorized by her “little monster” temperament. In “Arline ‘n’ Bob and That Thing in the Back Bedroom,” Sophie, who is around two years old, is portrayed as a cute but terrifying creature whose presence is announced, in the first panel, through a variety of loud noises whose source her tense parents, who stand fright- ened outside the door of her room, are unable to guess. The mode of this short story is slapstick comedy: Sophie jumps up and down in her bed, her cheerful energetic calls for her mother and father waking up her haggard- looking parents (here, for once, Aline’s posture mirrors Robert’s slouch); she is learning how to talk and chatters constantly and only somewhat intelligibly; finally, she throws a stale bagel at Aline’s head. To Aline’s worry, Robert showers their daughter with affection even when her behavior is lacking, something that prompts her mother to worry that “sensitive guilt-ridden, highly ‘evolved’ people make shitty parents.” This is a worry that keeps resurfacing throughout the couple’s autobiographical work.10 Robert expresses concerns that their eccentricities, alongside his own questionable representations of sex from his previous work, might have disqualified them from parenthood. In three panels from “Euro Dirty Laundry: ‘Merci, Au Revoir!’,” we see Robert sitting in a chair, more hunched over than usual, bowed down by doubt and guilt, as he says:

Sometimes I think it was a big mistake—us having a child…Eccentric weir- dos like us aren’t fit to be parents…The older she gets, the more embarrassed she is by us…She’s gonna hate us…/I mean eventually the li’ squirt’s gonna have to come to grips with all that twisted sex stuff in my comics… That worries me…I probably never shoulda drawn all that crap…Trina wuz right…” (Crumb and Crumb 2012, 141)

His regret, however, is not about the content of the work itself, but about his own child’s potential reaction to it. Robert and Aline’s hesitation between self-doubt and self-praise becomes a constant of their conversations throughout their work together, where they never stop assessing and reassessing their work, their past, and their performance as parents. Even 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 141 though they never reach a conclusion and consistently portray themselves as haunted by their past, what transpires most from the comics collected in Drawn Together is that they have learned to be kind to each other and to give each other credit for their happiness.11 Crumb does ponder the ethics of representing one’s child—during the years when she cannot grant permission—in autobiographical work that occasionally includes potentially embarrassing or upsetting moments (Couser 2004). He considers Sophie’s reaction as both a subject of her father/her parents’ autobiographical work and as a reader of her father’s more problematic previous work. For instance, in “Arline’n’Bob in Our Lovely Home” (1988), in a panel where we see Robert and Aline engaging in a typical sexual position—Robert suddenly jumping up on Aline’s behind and squeezing her face—Crumb adds a side question: “What effect will it have on our daughter when she looks at this?” (Crumb 2000). In “Euro Dirty Laundry: ‘Merci, Au Revoir!’,” Sophie (here drawn by Robert Crumb) walks in on her parents as they are engaging in heavy petting. She emerges from behind a door frame just as Aline is fondly biting and punching Robert; the sound bubbles seem to suggest that it may have been Aline’s loud growling (elsewhere she depicts herself as a bear when she is in a similar circumstance) that attracted Sophie’s attention. In a scene of comical role-reversal, the child admonishes the parents and runs away in disgust when they apologize and try to console her by showing signs of physical affection. However, this quickly passes, as four panels later—while her parents fret about the consequences of their actions—Sophie is already seated in front of the TV, watching The Simpsons and demanding that her mother get her a glass of water. When they represent Sophie touching herself as she explains that she is trying to fix her genitals, in a panel included in “More Good Clean Fun” (1986), Aline worries that “this might be immoral” and predicts that “Sophie’ll kill us for this when she grows up” (Crumb 2000). Robert, on the other hand, provides a desexualized perspective of the scene by looking on with confusion and mild amusement and quickly pronouncing his daughter cute, as in most of the other comics where she appears. While some readers were outraged by this image (Chute 2010), research has shown that such behavior is quite common in pre-schoolers (see Lloyd Davies et al. 2000, 1339) and the Sophie panel simply registers this behavior alongside other typical conduct such as tantrums, playing with dolls, or watching TV, thus exposing the outrage of readers as not only provincial but also harmful, as it stems from the association of 142 M. PRECUP sexuality with shame and the reflex position that any representation of a child’s discovery of their anatomy is prurient. Representing subjects other than oneself in an autobiography, particularly vulnerable subjects such as children or adults who cannot give their consent, is inevitable; it is, thus, significant that Crumb and Kominsky- Crumb share their concerns with their audience. In this context, it is also important that Sophie receives some agency when she is able to draw herself, even though it is quite difficult to gauge what part of her contributions to her parents’ autobiographical work may have been directed by their own suggestions. Sophie starts drawing herself in 1992, in “Euro Dirty Laundry: ‘Merci, Au Revoir!’,” but a few pages later, Robert Crumb draws her himself, and later it is Aline Kominsky-Crumb who picks up the Sophie parts. Sophie labels herself “a Junior Valley girl,” busy listening to MC Hammer on her Walkman and making fun of her father for failing to understand why the volume needs to be quite high (Crumb and Crumb 2012, 132–133). On the cover of The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics (1993), she presents a version of herself as the spoiled child her parents constantly worry that she might become: playing with her Game Boy and claiming that she cannot make up her mind what kind of Porsche she wants for her 16th birthday. As a pre-teen, Sophie represents herself as independent, whimsical, and detached, tending to ignore her parents, whom she generally approaches with various demands, and occasionally bursting into tears upon the slightest provocation. Once she becomes a teenager, her parents walk on eggshells around her as she polices their imperfect mastery of French, and her presence in her parents’ comics becomes more and more scarce (“A Day in the Life” 1994, by Robert Crumb). It is implied that she has a rich social life with her friends and that her parents allow her the freedom to spend time with them without worrying about a curfew: in “Self-Loathing Comics: ‘A Couple A’ Nasty, Raunchy Old Things,” 1997, for instance, we only see Sophie’s words emerging from another room as she tells her parents she is going out and does not know when she will return. Throughout this autobiographical body of work, Sophie’s presence gives a much-needed refresh- ing jolt to the repetitive dialogue and gestures of her parents. These disturbances of their routine are signposted as exhausting when she is younger and desired when she becomes older, but Sophie remains the subject of devoted affection throughout an otherwise predictable chronology of parenthood that overwhelms even people as idiosyncratic as Aline and Robert. 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 143

Crumb pointedly inserts his self-portrait as a father in the established conceit of his autobiographical persona not only by maintaining Robert’s overall coherence and mannerisms but also through the publication of some of the stories about his daughter alongside other autobiographical episodes that go back to his childhood. For instance, in “Uncle Bob’s Mid-Life Crisis,” published in Weirdo on 1982 and subsequently collected in My Troubles with Women,12 fatherhood is part of a “mid-life crisis” caused by work-related “performance anxiety,” as Robert’s own self- diagnosis indicates. As Aline, who is a stay-at-home mother, struggles to take care of the baby, who is about one year old, as well as cook, clean, do laundry, and drive into town for errands, Robert, whose studio is set up at home, attempts to overcome a bout of depression brought about by the appearance of The R. Crumb Checklist, a guide to his work that gives him a sense of finality and purposelessness. As a sexual encounter manages to provide some solace, he eventually offers a modicum of help to Aline by helping the baby flush the contents of a dirty diaper and giving her a bottle. These panels are placed side by side as the three panels that conclude Robert’s rendezvous, from which he departs, as usual, in a clandes- tine manner, suitcase under his arm, hurriedly apologizing to the surprised woman watching him from her doorway. The juxtaposition of these two scenes—Robert’s signature sex positions, where the woman’s head virtu- ally disappears in a tangle of limbs, while right underneath father and daughter carefully discard and solemnly say good-bye to the contents of her diaper—indicates that Sophie’s presence does not revise her father’s previous sexual conduct, nor does that conduct, in fact, significantly affect his performance as a father. As a partner, however, he does show himself to be insufficiently supportive, since most of the domestic and childrearing work seems to fall to Aline herself. Even as Robert grows closer and more affectionate toward his daughter, whom he showers with love and attention, Crumb adds this newfound role to his autobiographical character’s pre-existing beliefs and conduct without allowing fatherhood to revise them. Within the wider existence of Crumb’s autobiographical self, even little Sophie herself becomes one of the generic “women” who perturb Robert’s peace, as indicated by the “Epilogue” to “My Troubles with Women, Part II.” The six-panel story concludes an overview of the origins of Robert’s hatred of hegemonic masculinity, epitomized by a high school bully named Skutch, who terrorizes Robert and humiliates his brother Charles by questioning his heterosexuality and violently attacking him, thus paving the way for his 144 M. PRECUP slow descent into isolation and mental illness. Attributing some women’s attraction to the type of masculinity embodied by Skutch to biological factors provides the kind of simplistic essentialist reading of femininity that Crumb has never abandoned. Crumb/Robert reduces women to their biology—an opinion expressed often in different media—and bypasses the contributing cultural factors that he is willing to contemplate only in relation to the construction of masculinity, particularly when he considers himself. Robert often discusses the factors that contributed to the construction of the kind of the alternative masculinity that he claims to embody, starting from his upbringing to his environment and time period when he was raised. However, Robert rarely applies the same logic to the women in his life, whose irritating behavior he attributes to biological factors. Aline is one such exception, as Robert tentatively posits in “A Couple A’ Nasty, Raunchy Old Things”: “Maybe you’re living proof that humans are not just the slaves of natural laws” (Crumb and Crumb 2012, 204). The character’s scorn for the alleged hypocrisy behind women’s preference for dominant masculinity justifies and glorifies Robert’s openness about his aggression toward women. It also makes Robert the moral equivalent of his brother’s bullies. This is also the context of Sophie’s tan- trum at the end of the “Epilogue” that wraps up Crumb’s thoughts on gender roles (Fig. 6.2). In this short story, Sophie bestows a human identity and a name, “Brendan,” to a slice of bread her father is preparing to have for breakfast. When he ignores her whimsical objections, then cuts

Fig. 6.2 The last two panels from the “Epilogue” of “My Troubles with Women, Part II.” (© Robert Crumb) 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 145

Brendan in half and eats him, Sophie dissolves in tears and finally collapses in a bundle of emotion on the floor, prompting her father to label her as yet another one of those “women” that torment him. Thus, instead of using the opportunity offered by his new parental role in order to review his long-held opinions about gender, Crumb places his daughter in pre-existing categories, presumably in order to deliver the punchline, thus turning the Sophie character into a comedic prop rather than fleshing out her personality. At the same time, when he observes Sophie’s independence and strong will as signs that she will be able to stand up to dominant masculinity,13 Robert fails to address his own role in the propagation of the cycle of hostility against women. By regarding his wife and his daughter as both exemplars of the ills of irritating femininity and persons who should be exempted from its consequences, Robert leaves the status quo untouched and his own contribution to it, be it intentional or not, unrevised. It is important, at this point, to also examine the “cute” aesthetic mode Crumb chooses in order to display paternal love in the Sophie episodes. Robert’s behavior and affective response to his daughter remain constant throughout Crumb’s work, but they also remain anchored in and even contribute to the character’s established self-portrayal as an (embarrassing) example of alternative masculinity. To show the warmth of his affection while also mocking Robert for it, Crumb sometimes draws little hearts around his head, thus breaking his oft-announced anti-cuteness rule. For instance, in a panel from “I’m Grateful! I’m Grateful!” we see Robert seated in an armchair, a squirming Sophie on his lap, agreeing to her every whim, as his affection emanates in heart-shaped form from his head. With an expression of blissful adoration, eyes closed, he enjoys the temporary closeness she allows. The text box reads: “But if you want me to go totally soft in the head, just let me get started on my beautiful, brilliant, multital- ented daughter—I have no objectivity when it comes to her—I’m a doting fool—she’s got me wrapped around her little finger!” (Crumb 2000). The adjective “cute” is constantly applied to Sophie no matter what she does: whether she is five years old and exploring her sexuality or an adult covered in tattoos who has moved to New York and is living in a squat (Crumb and Crumb 2012, 235). Even though he often represents himself as grotesque and his daughter as cute, Crumb maintains the same aesthetic register that has made his comics so appealing through the way they mix influences from Basil Wolverton, Disney and “the ‘bigfoot’ style of American newspaper strips, to generate an old-fashioned, almost ‘sweet’ 146 M. PRECUP effect” that clashes with the content of the strips (Sabin 2001, 94). I argue that, in this context, Crumb’s “sweet” nostalgic aesthetic and Sophie’s cuteness—which itself “cute-ifies” the observer, her father (Ngai qtd in Dale et al. 2017, 5)—work together to disengage the Crumb persona even further from the contemporary world and instead place him and the Crumb family life in an atemporal bubble that not only protects the introverted narrator from the outside world but also makes it easier to suspend moral judgment (Dale et al. 2017, 10–11). Sophie does intervene in this self- representation when she begins drawing herself, and her emancipation from her father’s “cute” aesthetic becomes increasingly evident as she matures as both a person and as an artist. Sophie’s portrait receives a few additional touches in a few sketches included in The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, where Crumb includes a large number of realistic portraits, many of them drawn from photographs, but also sketches of household objects and scenes, landscapes, and street corners. The project is purposefully undermined by the book cover, where Crumb portrays himself walking while drawing in his open sketchbook, in a pastoral setting, as an attractive female hiker in the background gazes at him longingly. The aesthetic mode purportedly embraced in the book project is undermined by the grotesqueness of Crumb’s grin and other facial features, as well as by the cat in his arms, visibly disgruntled at being used as a prop. The lengthy subtitle and the preface are also meant to cast doubt over cuteness (here called “sweetness”) as an aesthetic mode,14 but also to clarify that Crumb himself does not regard the work included in the book as “sweet” or “cute,” and that the title is mainly a marketing ploy “to seduce, to soften up” female readers, for whom “sweetness and cuteness have a perennial appeal” (Crumb 2006). Indeed, the two pages of Sophie stories included here do not add a superior measure of cuteness to the work already collected elsewhere; they are similar to Jeffrey Brown’s Kids Are Weird, a collection of strangely humorous things young children think about when they discover the world. However, these stories are placed among portraits of other family members, including Crumb’s first wife Dana and his son Jesse, Robert Crumb as a child, as well as Aline and his brother Charles. As indicated in the preface, these portraits are affectionate, and so are the drawings of the many musicians Crumb admires, alongside apparently disconnected objects such as a broken tea pot that “served us well for many years” or Crumb’s cat, pictured as an oversized otherworldly creature sitting on her owner’s chest. These are neither sweet nor cute, but nostalgic and respectful tributes; they are attempts to preserve moments that are fleeting, to spend 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 147 time in the company of those who are absent by reconstituting their faces and figures, touching and retouching them. This collection exposes the “Robert” character from the rest of Crumb’s work as a conceit more clearly than his interviews do; it is the aesthetic of the grotesque that clearly separates Robert from these realistic portraits, whose line work is just as minutely time-consuming as in Crumb’s other work, but with different results. The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb has a luminous quality that can rarely be found in his other comics, which in turn provide this book with more narrative substance and context, thus making it more poignant by offering readers an understanding of the background of these tender images. Crumb’s decision to preface the book with a grotesque version of his self-portrait, alongside his comments about women’s preference for cuteness from the preface, propose a reading of this project as an exception to Crumb’s steadfast commitment to his main autobiographical conceit.15

Conclusion Throughout the stories where Sophie makes an appearance, both Aline and Robert are relatable and endearing parents, and their worries and dilemmas about their child are common, even though they do sometimes venture to represent and discuss matters that are rarely represented, such as the doubt that they made the right decision by having a child or the ordeal of an abortion because they do not want any more children. These are important contributions to contemporary conversations about parenthood that usually elide such topics, which are still taboo.16 However, embedded as they are in this episodic autobiographical narrative, the Sophie stories work backward toward normalizing and effacing problematic sexual conduct, since—to employ the terminology explicated by Smith and Watson (2010)—Crumb’s “narrating ‘I’” does not produce a genuine critique of his “narrated ‘I.’” In other words, instead of offering opportunities for self-examination and revision of past bad behavior, Robert’s self-portrait as a loving father works within the wider rhetoric of his comics to elicit leniency for problematic conduct—including sexual assault—that remains underexamined. In addition to this, and in spite of overwhelming evidence that Robert is trying to be a good father to his daughter, who is clearly depicted with love in many moving moments of closeness and companionship, even Sophie is occasionally summarily classed as an exasperating “typical” woman who torments or baffles him. Even if Crumb’s purpose here is partly to create a humorous effect, his 148 M. PRECUP stubborn adherence to well-rehearsed narrative patterns is an important commentary against the popular idea that the gender of one’s children can in and of itself profoundly revise entrenched beliefs about gender roles. Instead of clashing, the cute and the grotesque work together to blur the memory of Robert’s more questionable past behavior and of Crumb’s comics—such as “A Bitchin’ Bod”—that offer violence against women as a subject of consumption instead of unequivocally critiquing it. The comics that spend more time showing us Robert’s paternal conduct post-date his more problematic representations of women, but they are still embedded in a fragmentary narrative that stretches over decades, featuring the same character, a Crumb look-alike. That character has a history of sexual abuse for which he sometimes expresses (tongue-in-cheek) regret, but for which—in the grand scheme of things—he never gets punished. The critical function of these stories is, much like that of Crumb’s stories that feature racist stereotypes, “never complete, or free from what appear to be contradictory readings” (Creekmur 2015, 30). Crumb may claim in interviews that these more problematic stories are his sexual fantasies, his or America’s id, but within his body of work, his character has a life where these things happen, and even though autobiographical subjects are to a certain extent fictitious, the superpositions between his public persona and his character create expectations that he has entered an autobiographical pact with readers. Based on his statements in interviews, Crumb himself conflates his autobiographical persona with himself, but also expects readers to be able to read some of his stories as life writing and some as depictions of his fantasies. Crumb’s representation of fatherhood also exists within the wider story of the Crumb family, which can be pieced together not only from Crumb’s comics but also from other related attempts to tell the story of his upbringing, such as Terry Zwigoff’s documentary filmCrumb and Crumb Comics: The Whole Family Is Crazy, which also collects some of Maxon Crumb and Charles Crumb’s writings and other works by family members. Other more recent attempts to collect and publish the entirety of Crumb’s work, the Complete Crumb series, also reinforce a reading of Crumb’s autobiographical impulse as revisionist, the author himself an obsessive archivist who revisits the same documents with the same results. The Crumb family history is evidence of the disastrous consequences of growing up during the post-war period in a sexually repressed environment that reinforced social conformity and rewarded dominant masculinity, but also during a time period when there were fewer options for supporting people suffering from mental illness 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 149 and/or living in a family plagued by violence and addiction. Crumb’s popularity has placed him in situations where he has had to revisit these issues multiple times in interviews; the chaotic publishing environment of his early years as a successful cartoonist, as well as subsequent collections on various topics that only gathered a few comics at a time also create the impression of his work (or at least its publication history) as consistently retrospective. His archival proclivities, evident not only in the Complete Crumb series, but also the Sophie Crumb comics collection, also build up an image of Crumb as a person who is stuck in time, plagued by a painful family history and compelled to revisit—but not substantially revise—past behavior. Crumb’s deliberate reluctance on this account is difficult to explain, particularly since he has been an ally to many female cartoonists, such as Carol Tyler, Dori Seda, Phoebe Gloeckner, and others. Based on the narrative proposed in his autobiographical comics and other media along the decades, it appears that, while the world of underground comics offered him a safe space (away from both the difficult atmosphere in the Crumb home and the violence of hard-boiled masculinity that was so popular and so oppressive during his formative years), it did not offer an alternative to and a proper critique of mainstream models of masculinity. Thus, instead of representing alternative masculinities embedded in counter-narratives to hegemonic masculinity, many underground cartoonists perpetuated— and perhaps even strengthened—the very kind of masculinity that they claimed to abhor. The self-loathing humor that continues to be such a powerful influence in the work of cartoonists influenced by the underground, in part therapeutic and in part subversive, can be interpreted, depending on the subject, as either “edge-work” with some as yet unquan- tifiable political potential (Holm2016 ), or simply an early manifestation of what is nowadays known in internet culture as “Poe’s Law,” which is often used “as a shield for trolls to hide behind” (Grey Ellis 2017).17 However, in the present-day context, where violence against women and other minorities is still prevalent and perhaps even on the rise—in the context of the multiplication of public expressions of sexism and white nationalism—it is difficult to credit Crumb’s more problematic representations with any social or political transformative potential. In this context, the Sophie stories, particularly the early ones, as well as some of the images from The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb (including Jesse’s portraits), show fatherhood’s potential to offer some redemption and healing to a character who keeps emphasizing the cathartic value of confession. Unfortunately, as Crumb invariably returns to the well-worn 150 M. PRECUP tropes of his autobiographical conceit, fatherhood becomes a missed opportunity. Robert and Aline appear to be loving and devoted—if slightly eccentric—parents to Sophie, and their work remains an important contribution to the sparsely populated genre of collective autobiography, but not even the luminous and quirky Sophie sub-plot can free Robert from his loop: instead of prompting a genuine reevaluation of previous problematic conduct, Sophie herself becomes a narrative prop in an autobiographical work trapped in a 50-year-old conceit.

Notes 1. In this chapter, I only focus on the Sophie comics because Jesse, Crumb’s son from his first marriage, only makes brief appearances in his work, and his father does not seem to have played as significant a role in his education as in Sophie’s. Jesse first appears in one of the earliest comics co-created by Crumb and Kominsky, from their first issue of Dirty Laundry Comics, titled “Aline’n’Bob’s Funtime Funnies,” where he is not a developed character as such, but merely functions as a narrative prop, possibly with the intention of creating a humorous effect: he walks in on Aline and Bob as they are having sex, and his main contribution to the plot is providing a cascade of angry expletives and unreasonable wishes before disappearing quite suddenly and never being mentioned again. He also appears even more briefly as a baby in the first installment of Crumb’s short story “My Troubles with Women,” where we only see him in one panel, as his mother is breastfeeding him and watching her husband leaving home “for a few weeks,” the father’s guilt materialized in the shape of a knife that protrudes from his chest, but still powerless to stop him from abandoning his wife and child in order to “pursue every opportunity to meet girls”. In the tangled threads of Crumb’s autobiographical narratives, Jesse also makes a brief appearance in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film Crumb (1994), where we see him drawing with his father and helping him pack before his move to France. Even though in his later work Crumb did revisit some of his experiences, and even published two affectionate full-page portraits of Jesse and his first wife Dana inThe Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, as well as include some of Jesse’s artwork in the Crumb family artbook titled Crumb Comics: The Whole Family is Crazy!, Jesse—who passed away in 2017— never became an important subject of his father’s work. 2. Fantagraphics published 17 volumes of Complete Crumb comics, collecting work produced from 1958 to 1992. 3. Each family member generally produces their own self-representation, with a few exceptions, as when, for instance, Crumb amends his wife’s work or 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 151

when Sophie is too young to produce her own contribution. This differen- tiates this body of work from collections such as Dominique Goblet and Nikita Fossoul’s Chronographie, where mother and daughter draw each other’s portrait over a ten year-period. 4. This is a useful reminder to those who may be unfamiliar with the differences among underground female cartoonists who contributed to the first long-standing feminist comics anthology, Wimmen’s Comix, something that both Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin recount at length in Kominsky-Crumb’s memoir Need More Love (2007). 5. In one interview where he briefly touches on #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein’s behavior, which effectively pushed the #MeToo movement into the limelight, Crumb underlines the anachronism (rather than the non-consensual aspect) of Weinstein’s conduct: “And she [Dian Hanson] said the trouble with Harvey Weinstein was he didn’t realize it wasn’t the ‘70’s anymore. He was going around acting like it was still the 1970s. Back then, women would accept the fact that if you put yourself out there, men are going to be grabbing your ass or feeling up your leg or this, that and the other thing. And you just dealt with it. You had to learn to deal with that stuff. That’s just the way men are. And I’m sure, 99% of all heterosexual men, and probably homosexual men too for that matter, if you’re going to tell the truth, behaved inappropriately at some point with somebody, harassed somebody who was offended or wasn’t up for it” (2017). 6. Crumb has given numerous interviews where he repeatedly identifies himself as his cartoon character. For instance, in a 1988 interview with Al Goldstein, when asked to clarify some aspects about his sex life, he notes: “It’s all in the comics” (Crumb 2004, 143). In a 1991 interview with Michael Dougan, he claims: “I do those things. All those things, I do them all” (Crumb 2004, 166). In an interview with Jacques Hyzagi, he once again conflates his cartoon character’s and his own sexual preferences: “These things are hard to talk about. Anyway, it’s all in the comics” (Crumb 2015). 7. “That story is an extremely unromantic view of love and sex,” Mr. Crumb said. “Any normal, intelligent, college-type woman would find this story disgusting, would say look at how he’s portraying this woman. She gets drunk and then puts out, this guy is a creep, that’s just hateful to women. It’s very unromantic; they want romance. Some writers have a talent for seducing women through their work, you read their stuff and you know they are seducing women. It’s an art. Some men know how to talk to women and I just don’t have that” (Crumb 2015). 8. Dez Skinn quotes S Clay Wilson as saying that he, in fact, convinced Crumb to draw “dirty,” meaning “drawing anything that occurred to him, without censorship or concern for an imagined audience” (2004, 32). In Wilson’s own work non-consensual sex is sometimes portrayed as a source of humor. 152 M. PRECUP

9. The couple’s pregnancy scare at the end of this story turns out to have been real, as we find out from “Dirty Laundry Comics: More Good Clean Fun,” a story included in the same volume. As the story picks up this particular thread, Robert mentions that they went through an abortion, a “real nightmare” that eventually prompted Robert to get a vasectomy. These issues are not discussed or represented at length, even though it is quite important that they are featured here, as abortion is still not a topic that is discussed at length or this openly. 10. Aline’s approach of the quality of their parenting skills oscillates. For instance, in “Arline’n’Bob in Our Lovely Home,” when Sophie comes up to her parents and asks them to play “kootie Katcher” with her, Aline has an uncharacteristic outburst of affection rendered comical by the idolatrous expression on her face, as she thinks to herself: “She’s so uninhibited…I guess we’re great parents!/…She’s completely confident…fearless…she’s gonna give some man a real rollercoaster ride!” (Crumb 2000). Later, in “Euro Dirty Laundry,” when Aline and Sophie have an argument, Sophie’s words reiterate her mother’s own fears: “You don’t like me…You probably wish you never had me…right?” (Crumb and Crumb, 2012, 142). This scene, where Sophie is drawn by Kominsky-Crumb, is meant to be read as melodramatic partly because of the suddenness and insignificance of the motivation behind Sophie’s outburst (she gets angry because her mother protests when Sophie interrupts her from a conversation with Robert to ask her to get a glass of water). 11. Aline even credits Robert with having parented her: “…you parented me all these years! I’m much more secure because you’ve given me unconditional love (unlike my selfish parents)” (Crumb and Crumb2012 , 203) 12. In this volume, Sophie is also featured in “I’m Grateful, I’m Grateful!” (Weirdo, 1989), “Arline’n’Bob and That Thing in the Back Bedroom” (Weirdo, 1983), “Uncle Bob’s Midlife Crisis” (Weirdo, 1982), “My Troubles with Women, Part II” (Hup, 1986), “Arline’n’Bob in Our Lovely Home” (Weirdo, 1988), and “Dirty Laundry Comics: More Good Clean Fun” (Weirdo, 1986). The other four stories from this collection—which is not structured chronologically—focus specifically on Robert’s sexual and romantic life and sexual fantasies: “Memories Are Made of This!” (Weirdo, 1988), “Footsy” (Weirdo, 1987), “My Troubles with Women” (Zap, 1980), and “If I Were a King” (Hup, 1987). 13. In “I’m Grateful! I’m Grateful!”, for instance, we see both parents watch their daughter monkeying about instead of brushing her teeth, and Robert delightedly exclaims: “I’m grateful that she’s such a fierce little female—it’s tough on her parents but you know no man will ever push her around and get away with it!” (Crumb 2000). 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 153

14. The subtitle reads: “Being a delightful collection of adorable, heartwarming and lovingly rendered drawings which, I promise, will not make you feel threatened in any way, and will put you in a state all warm and fuzzy and cuddly towards the artist and life in general” (Crumb 2006). 15. His daughter Sophie seems similarly interested in the grotesque, but her work has a grimness that her father’s does not, as it appeals less to comedy and more to the tragic grotesque (see Sophie Crumb 2011). 16. It is quite difficult to draw any conclusions in these early days of the conversation about parental regret, but so far it seems that exhaustion, the loss of independence, as well as the financial responsibilities that are brought about by children are some of the common reasons why fathers and mothers regret having children (Marsh 2017). 17. The initial definition of Poe’s Law is formulated with specific reference to religion, but it has been applied to multiple other subjects: “POE’S LAW: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article” (qtd. in Grey Ellis).

References Campbell, Jessica. 2017. The Bad Behavior of Men in Comics. Hyperallergic, November 21. https://hyperallergic.com/411811/the-bad-behavior-of-men- in-comics/. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2018. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New York: Harper Collins/Kindle. Couser, Thomas G. 2004. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Creekmur, Corey K. 2015. Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix. In Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague, 19–33. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Crumb, Robert. 2000. My Troubles with Women. San Francisco: Last Gasp. ———. 2004. A Conversation with R. Crumb. Interview by Michael Dougan. In R. Crumb: Conversations, ed. D.K. Holm, 164–169. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 2006. The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb. London: MQ Publications Limited. Crumb, Sophie. 2011. Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist. New York/ London: W.W. Norton & Company. Crumb, Robert. 2015. Robert Crumb Hates You. An Interview with Jacques Hyzagi. The Observer, October 14. https://observer.com/2015/10/robert- crumb-hates-you/. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. 154 M. PRECUP

———. 2017. Crumb on Sexual Harassment. An Interview with Alex Wood. The Official Crumb Site. http://www.crumbproducts.com/pages/about/ crumbinterview2017.html. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. ———. 2019. Robert Crumb: I am no longer a slave to a raging libido. An Interview with Nadja Sayej. The Guardian, March 7. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/07/robert-crumb-i-am-no-longer-a-slave-to-a- raging-libido. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Crumb, Aline, and Robert Crumb. 2012. Drawn Together. London: Knockabout Limited. Crumb, Race, and Gender. 2019. MICE, February 7. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ZDePN-swvuE. Accessed 30 Mar 2019. Dale, Joshua Paul, et al., eds. 2017. The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness. New York/Abingdon: Routledge. Goblet, Dominique, and Nikita Fossoul. 2010. Chronographie. Paris: L’Association. Grey Ellis, Emma. 2017. Can’t Take a Joke? That’s Just Poe’s Law, 2017’s Most Important Internet Phenomenon, May 6. https://www.wired.com/2017/06/ poes-law-troll-cultures-central-rule/. Accessed 5 Aug 2019. Holm, Nicholas. 2016. Humour as edge-work: aesthetics, joke-work and tendentiousness in Tosh.0 (or Daniel Tosh and the mystery of the missing joke-work). Comedy Studies 7 (1): 108–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/20 40610X.2016.1146438. Kim O. 2017. r. crumb is a sexual predator. The Shallow Brigade, January 30. https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/01/r-crumb-is-sexual-predator. html. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Kominsky-Crumb, Aline. 2007. Need More Love. London: MQ Publications. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lloyd Davies, Sally, Danya Glaser, and Kossoff Ruth. 2000. Children’s sexual play and behavior in pre-school settings: Staff’s perceptions, reports, and responses. Child Abuse & Neglect 24 (10): 1329–1343. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0145-2134(00)00184-8. Marsh, Stefanie. 2017. ’It’s the breaking of a taboo’: the parents who regret having children. The Guardian. February 11. https://www.theguardian.com/ lifeandstyle/2017/feb/11/breaking-taboo-parents-who-regret-having-children. Accessed 15 Feb 2019. Rosenkranz, Patrick. 2002. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Sabin, Roger. 2001. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London/New York: Phaidon Press. ———. 2010. Adult Comics. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. 6 “A DOTING FOOL”: THE LIMITS OF FATHERHOOD IN R. CRUMB’S SOPHIE… 155

Singer, Marc. 2018. Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies. Austin: University of Texas Press. Skinn, Dez. 2004. Comix: The Underground Revolution. London: Collins & Brown. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Zwigoff, Terry, dir. 1994. Crumb. Superior Pictures. CHAPTER 7

“Emasculated by the diaper bag”: Aging, Masculinity, and Fatherhood in Joe Ollmann’s Mid-Life

Canadian cartoonist Joe Ollmann’s semi-autobiographical book-length comic Mid-Life is a cranky but insightful meditation on aging and fatherhood, and also a darkly humorous commentary on how the many demands of paternity can negatively affect self-perception, creativity, and relationships. Father of two adult daughters and one baby boy with his younger wife, the main character—whose name, John Olsen, approximates the author’s—fixates on signs of decrepitude he thinks he notices in his early 40s, his diminishing level of attractiveness to the opposite sex, as well as his inability to concentrate on his job as an art director for a magazine. In Mid-Life, fatherhood is understood as a complicated, exhausting, but ultimately rewarding role that can both build character and ruin it, but also has an important impact on the narrator’s performance of masculinity. Publishers Weekly called Mid-Life a “gem,” “a work of uncompromising honesty,” despite initial fears that this may be yet another of those “misan- thropic, self-pitying comics about unappreciated cartoonists” (2011). The Comics Journal found it to be “a deftly structured novel full of shrewd characterizations, nuanced scenes and memorably quirky bits of business, everything as harrowing as it is compassionate and very funny—a genuine accomplishment” (De Haven 2011). The National Post called it “a superb graphic novel, by turns hilarious and appalling” and pointed out Ollmann’s “self-lacerating sarcasm, reminiscent of winningly neurotic stand-up comedians such as Marc Maron and Louis C.K.” (Heer 2011a). In a supplementary piece for Comics Comics, Jeet Heer also praises Ollmann’s

© The Author(s) 2020 157 M. Precup, The Graphic Lives of Fathers, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_7 158 M. PRECUP work for its contribution to the low mimetic tradition in comics, which he convincingly argues has been understudied and underappreciated (2011b).1 The largest part of Ollmann’s body of work, which consists of four collections of short stories and three graphic novels published to date, brings to the fore characters whose originality and intelligence do not necessarily make them likeable, but whose predicament opens up conversations about deceptively mundane contemporary issues. Part of what is commonly defined as the second generation of Canadian alternative comics (Rifkind and Warley 2016), Ollmann’s work can be placed in a comedic tradition that has sprung from both (male) American underground comix and stand-up comedy, but also moves beyond it to sidestep some of their sexist conceits as he produces a significant critique of paternal conduct. Some of the topics developed in Mid-Life are anticipated by Ollmann’s earlier short stories, particularly issues related to the pressure of hegemonic masculinities, the social and emotional implications of aging, body image, as well as various limit situations that arise from these issues. Ollmann’s main characters do not speak from positions of power, but instead occupy marginal spaces from which they interrogate the social dynamics that oppress them. This is a process that does not necessarily make them likeable or flawless, as Ollmann uses hyperbole and caricature both to show their plight and to emphasize their pettiness. For instance, Schultz, the narrator of the short story “Oh Deer,” published in the 2006 collection This Will All End in Tears, finds himself working in an insurance office, surrounded by “alpha male, hunting and fishing and strip club types” (Ollmann 2006, 51) who pressure him to buy a rifle and join them for a hunting expedition. After he unexpectedly kills a deer, he is regretful, proud, and finally desperate as his colleagues abandon him and he has to dissect the dead animal all by himself. At 30, he declares himself “ripe for a midlife crisis” (Ollmann 2006, 51),2 and thus feels additional pressure to prove his masculinity; this has disastrous consequences that place him in cringe-worthy situations from which he desperately tries to extricate himself while having to relin- quish his last shreds of dignity and self-respect. The narrator of “Oh Deer” depicts himself as an awkward, gaunt, non-athletic geek bullied by “the macho-types” (Ollmann 2006, 51), and he bears a striking resemblance to “John Olsen,” the father from Mid-Life, with whom he also shares his obsession with proving his masculinity, particularly because of various age- related anxieties. The same character—or a character with almost identical features—keeps making an appearance in Ollmann’s work ever since his first published collection of comics,Chewing on Tinfoil (2002), but he 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 159 does not develop a cohesive personality. In Mid-Life, the character is revealed to be semi-autobiographical as a few notes at the end both specify that the book is a combination of autobiography and fiction, and make a point of distancing the main character’s life from one specific event in Joe Ollmann’s biography.3 Mid-Life relies on a double narrative perspective to produce a commentary on fatherhood, aging, and gender. The book critiques social pressures around adequate gender performance from two points of view: that of John Olsen, an art director for a magazine, a father of three who is depressed that he has just turned 40, and Sherri Smalls, a children’s enter- tainer, who is still in her 30s but at the crossroads in both her career and her personal life. Even though the book does privilege Olsen’s story by providing more background to both the character and his family, Sherri Smalls’s part is also substantial, and her presence is a rare and important attempt to include a first-person female perspective in a comic that is ostensibly about a man’s mid-life crisis. Here, Sherri’s part shows that even if guilt, dissatisfaction, and self-destructive urges can in fact haunt everyone on the gender and age spectrum, they do so differently. When it comes to the pressures of parenting and procreation, Sherri Smalls’s story shows how unrelenting, internalized, and damaging to a person’s sense of self they can be. As it easily moves between the two narrators, the story largely preserves the nine-panel grid that Ollmann uses in most of his work, with several effects.4 The small rectangular panels, with ominously dark and detailed backgrounds contain characters that appear to struggle to fit into the small space provided for them, their disproportionately large heads sitting awkwardly on their shoulders and undermining their owners’ already diminished dignity. The fixed structure also suggests that these people are quite stuck in their everyday spaces, an immobility that results in competing degrees of misery that are realistically rendered. This starts from the first page, which has John Olsen fighting an unequal battle against the large amount of excrement produced in his home. Still, the gritty realism of Mid-Life is either tempered by the warmth and tenderness of some of the domestic scenes or modulated by self-deprecating humor. At the same time, the characters’ fear of loneliness and mediocrity is put into perspective by their own awareness of the ridicule of the situations they—either deliberately or unwittingly—create. The questions I am asking in this chapter are related not only to what graphic narration can offer to the conversation on contemporary 160 M. PRECUP fatherhood and aging, but also what, according to the narrative logic of the book, qualifies as appropriate paternal conduct. Considering the fact that fatherhood is usually tangled up with issues such as romance and domesticity, but also entrenched stereotypes about age and gender, I also ask if Mid-Life proposes certain changes to the understanding and performance of traditional masculinity, in favor of the emergence of alternative masculinities. Every male cartoonist included in this book considers and depicts issues related to how the male body is regarded through the lens of hegemonic masculinities: Robert Crumb reacts by portraying himself as a grotesque, weak “wimp” who compensates for his “soft” masculinity through his sexual conquests; James Kochalka creates the conceit of the cute and zany accident-prone elf, both endearing and exasperating, whose vulnerability may elicit sympathy for him; finally, Jeffrey Brown’s work from before A Matter of Life shows his autobiographical persona struggling with the demands made by hegemonic masculinities on his body, sex life, and the way he socializes with other men. Of these authors, only Crumb produces work related to aging, but he does so not in connection with fatherhood, but in order to address the ageist perception of older people as sexless. In this context, Ollmann’s Mid-Life produces an important commentary on how the “mid-life crisis,” which some scientists have debunked (Strauch 2010) continues to haunt men as anxiety about aging remains a real concern. Studies have shown that masculinities have not been studied sufficiently as “temporal scripts” (Spector-Mersel 2006, 67), and that models of hegemonic masculinities typical of Western culture are incomplete, as they do not include sufficient (if any) models for older men, who are perceived as losing their gender and becoming invisible as they age (Spector-Mersel 2006, 74–77). As a result, middle-aged men often live with substantial anxiety caused by the fear that they might lose their “harmony with the masculine social clocks” (Spector-Mersel 2006, 79). When fatherhood becomes a factor, such anxieties usually coalesce around the fear of turning 40, more specifically related to body issues such as putting on weight (as involved fathers have less time for healthy food and exercise), being able to participate in children’s activities (as fathers also worry their children might find them old or embarrassing), particularly if they have sons, whom they see as more physically challenging than daughters (Shirani 2013). In this chapter, I first look at how Ollmann uses graphic narration to externalize anxieties about aging, masculinity, and fatherhood by depicting them as physical manifestations that radically transform the narrator’s body, a volatile object that changes shape and size 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 161 under the burden of his psychological states. I next consider how the responsibilities and effects of parenthood can differ depending on factors such as gender and age, that mark the bodies of parents differently.

Middle-Aged Fatherhood and the Crisis of Confidence Ollmann shows to what extent one’s perception of parenthood is determined by contemporary social conventions about old age and aging, as well as widespread notions about what constitutes an appropriate age for child-bearing. The narrator keeps falling between the acceptable bench- marks for fatherhood, and is hence deemed either too young or too old for the task. Olsen’s worry that he may be regarded as anomalous from the perspective of his age is justifiable in the light of Canadian national statistics that specify that, for instance, for the year 2011, the average age of first-time fathers was 28.3 years (“Father’s Day…” 2017). On the other hand, the average for first-time mothers was 30.2 for the same year (“Fertility: Overview, 2009–2011” 2015), something that partly explains the anxiety felt by Sherri Smalls’s character, who is most probably in her early 30s, about the fact that she does not have a long-standing romantic partner or prospects of having children in the near future. Throughout Mid-Life, age is an important lens that determines various readings of fatherhood and masculinity, and Ollmann uses comic exaggeration to expose contemporary Western culture’s cult of youth and its real-life effects on how fatherhood is publicly interpreted. Ollmann explicitly—albeit humorously—points out that his choice to represent his alter ego as a much older man is not to be read literally. In a drawing placed at the beginning of the book above a few prefatory remarks,5 Ollmann portrays himself as an elderly disabled man in a wheelchair, with sagging skin, a hearing aid, two remaining teeth, and a substantial bald spot, flies buzz- ing out of emanata around his back to suggest that he also gives off an unpleasant odor. He giddily confesses his intention to depict himself as “old and fat” to his son, who is perhaps three or four years old, and whose wide eyes, rigid body posture, and transparent exasperation (“Oh, Lord,” reads the thought bubble above his head) suggest that he is exhausted by his father’s well-worn conceit. This small metafictional scene, alongside additional opening and closing remarks that provide more details of the author’s concept and process, suggests that readers are presented with an 162 M. PRECUP

“(extra) warts and all” semi-autobiographical narrative that explicitly relates fatherhood, masculinity, and aging. It follows that readers are not to interpret the narrator’s portrayal as a rapidly decaying old man as a realistic representation of his physical appearance, but rather of his emotional state as a result of internalized social pressure. An additional detail that supports such a reading is the author’s photograph on the rear dust jacket. Ollmann is playfully smirking as his son is hiding behind him, a pair of smiling eyes barely emerging from behind his father’s shoulder. The caption once again emphasizes the extreme old age of the author: “The senile ‘author’ avec his inker-in-training, the hyphenated Sam Ollmann-Chan.” Above the photograph, the author’s bio describes him as a “maladjusted old man” and a “flatulent, elderly windbag.” Both the tongue-in-cheek photograph and the descriptions over-emphasize the age issue, exposing it as a useful artifice for the exploration of fatherhood, domesticity, and the gender dynamics of parenthood. The cover of Mid-Life spells out a reading of the middle-aged father as a figure of misery, depressed and oppressed by his offspring and his second wife (Fig. 7.1). The composition of this image plays on the standard structure of the family photograph (which typically contains custom-made smiles and perfunctory closeness) to unveil the core reason of the family’s dissatisfaction: the father himself, placed in the center, as his eldest daughter and wife are symmetrically positioned on either side, frowning, arms crossed, and glaring at him. His wife is also tapping her foot, either angrily or impatiently (we find out from the book that it is probably both). His younger daughter’s emotion is closer to anger, as one can see from her firmly clenched fist. The father himself is a figure of ridicule, pitiable and self-pitying; he looks dejected and confused (the emanata around his head suggest he may even be startled), and his back is stooped under both his dejection and a heavy pink floral diaper bag, complete with toy bunny and nursing bottle, as well as the odd diaper peeping out of it. His long fingernails and yellow skin with a blueish tinge make him look both unkempt and slightly vampiric. He is staring straight at something or someone right in front of him with such intensity that readers may feel interpellated and wonder if it is up to them to save him. In his arms, the man is holding a baby boy, who is the only smiling character on the cover, unaware of the tension around him. Ollmann suggests the character’s inadequacy as a father through the way he is holding his son: awkwardly, far away from his body, as if it were a bomb ready to explode. 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 163

The fact that the man is thus besieged by women suggests that he probably inhabits a matriarchal domestic space, where he is dominated by female figures who are sorely disappointed with his performance. The skull ring on his finger,6 a memento of earlier days of non-conformity, his liver spots, receding hairline, and prominent circles under his eyes all indicate that this is a self-portrait of a man who feels old and tired. The cover also appears to suggest that fatherhood is in fact the lens through which the main plot points in the book are to be read, including John Olsen’s almost-extramarital affair. Sherri Smalls may be absent from the front cover, but she does appear on the back cover, and her presence explains the emanata above Olsen’s head, that had suggested him to be startled. Sherri’s arms are crossed and she is glowering at Olsen, who is pictured from behind, holding little Sam; in this context, Sam’s blissful face brings both more humor and more potential sadness to this scene that emphasizes the extent of his father’s betrayal. All in all, the covers show that the father’s unethical and irrational behavior stems from his understanding of the arrival of his third child not as a rebirth or second chance at youth, but rather as a clear indication of old age and incoming death. At the same time, in Mid-Life, just as fatherhood is never a source of dignity, neither is age ever a source of satisfaction. Ollmann’s fathers are either too young or too old, and because of their self-perception as age- inappropriate, they see themselves as awkward, unwise, and unattractive to the opposite sex. There are only two versions of fatherhood in this book: the teenage and the middle-aged father, and they are both immature.7 When Olsen first becomes a father, at 17, his incongruousness is suggested by the reproduction of a yearbook photograph where the new father/high- school graduate is holding a baby and looks both too young (as suggested by his acne) and prematurely old and tired (as indicated by the dark circles under his eyes). His buck teeth add a touch of comical cluelessness, but also make a stereotypical reference to poor young uneducated parents from the American South, as the text box also explains: “I was married, ridiculously, at seventeen and spawned children at that same time like some hillbilly child bride” (Ollmann 2011a, 9). In the opposite panel, for comic contrast, we are greeted by the equally unrecognizable features of an antiquated two-horned demon-like character with enlarged ears and nose, oversized bushy eyebrows and glasses that both hide and expose his bulbous eyes, walking alongside his evidently younger smooth-skinned second wife, who is holding their baby and looking apprehensively at him. The caption indicates that, at 40, fatherhood becomes an indication of impending death, of 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 165 which premature aging is the first sign: “Contrary to what you might think, having adult children when I’m forty does not make me feel as old as their little brother does. Having a baby at forty with a substantially younger wife has aged me twenty years in minutes” (Ollmann 2011a, 9). Both the image of the mature and that of the young father are, in fact, caricatures meant to emphasize the very absurdity that such a personage may even be a father at all. In the pervasively negative perspective of the male protagonist of Mid- Life, fatherhood at any age does not seem to boost the narrator’s level of attractiveness to the opposite sex; in this context, even the laudable fact that he works to support his family is presented as unappealing. When Olsen depicts himself as a young father, he does not paint the stereotypi- cally touching image of a man holding a child in public, the display of tenderness suddenly rendering him attractive, as recent studies have shown (Dewar 2009). Instead, in a panel where he is holding one of his infant daughters, at which point he is indeed approached by a woman who has predictably been drawn to him because he is holding a child, the cute baby projectile vomits and dilutes any sex-appeal the father might have initially possessed. Ollmann even depicts the commendable factory work his character does in his early years as a father as “high school and university hi- jinks and jolly japes reduced to almost nil and pretty much everything else but drudgery, factory work, and a lack of sleep” (Ollmann 2011a, 113). Out of a drawing of a workplace photograph stares a prematurely stooped John Olsen, dark circles under his eyes, his hand demonstratively pressing a lever to move two identical-looking boxes. The wide grin of one of his work mates, an older man with a “Boobie Inspector” T-shirt, enhances the bleakness of this image not only because his rotten teeth and red nose suggest neglect and alcoholism, but also because he seems to predict John’s future development. Still, even if these panels read like cautionary tales, the middle-aged version of the factory worker is very different from what the future seems to have had in store for his younger colleague. Olsen now has a white-collar job and no indication of financial problems (even though there is a strong possibility that he may be losing his job at the end of the book), and all of his children seem well-adjusted and happy, partly as a result of his work as a father. The narrative logic of the book debunks the male protagonist’s understanding of fatherhood as a source of emasculation and rapid regression. On a full page where John Olsen quickly reviews his predicament as a “yuppie dad, emasculated by the diaper bag” (Fig. 7.2), his conclusion also 166 M. PRECUP

Fig. 7.2 The volatile paternal image from Mid-Life. (© Joe Ollmann) 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 167 points out that, even though the age factor will always add an additional layer of misery, fatherhood itself is a source of distress. In spite of this, the images on the page—which displays the tragi-comic volatility of the father figure, morphing from one age group to another but remaining constantly grotesque—in fact undermine John Olsen’s script. As a middle-aged father, John is depicted in three consecutive panels as awkward and uncomfortable in his own inadequate body: in the first he is too stiff, burdened as he is with both the baby and the diaper bag, in the next one he is “lurching” because the handle of the stroller is too low for him, and in the third one his body manages to look paradoxically both skeletal and puffy as the cords of the “mama kangaroo” sling cut into him, and Sam, facing forward, seems to be strapped too close and unable to move. The absurdity of the reading of the 40-year-old father as a “weak- saggy-bosomed old dad” (Ollmann 2011a, 9) is shown both by the fact that he is quite prematurely contemplating death in the “mama kangaroo” panel and by the fact that, in order to emphasize his point, he draws himself as significantly older in the last panel, when little Sam is about three or four years old, and witnesses his father being hit over the head with an empty can in a parking lot. The alternative to this kind of masculinity is provided in a panel where we see the father in his late 20s, with his two daughters close behind him, holding ice cream cones. The supposedly more virile John Olsen, his longer hair braided in a thin ponytail, gestures angrily at another man, who is clenching his fist, while urging his daughters to wait for him in the car: “You wanna do the man-dance, punk? Girls, wait for daddy in the car” (2011a, 9). The unmotivated aggressiveness, together with the character’s hairstyle and choice of language work together to point out the ridicule of this type of muscular masculinity. Such episodes reveal the narrator’s regret as facetious and undermine his professed desire for aggressive masculinity. Ollmann subtly mocks traditional masculinity throughout the comic by drawing excessive versions of it or simply by exaggerating the main character’s loss of masculinity to such an extent that it is revealed as false, thus exposing the negative effect of social pressure on self-perception. The book is prefaced by a double-page spread that features the visual counterpart of its title, more specifically the headless wrinkled torso of a “mid-life” man with sagging chest and a protruding stomach. It is also recognizably marked by signs of old age: wrinkles, drooping skin, and either age spots or enlarged moles. This is not the body of a man who is well-adjusted and accepts the passage of time as natural: even his nipples look angry, eye-like, and appear 168 M. PRECUP to stare with dissatisfaction at the reader. The volume is bookended by the front and back of this body, as the last two pages, another double spread marked “the end,” is of the same headless torso seen from behind. Propelled by a multitude of suggestively branded “Ol’ Hoss” whiskey bottles from the endpapers, this vulnerable body goes through sudden changes, none of them flattering, throughout a narrative where transformations can occur from one panel to the next. In fact, despite his self-deprecating rhetoric and occasional caricatured representation that underlines his flaws, John is quite high up on the scale of alternative masculinities in Mid-Life, which does not boast a wide array of positive role models. The asocial and aggressive suggestively named “Dilbert” is a remorseless harasser who makes good on his threats and almost has John fired (as one of the owners of the magazine is his uncle), which draws attention to the pernicious dynamics of power in what John calls the “ass-sniffing, territorial-pissing, alpha-male design world” (Ollmann 2011a, 87). The IT specialist is a milder version of the “Dilbert” character, but he is also a stereotype, this time of the overbearing computer geek: he is overweight, and we see him eating chips and drinking soda while he is talking to John, but one can also spy empty McDonald’s packaging on his desk; he wears a “Lego” T-shirt that barely covers his protruding stomach, he is excessively enthusiastic about new technology and despises John’s lack of appreciation for its merits. Pictured alone in a dark room surrounded by servers and other machines, Randy is only mildly friendly (but never sympathetic to Sarah, the co-worker who is being harassed) as long as John humors him and defers to his superior specialized skills, to such an extent that John describes him as “abusive, sarcastic, and makes one feel like a purposely dull-witted infant that they are very angry at” (Ollmann 2011a, 35). When they sit next to each other, John Olsen appears smaller not only because the drawings emphasize Randy’s weight, but also to suggest John’s false respect for his co-worker’s “giant brain” (Ollmann 2011a, 36) in yet another scene where we see him humiliate himself. In Sherri Smalls’s part of the narrative, there are other important male characters who are merely using her talent for profit, with little or no interest in her own well-being, comfort, or desires. There is her agent, Karl, an older gay man who treats her like a child, keeps touching her inappropriately, and even slaps her behind at some point (Ollmann 2011a, 37). The other important male character is Ric, her former boyfriend and current band member (whose coarseness is made transparent by the fact that he has to wear a 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 169 monkey suit during their act), who is violent, verbally abusive, and compromises her chances of improving her career. The only decent man in this part of the book is Gary Friedkin, the television executive who only appears briefly, a man whose decency and intelligence subvert the stereotypical reading Sherri has of him to such an extent that she instantly begins envi- sioning a future with him. The part where she suddenly fantasizes about building a family with this man she barely knows is as overstated—and self- deprecating—as the part where John Olsen describes himself as an elderly man in a wheelchair: “And lately, I’m wondering more and more if some guy is the ‘one.’ Aquaintances [sic], waiters, hoboes, everyone’s the ‘one’ with me of late. I’m not even half-hearing what handsome-Gary is saying. I’m just admiring what a kid of our combined genes would look like” (Ollmann 2011a, 45). This aside is inserted in a text box and accompanied by a drawing of Gary who, still seated at the table where the two are having lunch, is suddenly holding a baby up for inspection.

“The unequal distribution of fun and responsibility”: Parenthood and Gender The primary lens through which the male narrator from Mid-Life reads fatherhood is age, but gender is also a major perspective through which John Olsen attempts to consider his conduct first as a father, but also, more generally, as a partner and employee. Even though the division of labor in the Olsen household seems to be rather egalitarian, the mother appears to be the manager of the household, and the father, the bumbling grumbling worker. Both parents are involved in creative professions, but only the father appears to work outside the home, which means that the mother shoulders most of the burden of childrearing. The two partners are rarely shown together in the same panel, as their different chores keep them apart; when they are together, they either argue or attempt to make up for earlier arguments, realizing that their relationship is in trouble. Chan is not depicted as a traditional homemaker either before or after the birth of their child, but in spite of this, in one of the few moments when we see the couple working together to accomplish a simple task (i.e. give the baby a bath), she coordinates the operation as John postpones helping her to send an e-mail, and finally forgets to show up at all.8 Ollmann emphasizes the unevenness of parental roles by making the father aware of his own pettiness, and yet unwilling to reign it in or refrain from repeating the same pattern. There is, in fact, a lot that qualifies as 170 M. PRECUP childish about the father’s conduct, such as his pettiness, his tantrums, and his forgetfulness. John understands that his behavior is petty when he resents letting Chan sleep an extra seven minutes in the morning when it is his turn to wake up first (Ollmann2011a , 26–27). Still, even though he apologizes about grumbling (by claiming that “sleep deprivation turns us into monsters,” partly exonerating himself as he includes her), he is unable to give her the chance to wake up properly and perhaps perform a morning routine before the child starts nursing, thus making her feel “like a milk cow” (Ollmann 2011a, 27). This is a harmful pattern that recurs throughout the narrative, which exposes it as such. Ollmann does not merely spell out his main male character’s selfishness through verbal cues like the first-person narration at the top of panels, which could have worked merely to harness sympathy for an apologetic narrator who still gets to engage in bad behavior. Instead, Ollmann provides additional visual cues that are unavailable to John Olsen himself, but accessible to the readers. For instance, at one point, John and his wife have a conversation on the phone about a previous arrangement that would have him babysit while she goes out with her friends. As he employs various techniques to extricate himself, we see little Sam, increasingly unsupervised, going from playing with a train set to requesting a cookie, to victoriously declaring that he has a cookie, to eating it as he is climbing one, then two chairs, and then finally smiling, his face full of the remnants of his feast, perched like a bird on the back of a chair. This sequence of background scenes not only demonstrate how demanding childcare can be, thus harnessing additional sympathy for the mother, but also work toward undermining the compassion that the father’s apologetic rationalizations may have summoned. We see John engaging in domestic chores that are not traditionally masculine, but he performs them all begrudgingly, only occasionally calmed down by his wife’s somewhat soothing influence. Such is the theatricality of his distress that there are panels where he pauses and poses for the readers in the midst of a task, in a sad freeze-frame meant to immortalize the indignity of his condition. One such situation presents itself on the first page of Chapter 1, titled “Were You in the Shit? Yeah, I Was in the Shit,” in a succession of panels that introduce the father as a smirking, ineffective, and perpetually unhappy man, physically and mentally exhausted by “drudgery.” He is cleaning three cats’ litter boxes full of excrement, and, in the process, manages to step on his son’s “environmentally-friendly” full diaper, which he has also set aside to clean. The character does not speak except through the text boxes at the top of each panel. He works in silence, 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 171 somber in his indignity even as, unbeknownst to him, one of the cats points at him and laughs. His facial features illustrate and reinforce the text: he looks, by turns, displeased, disgusted, dejected, and finally beaten by the sheer volume of tasks he has to perform. According to recent statistics (2010), in Canada 81% of fathers participate “in housework and related activities,” and fathers spend an average amount of 131 minutes a day “on child care activities for children 12 years and under” (“Father’s Day…” 2017), but based on the fragmentary information provided in this book, it is difficult to assess if this also applies to the Olsen household. At best, it is only a few hours, as on the rare day when Chan leaves to have a drink with her friends and John has to be back home by six to babysit his son. At worst, it is no time at all, as when John has to travel to New York to save the job he himself has endangered and to pursue a possible romantic entan- glement with Sherri Smalls. What remains constant is the dissatisfaction with which John performs every task, and instead of attempting to enjoy his son, he seems to be merely biding his time, waiting for him to grow up and offer more challenging opportunities for education. The results of John Olsen’s labors as a parent once again belie his self- deprecating perspective when he tries to view himself through a feminist lens. Such moments show that it is difficult to cleanly separate hegemonic masculinity from its alternatives, as they often coexist (Carabí and Armengol 2014, 4). For instance, he mentions that he tried to raise his daughters as feminists and he beams with pride every time they demonstrate that he was indeed successful in that respect, but he also blames himself for being an inadequate feminist, “a closet scumbag” (Ollmann 2011a, 43), a lecherous old man with dirty thoughts and bad pick-up lines who startles and disgusts women and himself. We see him being transformed—within the space of four panels—from a polite shy man to a salacious flirt who alarms a kind unsuspecting saleswoman at a lingerie store, as his disastrous attempt at flirting is unforgivingly depicted as emerging from a space of moral decrepitude where he objectifies women (Ollmann 2011a, 123). The same situation occurs when he gives readers a peek behind his innocuous “sensitive new age guy” mask when he reveals himself to be “an ogler” that reduces “women to a series of parts and analyzing the merits of those bits in secret, sexist diatribes” (Ollmann 2011a, 43). As the half-man half-ape “ogler” huffs and puffs while following an alarmed woman down an empty street, his mask is revealed to be John Olsen’s smiling face, in a Jekyll/ Hyde split that never, in fact, has any real-life consequences. His enormous simian body, with disproportionately large arms that drag onto the ground, 172 M. PRECUP shares a striking similitude to that of the headless torso that prefaces and ends the book, thus suggesting that the contents of Mid-Life offer a glimpse inside the sexist subconscious of the narrator. The tone here is remorseful and self-deprecating as the narrator professes to regret his fantasies—in fact, his affair with Sherri Smalls never materializes either.9 While the detailed unveiling of a subconscious dominated by sexual fantasies seems to evoke Robert Crumb’s own apologetic self-flagellation, Joe Ollmann does not represent his character’s hidden desires in self- congratulatory detail. What in Crumb’s autobiographical persona reads like a long-life practice of objectifying women and celebrating successful sexual gratification at any cost (including, as I show in Chap.6 of this book, sexual assault), for John Olsen the conduct described in Mid-Life appears to be a temporary crisis. Genuine self-reflection reveals a character who is shocked by his own aberrant behavior, as opposed to Crumb’s recitation of the same chain of events that trap him in a self-loathing loop. Self-reflection is not only an important visual theme of this first-person account of a life that is, in its biographical detail, quite similar to Ollman’s,10 but it is also a means of simultaneously confirming and undermining the seriousness of the character’s predicament. Olsen reflects constantly on who he has become—both physically and morally—by contemplating (and always criticizing) his image in mirrors and reflective surfaces that begin to populate the book after he makes the decision to contact Sherri Smalls and arrange a meeting in New York, under the pretext that he wants to interview her for the magazine. From that point onward, the book is inundated by such images; this culminates when, after he decides to go jogging to pass the time, he suddenly sees a reflection of himself, wearing a T-shirt that emphasizes his suddenly bigger stomach and tight running shorts. The narrative spells out the fact that this image has finally produced a much-needed revelation: “I’m glad to see myself in this out- fit. Fucking ridiculous old man. I’m just glad this was stopped in time. I’m just glad that no one’s been hurt…oh shit, Sherri” (Ollmann 2011a, 155). Finally, this process of self-reflection allows the character to formu- late a number of decisions to confess the truth to his wife, open up to his daughters about the divorce from their mother, apologize to everyone, and start on a new path of positivity (a facile ending that is promptly sub- verted by a phone call that indicates that he will probably be fired). Sometimes the background adds layers of derision and irony to the image in the foreground, often a close-up of the main character himself, already engaged in a ridiculous task. For example, when John Olsen enters the 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 173 restaurant where he is meeting Sherri Smalls for the first time, he recog- nizes her as she is sitting at a table and waves at her with both hands, an exaggerated grin on his face. In this panel, readers cannot see Sherri; at the same time, John Olsen himself cannot see that he is standing right next to a noticeboard where someone posted an advert titled “YOGA SEXY,” right above an image of two people having sex. Thus, the background functions as a window into the character’s subconscious (because of its position it suggests very literally what is at the back of the character’s mind) that clarifies or augments the caricature.11 Self-reflection also positions readers as judges and jury who must assess the character’s lengthy plea in favor of his old age conceit. In the only one- page spread from the entire book (Fig. 7.3), Olsen is wearing nothing but his underwear, staring at readers expectantly as he makes the case for his decrepitude in boxes of text that describe various areas from his body: “face-liver spots and wrinkles,” “neck—turkey wattles,” “shoulders—sagging, plus

Fig. 7.3 Carol Tyler’s “Anatomy of a New Mom.” (© Carol Tyler). Joe Ollmann’s portrait of the middle-aged father. (© Joe Ollmann) 174 M. PRECUP bosoms!,” “stomach—continual bloating,” “stomach (contined – sic!)—he now has a gut” (Ollmann 2011a, 10). However, he is careful to specify that his “plumbing” is still in good order as far as the “recreational aspects” are concerned; knees—“bending to pick up my young son is accompanied by a sound like four chopsticks breaking,” and “legs—the hair is falling off and there are varicose veins” (Ollmann 2011a, 10). The self-portrait partly performs the same rhetorical function as his many self-deprecating rants: he fully displays his alleged unattractiveness, but later in the book Sherri Smalls provides the opposite perspective (and so does his wife). A comparison with the way motherhood affects the body is not offered in Mid-Life except in small glimpses, such as Chan breastfeeding and sometimes feeling “like a milk cow” (Ollmann 2011a, 27), but it is important to consider the author’s “old age” conceit from this perspective as well.12 I believe that this analysis might benefit from a comparison with a similarly constructed image from Carol Tyler’s collection Late Bloomer (2005). Titled “The Anatomy of a New Mom” and signed “Carol Ann Tyler, mom,” the one-page comic was published in 1988 in the underground comics anthology Twisted Sisters, founded by Aline Kominsky and Diane Noomin. In the Late Bloomer table of contents, Carol Tyler humorously—but also somewhat chillingly—suggests that this image could be used as a contraceptive method: “When worn by youth, the T-shirt makes a great birth control device.” The black-and-white drawing is meant partly as a self-portrait of Carol Tyler, pictured breastfeeding her newborn daughter, transformed by the experience of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood, but also as a generic image of the new mother whose husband, represented only as a small smiling head in the right-hand corner, indicates what he would like for dinner and goes off to work. The portrait is a devastating representation of the significant toll early motherhood can have on one’s mental and physical health. The bucket from the mother’s right hand contains “relics from the pre-baby days,” whose enumeration reads like a feminist manifesto: “creativity, solitude, focus, spontaneity, travel, romance, relaxation, sex, foods, fun…etc.” (Tyler 2005, 58). The body of the new mother is broken in many places, in considerable pain that comes from not one but several areas, ungroomed, both pitiful and awe-inspiring, immobile but ready to spring into action, vulnerable and larger-than-life, bearing the marks of the pregnancy (the varicose veins, the “bloated and loose” stomach), the birth (an IV scar in her right arm, bleeding as she is still recovering from a vaginal birth), and new motherhood (blocked milk ducts, painful cracked nipples, sore neck and back). 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 175

She also displays signs of post-natal depression or at least extreme mental exhaustion (“could snap at any minute”). The baby attached to her breast, an “oblivious” “need machine,” is the only luminous element of this nightmarish version of maternity. There are quite a few elements that draw attention to the gendered nature of these two subjects’ predicament (Carol finds no time to shave her legs, John is distressed because he is losing his leg hair), but while Carol’s body is fundamentally altered by maternity, John’s is, in fact, merely marked by the first signs of aging. While both motherhood and fatherhood are constructs dictated by a complicated dynamic of convention and social background, parenthood itself is more naturally and directly detrimental to the body of the parent that has to bear the child, birth it, and breastfeed it. Carol Tyler’s representation of the vulnerable yet formidable body of the new mother thus shows the limitations of Joe Ollmann’s “old age” conceit. This is not to say that anxieties about aging in middle- aged men should be dismissed as irrelevant, but rather to suggest that fathers find themselves under a significant but different set of social pressures. The recent popularity of the “dad bod”—however problematic for creating more flexible standards for men (Peters 2015)—appears to relax norms around weight gain, but it does not address any age-related concerns. Aging, in fact, continues to be an aspect that is little discussed in contemporary popular culture texts that depict other aspects of fatherhood. In this context, Joe Ollmann’s is an important and certainly under- rated contribution to the conversation about age, masculinity, and fatherhood that has not properly begun, in spite of the rising age for fatherhood in certain social groups.

Conclusion Mid-Life makes an important comment in favor of a perception of fatherhood as a skill that is not only learned, but also practiced differently depending on the children’s age and gender. While the book cannot offer a full-length comparison between how John Olsen educates his daughters versus how he educates his son, since there is a significant age difference between them, it is evident that he made a conscious attempt to raise his girls not only as feminists, but also more generally as individuals capable of critical thinking. His educational methods are humorously depicted as relying on brusque critiques of various cartoons that the girls are watching, at an age where they—also according to their facial expressions—do 176 M. PRECUP not seem to be able to follow their father’s arguments. For instance, he calls Papa Smurf a fascist (Ollmann 2011a, 12) and My Little Pony, “a sexist pile of consumer crap” (Ollmann 2011a, 11) to an audience of either one or both of his daughters, who watch him silently, with wide baffled eyes. This adds to his portrait as a kill-joy, but also creates a contrast with the way he educates Sam, for whom he admits he is “mostly too tired to do anything but go quietly into that good night” (Ollmann 2011a, 11). Still, the comic draws a line between his educational methods and the girls’ later behavior when they are depicted in a train station, quickly reading an ad for underwear as an invitation for “non-consensual sex” (Ollmann 2011a, 57) as their father shuffles behind them, ignored but beaming with pride. He qualifies as “transcendent” (Ollmann 2011a, 58) those moments when his daughters are old enough to sing to themselves; we see him listening and crying behind a door, his face distorted in a grotesque expression of emotion.13 Paternal pride is an emotion that is recur- rently expressed throughout Mid-Life, in connection to John Olsen’s adult daughters, even though the emotion is usually hidden behind his scowl and interlaced with guilt. The self-deprecating rhetoric is belied by the father’s conduct: he not only works to support the family but also appears to be present for his children, reads to them, watches age-appropriate television with them, and puts the youngest to sleep (only to be pinned under him for hours).14 He does complain throughout and critiques his own performance as a father, but this does not invalidate the things he does for his children, who seem happy, well-adjusted, and close to him, even if his daughters apparently harbor some resentment.15 Even though he is not depicted during moments of affection and his tactile connection with little Sam seems to be mainly motivated by practical reasons (he has to hold him as he sleeps and carry him around),16 he does speak lovingly to and about his children. At the same time, he is (perhaps healthily) aware of the limitations of his time and patience when he states that he will not father any more children: “First of all, let me tell you, I love my kids. All of them. But I am seriously going to smash my balls with a couple of bricks to stop my propensity for reproduction” (Ollmann 2011a, 6).17 It is thus important that the bad father conceit allows the narrator to express certain relatively taboo emotions, such as regret because one has had children at an inappropriate time in their lives or boredom caused by the everyday routine and exhaustion of raising a young child who cannot communicate verbally yet. The book demonstrates that admitting to a certain measure of regret and boredom as inevitable components of the amalgamation of emotions that comes 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 177 with childrearing is important, but that conserving these sentiments at the expense of your partner is ungenerous and detrimental to the family as a whole. Ollmann uses visual representation to expose the ample and self- deprecating first-person verbal narration as unreliable; the comic thus gradually builds a case against the simplified “bad father” narrative it seems to uphold. His use of the visual-verbal dynamic of comics does not always entail a complementarity between the two: the visual often undermines or problematizes the verbal through small cues that appear behind characters who seem unaware of them, as a sort of wink to the reader. This technique partly compromises the bad father/partner stance Ollmann constructs through the use of other methods that also work against an unequivocal reading of the male protagonist and narrator as a bad father: caricature, hyperbole, and humor. In the moral universe of the book, apologetic self- deprecation can work as a rhetorical strategy that exculpates the self- professed guilty party from the dubious deeds he has committed, but it is not sufficient if unaccompanied by a certain number of redeeming actions. It is here that Ollmann’s use of the possibilities of graphic narration is most evidently productive: when the verbal layer paints the self-portrait of a regretful bad father who implicitly wants to be forgiven, and the visual layer supports that claim not by showing an illustration of the words, but by providing information that actively contradicts them. Mid-Life unveils the substantial anxiety that can be generated in men by the internalized ageist logic that justifies a gradual loss of masculinity as they begin to grow older, particularly in the context of fatherhood, a social practice that generates its own set of fears that the “old” father might not be able to keep up physically as his son grows up. It is not even a version of tough masculinity that John Olsen mourns here, but rather, as he himself labels it, a “new agey sensitive” alternative version of masculinity, one that a certain category of women found—and still do, if one contemplates the narrator’s almost-affair—attractive. The “mid-life” game whose endpoint is either an affair or confirmation that the father is still attractive is a cautionary tale at the end of which John learns to embrace ridicule and count his many blessings. The ending once again confirms that being a good father and partner is not a linear path, but the result of exhausting practice that is measured every day. I argue that, while the self-loathing rhetoric partly undermines the narrator’s negative perception of his own performance as a father, the grotesque self-representation, often subject of ridicule, works well to show the limitations of the narrator’s involvement as a father without covertly glorifying his many good qualities. 178 M. PRECUP

Notes 1. Heer traces the low mimetic comic tradition to Hogarth, but more recently to Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat comics, Gilbert Shelton’s Freak Brothers, Peter Bagge’s Buddy Bradley series, and other work by the Hernandez Brothers and Daniel Clowes. 2. According to Ollmann’s “Notes,” included at the end of the book, the story is fictional. 3. One point the author insists on making at the end is the fact that, even if he was indeed—in real life—fired from his job as an art director at a yoga magazine, that was not (as in John Olsen’s case) for incompetence, but because of a magazine-wide decision to let all male employees go during what he calls “the penis purge of 2007” (Ollmann 2011a). This clarification emphasizes the importance of Ollmann’s professional reputation and invites readers to understand the main character’s incompetence—as well as other related features—as a conceit. 4. In an interview with Chris Mautner, Ollmann explains the deliberate choice of his page structure: “What I hope is that the uniformity of the frame is so ubiquitous that the reader eventually forgets it and just concen- trates fully on the narrative” (Ollmann 2011b). 5. The preface does not make a point of identifying and delimiting fact from fiction; instead, it openly states that the book contains a combination of both: “This is largely a work of fiction, except where it isn’t. Please see the notes for even less clarification. If, after reading this book, you find yourself asking: why would a man draw himself in his underpants so often and reveal fictionalized tidbits of his life in cartoon form? I can only respond that (…) I still believe some things are universal truths and hold that, yes, those truths may include drawing oneself in one’s underpants. Oh, and also, that some of those truths are fictions” (Ollmann 2011a). 6. The skull is a recurrent image throughout the book. It is either visible as a ring on Olsen’s finger (a reminder of the autobiographical connection to Ollmann himself, who also wears a skull-shaped ring) or strategically placed in the background, to add a note of morbidity to the main subject of panels. The skull is not only a memento mori (in which capacity it also appears, for instance, in a short story from Chewing on Tinfoil, titled “Death wears inexpensive loafers”), but also as a fashion accessory that links the character to rock culture, suggesting perhaps an earlier period of non-conformity. Both interpretations coalesce in one panel where John Olsen hugs a bottle of “liquor” during the “five-year breakdown” that followed the end of his first marriage; in the background, behind Olsen’s own dark-circled skull- like head, floating skulls suggest that he is engaging in potentially suicidal behaviour. 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 179

7. This dichotomy is forced and not supported by the biographical data provided by the narrator himself. While he claims that he had his first daughter at seventeen, the four-year age difference between his daughters would place him at twenty-one by the time his second child is born. Still, he always refers to himself as a “teenage” father for that portion of his life, and in one panel even draws himself holding two similarly aged screaming swaddled babies in each arm (Ollmann 2011a, 113). 8. This short script is an important illustration women’s “mental load,” as evinced by the viral webcomic I briefly discuss in Chapter I, “You Should’ve Asked,” by French cartoonist Emma (2017). 9. The Sherri Smalls episode may not include de facto adultery, but it is a boost to the narrator’s fragile ego, since he admits that what he desires is merely to be offered the opportunity to be adulterous: “I don’t want to euphemistically ‘sleep’ with any of these women. I guess I’d just like it if one of them would actually consider euphemistically sleeping with me. Oh, yea, plus, I’m happily married. Sheesh, what a kook!” (Ollmann 2011a, 43). 10. See the author’s bio, the dedication of the book to his wife, two daughters, and one son, all of whom have different names but bear a striking likeness to their counterparts in the book (Ollmann 2011a). 11. It is only when the characters experience strong emotions that the background darkens completely, and their extremely expressive faces show what they are feeling. 12. Carol Tyler’s work contains other similar images of maternity. “The Outrage,” another short story from the Late Bloomer collection, is a nightmarish self-representation as a murderous and suicidal devil in the throes of post-partum depression. In Soldier’s Heart (2015), we see Carol writhing in agony during prolonged labor, under her own mother’s horrified stare. Together, these images produce a counter-narrative to the writing of child- birth and motherhood as ultimate fulfillment and instant joy. 13. Not even when he expresses love is Ollmann’s pen forgiving of Olsen; even when he mourns the death of their beloved cat Zooey he is unforgivingly represented as grotesque rather than touching. 14. It is difficult to assess how Olsen and his first wife may have shared their parental duties, since she is almost completely erased in this book. Her image appears to have been burned off in a family photograph of the four of them, she is rarely mentioned and never visually represented, like all the other minor and major characters. This is motivated by the fact that the couple had a bitter break-up. Because of the decision not to represent her, Olsen appears to have been a single father, even though he was also working full time: “It’s only ever the three of us in memory” (Ollmann 2011a, 58). This is also a conceit that acts as compensation for what Olsen himself qualifies as sub-par post-divorce paternal conduct. 180 M. PRECUP

15. John Olsen’s expression of regret is at its most emphatic when he remembers his behavior after his divorce, when he was not emotionally available to his daughters. In an uncharacteristically effusive tone, he calls them “the poor things, my dear baby girls” (Ollmann 2011a, 57), in a profession of regret that is undermined by a portrait of post-divorce Olsen, “newly buff and wearing girlfriend’s T-shirt,” but also sporting hair colored by “midlife crisis blonde #22” (Ollmann 2011a, 57). 16. There is one panel where he gently and protectively hugs his son, who is strapped in his baby carrier, and states his determination that he will do “everything right this time” (Ollmann 2011a, 58). 17. At the end of the book Ollmann reproduces a request form for a vasectomy, dated August 26, 2006 and corrected by a caption that explains that, “as of this writing, in 2010, I’m still firing ‘live ammunition,’ ladies and gentlemen…but, please, spay and neuter your pets!” (Ollmann 2011a). This note is a commentary on the ambivalence about further procreation expressed throughout the book.

References Carabí, Àngels, and Josep M. Armengol, eds. 2014. Alternative Masculinities in a Changing World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. De Haven, Tom. 2011. Reviews: Mid-Life. The Comics Journal, May 4. http:// www.tcj.com/reviews/10352/. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Dewar, Gwen. 2009. Sexy dads: the allure of men who like babies. Parenting Science. https://www.parentingscience.com/sexy-dads.html. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Emma. 2017. You Should Have Asked, May 20. Trans. Una Dimitrijevic. https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Father’s Day…by the numbers. 2017. Statistics Canada, September 29. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/dai/smr08/2016/smr08_208_2016. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Fertility: Overview, 2009–2011. 2015. Statistics Canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-209-x/2013001/article/11784-eng.htm#a4. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Heer, Jeet. 2011a. Book Review: Mid-Life, by Joe Ollmann, March 4. https:// nationalpost.com/afterword/book-review-mid-life-by-joe-ollmann. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. ———. 2011b. The Mid-Life Moment in Alternative Comics. Comics Comics, March 4. http://comicscomicsmag.com/?p=9019. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Mid-Life. 2011. Publishers Weekly, March 21. https://www.publishersweekly. com/978-1-77046-028-7. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Ollmann, Joe. 2002. Chewing on Tinfoil. London: Insomniac Press. 7 “EMASCULATED BY THE DIAPER BAG”: AGING, MASCULINITY… 181

———. 2006. This Will All End in Tears. London: Insomniac Press. ———. 2011a. Mid-Life. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly. ———. 2011b. Creator Q&A: Joe Ollmann confronts his ‘Mid-Life,’ February 12. https://www.cbr.com/creator-qa-joe-ollmann-confronts-his-mid-life. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Peters, Lucia. 2015. What Is ‘Dad Bod’?. Bustle, May 1. https://www.bustle. com/articles/80345-what-is-dad-bod-heres-everything-you-need-to-know- about-the-phrase-and-phenomenon. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Rifkind, Candida, and Linda Warley. 2016. Editors’ Introduction. In Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives, ed. Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, 1–19. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Shirani, Fiona. 2013. The Spectre of the Wheezy Dad: Masculinity, Fatherhood and Aging. Sociology 47 (6): 1104–1119. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038512469063. Spector-Mersel, Gabriela. 2006. Never-aging Stories: Western Hegemonic Masculinity Scripts. Journal of Gender Studies 15 (1): 67–82. https://doi. org/10.1080/09589230500486934. Strauch, Barbara. 2010. The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind. London: Viking Penguin. Tyler, Carol. 2005. Late Bloomer. Seattle: Fantagraphics. ———. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. A Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle: Fantagraphics. CHAPTER 8

“When the monsters come jello them”: Fatherhood, Vulnerability, and the Magic of the Mundane in James Kochalka’s American Elf

James Kochalka’s long-standing graphic diary, initially published online, where he draws his family members as elves and his friends as various animals, is the longest published record of everyday life in comic book form. Capturing snapshots of the life of the cartoonist/rock star lifelong resi- dent of Burlington, Vermont,1 from October 16, 1998 to December 31, 2012, American Elf is also a valuable exploration of fatherhood, masculinity, and domesticity.2 Part of an impressive body of work that includes the well-known series of comics for children Johnny Boo and the Superf∗ckers comics (which was also adapted into an animated series), alongside other works that blend reality, fantasy, and some autobiographical detail, American Elf stands out as both an impressive model of daily self- documentation, and a record of creative and personal growth. American Elf has now been emulated by quite a number of cartoonists, like Vanessa Davis, Ryan Claytor, Erika Moen, Jesse Reklaw, and others (Cates 2011, 210), and received glowing reviews, but less academic attention than other autobiographical comics.3 Generally drawn in a black-and-white four-panel format, with added color in the digital and some of the print versions, the comic provides snapshots of Kochalka’s everyday life as an awkward and scatter-brained hypochondriac, excessively plaintive and focused on imaginary problems, quick to anger but also remorseful. Kochalka’s unflattering self-caricature is somewhat similar to Joe Ollmann’s

© The Author(s) 2020 183 M. Precup, The Graphic Lives of Fathers, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_8 184 M. PRECUP from Mid-Life, but his record of the experience of fatherhood is also significantly different, in no small part due to the specifics of the graphic diary, but also because of the author’s decision to work within an anthropomorphic/mythological conceit and operate at the intersection of the (slapstick) comic and the tragic mode, with occasional inflections of the fantastic.4 The result is an important work of memory that goes beyond documenting white middle-class family life from a relatively quiet neighborhood in New England by relentlessly interrogating what it means to perform one’s part in life with kindness, generosity, and consistency. How to be a good father becomes an important question after Kochalka’s first son is born and through the birth of his second child, and it remains the main concern of an autobiographical discourse whose inevitable self- involvement is deflected by the ethical preoccupation with how to do best by one’s loved ones. The diary is “a form of periodic life writing” that “records dailiness in accounts and observations of emotional responses” (Smith and Watson 2010, 266). While some critics distinguish between the diary (as a more private and intimate genre) and the journal (as a more public document), this kind of distinction needs to be re-examined in light of the advent of the internet, where autobiographical stories can create “network intimacy” (Lejeune 2014, 252). In Kochalka’s diary, which has now been taken off the internet, but still circulates in the form of printed books,5 this particular temporal embeddedness produces depth of observation through accumulation and repetition, from strips that capture mundane events and embarrassingly intimate scenes to life-altering moments or instances of enraptured contemplation. In his preface to the first volume of the print version of American Elf, Kochalka describes the purpose of his autobiographical work as an “attempt to better understand what it means to be a human being,” to capture “the magic and mystery of life” (2004). The specificity of the diary as a genre allows it—unlike the graphic memoir, for instance—to draw attention to life’s insubordination to the narrative patterns of more inherently cohesive autobiographical narration: “Life is not structured like a typical narrative. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Life has ins and outs and ups and downs and backs and forths of endless repetition and endless distractions” (Kochalka 2004)6 In fact, Kochalka’s work is replete with meta elements, most of them comments and questions about how to structure one’s experiences into comic book form, and how to decide what to represent out of the chronology of a day that may not appear to be particularly remarkable or entertaining.7 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 185

Sometimes a deadpan punchline concludes the strip, while other stories either remain open or receive subsequent details and revisions in the following days or weeks.8 There is an acknowledged therapeutic side to James Kochalka’s diary, which not only provides reassurance by preventing fleeting moments from disappearing, but also anchors each day in contemplation and representation. In addition to this, the evident constructedness of the author’s elf persona, as well as the fact that he produces a document for public consumption, creates a more visible distance between the author and the narrator, but also lends a certain glamor to his everyday life.9 While American Elf does not always celebrate the poetry of the everyday or the comfort of repetition, it does propose, through its sheer volume as an impressive archive of the everyday, that creating and doggedly preserving a routine of daily examinations of one’s life can work to provide an anchor during troubled times, particularly in the context of distress or mental illness: “My sketchbook diaries are my only hope for making sense of everything. They define who I am and my place in this world. I am lost without them” (2004). For a character who often appears to be unmoored, the daily comic strip offers a frame, a time capsule where meaning might reside, ready for contemplation if not immediately, then perhaps at a later date.10 By incorporating photography and occasional realistic drawings, and also by discussing his decision to draw himself and his family as elves, Kochalka emphasizes the artificiality and deliberateness of his conceit, particularly in an autobiographical context. Kochalka’s elf persona is also a reflection of the underground comics tradition of self-representation, where describing oneself as socially awkward was part of a popular self-deprecating autobiographical mode and a way of signaling difference and inability to fit in. In fact, the autobiographical mode from American Elf owes much to the combination of sometimes outrageous real-life facts, “shot through with fantasy, burlesque, and self-satire” that came to characterize much of the work of the American underground (Hatfield 2005, 7). In the preface to the first printed volume of American Elf, Kochalka provides a somewhat vague explanation in a caption above a panel where we see him contemplating his elf face in the bathroom mirror: “I draw myself as a rather awkward looking elf because it reflects my relationship with the world. The magic & mystery of life and my awkward grappling with it” (2004). Kochalka’s elf character—whose first appearance preceded his graphic diary and was featured in a number of other comics by Kochalka under the name “Magic 186 M. PRECUP

Boy”11—is a comedic version of the mythological figure of the elf, to which he adds buck teeth that provide an air of bumbling and childish naiveté, as well as oversized pointy ears that often do not fit properly under his hats and make him look cutely incongruous. Both these features contribute either to the overall humorous effect or to a level of awkwardness that undermines the gravity of certain situations. Through this character’s eyes, life is constantly surprising, and everything from ordinary little gestures to bizarre occurrences is regarded with wonder.12

Vulnerability and the Elf Mask Throughout American Elf, Kochalka portrays himself as crabby, fanciful, and uncoordinated, a worrywart who works hard, drinks too much, is prone to bouts of anger, grumbles often but is also easily placated. He is loving and devoted to his family, but can easily exasperate them, a cross between child and adult, rendered vulnerable particularly by his fragile state of mind. His body is also quite frequently a source of distress, sometimes fabricated or sought out, and sometimes quite motivated. In the household, Amy is the voice of reason, warding off her partner’s many anxieties, but also exasperated with some of his more childish behavior (we often see her rolling her eyes or frowning), for which he apologizes constantly and profusely. In fact, James’s childishness exasperates not only Amy, but, as he shows in several strips, other friends and acquaintances as well. However, the round of complaining, stressing out, and fearing the worst is frequently interrupted by moments of peaceful contemplation and gratitude for the good in his life. In this complicated back-and-forth between happiness and despair, the elf is the character’s comic foil.13 Humor mediates the way we read the main character’s temperament, but it is not often light-hearted; rather, it works as a filter that makes the narrator’s post-traumatic reactions—such as depression, anxiety, and anger—more bearable (Critchley 2002, 102). While James’s trauma is only revealed more than ten years after the diary starts, it is evident from the beginning that the narrator struggles with mental health issues with little sign of relief and no professional help. Kochalka’s record of his psychological state both before and through fatherhood supports recent calls for better mental health services for fathers, which have drawn attention to the fact that there is insufficient research on a variety of subjects, such as fathers’ anxiety and depression before and after their children’s birth (Tomlin 2017) and the way fathers experience the stigma of mental illness 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 187

(Price-Robertson et al. 2015). In the January 22, 2009 entry, Kochalka reveals his elf persona to also be a protective mask that shields him, at least temporarily, from the devastating effects of childhood trauma.14 The revelation that, as a child, he was the victim of sexual abuse by older children in his neighborhood also comes as a shock to his wife Amy, who instantly makes the connection to her husband’s palpable struggle to be happy. Throughout the comic, we see the narrator struggling with depression, bouts of anger, and even suicidal thoughts; he also occasionally announces his decision to remain happy and maintain his composure, but this is a complicated process with no resolution by the time the diary ends.15 In this context, the fact that Kochalka’s elf belongs to the same family as Matt Groening’s cute, diminutive, and transgressive Elfo from the recent animated series Disenchantment (2018–) rather than, for instance, Tolkien’s stately elves, also suggests that Kochalka’s mask has a playful and disrup- tive dimension with the potential of mobilizing the therapeutic function of humor and destabilizing the predictable chronology of everyday actions. Kochalka’s decision to place his aesthetic choices in the intersecting realms of cute and zany can also increase the narrator’s likeability, as well as make him more palatable and relatable. As Sianne Ngai defines these two modes, cuteness is “a way of aestheticizing powerlessness,” and the zany, “an aesthetic of incessant doing” (2011). Ngai argues that the cute and the zany are only apparently “states of weakness,” but in fact they possess “surprising power” in late capitalist culture, as they are both “politi- cally ambiguous” and “good for diagnosing states of suspended agency” (2011). As Joshua Paul Dale shows, cuteness is also—and this is particularly clear in American Elf—an “appeal to others: an invitation to sociality that we respond to as if it were an act of agency” (2017, 52). In the case of American Elf, cuteness and zaniness work to emphasize the narrator’s vulnerability and enhance his likeability, as well as increase the likelihood of the elf obtaining empathy and leniency from the readers, particularly on those occasions when he behaves objectionably.16 When the trauma of sexual abuse becomes part of the narrative, the paradoxical function of this type of aesthetic becomes more evident: the magnitude of the trauma is both augmented and diminished by the diminutive and agitated figure of the elf. In this context, the comic thus suggests that, in the absence of therapy, comedy and creativity may work together to make the subject’s difficult moments more bearable. At the same time, the magnitude of Kochalka’s struggle to gain a sense of balance and durable happiness can also draw attention to the advisability of seeking professional help. 188 M. PRECUP

While the revelation of the subject’s childhood trauma prompts a reinterpretation of the character’s many episodes of depression, but also his idiosyncrasies, there is, throughout the narrative, one important additional factor that prompts a reading of Kochalka’s anxieties as not comically melodramatic, but in fact quite serious: the precarity of the life of the cartoonist/rock musician. Kochalka’s diary documents the financial and psychological strain caused by insufficient and inconsistent pay, as well as having to separate himself from his family in order to travel for concerts or comics conventions, in spite of his significant travel anxiety. While by the end of the diary his situation improves, the amount of work he has to perform in order to ensure some financial stability is an important commentary on the condition of the contemporary cartoonist in an industry where even well-known artists like Kochalka work under the constant pressure of precarity. From this perspective, American Elf is also an important document for the alternative comic book industry, recording inside information including how much money a cartoonist can make a year at different points during his career, but also sales figures from conventions and interactions with other cartoonists and fans.17

Learning Fatherhood: Infantilism, Adulthood, and Self-Deprecation In American Elf, fatherhood begins to dominate the world of the narrative when Kochalka’s first son, Eli, is born, almost five years after the first diary entry. Parenthood revises the dynamic, social roles, and practicalities of the couple’s domestic situation: Amy and James decide to buy a house when she is pregnant, an intimidating and anxiety-provoking endeavor not only because of financial concerns, but also because it signals the future parents’ change of status (June 1, 2003). However, James soon settles into a routine of renovation, and depicts himself joyfully painting and repainting the walls, as Amy is too heavily pregnant to be able to help. The house-purchasing adventure follows a narrative pattern that becomes familiar throughout the comic: James is faced with a daunting prospect, particularly one that spells out adulthood, faces it with fear and hesitation, and finally settles into the new situation happily and successfully. In this way, the conceit of the scatter-brained, irresponsible, and panic-stricken future father is built up and exposed as a construct at the same time.18 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 189

The ordinariness of the couple’s baby-related anxieties helps place their domestic situation within the sphere of widely relatable circumstance, while at the same time recording the strangeness and even otherworldli- ness of the experience of bringing a human being into the world. Kochalka depicts various aspects of a home life that appears to be harmonious and happy overall, even though its peace may sometimes be punctured by the occasional fight, usually provoked by James’s idiosyncratic or self-involved behavior (he is, for instance, in the habit of waking Amy up in the middle of the night to ask her minor questions or communicate anxieties). The couple initially practice parenthood on their cat, Spandy, a reluctant subject who is weighed, measured, scolded, and petted, and who remains a beloved member of the household even after the children are born. The motivation behind their decision to have a child is, according to the preface to the fifth year ofAmerican Elf, partly related to the “destruction and hate” of 9/11; this particular contextualization of an otherwise private decision strikes one of the more solemn notes of Kochalka’s graphic diary and embeds the narrative more firmly in the social and political American space: “I realized we simply must choose life & love. So we decided to make a baby to love together” (2004). Amy’s first pregnancy plunges James into a familiar state of anxiety and doubt (a state that confirms an already-established conceit), but also love and fascination with the way her body changes. On March 5, 2003, he inserts a double entry: a photograph of a sonogram and a drawing of a close-up of his son’s head, in profile. The wordless one-panel drawing titled “Ultrasound” adds little visual information to the photograph of the ultrasound itself, except perhaps a more precise profile, but the thick hatching and the use of black instead of gray- scale enhance the impression that the fetus is a lonely alien, traveling in a capsule through a dark distant space. At a later ultrasound, James and Amy listen to the non-verbal messages sent by their unborn son from the “strange space” from inside his mother, “a bubble in space and time,” “an expanding galaxy,” with joy and awe. These diary entries record the many conflicting emotions of the new parents, and picture their journey toward parenthood as both familiar and extraordinary. Like Joe Ollmann, Kochalka represents fatherhood as a skill that needs to be learned, while accepting that progress is not guaranteed and that it will trigger conflicting emotions. For James, the ongoing process of learning how to be a father is frustratingly non-linear, its ups and downs following each other in quick succession, in a chronology that is also punctured 190 M. PRECUP by mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal urges. With the birth of the couple’s first child, even banal passing thoughts such as wondering what might happen if one partner dies before the other are subjected to a new kind of scrutiny. For instance, in the December 16, 2003 entry, titled “Thinking about Stuff,” as James walks home, encumbered with multiple packages and bags, an oblivious baby Eli sleeping in a sling strapped to his chest, he suddenly becomes aware that he can no longer play out in his mind what might happen if either he or Amy died. Huffing and puffing through the heavy snow, his responsibilities—heavy both in a literal and a metaphorical sense—make the new father both more and less morbid at the same time, as he cannot prevent himself from both contemplating death and ruling it out. Paradox comes to define the condition of fatherhood in American Elf: being a new father is both difficult and easy, boring and exciting, conducive to both positive and negative emotions, bringing up a complicated interplay of character traits, creating both clarity and confusion. James eagerly acknowledges his contribution to the negative moments of childrearing, but tends to credit anyone but himself for the moments of clarity and positivity. For instance, in one of the many strips that envelop mundane moments in an aura of magic and revelation, James is putting his son to bed. “Almost three,” as the title of the piece indicates (Fig. 8.1), Eli lies back in bed and enjoys a bedtime story where he becomes the hero of his father’s quest to overcome the fear of taking care of a new baby. In the dark room, the father builds suspense across the first two panels, even lifting his head from the pillow to emphasize his point; the resolution offered in the panoramic bottom panel is different from the customary deadpan joke or comment that Kochalka adds to his daily strips. Instead, the happy ending of what is not a conventional suspense story—as one may be led to believe by the overall atmosphere of the strip—places the son in the position of savior of the father. Some years later, the couple’s second son, Oliver, is credited with protecting his father from suicide. In the February 5, 2011 strip, Kochalka depicts a sudden suicidal urge that has him seek comfort in his youngest son’s presence: “I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night gripped with the notion that I had no choice but to go downstairs and slit my wrists. Instead I went to Oliver’s tiny bed, picked him up & held him tight.” The thought bubble explicitly places the little boy in the role of savior of his father’s life, but this episode, unlike others where Kochalka credits his family with various positive things, does not read like an accomplishment. Instead, it draws attention to the fact 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 191

Fig. 8.1 August 6, 2006 entry from American Elf. (© James Kochalka) that, in the absence of professional help, it often falls to the family to offer mental health support that they may be either unprepared, unqualified, or simply, as in this case, unfairly asked to offer. It is important that Kochalka does not shy away from representing such episodes, as they draw much- needed attention to the fact that fatherhood is not a process with a finite learning curb, but instead a constant pursuit full of obstacles and tests whose unwitting subjects may sometimes be the children themselves. In American Elf, fatherhood is examined not only by the parents, but also by the children: as they grow, they are often offered the opportunity to assess James’s performance as a father, with mixed results. While James himself admits that his paternal conduct can alternate between the “best” 192 M. PRECUP and the “awful” (March 17, 2008), we often see his children praise him specifically for the way he behaves as a father. However, some of these positive assessments are almost always subsequently revised either by the child or by the father himself. Eli, born in 2003, declares that he has never had a bad day spent in his father’s company (January 18, 2010) and also pronounces him his “favorite thing in the whole world” (July 12, 2012), but also notes that his father has been “responsible for his worst days ever” (July 17, 2011). Oliver, who is four years younger, deems him the “best DaDa” in the world in a comic where James makes a point of mentioning that he forgot to put on his son’s shoes before they go for a walk (October 28, 2010). Upon one occasion, even the over-critical narrator character- izes himself as an excellent parent, as when, for instance, he contemplates his decision to stop publishing American Elf. Placed in the context of the general self-deprecating tone of the diary, this reads less like self-praise and more like a tongue-in-cheek comment about his own parental imperfec- tions: “Maybe I don’t need to be an artist. I think I could be satisfied just with being an awesome dad” (December 16, 2012). Such ambivalent characterizations help draw attention to the absurdity of strictly labeling the father’s performance, which can only be uneven and perceived differently in different contexts and at various ages.19 Being the father of two children is also more demanding for James, whose level of exhaustion often seems to cause confusion and aggression.20 The reviews for the father position may be mixed, but it is important that the domestic space depicted in American Elf is one where both children and parents feel encouraged to evaluate their behavior toward one another. What stands out among the many sources of self-deprecation is the father’s near-constant exhaustion, often mentioned in an apologetic, highly self-critical voice whose harshness is not only part of the more general negative self-image, but also appears to stem from the social expectation that a good father should never be emotionally unstable. James reproaches himself with many things, but his angry outbursts—or “tantrums” as they come to be called by various characters, including James himself, throughout the comic—are recurring sources of distress, for both the narrator, his wife, and their children. The choice of the term “tan- trum” places Kochalka in the category of young child, while Amy is generally portrayed as the adult in the relationship. Both before and after the birth of their children, James often depicts himself screaming, and his relationship with Amy survives many loud arguments. Even though he is deeply apologetic, his anger often gets the better of him; in the absence of 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 193

Fig. 8.2 December 14, 2004 entry from American Elf. (© James Kochalka) professional help, which he refuses in spite of Amy’s advice, he remains caught in a pattern of acting out and regret. In one such instance, pictured in a strip titled “Spiral of Despair” (Fig. 8.2), an outburst of anger and violence is caused by the pressure to produce too much work, a major theme and source of anxiety (December 14, 2004).21 We see James striking himself twice in the face while claiming a lack of awareness as to how this occurred (the narrative box reads: “I’m not sure how this happened”), 194 M. PRECUP engulfed by two separate vortexes surrounded by stars and flashes of lightning. His self-described “dizzying spiral of angry despair” culminates at the bottom of the strip, where he breaks the refrigerator door by slam- ming it too hard, bottles and jars falling to the floor. The scene is carefully constructed around the three depicted outbursts, each of them separately labeled by three different onomatopoeic renditions (“smack,” “swap,” and “wamp”) that increase in size as James moves from attacking his own face to focusing his rage on the refrigerator door. The strip’s frenzied movement is only anchored by Eli’s smiling face; close to the center of the panel and slightly outside the contact zone of the two main vortexes that encircle his father, the toddler’s presence serves to give an indication of the absurdity and ridiculousness of his father’s behavior. At the same time, the meticulously arranged chaos of the architecture of this comic demonstrates the graphic diary’s ability to structure turbulent past events, and its potential for self-scrutiny and even self-therapy. However, subsequent entries show the limitations of the therapeutic potential of the graphic diary. Even though James generally manages to focus his rage on various objects and records himself repeatedly attempt to manage his anger, it does on one occasion transfer from objects to those around him. In “The Violent Bed,” he casually smacks Eli over the head in what looks like a reflex reaction to Eli falling backward and accidentally hitting his father over the head (October 15, 2007). Amy, who is pregnant with their second child at the time, cries and angrily punches James. While Eli’s facial expression is more difficult to decode here (it is not clear if he is smiling or looking surprised), Amy’s shock provides an appropriate adult interpretation of what we have just witnessed, even though her own use of violence may not be advisable either. In fact, it is surprising that Amy is pictured losing her temper so rarely in this 14-year diary, particularly since her husband’s outbursts are recorded so often that they end up accumulating in a way that they read like an inevitable part of the American Elf life. It is James not losing his temper that is regarded as such a commendable exception that it is specifically mentioned, as when Eli declares he is “being a NICE DADA” because he has not “yelled or anything” in the five minutes since he woke up (May 11, 2009). In the wider context of his behavior as a parent, it is neither the apologies, the heartfelt regret, or the lack of intention to behave poorly that plead in James’s favor, but the evidence of his many other good qualities and deeds as a father. Kochalka’s decision to record all of these episodes is also important, as 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 195 they help provide a deeper understanding of how emotional instability can influence otherwise admirable paternal conduct. One of the many good qualities of James as a father is a possible consequence of his character’s negative expectations of the future, more specifically the conviction that things can and will deteriorate: he is often portrayed as quite calm and composed during difficult situations such as a child’s illness, something that could perhaps cause an even less volatile person to panic. There is a certain wisdom about the way the father cali- brates his extreme emotions in this comic, manifesting more trepidation in less serious situations (like his own manifold ailments) and demonstrating much-needed poise during potentially grave circumstances. On the frequent occasions when the children are sick or sustain minor injuries, James comforts them while remaining composed and preserving his sense of humor. Some of the humor may be added during the conception of those strips that depict potentially dangerous situations for the children, as in “Oliver Descending a Staircase” (September 16, 2008). Here, Kochalka adds to the already substantial stock of Marcel Duchamp parodies that have been in circulation by depicting a spectacular fall with no consequences upon Oliver’s health. The one-panel strip captures both the fact that the situation is frightening (through the word bubble that spells out, in increasingly large letters, James’s name) and that it is completely outside of the control of anybody in the house. The child looks doll-like and wide-eyed as a movement line indicates his inevitable descent, but his car- toonishness is an indicator that the fall did not have any serious repercussions. Considering the point of view of the strip, it may have been that James was quite close to the foot of the stairs, but still far enough as to be placed in the position of a powerless observer. This strip, alongside others that depict similar scenes, spells out a common predicament of parenthood, one that Kochalka is wisely suggesting should be regarded with calm and humor: being close enough to see your child is in danger, but too far away to be able to prevent it. The amount and variety of activities in which the father and children engage belie the excessive self-criticism that runs throughout the strips. The father and sons engage both in relatively mundane activities such as reading and playing puzzles, and also accomplish uncommon feats, such as the invention of the music of the future, the aptly named “skiz-glotch,” born out of a cacophony of “unbelievably loud, stiff crinkly plastic” noise and the melody of a “silver rattle” (June 2, 2004). They enjoy many educational and creative activities, some of them more traditional (such as 196 M. PRECUP learning various basic skills or playing catch), others more whimsical, such as tasting the rain. Kochalka’s paternal signature can be traced along the multitude of creative activities he organizes for his sons. During breakfast, he takes advantage of the configuration of the kitchen to improvise puppet shows; together, they make sweets and then create wrapping paper for them featuring Squiggle, one of the main characters from Kochalka’s long- standing comic for children, Johnny Boo (February 26, 2009); Kochalka draws comics both for and with both of his boys. Some of the sons’ first scribbles, elevated as attempts at graphic storytelling, are incorporated into American Elf as incomprehensible entries labeled, “Eli helped me draw today’s comic” (April 22, 2006) and “Oliver’s first comic strip” (December 17, 2009). When Eli draws his own comic, and they photocopy and staple it together, his father is visibly giddy with excitement (May 23, 2006). In fact, drawing is one of the activities that gain a paradoxical function after the children’s birth: both lifeline and source of stress, both a skill lovingly bequeathed onto one’s children and a frustratingly neglected skill because of the demands of childrearing. For such a prolific creator, producing nothing except his graphic diary during the early months of Oliver’s life, for instance, is a source of anxiety, but James’s consolation stems from the same source as his distress: his baby’s fluffy hair distracts him from his anxiety (February 11, 2008).22 Part of the impressive collection of whimsical and entertaining activities concocted by the father, drawing remains a structuring principle of Kochalka’s life and daily comic. He also introduces his important but secondary interest in video games to both his sons, while monitoring the practice so that it does not end up confining them to the space of the house. Playing video games side by side is often represented in the comic as an activity that helps create a space of camaraderie where parental authority temporarily fades into the background.23 The father’s many creative outlets thus help balance out the darker moments of parental exhaustion that sometimes cause anxiety and anger. Kochalka’s experience of fatherhood is also represented as a spiritual practice that brings sudden moments of joy and revelation as the narrator is prompted to contemplate the world around him with fresh eyes. These experiences stand out when they are emphatically placed in one-page strips, and become small magical tableaux with very few words, where father and son appear to be cut off from any outside distraction or torment. In these bubbles of happiness, they are protected, at least temporarily, from common sources of sadness or irritation. A fairytale atmosphere hangs about them, partly because of the visual dynamic between the elf 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 197 father and his human child, but also because sequentiality is temporarily suspended during these “lyric efforts” (Cates 2011, 220). I would also argue that these one-page strips, where the diary is used not so much to construct a story, but rather to encapsulate a moment of the day, evoke some of the animated stillness of the photographic snapshot. That is not to say there is no movement in them: the tall grass swishes around (June 12, 2004), Eli waves a wand as he battles an enormous shadow puppet (March 6, 2006), father and son watch the “hot sparkles” that emerge from a camp fire (April 10, 2006). However, their particular framing encourages readers to contemplate and return to these scenes not for their narrative substance or storytelling techniques, but for what they say about the potential of the apparently mundane moment to be elevated through the power of human connection. The stillness of these moments is also given by the fact that they are single images offered as places of memory, encap- sulating the distilled essence of a particular day. While they do not always contain images of familial harmony, the one-page strips almost always capture moments of reflection; when the content includes father-son scenes, they become contemplations of fatherhood, most of them happy. There are a few important constant elements in a comic where assessments of Kochalka’s fatherhood fluctuate: he is present in his children’s lives more than any of the other male authors discussed here, he tries to apply an original approach to education by concocting various activities that might stimulate their imagination, and he examines his own behavior as a father in order to improve it. Even though he does have to travel for work to attend comics conventions—to which he occasionally brings his family—and even if he seems to have maintained a staggering level of productivity in his career, he spends most of his days in his children’s company. When, for instance, he walks into a bookstore without his sons, he strikes such an incongruous note that one person feels compelled to voice his disbelief: “Wow! I haven’t seen you without your kids in… EVER” (January 29, 2008). Tellingly titled “Daddy in the Bookstore,” the strip emphasizes the fact that James is mainly interpellated as a father in his community. In fact, the very publication of American Elf makes his experience of fatherhood open to both criticism and emulation. Since American Elf was initially published online, readers were able to respond in real time to some of the strips, and either critique, praise, or support Kochalka during his more difficult phases. While this initial back-and- forth is now unavailable, some of the readers’ reactions are preserved in the comics themselves. For example, in one strip, the narrator is surprised 198 M. PRECUP to see that he apparently projects an image of original fatherhood, as when a reader declares that he asks himself the question “What Would James Kochalka Do?” when faced with a more eccentric request from his child, such as brushing his teeth upside down (April 13, 2008). Kochalka modestly rejects the implicit praise left by his reader on the americanelf. com message board by quoting his “tired and cranky” persona that allows for less experimentation and fun than his readers may guess. However, the strip ends up confirming the benefits of communication between readers and creators of webcomics as James takes inspiration from his reader’s positive perception of him in order to improve his behavior. We see James transformed from the “tired and cranky” self-portrait in the first panel of the strip to a supportive father, holding a protective hand on Eli’s back after allowing his son to wear a wrestling mask while brushing his teeth. This, however, is only a small example of the large amount of activities in which father and sons engage, and which Kochalka does not depict as particularly praiseworthy. Kochalka’s examination of fatherhood throughout American Elf also offers ample opportunity for reflecting upon the gendered aspects of parenting. The comic uses the childish and always plaintive elf persona to satirize some men’s attitude during their partners’ pregnancy, but also during the more challenging moments of childrearing. There are many examples in the comic of how parenting can be more taxing for women than for men, for biological reasons such as having a difficult pregnancy or having to wake up multiple times during the night in order to breastfeed. Even though James keeps panicking and complaining throughout, having to be reassured even as Amy undergoes serious medical procedures (such as, for instance, an emergency C-section), he repeatedly declares himself in awe of his wife’s beauty, strength, and ability to create life. Amy is portrayed as a stable and generally constant adult; it is, therefore, James’s oscillation between generosity and selfishness that causes the life of the new parents to shift from harmony to petty fights provoked by competitive misery, as the parents attempt to establish who is more exhausted or more entitled to free time. As the diary approaches its end, the two sons occupy an increasing amount of space, while James continues to confirm the label Amy repeatedly applies to him, that of a child that refuses or is unable to grow up. Whether she refers to herself as “a single mom with three little boys” (February 7, 2008) or to her husband as “a baby,” or as “someone who never grows 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 199 up & remains so vividly in touch with childhood imagination,” something that “sounds great – unless they’re your LIFE PARTNER” (December 27, 2009), Amy seems to propose an understanding of the infantile moments of James’s paternal conduct as permanent, unavoid- able, and overpowering. Even though American Elf does not focus much on contemplating the past, in keeping with the initial intention using the graphic diary as a record of present experiences, the several references to the author’s father—who passes away on September 14, 2012—are significant and provide a better understanding of James’s own paternal conduct. Several strips are devoted either to showing James in the process of mourning or reminiscing. The September 16, 2012 strip is titled “John Kochalka” and reads like a well-documented eulogy: while the text in the upper two panels praises and thanks James’s father, the reproduced drawing from the lower half of the comic documents some of the many qualities enumerated above. The text of the eulogy could, in fact, easily apply to James Kochalka himself: “He was a poet, a dancer, a loud & strong singer, loved books & thinking and conversation, smiling wide and laughing, keeping a journal, writing letters and drawing pictures.” The picture John Kochalka drew for his son, which is reproduced below the text, also provides an image of the man as a supportive and imaginative father who comes up with creative solutions to help his son fight his fears and perhaps also his bullies. The text of the drawing, composed in the form of a letter marked “top secret,” holds a short but powerful text (“Dear James, You are fun. You are invin- cible. When the monsters come jello them. Love, Dad.”), that is split up so that each sentence is placed in a box connected to the previous one by an arrow, in a logical sequence of one-variant answers to a question that is never asked as such, but can easily be surmised to be about how to navi- gate the more difficult moments in life. The last box that encircles the letter closing is supported by two human figures with beaks—perhaps anticipating the human-animal character from American Elf—that, together with a representation of a small explosion marked “oops,” that depicts the demise of “the monsters,” adds a lighter touch to a note that addresses a grave problem. This strip, alongside the other diary entries where Kochalka pays tribute to his father, works not only to construct a more fully developed narrator but also to emphasize the contribution made by early education and example to future paternal conduct. 200 M. PRECUP

Conclusion In her ground-breaking stand-up show Nanette (2018), comedian Hannah Gadsby addresses the issue of self-deprecating humor and proposes that members of minority cultures, like herself, should dispense with it altogether. By explaining that, in the case of people who already exist “in the margins,” self-deprecation does not signal humility, but rather humiliation, Gadsby points out the self-destructive effects of this powerful comedic tradition. This is apparent particularly in autobiographical situations like the stand-up routine, where the comedian speaks at least in part from her own experiences and memories, but may also discuss her physical appearance in front of an audience that is thus invited to view her body in a certain way. While I do not claim to equate Kochalka’s position with Gadsby’s in any way, I think her comments can be pertinent to the chosen comedic mode from American Elf. While white straight middle-class men are not a minority, stay-at-home fathers are still less common, and within that category very few are survivors of sexual assault who struggle with depression and suicidal urges and who still manage to work and remain devoted and present fathers.24 By employing self-deprecation, Kochalka gives his elf alter ego less credit than he seems to deserve, and while this mode may seem ideally suited to a character who struggles with insecurities and a certain amount of self-loathing, American Elf does more justice to the father when it embraces humility, not humiliation. I argue that the self-deprecating humor, which is also a staple of the American underground comics tradition, works to both undermine the readers’ positive reactions to the overwhelming moments of involved fatherhood portrayed in the comic and garner some sympathy and leniency for the character’s less successful performances. Self-deprecation relies on over-the-top brutal honesty that readers should regard with skepticism not only because honesty in the context of autobiography is itself mediated by circumstance and other factors but also because this convention is not necessarily conducive to self-discovery. Rather, self-deprecating humor functions to further consolidate stereotypes, such as, in this case, the infantile father, incapable of growing up, always a lost child at heart, while his wife is the actual adult in the relationship, and bears the burden of keeping the family together. In fact, Kochalka provides an important commentary on the often criticized practice of “peerenting,” a parenting style that has often been associated with “Generation X” (Pallister 2016, 241–242), by showing that the “father as pal” model can be a constructive and rewarding—although by no means unique—component of parenting. 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 201

Kochalka’s version of himself in American Elf creates a portrait of a loveable curmudgeon, profusely apologetic for his mistakes, constantly battling his demons, and often losing to them, but also cute and vulnerable, like most of his characters. The elf’s cuteness and zaniness may also help elicit some forgiveness for the character, whose angry outbursts and neurotic episodes appear to be a burden for both himself and his loved ones. According to the record provided in American Elf, Kochalka is not only forgiven often and wholeheartedly by a long list of people he has unwittingly wronged, but he is also loved by his many friends and family members. The facts that transpire under the thick layer of complaints actually belie the character’s self-deprecating representation as unreliable. It is not only the grueling discipline of the entire American Elf endeavor that draws one’s attention to the author’s impressive work ethic but also the numerous other projects—from comics to animation, panting, music, teaching, and gaming—in which James becomes involved, as well as his many accolades. While the character does not profoundly change along the 14 years of the publication of his diary, his changed circumstances after he becomes a father offer him the opportunity to reveal certain sides of himself that had not become apparent in the earlier comics. The contem- plative moments—which exist from the beginning of the diary—some of which are condensed in one-page strips, gain an additional layer of magic, and hope after the children are born. They not only provide moments of peace in an otherwise frantically paced existence, but they also seem to hold the promise that the father, often tormented by depression and anxiety, may eventually be able to attain longer-lasting peace.25

Notes 1. In recognition of his contribution to local culture, James Kochalka became cartoonist laureate of Vermont in 2011, a position he held for three years. 2. In the preface to Volume II, Kochalka mentions that he took a break from the diary in 2000, from March 9 to May 3, a decision that negatively affected his mental health. 3. For instance, in a Booklist review of the first published volume ofAmerican Elf, collecting Kochalka’s diary comics from October 26, 1998 to December 31, 2003, Ray Olson praises it for its sincerity, charm, and quirky aesthetic choices: “It’s as if sweet gross-out filmmaker John Waters had reconstituted Schulz’s classic with and for grown-ups: vulgar but loveable” (2004). In a later review (of American Elf, Book 4: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka, January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2011), 202 M. PRECUP

Olson also provides a positive reading of the paternal figure as it emerges from Kochalka’s diary, despite the narrator’s many doubts about his performance as a father: “Though like all parents he worries about being good enough, he must know that he presents himself as a kind of father-we-all- wish-we’d-had—even when we did!” (2017). The real-time online reception of Kochalka’s work is sometimes recorded in the diary, as well as the response from the public to his many art-related activities, such as participation in national and international comics conventions, painting exhibitions, and teaching. However, since American Elf was initially a webcomic that is no longer available on americanelf.com, where Kochalka used to upload it every day, it is difficult to gauge the impact it had at the time that it was published. It is thus important that Kochalka occasionally records his readers’ opinions and provides website statistics that indicate how well- read his work was: “I have 2000 unique readers a day and 22,000 unique readers a month…and about 768,000 page views” (October 1, 2011). 4. Kochalka jokingly contemplates the accuracy of the generic classification proposed by his subtitle “sketchbook diaries” in a phone conversation with an unnamed person who objects to his work being “neither truly sketchbooks nor diaries,” and proposes the wilfully pretentious formulation “portable drawing book autobiographical comic strips” (March 15, 2005). 5. While it is not the purpose of this chapter to analyze the full implications of the transition of Kochalka’s diary from online to print (even though I do refer to it throughout the chapter), I would argue his decision to print online content is not only a nod to the print tradition of comics, which is still dominant, but also an important part of the consolidation of physical socialization enabled by authors’ participation—with print copies of their books—at comics conventions. 6. Isaac Cates also notes that Kochalka’s accumulation of everyday snapshots produces a “composite vista” that relies on the “inference and imaginative construction” of the reader and with a “comprehensive completeness that the structures of the memoir could barely hope to attain” (2011, 223). 7. For instance, in the March 14, 2005, entry, he explains the relative calm of his latest recordings through a decision to temporarily leave out his various outbursts: “I have not drawn any of my meltdowns, freakouts, or tantrums in a while. I just don’t feel like drawing them. Usually some other little thing from the day strikes me as being more important.” This is both a comment on his creative process, emphasizing once again the inherently fragmentary nature of the memory work he produces and an honest observation about the de facto occurrence of such situations. 8. He also provides occasional titles for his strips, which become permanent a few years into the production of the diary. 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 203

9. In the December 13, 2012 entry, James contemplates his own work from outside the frame of a panel that contains it, an “alternate reality,” open sketchbooks upon sketchbooks on a desk, with the baffled air of naïve surprise that comes to be a regular pose of his cartoon alter ego. His conclusion, that even his most inconsequential moment “shines like an angel,” as he depicts himself wearing mirrored sunglasses meant to emphasize his unearned glamor, is downplayed by the explanation that he found the glasses in the woods “while playing disc golf.” 10. Even in those rare situations where he is too exhausted to draw, he still leaves a mark on the page (sometimes only a scribble), as a sign of presence and confirmation of consistency. 11. “Magic Boy” shares some autobiographical details with the later “American Elf” character, such as the fact that he is also married to an elfish woman named Amy, but also other character traits such as the tendency to worry incessantly. However, in the “Magic Boy” comics the autobiographical is a minor side story in a plot that—as in Magic Boy & the Robot Elf, for instance—includes an elf-like robot, time travel, and a robot version of the American Elf cat, Spandy. 12. There are two photographic inserts placed at the end of the second and the third printed volumes of American Elf. Titled “Kochalka Family Photos 2004–2005” and “Kochalka Family Photos 2006–2007,” they contain 12 color photographs each, placed symmetrically on two separate pages and surrounded by panel borders. These wordless photo comics signal back to some of the drawings from the graphic narrative, with occasional overlaps. The photographs confirm basic factual elements from the narrative of Kochalka’s diary (such as, for instance, the neighbor’s car being on fire or Eli’s baby eczema), but they also evidently contradict the elf conceit and project an overall happier and more light- hearted image of James Kochalka’s family. This is, of course, due to the fact that there is much less narrative substance in this photographic record, which is predicated by its own conventions; however, it plays an important part in drawing attention to the limitations of both family photography and autobiographical comics, both tethered to reality but separated from it at different distances and angles. 13. Throughout this chapter, I use “James” to refer to the autobiographical persona constructed in the diary, and “(James) Kochalka” to refer to the author of the book. 14. Various artistic practices, including mask-making, have been used in therapy to help create distance between patients and their traumas and to facilitate the expression of emotions (Trepal-Wollenzier and Wester 2002, 125). 204 M. PRECUP

15. Depression and anger are common effects of sexual abuse, as a recent autobiographical story by writer Junot Díaz also shows. Titled “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” Díaz’s narrative of the aftermath of sexual abuse at the age of eight has a striking number of similarities to what Kochalka reveals about his own trauma: he only belatedly receives professional help through therapy (in American Elf, we see James rejecting Amy’s suggestion that he should seek help), suffers from depression and bouts of anger, and is able to interact more easily with the world by hiding his painful past behind a mask. While Díaz also pinpoints the negative consequences of the mask that prevents him from being able to meaningfully interact with people and form lengthy attachments, Kochalka does not, in fact, disassociate himself from his elf persona, even after his confession, which itself triggers a longer period of depression. This is possibly because, while Díaz speaks about his healing, Kochalka represents a process whose resolution may be lying outside the scope of American Elf. 16. In a chapter on the intersection of cuteness and the grotesque in comedies like Ted and Wilfred, Anthony P. McIntyre demonstrates that cuteness has the “ability to attenuate criticism” (2017, 290), which can mean that, in the case of his chosen primary sources, this aesthetic mode can work to facilitate misogyny. In similar vein, in American Elf cuteness works to facilitate forgiveness for a number of the title character’s misdeeds. 17. For a more in-depth discussion of this topic with reference to James Kochalka and Jeffrey Brown’s work, see Johnston (2013). 18. There are many other examples where James is not taken seriously because of preconceived notions about creating work on the computer from home, which some do not regard as legitimate labor. For instance, when his computer breaks down, a friend considers James’s grief frivolous, but Amy explains that their livelihood depends upon it, as James’s exhausted face confirms the seriousness of her remarks: “She doesn’t realize the computer is how you make a living—that’s how you’ll pay for the house…the baby…” (July 21, 2003). 19. Fatherly duties also change over time and produce fresh revelations and character developments, as well as new readings of past conduct: while, for instance, Amy is initially responsible for waking up throughout the night to breastfeed Oliver, when they wean him the roles are reversed and James feels retrospective compassion for his wife (December 4, 2008). 20. Upon being asked about the difficulty of raising two children instead of one, he answers in the negative only to immediately contradict himself: “No. I’m just really confused all the time. And I can’t think…and I’m cranky and nothing I say or do makes any sense and I don’t know what’s going on” (May 18, 2008). 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 205

21. The combined pressures of work and fatherhood often make James feel understandably overwhelmed, as he himself admits: “95% of my brain power and time is occupied with caring for my two boys. Plus I work like 3 full time jobs on top of that” (May 30, 2009). 22. In fact, even when he laments the fact that he cannot find the time to do any work, James works constantly, even though perhaps his productivity is not the same as before the children arrive. For instance, after Oliver is born, he spends part of the first day of his paternity leave painting portraits of his son using his Nintendo D5 and incorporates the results into American Elf (January 24, 2008). Work remains, throughout American Elf, both a source of stress and salvation. 23. As usual, sometimes James’s enthusiasm overpowers him and he slips completely out of his parental role, as when he continues to play a game after Eli goes to sleep and is later compelled to go into his child’s room to let him know, in a proud whisper, that he “got the infinity blade” (May 29, 2012). 24. According to a Pew Research Center statistic for 2016, only 7% of fathers (by comparison to 27% of mothers) are stay-at-home parents. A RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) statistic specifies that 82% of all victims under 18 are female. Together, these figures indicate that stay-at- home fathers who are also survivors of sexual assault are quite uncommon, but also that it is possible that the figures are higher. 25. This hope remains unfulfilled by the time Kochalka decides to put an end to American Elf, but this open ending mirrors the structure of the daily comics themselves and indicate to what extent the diary, as a genre, is closer than the memoir to mirroring the haphazard narrative of life itself.

References Cates, Isaac. 2011. The Diary Comic. In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A. Chaney, 209–226. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge. Dale, Joshua Paul. 2017. The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency. In The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al., 35–55. New York/Abingdon: Routledge. Díaz, Junot. 2018. The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma. The New Yorker, April 16. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence- the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma. Accessed 7 Feb 2019. Hatfield, Charles. 2005.Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 206 M. PRECUP

Johnston, Paddy. 2013. Comics and the Day Job: Cartooning and Work in Jeffrey Brown and James Kochalka’s Conversation #2. Comics Forum, December 17. https://comicsforum.org/2013/12/17/comics-and-the-day-job-cartooning-and-work-in-jeffrey-brown-and-james-kochalkas-conversation-2-by- paddy-johnston/. Accessed 27 Aug 2019. Kochalka, James. 2003. Magic Boy & the Robot Elf. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2004. American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka October 26, 1998 to December 31, 2003. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2007. American Elf, Book Two: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2008. American Elf, Book Three: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2007. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2012. American Elf, Book Four: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2011. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2014. American Elf 2012: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. Lejeune, Philippe. 2014. Autobiography and the New Communication Tools. Trans. Katherine Durnin. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 247–258. Madison/London: The University of Wisconsin Press. McIntyre, Anthony P. 2017. Ted, Wilfred, and the Guys: Twenty-First-Century Masculinities, Raunch Culture, and the Affective Ambivalences of Cuteness. In The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al., 273–294. New York/Abingdon: Routledge. Ngai, Sianne. 2011. Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai. Interviewed by Adam Jasper. Cabinet Magazine 43. http://www.cabinetmaga- zine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php. Accessed 7 Feb 2019. Olson, Ray. 2004. Review of American Elf: James Kochalka’s Sketchbook Diaries. The Booklist, July 1831. ProQuest Central. ———. 2012. Starred Review of American Elf, Book 4: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2011. The Booklist, October 15. 35. ProQuest Central. Pallister, Kathryn. 2016. Modern Fathers in Modern Family: The Impact of Generational Differences on Fatherhood Styles. In Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the New Man, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks, 133–249. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Price-Robertson, Rhys, Andrea Reupert, and Darryl Maybery. 2015. Fathers’ experiences of mental illness stigma: scoping review and implications for prevention. Advances in Mental Health 13 (2): 100–112. https://doi.org/10. 1080/18387357.2015.1063746. 8 “WHEN THE MONSTERS COME JELLO THEM”: FATHERHOOD… 207

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tomlin, Andre. 2017. Perinatal Mental Health Problems in Fathers Are Common and Legitimate, But We Need Better Ways to Reach and Help Them. The Mental Elf, March 13. https://www.nationalelfservice.net/populations-and- settings/perinatal-mental-health/perinatal-mental-health-problems-in- fathers-are-common-and-legitimate-but-we-need-better-ways-to-reach-and- help-them/. Accessed 7 Feb 2019. Trepal-Wollenzier, and Kelly L. Wester. 2002. The Use of Masks in Counseling. Journal of Clinical Activities, Assignments & Handouts in Psychotherapy Practice 2 (2): 123–130. https://doi.org/10.1300/J182v02n02_13. CHAPTER 9

“You tell your father he did a good job”: Sons, Fathers, and Intergenerational Dynamics in Jeffrey Brown’s A Matter of Life

Of all the authors discussed in this volume, Jeffrey Brown is the only one who examines fatherhood intergenerationally, both as a son and as a father himself. In his latest graphic memoir, A Matter of Life (2013), subtitled “an autobiographical meditation on fatherhood and faith,” he asks not only what makes one a good father, but also tackles the question of how he, as a non-believer, can share his religious heritage with his son. For the narrator, religion is not merely a source of aggravation as he is growing up, but also a connection to his own minister father’s faith and profession. Unwilling to transmit the irrational fears taught by the church to his young son, but also reluctant to completely erase this part of his own background, Brown’s autobiographical persona negotiates between these two worldviews in order to provide answers to his son’s questions. This pursuit inevitably produces a contemplation of the frailty and finality of life and how to maintain one’s capacity for happiness. Brown’s representation of his own experience is a hopeful example of involved fatherhood: he depicts himself as a calm, helpful, and supportive father, and his own distance from his minister father’s beliefs offers him a serene perspective on life and death. Deemed “delightful and thought-provoking” and “his most personal work to date” (Arlington 2013), A Matter of Life is a concise meditation on what makes a good father, but also what makes a good life, against a fragmented chronology where past and present events mirror and revise one another.1 The cultural space of the book remains the Midwest, as the character, who is raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, finally

© The Author(s) 2020 209 M. Precup, The Graphic Lives of Fathers, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_9 210 M. PRECUP settles relatively close to home, in Chicago, Illinois, a decision that allows the family to spend a substantial amount of time together. This chapter focuses on the two models of paternal conduct depicted by Jeffrey Brown in A Matter of Life, but also on related issues such as alternative masculinity, intergenerational conflict, and the apparent contradiction between a positive worldview and the inevitability of the final extinction of human life. By placing the representation of his own parental conduct alongside that of his own father, without giving evident priority to either, Brown offers a rare examination of parenting. As John D. Barbour argues, this kind of parallel can produce two ethical problems: “the effect of the writer’s own parenting experience on the moral assessment of his parents, and the tension between judging and not judging” (2004, 74). Brown writes with empathy of the moments when he and his brothers tested their parents’ patience; as he was raised in a religious household, one would expect his view of the parents’ (and also his own) transgressions to be influenced by a religious perspective on forgiveness. In this chapter, I also examine Brown’s moral judgments of both himself and his parents and attempt to assess the dynamic created through this back-and-forth where the protagonist switches identities and power positions, sometimes from one page to the next, as he turns from a child to a parent and vice versa.

Masculinity and the Shaping of the Autobiographical Subject Throughout his substantial body of autobiographical work from before A Matter of Life, Jeffrey Brown portrays himself from childhood to adulthood in short sketches that are either organized under a specific topic, such as the author’s love life and body-related issues or simply grouped together because they are stories from similar periods. Just as James Kochalka, Brown offers equal attention to the mundane and momentous events in his life as he records the evolution of a character who shares some of the American Elf’s insecurity and vulnerability.2 Since Brown, much like the other male cartoonists discussed in this book, developed an autobiographical persona in comic book form for a significant amount of time, readers might expect fatherhood to play out within an already well-established conceit. However, Brown’s character grows quite noticeably as his circumstances change, by contrast to other cartoonists, most notably Robert Crumb (as I demonstrate in Chap. 6 of this book), who remain consistently devoted to their long-standing personas. From his first autobiographical comic book about 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 211 a failed relationship, Clumsy (2002), to A Matter of Life (2013), which shows that he has settled down, the style and tone of Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical self undergo noticeable positive transformations. Brown’s technique has also changed: he now makes more polished full-color comics, more carefully structured, with more focus on detail, substantial variations in the size of the panels, and—in A Matter of Life—panoramic vistas of scenes of natural beauty.3 Even though they are both variations of geek masculinity, Brown’s autobiographical self is much less buoyant and outgo- ing than James Kochalka’s elf persona, but he can also be assertive and stubborn; his shyness does not prevent him from making friends, and his insecurities—emphasized by his self-deprecating humor and generally pes- simistic outlook—are resolved as soon as he embarks on a career path he enjoys and finds a long-standing relationship with the woman who becomes the mother of his two sons. Most importantly, both James and Jeffrey manage to avoid the pitfalls of toxic masculinity as embodied in geek culture through aggression toward women and other minorities, a typical move “from bullied to bullies” (Salter and Blodgett 2017, 12). From this perspective, a reexamination of Robert Crumb’s socially awkward persona can better help us understand the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinities by members of geek or nerd culture. Brown depicts himself as a small, fragile, and awkward-looking figure with an oversized head, a near-perpetual stubble, and disheveled hair. Throughout the years, Brown has repeatedly pointed out the distance between himself and his autobiographical persona, as, for instance, in the preface to his collection Undeleted Scenes: “I’m not really writing about me. I mean, I don’t even look like this exactly” (2010). For Brown, creating autobiography appears to be less about the accurate recording of facts, and more about utilizing its potential for contemplation and human connection. In a disclaimer that precedes the table of contents of Undeleted Scenes, he warns that the book “also contains a decent amount of outright fiction”; he later adds that the main purpose of his work is not to create an entirely accurate account of himself and various developments, but rather to offer his readers a didactic moment, the opportunity to ponder the meaning of similar events in their own life: “What I’m really trying to write about is life-experiences, feelings, situations…the things we all go through./I don’t think life has to be ‘interesting’ as much as I think it should be meaningful./For me, that’s the whole purpose of art—to better understand life, and find meaning in it. Byshowing these pieces of my life, I hope that others can learn something new about 212 M. PRECUP their own life” (Brown 2010). As the frantic pace of the first years of Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical work begins to slow down, and the urgency of meeting new goals and ticking new boxes is replaced by musings on the fleeting nature of human life and the value of our time on earth, one of the important simple lessons of his body of work is about learning how to be kinder to oneself and others. An important part of the development of Jeffrey Brown’s character even before he becomes a father is learning to detach himself from the pressures of hegemonic masculinities, as we see him struggling to meet social demands related to his sexual activity, his body, and male socialization. Revisiting past versions of himself is an important part of Brown’s autobiographical process. By playing with conventional chronology, his books question the rhetoric of progress embedded in the tradition of Western autobiography (Smith and Watson 2010, 113). Even though his character does grow, the frequent retrospective movements to inter- mediate points of his journey function as reminders that growth is not a given and that early education and environment have pervasive long- term effects. In his first four autobiographical books, Clumsy (2002), Unlikely (2003), AEIOU/An Easy Intimacy (2005), and Every Girl Is the End of the World for Me (2006),4 Brown shows the amount of stress that can be produced by the pressure to meet contemporary standards of sexual and romantic fulfillment. While this remains a recurring concern throughout his next autobiographical collections, such as Little Things (2008), Funny Misshapen Body (2009), and Undeleted Scenes (2010), these later works contain stories that focus more specifically on anxieties related to Jeff’s body image (particularly his weight), but also health- related issues like his battle with Crohn’s disease and subsequent surgery, as well as worry and confusion about his career. Throughout this angst-ridden journey, the character is saved by his lifelong passion for comics, the unwavering support of friends and family, but also the desire to apologize for and rectify his mistakes, particularly when his behavior is hurtful to others. It is this ability to separate self-loathing from constructive self-criticism that appears to work in Jeff’s favor, including when it comes to his capacity to fully embrace what Carabí and Armengol describe as “nondominant ways of being a man, where (male) power is not synonymous with oppression” (2014, 4) and leave some of the initial anxieties of his adult life behind. A good example of this is a short collection of stories titled “Be a Man,” included in Undeleted Scenes, where Brown uses satire to sustain a rather lengthy attack on one specific com- 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 213 ponent of hegemonic masculinity: regarding sex as a sexual battle where a man emerges victorious if he has managed to convince a woman to have sex with him. He warns readers that this is a piece of satire instead of actual events in a brief meta comment titled “Why Not Autobiography?” There, he invites a reading of “Be a Man” as part self-criticism, but also criticism of certain readings of his previous work, more specifically Clumsy, which was attacked by one reviewer not for its artwork, but for his character’s allegedly failed masculinity (Brown 2015).5 Brown portrays his character on the title page of “Be a Man” as a sexual champion (screaming, “I have conquered you, woman!”), rendered ridiculous not only by the obvious clash with the author’s long-standing autobiographical persona, but also through the obviously bombastic masculinist rhetoric in the word bubble and the presence of the naked woman, lying in bed on her back behind him, her head obscured by his frame, her underwear on the floor behind him. The short stories from this segment show “Jeff” engaging in objectionable behavior that places his female partner in upsetting and awkward situations, such as pressuring her to engage in intercourse, displaying blatant disregard for her own sexual pleasure, and other displays of aggressive masculinity. Performing masculinity is an issue that Jeff continues to examine after becoming a father, particularly in the context of his religious upbringing, which contributed to the creation of an air of secrecy and subsequent confusion around sexuality. In A Matter of Life, in several panels devoted to the subject of having grown up “pretty sexually repressed,” we see Jeff as a child, sneaking around the church library when no one is around, and managing to unearth a book called Where Do Babies Come from?, which provides several “secret details” (2013a, 49). Since Jeff grows up in the pre-internet era, some of the initial wide-eyed wonder with which he reads about details his church teacher is not willing to impart lingers until high school. He also revisits past homophobic sentiment and behavior by going back to high school and the first year of college, and drawing a causal connection between his homophobia and the “irrational fear” (2013a, 46) that pervaded the atmosphere of his youth church group. This emotion has many variations, including the well-circulated fear that heavy metal music is evil, or the apprehension surrounding certain trigger words, even when disconnected from what they originally mean, as when one person sees Jeff reading Douglas Adams’s humorous science fiction novelDirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and gravely warns him to “be careful with that holistic stuff” (2013a, 46). Jeff’s 214 M. PRECUP subsequent transition to Christian heavy-metal sees regular heavy metal lyrics—rumored to spell out, if played backward, “Satan my dark lord I will kill for your awful evilness” (2013a, 46)—change to homophobic messages about divine judgment, such as “You want gay rights? You have the right to stand before God and be judged.”6 On the pages where Brown depicts these episodes, structured along the prevailing 12-panel grid of the book, he makes subtle connections between the ideology of the church and the homophobia shared by Jeff and his friends, while also pointing out the prevalence of homophobia outside of religious gatherings. Brown does this by placing part of his heavy metal story in a series of six panels on the first row of two adjoining pages to tell a secondary narrative to the one in which they are originally embedded. This particular narrative sequence begins with an image of Jeff blasting heavy metal music, while his mother is covering her ears against the “noise” and ends with a panel where we see Jeff and a friend using homophobic slurs as another boy—presumably the target—runs away from them. While neither of Jeff’s parents is ever portrayed as homophobic,7 it is evident that the culture where Jeff grows up cultivates both ignorance and hatred of homosexuality. In this context, when his classmate Herman develops a crush on him, Jeff feels both awkwardness and fear; for the duration of this entire segment, Jeff’s eyes are wide open in alarm, his mouth is distorted in a disgusted grimace or quivering plaintively. He manages to revise this position only after he befriends a gay man at work, soon after writing a cold letter to reject Herman. His new perception of homosexuality as natural is not presented as a climactic victory for the character; instead, it is introduced, like many important positive changes from Jeff’s life, in an understated manner that, in this case, indicates the right ethical perspective without giving an exaggerated amount of credit to the straight man for revising his homophobic views. With regard to men’s ability to reject dominant masculinity, Bob Pease argues that it is important to create the right conditions for change, meaning “to desta- bilize men’s identities and encourage them to create solidarity with women and gay men on the basis of respect for difference” (2014, 18). In this context, Brown’s decision to include the segment about his past homophobia is important, even if it took place a long time before the present time of the story, because it shows the potential for change that exists even in homophobic environments. Except for this short episode from the distant past, the autobiographical self from A Matter of Life is represented as a good example of alternative 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 215 masculinity, as readers are also able to gather from previous comics. This is not only evidenced by Jeff’s paternal conduct, which I focus on next, but also by other relevant topics, such as the potential for violence embedded in hegemonic masculinities. That Jeff is hardly a model of hard-boiled masculinity is confirmed by the only moment of unleashed rage from the book. At the end of an extremely stressful moving period, described as “a month-old ordeal” that makes the narrator understand why “the stress of moving rates with death, divorce and getting fired” (2013a, 43), Jeff finally vents his accumulated frustration upon an empty soda can, which he squashes, to his wife’s amusement. Preceded by a climactic moment where the character lifts his diminutive arms toward the skies while a spiral above his head and a speech bubble that spells out a loud “AAGGGHHHH!” to show that his exasperation has pushed him beyond language, the scene ends with Jeff pointing out to Jennifer the futility of his gesture: “That was hardly satisfying” (2013a, 43). As one of the most destructive manifestations of hegemonic masculinity, domestic violence is a topic that, when approached, makes it apparent that we live in a world where even children as young as Jeff’s son Oscar, who is about 4 at the time, live with the expectation that it is possible for their father to hit their mother. After his mother accidentally stubs her toe in the kitchen (an episode that, like other parallels from A Matter of Life, mirrors a past moment when Jeff’s mother broke her toe as she was chasing her sons), little Oscar rushes in to ask if she was attacked by his father (2013a, 41). Even though his parents quickly reassure him, the episode is not easily dismissed or confined to one or two panels, like, for instance, most of the stories from Brown’s collection of curious things Oscar says, Kids Are Weird. Instead, it takes up an entire page, where more than half of the panels linger on the little boy’s exchange with his parents as he goes on to rephrase his initial question and receives yet another reassuring answer. It is quite telling that little Oscar immediately associates a domestic accident with violence and thinks to look to his father as a possible abuser. Even if this might not be caused by the prevalence of this model of masculinity in his immediate physical proximity, but motivated instead by something he may have heard or seen in the media, his parents do worry that people may believe Oscar should he decide to tell other people a fictitious version of the story where Jeff did hit his wife. That this second version of the story may strike others as true speaks to the pervasiveness of domestic violence and the understanding of men as possible perpetrators. 216 M. PRECUP

Secularism and Parental Conduct The representation of fatherhood from A Matter of Life is anticipated by three short autobiographical stories included in Brown’s collection Undeleted Scenes (2010); these are humorous but darker episodes that showcase the more anxiety-provoking side of pregnancy and early parenthood. “Pregnant Pause” is a 31-page diary recording his partner Jennifer’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of their first son, Oscar. Even though neither the pregnancy nor the birth is accompanied by complications, Brown depicts them as major sources of stress for both himself and his partner, while emphasizing the high degree of physical discomfort and emotional distress to which the future mother is subjected. There is little emphasis on the potential joy of bringing a baby into the world until the very last panel of the story, where the new parents smile happily as they contemplate their newborn while remaining clueless about the future, as Jeff’s thought bubble reads: “Okay, now what?” (2010, 289). The other two child-related stories that precede A Matter of Life are not examinations of parenthood per se, as much as snapshots of disquieting experiences such as the entire family catching a virus (“To Phoenix”) and the frustrating American health care system whose intricacies work against exhausted and worried parents (“Fine Print”). By contrast, a large part of A Matter of Life focuses on the luminous moments of love and companionship spent by Jeff with his wife and son, whose slight incongruity in the adult world produces humorous effects even under trying circumstances. The image on the cover not only anticipates the warmth and understated joy of this family, but also places the attention firmly on the relationship between father and son: Jeff is holding his son in his arms, both smiling as they are posing in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, in front of a dinosaur skeleton playfully labeled “Jeffrey Brown.”8 In spite of the various hardships the family faces along the way, the panels that provide the denouements of such episodes always feature the three family members together, smiling, snugly fitted inside Brown’s small rectangles. For instance, at the end of the story of the one-month moving ordeal, in the last panel we see the idyllic scene of the three family members together, enjoying their new home, the parents seated on each side of the porch, watching little Oscar playing in the grass. Similarly, at the end of an ultimately enjoyable family trip to London, whose beginning is marred by a series of misfortunes, in the last panel we see the family on their way back, stuck on a plane as it approaches Chicago 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 217 only to be turned away by heavy storms, smiling with resigned amusement at the symmetry of their bad luck. In another sketch, titled “Just Another Earache,” three-year-old Oscar endures an escalation of an initial ear infec- tion that has his worried parents lost in the multitude of pills he is pre- scribed for various side effects to his initial treatment. Uncomfortable and weak, covered in red spots caused by an allergic reaction, Oscar is propped up in bed, an object of pity, fear, and some hilarity as he shouts his viewing preferences at his exhausted parents, who can no longer bear to watch the same episodes of The Smurfs. This segment reads like a version of Kate Beaton’s humorous take on raising a baby boy, King Baby, with specific focus on how to be a good parent/subject to an ailing king: at the end of a long ordeal, harmony is restored when the correct version of The Smurfs is once again provided for consumption. The last panel shows the parents seated on either side of their placated child, The Smurfs purist; they are all smiling as Jeff concludes that it is a mistake to “argue with a three-year-old on steroids,” and the music from The Smurfs floats from the direction of the TV into the space above the bed. In a book where neither the symbol- ism nor the various revelations are made too plain, it is these and other moments of simple joy that spell out the book’s message of hope. The optimism of A Matter of Life does not come from a romanticized view of the strength of the bonds of affection that connect family members or from belief in a higher power that may protect those who care for one another. Instead, the memoir’s hopefulness paradoxically stems from the fact that there is a certain amount of randomness to life and death, and that human beings are vulnerable and unable to fully protect one another. As the book nears its ending and the news of Jeff’s father’s diagnosis with pulmonary thrombosis brings the issue of death closer to home, Jeff and Jennifer attempt to teach their son the hard fact that death is final and there is no return, as they both share a non-religious worldview. Oscar’s own initial shock, fear, and disappointment fade as he decides that he has solved the riddle and that he will simply have to “fight dying” 2013a( , 84).9 The child’s touching and humorous revelation functions as both a punchline and a kind of consolation for his father, saddened by having to deliver the news about mortality to his son. In the final panel from this encounter, as Oscar announces his intention to defeat death, Jeff is smiling as he watches him scrunch down to strike a wrestling pose. This typical deadpan ending is hopeful not because little Oscar’s solution might be viable, but because it suggests another manner of approaching death: by creating and preserving moments of joy and playfulness without allowing 218 M. PRECUP their inevitable eventual disappearance to mar them. It is also important that Oscar has the last word here, because his solution comes from a place of uncomplicated vitality as he is discovering new things about being alive: death is “a matter of life,” but it does not need to be accepted or wel- comed without a fight. The narrator’s nuanced atheism offers him a certain useful flexibility when it comes to his son’s education. In a scene that mirrors Jeff’s earlier revelation to his parents, Oscar tells his father that he does not want to go to church; Jeff’s response indicates that he does not intend to pressure his son to make a decision when he is still too young to do so. However, in the larger logic of the book’s optimism, it is science, not religion, that offers the narrator peace of mind when confronted with inevitable depress- ing thoughts about the eventual disappearance of his family. On a visit to the Field Museum, where little Oscar is pictured excitedly discovering yet another button on the exhibit label of a dinosaur skeleton, the narrative box reads: “It’s good to put things into a different perspective… Every sixty million years or so, most of life on Earth seems to get wiped out” (88). While for some this may be only a small consolation for the prospect of total extinction, accepting that this clear and unchangeable fact allows Jeff to enjoy his time with his son. Two adjoining panels trace the bitter- sweet evolution of Brown’s argument (Fig. 9.1): in the first, little Oscar smiles contentedly as he walks unharmed in front of a large bone that once belonged to a creature that might have easily destroyed him (as he victoriously announces a few panels before: “He is not coming to eat me!”); in the second panel, father and son are in bed, happily watching TV or perhaps playing a video game.

Fig. 9.1 The consolation of total extinction from A Matter of Life. (© Jeffrey Brown) 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 219

The juxtaposition of these two panels suggests that worrying about the future is as redundant as the caption itself (“So maybe we just shouldn’t worry so much. In the future, all of this will be the past…”). There is a certain simplistic logic to this argument, possibly because it is also phrased in a way that would make it understandable not only to an adult, but also to a child, which makes it possible that Brown has also considered the didactic potential of his book for younger readers, including his own children. This kind of argument is part of the book’s general commentary on the intergenerational transmission of negative behavior and emotion. From the first pages of the book, we see Jeff jumping aside and hiding behind his wife when he sees a bug crawling on her blouse, as Oscar bravely pushes it aside with a stick. This episode seems to have been introduced to point out the dangers of transmitting irrational fears to one’s child: the next night Oscar has a nightmare that there are bugs in his bed. It is also a strategy of introducing one of the main topics of the book: how one han- dles the fear of old age and death. Oscar’s bravery when he announces that he will fight death is partly motivated by his young age, and it can be contrasted with his father’s fears as he was growing up. At first, young Jeff’s discovery of science results in an overwhelming fear of total and unequivocal extinction (2013a, 34). Throughout the space of nine panels, he is pictured lying in bed, on his back, his head on a pillow, and his hands across his stomach, in a manner that evokes the posture of a corpse; the fact that he is shown lying between two planks of wood—since he sleeps in the bottom bunk—also emphasizes the intensity of his fear of dying. Brown never has his character explain in great detail how he managed to transition from this initial terror of a death with no possibility of return— phrased in a thought bubble as “Someday I’ll die and then I won’t exist forever and I’ll never have another thought” (2013a, 34)—to the serenity expressed at the end of the book. The representation of Jeff’s contemplation of the beauty of and vastness of the natural world seems to act as a transition to his peaceful understanding of the finite nature of the universe. The narrator’s lack of faith does not diminish his profound admiration for the beauty of nature, expressed in a few panels, some of them wordless, that feature panoramic images of mountains or shifting shapes and colors of clouds reminiscent of Romantic landscape painting. The stillness of these moments—placed around the middle of a story that is bracketed by drawings of the dark immensity of space—provides a change of pace and anticipates the tranquility of the book’s conclusion. 220 M. PRECUP

Brown gives the intergenerational connection between father and son a new dimension when he creates parallels between himself as a child and his own son. This suggests that good paternal conduct is also determined by early education, a chain reaction where the behavior of one father influences that of the next. Before the characters dissipate into the dependable darkness of future extinction, Brown places his childhood self and his own child on juxtaposed pages; they both display the kind of uncensored and slightly incongruous behavior that is a source of perplexed amusement and surprise for the adults present. Young Jeff’s story takes place when he is “four or five,” about the same age as Oscar; it appears to be a brief record of two moments of spectacular clumsiness, when he tries his hand at base- ball and miniature golf, respectively (Fig. 9.2). As his father is standing supportively behind him, Jeff excitedly launches into a backspin and gives his father a bloody nose with the golf club. The father is depicted as remarkably calm and kind, trying to reassure Jeff, whose tears do not stop even when he gets ice cream. The transition from Jeff to Oscar is made— like the majority of transitions in the book—through a common activity or visual motif: in the last panel we see Jeff crying his eyes out, seated at a table next to his brother, the unwitting subject of his little brother’s loud outpouring of grief; in the first panel of the adjoining story, little Oscar is climbing a chair to join his parents at the dinner table. The story in the second timeline is happier and less physically taxing for the parents; it merely involves several musings of Oscar’s after he becomes excited that his mother has given him both water and lemonade with dinner (Fig. 9.3). His fanciful dream is of a future where he might come to

Fig. 9.2 Conclusion of the miniature golf scene from A Matter of Life. (© Jeffrey Brown) 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 221

Fig. 9.3 A happy domestic scene from A Matter of Life. (© Jeffrey Brown) personify one cup, his mother another, and—in a somewhat baffling logical sequence—he would jump inside one of the cups so that they could snuggle. By contrast to the conclusion of the Jeff story, the last panel of Oscar’s is one of joy and harmony: a bird’s eye view of the dinner table where the three family members smile. The parents look at each other, sharing a wordless moment of amusement and delight; Oscar is staring straight ahead, presumably contemplating the whimsical version of the future he has just produced.10 In these two pages, Brown draws a line not only between the past and present generations of fathers, but also between himself as a child, his own son, and a mysterious future he contemplates with optimism.

Religion, Paternity, and Intergenerational Transmission Jeff’s account of his own father’s paternal conduct is inextricably bound with his profession, which structures both the family’s private life and their interactions outside of the home. It has been consistently demonstrated that religion can have both positive effects on family life by, for instance, encouraging kindness and strengthening marital relationships, as well as negative effects, by isolating the family from other communities of faith and creating overwhelming pressure toward an impeccably moral conduct that ultimately harms the peace of the home (Dollahite et al. 2018).11 While A Matter of Life seems to support these findings, it only examines the detrimental effects of religion when they directly affect the narrator, and generally exempts both parents from responsibility, placing it instead 222 M. PRECUP upon external factors, such as the church and its various outlets. This is different from Craig Thompson’s much darker perspective from Blankets (2003), where the oppressive atmosphere of the home is causally related to the parents—and particularly the boys’ authoritarian father’s—beliefs. By contrast, in A Matter of Life there is only one page that briefly depicts the atmosphere in the Browns’ home as Jeff was growing up as “tense and angry” (2013a, 40), with many arguments either provoked by the boys or caused by problems between the parents themselves. Here, the characters are portrayed screaming, chasing each other, or telling each other off; when the parents fight, the noise is pictured from outside the house as a multitude of red and black lines that emerge from their bedroom and eventually infiltrate the space of the children’s room, where little Jeff stands up in bed, sad and shocked by “the idea of Christians fighting” (2013a, 40). There is a strong contrast between this brief look at the Browns’ domestic space, the public space of the church, as well as Jeff’s own home as an adult. Unlike other tense domestic spaces depicted in the comics discussed in this book, here the adults attempt family counseling and are pictured as simply too overwhelmed by their many responsibilities as parents of three energetic and, on occasion, disobedient boys. When Jeff is a child, their family home is represented less than his father’s workplace, the church. The whole community appears to be an extended family; in Brown’s book, Grand Rapids seems to be a small provincial town whose existence is centered around religious holidays, church school, and other similar gatherings. Jeff and his brothers are rarely represented in their own home; instead, we see Jeff spending time by himself quietly reading, playing, and drawing in his father’s office. Even family trips seem to revolve around the church: an entire trip to Canada is depicted without any record of sightseeing or other memories of the family members as tourists, but only with reference to their attendance of church service, possibly as a pretext of introducing an episode where Jeff’s insubordination in church—which reads as comical and motivated by boredom—attracts a rare manifestation of anger from his father. The story is embedded in a longer narrative about Jeff’s religious indifference, skepticism, and gradual abandonment of church attendance. While the parents do exert pressure on Jeff concerning his faith and church attendance, their reaction to their son’s announcement that he has decided to officially abandon his faith is not fully verbalized in the memoir. The scene takes place in a diner, Jeff and his parents seated across from one another; while in obvious shock (suggested through a gutter that suddenly comes up 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 223 between the mother and the father as they stare at their son), they look disappointed, the corners of their mouths slightly turned downward, but they say nothing. The parents’ reaction, toned down by the fact that they “may have known already” (2013a, 36), appears to be merely one of perplexed resignation. By singling out the negative elements from his education and suggesting that they are an effect of the way the church (rather than individual believers and practitioners like his parents) manages its affairs, Brown places moral responsibility on organized religion rather than individual practitioners like his own family members. Thus, by giving his own father’s conduct as an example of admirable paternal behavior, Brown further nuances his perspective on religion by suggesting that it is possible to be both religious and a good father, even though he explicitly removes any causal connection between the two. While Jeff’s loss of faith does not appear to negatively affect his relationship with his father, it is embedded in the book’s overall interest in fatherhood. When Jeff starts losing his faith, it is because of Bible stories he “just couldn’t agree with” (2013a, 29). It is significant that the specific example he chooses to illustrate this point is of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son.12 Suddenly transported to Biblical times, Jeff looks up toward a god that resides somewhere outside the panel, but his diminutive frame does not prevent him from waving his hand at the deity reproachfully, to pro- test, as a father himself, the absurdity of the request: “WTF, God?! Are you insane?” (2013a, 29). Temporarily positioned in Abraham’s place, Brown shows how, in this deliberately literal reading of the Biblical episode, his character sees himself as not being able to be both a good Christian and a good father. Brown makes a second connection between a Biblical character and fatherhood in the two-page episode titled “Can You Feel Jesus in Your Heart?”, where, on one side of the page he once again provides a willfully literal depiction of this question (by drawing Jesus inside a human heart) and on the other he recounts the story of his father having emergency triple bypass surgery as his son has absolute but unmotivated faith that science will fix his father’s heart. Aside from pointing out the absurdity of “absolute faith” (2013a, 38), be it in science or religion, this short story also unequivocally argues that it is science, not religion, that is responsible for saving his father’s life. This reading is supported by the irony that a man who, like the narrator’s father, did feel “Jesus in his heart” also had major cardiac blockages. Brown does not hold back: the figure of Jesus appears by degrees, advancing upward in each panel as if pushed by a mechanical force beneath his feet, and pops up inside a heart 224 M. PRECUP that is represented just anatomically enough to suggest a smiley face. As in a game of hide-and-seek where no one is seeking, Jesus first attempts to intimidate his opponent, but his growl and the demonstrative extension of his arms to display his stigmata produce no response from Jeff’s immov- able heart. Rendered ridiculous by his anger, Jesus first resorts to insults, waits in breathless expectation for a response that never comes, and then directs his rage (once again reinforced onomatopoetically with a silly “RARRRRRRR!”) at the walls of Jeff’s insensitive heart, whose strings he pulls and punches until, exhausted, he leaves it as empty as it was in the first panel of this sequence. In this rather angry satire, Jesus himself is depicted as a bad father, childishly demanding, inconsiderate, and powerless both to punish the non-believers and to protect the faithful. Such episodes extricate good paternal conduct from religious belief, an important point in the greater moral logic of the book. The matter of religion also begs the question of how the narrator, as a non-believer, can share some of his legacy with his son. Even though Oscar is given a secular upbringing, his father does not forbid his interest in religious ritual and even anticipates the possibility that Oscar might develop further interest in the church later. After visiting his grandparents, for instance, Oscar brings new customs into his parents’ home, such as saying grace before a meal. These formal gestures are less important for the narrator than demonstrating that ethics can exist outside of organized religion. In a segment titled “You Don’t Need God to Be Good,” which reads like a didactic segment written specifically for Oscar, we see Jeff rushing to help an elderly neighbor who has fallen in the shower. This is one of the many parallels between past and present offered by the memoir, whose structure relies on foreshadowing, repetition, and revision: Jeff’s initial fear of old people, depicted during a church trip, is now revisited and revised as he performs a good deed for a disabled elderly person without displaying the fascinated fear from the earlier story. What appears to be more important in this case is that Jeff operates out of kindness but with no causal connection to the morality lessons taught by the church. In this context, the legacy that Jeff is passing on to his son Oscar is, in fact, his minister father’s kindness. There are also many poignant moments that take place inside the family home. These are samples of everyday harmony and companionship that are remembered with gratitude, and that flesh out the portrait of Jeff’s father as a selfless, kind, and considerate man. “Pizza Is Love,” for instance, is a short story where Jeff and one of his brothers bring their father pizza, 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 225 but refuse to drink Coke out of the two glasses he had carefully filled with ice in preparation for the occasion. The last panel is wordless, but functions as a conclusion to a scene that offers a good example of parental love: a close-up of the two empty glasses in a small rectangular panel alongside a wider shot of the three sitting down at the table and eating, each with their own choice of receptacle. Cursorily abandoned on a corner of the countertop, the two glasses serve to construct a portrait of the good father as one who not only makes an effort to help his children (“I was only trying to help,” his speech bubble reads) but also easily accepts that he may not understand what they desire. Jeff’s relationship with his father is depicted as developing more fully outside of church events and activities when Jeff is already an adult, when we see them spending more time together outside of the space of the home and away from other family members. At one point, they share a commute, and Jeff occasionally accompanies his father on his work trips; these are both opportunities Jeff uses to not only bond with his father but also educate him about certain issues without slipping into patronizing role reversal. The father is mildly receptive to listening to music that is new to him, by bands such as Neutral Milk Hotel or Cat Power; he allows his son to help him reign in his road rage, and occasionally even accompanies Jeff to art exhibitions, where we see him camera in hand, taking an active interest. Jeff uses his father’s interest in paintings inspired by religious motifs, such as Robert Campin’s “Merode” altarpiece or Hans Holbein’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” to point out other works by artists interested in examining the spiritual, such as Mark Rothko or Francis Bacon. These small moments of quiet companionship are marked more evidently as happy by a panel that ends the New York segment, where we see the two seated in opposite armchairs at a coffee shop, the father reading obliviously as Jeff lifts up his head from his sketchbook to register the joy of the moment with a smile. This kind of healthy role reversal when one’s parent grows older is completely absent from any of the other autobiographical comics discussed here: Carol Tyler’s father is too rigid and has too little respect for his daughter to accept that he can learn something from her; Nina Bunjevac’s father dies when she is an infant; Alison Bechdel’s dies just as this process is perhaps beginning to unfold, through a brief and uncomfortable conversation in the car, and Laurie Sandell is rejected by her father after she refuses to stop unraveling and documenting his web of deception. Of the male cartoonists, it is only James Kochalka who lingers more on his relationship with his father as an 226 M. PRECUP adult, but only shortly before his father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and their relationship changes in a different manner. As one can see from memoirs that capture the experience of being a caretaker to elder parents, such as Roz Chast’s Why Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? and Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits, both published in 2014, spending substantial time and effort helping your parents in their old age does not mean that the adult child’s didactic efforts will necessarily yield positive results or that they are even advisable. The intergenerational paternal dynamics from A Matter of Life can also be observed on the book’s endpapers. They each feature the same series of drawings of family photographs in a jumbled chronology that shows Oscar, his father, and his grandfather at different ages, spending time together both on ordinary days and on special occasions. We see them playing, building things, and enjoying their time together: there is much smiling and an overall atmosphere of joy and tenderness. In the first photograph we see the grandfather as a young man and the last, we see him in his old age, sitting on a bench, tenderly holding his grandson as they are both smiling. What at first looks like a backpack is in fact a tank delivering oxygen through a tube to one of the grandfather’s nostrils, which makes the photograph somewhat ominous without diminishing its simple joy. The drawings of these photographs capture and testify not only to the bonds of affection that unite the three, but they also show the way the life of a generation mirrors the life of the previous one and anticipates the next. In this way, Brown’s memoir begins and ends with the suggestion that our lives, whose value is given by simple moments of human connection, remain significant in spite of their transience.13

Conclusion Of all the cartoonists discussed here, Jeffrey Brown’s memoir offers the only representations of a happy family life, uncomplicated by unresolved anxieties, past mistakes, or regret. A Matter of Life does anticipate loss and mourns missed opportunities for human connection, while refusing a linear structure that might produce a self-congratulatory rhetoric of progress. Browns’ autobiographical self has indeed matured since he first appeared in Clumsy, but while his insecurities and struggle with/against the demands of hegemonic masculinity are no longer given center stage, he remains a quiet, modest person who avoids giving himself too much credit for his own growth. As A Matter of Life suggests, adequate or admirable 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 227 paternal conduct depends on multiple factors, such as one’s early education, a secure family environment, and intergenerational harmony. Out of the family legacy, Jeff extracts an ethical system based on kindness and respect to others while eliminating the religious scaffolding that supported it, while also allowing his son enough space to observe and even incorpo- rate some elements of religious ritual. Like Kochalka before him, but in a more serene manner, Brown suggests that happiness can be found in small everyday moments of quiet togetherness, even as their transience and the extinction of their subjects are completely certain. For a cartoonist building a work of memory, this may sound somewhat counterintuitive, but it is important that Brown allows this premise to complicate the book’s underlying optimism.

Notes 1. Brown motivates the fragmentary structure of his work through his interest in examining “how our memories reconstruct events to give meaning” (Brown 2015). 2. See Kochalka and Brown’s collaborative work/argument on their respective motivations for writing alternative instead of mainstream comics, but also other matters related to their creative work, Conversation #2 (2005). 3. Brown mentions that his use of color in A Matter of Life is partly motivated by the fact that he has gradually become more comfortable with it, but also because the book occupies a special place in his autobiographical body of work: “Despite the fact that I’ve written these other autobiographical books that are all about these super-personal, intimate moments, this is really the most personal book I’ve written. Doing it in color added an extra level of representation that was important to me” (Brown 2013b). 4. Every Girl Is the End of the World for Me (2006) was republished in Undeleted Scenes (2010). 5. A one-page reference to Clumsy, alongside a previous comic titled “Jeffrey Brown Must Die,” helps explain this segment as a reaction to criticism he received about his first memoir from one critic: that it is a book “for sis- sies,” “dripping with self-pity” (Brown 2010, 309). 6. Brown does not, however, idealize the outlook of classic heavy metal bands on homosexuality, as the commentary in the narrative box points out: “The Christian music lyrics weren’t all that different from other heavy metal” (2013a, 47). 7. Jeff’s mother complains about the high volume and the style of the music, but never calls it evil, while the father is portrayed elsewhere trying to convince his own mother that pedophilia and homosexuality are not the same thing. 228 M. PRECUP

8. The back cover showcases the book’s subtitle, carved above an altar in an empty and impeccably groomed church; Brown thus places science and religion on opposing sides of his narrative, even though the book itself complicates this apparent black-and-white premise. 9. Having to explain the finite nature of life to one’s child is a difficult duty of parenthood, one that shows the parent, as Michael Chabon argues in some of his own musings on fatherhood, as “ultimate guarantor or destroyer” of their child’s “perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow” (2009, 45). Both James Kochalka and Jeffrey Brown picture themselves having to tackle this unenviable task. While in American Elf Kochalka—working in the four-panel format of his graphic diary and having to condense or curtail certain experiences—shows himself teaching his sons about death by pointing out various dead animals they see on their walks, in A Matter of Life death is the subject of lengthier scenes and conversations. 10. Jeffrey Brown’s next book after A Matter of Life, titled Kids Are Weird (2014), is a treasury of similar Oscar moments, where the bizarre logic of his imagination and his understanding of the world around him are both heartwarming and comical. Luke Skywalker, from Brown’s series of Star Wars parodies that started with Darth Vader and Son (2012), bears a physical resemblance to Oscar and some of the situations from A Matter of Life. In an interview with Jason Heller, Brown draws an explicit connection between A Matter of Life and his Darth Vader and Son: “I was working on Darth Vader And Son while I was drawing A Matter Of Life, so those two books kind of inform each other. Darth Vader And Son represents this lighter side, that less-philosophical side that’s still meaningful and can be touching or emotional, just in a different way. I think that any time I’ve done more humorous work, I’ve always put a lot of myself into it, Darth Vader And Son especially. I basically draw Luke Skywalker the same way I draw my son Oscar in A Matter Of Life” (2013b). 11. The authors of a study of almost two hundred families of largely Abrahamic faiths over 15 years provide a useful review of previous research on the matter and conclude that, according to their analysis, faith alone is not a guarantor of good behavior or a successful family life: “When faith and family relations are combined—when the power of religion is linked with the powerful social and emotional bonds inherent in family relationships— both great good and horrific harm to children, women, men, and society are possible” (Dollahite et al. 2018, 238). 12. It is not precisely specified when Jeff’s loss of faith occurs, but the conditions for this are created during high school by his discovery of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan’s work, alongside other scientific writings—such as Lawrence Krauss’sThe 9 “YOU TELL YOUR FATHER HE DID A GOOD JOB”: SONS, FATHERS… 229

Physics of Star Trek and Isaac Asimov’s Understanding Physics—that are also relevant to young Jeff because of his love of science fiction (2013a, 32–33). 13. That Brown means to draw intergenerational connections among the family’s fathers is also made apparent through the brief presence in the memoir of the narrator’s paternal grandfather. The segment is introduced as a postmortem tribute, as Jeff remembers the last time he visited his grandfather and received a wood sculpture as a gift before going to college to study art. Baffled by the fact that it is an abstract piece that does not immediately spell out its meaning, Jeff’s face mirrors his disappointment. The first and last panels of this segment, placed diagonally on the page, make the connection between the grandfather’s wood-carving tools and the final product of his labors, the abstract sculpture Jeff contemplates with a smile in the last panel, after understanding that it must have been the most laborious, hence the most precious artwork that his grandfather produced.

References Arlington, Jody. 2013. Exploring a Crisis of Faith With Confessional Comics. NPR Book Reviews, July 11. https://www.npr.org/2013/07/11/198354850/ exploring-a-crisis-of-faith-with-confessional-comics. Accessed 30 Jan 2019. Barbour, John D. 2004. Judging and Not Judging Parents. In The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, 73–98. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Brown, Jeffrey. 2002. Clumsy: A Novel. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2003. Unlikely. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2005. AEIOU/An Easy Intimacy. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2008. Little Things: A Memoir in Slices. New York: Touchstone. ———. 2009. Funny Misshapen Body. New York: Touchstone. ———. 2010. Undeleted Scenes. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2012. Darth Vader and Son. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ———. 2013a. A Matter of Life. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2013b. Graphic novelist Jeffrey Brown talks about Star Wars, memoirs, and faith. Interview by Jason Heller. The A.V. Club, July 18. https://www. avclub.com/graphic-novelist-jeffrey-brown-talks-about-star-wars- m-1798239359#replies. Accessed 30 Jan 2019. ———. 2014. Kids Are Weird And Other Observations from Parenthood. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ———. 2015. Artist Interview: Jeffrey Brown. Interview by Christy Mag Uidhir. Aesthetics for Birds, June 23. https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2015/06/23/ interview-with-comic-artist-jeffrey-brown/. Accessed 30 Jan 2019. Brown, Jeffrey, and James Kochalka. 2005. Conversation #2. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. 230 M. PRECUP

Carabí, Àngels, and Josep M. Armengol. 2014. Introduction. In Alternative Masculinities in a Changing World, ed. Àngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chabon, Michael. 2009. Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. London: Fourth Estate. Chast, Roz. 2014. Why Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? New York: Bloomsbury. Dollahite, David C., Loren D. Marks, and Hilary Dalton. 2018. Why Religion Helps and Harms Families: A Conceptual Model of a System of Dualities at the nexus of Faith and Family Life. Journal of Family Theory & Review 10 (1): 219–241. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12242. Farmer, Joyce. 2014. Special Exits. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Pease, Bob. 2014. Reconstructing Masculinity or Ending Manhood? The Potential and Limitations of Transforming Masculine Subjectivities for Gender Equality. In Alternative Masculinities in a Changing World, ed. Àngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol, 17–34. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. 2017. Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, Craig. 2003. Blankets. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

This book has shown that depicting and assessing paternal conduct— whether from the perspective of the child or that of the father—test the limits of autobiographical narration in comic book form and make com- pelling statements about the contemporary construction of fatherhood. The texts I read here offer multiple ways of thinking about fatherhood by showing the impact on paternal conduct of various factors such as trauma and precarious mental health (Carol Tyler, James Kochalka), radicalization (Nina Bunjevac), problematic sexual conduct (Alison Bechdel, Robert Crumb), aging (Joe Ollmann), fraudulent acts (Laurie Sandell), and religion (Jeffrey Brown). These cartoonists attempt to define what a good father might be, as well as answer important methodological and ethical questions about (auto)biographical representation and archival work, the employment of humor, caricature, and the grotesque in self-representation, the ownership of the stories they tell (and how that can be gained or lost), and their rights as self-appointed storytellers (sometimes in spite of open opposition from family members, as in Laurie Sandell’s case, or in the absence of the actual possibility of obtaining permission, as when the autobiographical subject is either dead or too young to be able to comprehend and provide consent). The answers these cartoonists implicitly or explicitly give to these issues reflect contemporary beliefs and expectations about paternal conduct, the therapeutic power of self-representation, confession and closure, and the ethics of autobiography.

The texts I discuss in this book are transparently mediated versions of personal experience, “fictive but not fictitious” stories (Hatfield2005 , 124) that spell out their artifice, as well as their investment in truth-telling, in different ways. Sometimes cartoonists employ meta elements like the depiction of their process (consisting in interviews, archival work, the expression of doubt about the quality of the truth and the desirability of representation). Other creators pointedly distance the narrative ‘I’ from the narrated ‘I’ (Smith and Watson 2010) by organizing naturally chaotic lived experience according to patterns that serve to emphasize the author’s point (Jeffrey Brown) or by using grotesque comic elements, as expressed particularly in self-deprecating humor (R. Crumb, Jeffrey Ollmann, James Kochalka). The graphic memoirs by female creators discussed in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5 of this book rely on substantial research in both private and public archives, photographic documentation, and detective-like investigation. However, none of the fathers from the first four chapters of this book become fully legible to their daughters; there is always a missing piece or obscure explanation that eludes the narrators, in the absence of genuine dialogue with their subjects. While this inevitable failure of autobiography to fully encapsulate and disambiguate an inaccessible past (Eakin 1985; Dow Adams 2000) can be productive itself, as it shows the blind spots in the work of memory and postmemory (Hirsch 1997), these comics are also important gifts of visibility to the authors themselves, as they take ownership of life stories where they were not properly seen or heard. These fathers may have been unavailable in various ways, but their portraits are nuanced and sometimes even redemptive, as several authors (Carol Tyler most evidently, but also Alison Bechdel and Nina Bunjevac to a certain extent) provide exculpatory narratives for them, or at least create and attempt to preserve the memory of luminous family moments to which the father contributed (as in Laurie Sandell’s case, where by the end of the book even such moments are tainted by the father’s deception). Through its structural properties and specific vocabulary, comics unpack not only the unreliability of memory but also the work of imagination that enables autobiographers to take ownership of their families’ stories. The narrative limits of photography allow cartoonists to draw on top of and in conversation with private and public photographic archives and thus produce valuable interventions in their own stories. The ethics of storytelling appear to be dictated by the fact that these can also be read as “public interest” stories whose protagonists’ paternal conduct is deeply bound with crucial social and political issues such as, to name but a few, 10 CONCLUSION 233 the insufficient support for traumatized World War II veterans and their families; the revision of masculinity and paternity during the 1950s; gay and lesbian rights; poverty and access to higher education; nationalism and extremism. In addition to this, these stories suggest that, even though the fathers remain “vulnerable subjects” (Couser 2004, x), since they can neither represent themselves nor do they/can they consent to being represented, their problematic conduct results in a transfer of ownership and authority of their life stories from themselves to their daughters and other family members. In the texts by fathers about their experience of fatherhood, discussed in this book in Chaps. 6, 7, 8, and 9, the self-deprecating mode of the underground comics tradition is still employed considerably (with R. Crumb, the most prominent figure of the American underground, using it consistently and with few exceptions throughout his work), even though second-generation alternative cartoonists do rely on it to a lesser degree. I have argued here that self-deprecation as an aesthetic and affective lens—while important for its therapeutic potential and the way it facilitates the rendition of certain painful moments from the protagonists’ lives—ends up limiting them to the sum of their negative qualities and diminishing their admirable actions. In the context of fatherhood, self- deprecation draws attention not only to questionable behavior but also away from good paternal conduct, such as it is, while also reinforcing long-standing stereotypes like the bumbling father or the eternal teenager. This is particularly true of those texts written by male creators partly because they operate within already-established autobiographical conceits that precede their work on fatherhood, and that rely on self-loathing, caricature, and the grotesque. Self-loathing itself is a long-standing mode of expression in autobiographical comics, advanced by the moral ideal of sincerity that proposes a reading of autobiography as a cathartic confession with no filter. As I argue in this book, sincerity is also an important persuasive technique of unreliable narration that comes up occasionally in all of the memoirs discussed here (Magill 2012); when it stands in for honesty, sincerity can either enable the father’s cycle of questionable behavior or facilitate leniency. All of the autobiographical comics discussed here appear to be profoundly invested in a critique of hegemonic masculinities by showing the disastrous effects of living in households dominated by a patriarchal order, or by focusing on the authors’ struggle with the norms of traditional masculinity. The daughters’ graphic memoirs discussed in this book are 234 M. PRECUP thus acts of resistance against their own erasure during their own history of growing up with fathers who would not reciprocate their gaze, while the fathers’ autobiographical comics depict the pressure to conform to dominant norms of masculinity, both before and after having children. While all of these authors speak in favor of the emergence of alternative masculinities by showing the benefits of raising children in environments without domestic violence or other kinds of abuse, these texts also show that alternative masculinities often inhabit spaces that are adjacent to or generated by hegemonic masculinities. By offering nuanced (self-)representations of paternal conduct, these authors show the pervasiveness of traditional notions of masculinity, and their negative impact on both male and female subjects who sometimes also perpetuate them. In this context, I have argued that certain exculpatory factors—such as trauma—as well as certain aesthetic modes—such as cuteness—divert attention away from internalized patterns of behavior and thought that can negatively affect fathers’ behavior. These autobiographical stories span a timeline that starts from the inter-war period and continues up to the present, but even though they are arranged in this book in an optimistic chronology that seems to announce progress, what this relatively small sample of testimonies seem to show, in fact, is that there is no linear development in the way men have recently performed fatherhood. Still, I would argue that these books offer an additional—and important—contribution to the ambivalent memory space of fatherhood: an archive of moments of tenderness, companionship, and affection among fathers and their children, as well as representations of fathers who contribute to child-care and housework. Even if they are embedded in narratives where paternal conduct is imperfect or questionable, the cumulative effect of such moments makes an important contribution to the representation of fathers and children in the contemporary public space, where such images are not yet sufficiently common.

References Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Brown, Jeffrey. 2013. A Matter of Life. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. Bunjevac, Nina. 2014. Fatherland. London: Jonathan Cape. Couser, Thomas G., ed. 2004. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Crumb, Robert. 2000. My Troubles with Women. San Francisco: Last Gasp. 10 CONCLUSION 235

———. 2006. The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb. London: MQ Publications Limited. Crumb, Aline, and Robert Crumb. 2012. Drawn Together. London: Knockabout Limited. Dow Adams, Timothy. 2000. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill/London: The University of North Carolina Press. Eakin, Paul John. 1985. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self- Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kochalka, James. 2004. American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka October 26, 1998 to December 31, 2003. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2007. American Elf, Book Two: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2008. American Elf, Book Three: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2007. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2012. American Elf, Book Four: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2011. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. ———. 2014. American Elf 2012: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. Magill, R. Jay, Jr. 2012. Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars | modern art | hipster chic | and the curious notion that we ALL have something to say (no matter how dull). New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. Ollmann, Joe. 2011. Mid-Life. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly. Sandell, Laurie. 2009. The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir. New York/ Boston/London: Little, Brown and Company. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tyler, Carol. 2015. Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father. A Daughter’s Memoir. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS Aggression, 18, 120, 137, 144, #MeToo, 16, 134, 151n5 192, 211 See also Rape; Sexual assault Altarriba, Antonio, 7 American Elf, 22, 183–201, 210, 228n9 A Anderson, Linda, 25n14 Abdelrazaq, Leila, 7 Anthropomorphic representation, Abuse, 4, 88, 94, 99, 104n6, 37–44 126, 148, 187, 204n15, Anxiety, 36, 158, 160, 161, 175, 177, 205n24, 234 186, 188–190, 193, 196, 201, AEIOU/An Easy Intimacy, 212 212, 216, 226 Aesthetic, 41, 71, 87, 102, 135, Archival work, 59, 231, 232 145–147, 187, 201n3, 204n16, Are You My Mother?, 61, 62, 68, 69 233, 234 Argentina, 5, 95, 97 Affection, 2, 7, 18, 37, 40, 52, 69, 70, Armengol, Josep M., 18, 171, 212 76, 79n14, 79n15, 80n19, 96, The Art of Flying, 7 117, 120, 140–142, 145, August, 1977, 22, 107–127 152n10, 176, 217, 226, 234 Autobifictionalography, 10 Agency, 42, 69, 92, 142, 187 Autographics, 10

1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

B Chaney, Michael A., 10 Baby, 6, 7, 19, 26n18, 56n20, 68, Chast, Roz, 226 117, 139, 143, 150n1, 157, 162, Chewing on Tinfoil, 158, 178n6 164, 165, 167, 169, 175, 179n7, Chiappetta, Joe, 5, 25n8 180n15, 180n16, 189, 190, 196, Chick lit, 84, 86, 87, 100, 102, 198, 203n12, 204n18, 216, 217 104n10 See also Breastfeeding; Pregnancy Childhood, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 38, 39, 69, Bad daughter, 84–88, 102 84, 91–93, 115, 143, 187, 188, Baddawi, 7 199, 210, 220 Barbour, John D., 16, 34, 210 A Child’s Life and Other Stories, 4 Barry, Lynda, 10 Chute, Hillary, 10, 11, 48, 59, 67, Barthes, Roland, 13, 62, 63, 65, 78n7 78n5, 133, 134, 141 Bechdel, Alison, 15, 22, 40, 41, Clumsy, 211–213, 226, 227n5 59–80, 89, 99, 108, 117, 119, Color, 24n5, 35, 39, 46, 54n10, 123, 124, 128n11, 225, 231, 232 55n16, 62, 63, 66, 74, 78n9, Big Mouth, 20 80n18, 87, 88, 91, 99, 100, 183, Bisexuality, 60 203n12, 211, 219, 227n3 Black-ish, 20 Coming out story, 61 Blankets, 222 The Complete Crumb Comics, 131, Blog, 20, 61 150n2 Bond, Lucy, 11, 51 Connell, R. W., 17, 18 Breastfeeding, 150n1, 174 Couser, Thomas, 15, 141, 233 Brown, Jeffrey, 22, 146, 160, 204n17, Craps, Stef, 25n12, 51 209–227, 227n1–3, 227n5, Creekmur, Corey K., 148 227n6, 228n10, 229n13, Critchley, Simon, 23, 186 231, 232 Crumb, Robert, 16, 22, 23, 35, Bunjevac, Nina, 15, 22, 86, 89, 131–150, 160, 172, 178n1, 210, 107–127, 225, 231, 232 211, 231–233 Burma Chronicles, 6, 7, 25n9 Aline Kominsky-Crumb, A, 22, 35, Butler, Judith, 56n21 132, 133, 139–144, 146, Bystander, 102, 125 147, 150, 150n1, 152n10, 152n11, 174 Sophie Crumb, 16, 22, 131–150 C Cruté, Jennifer, 5 Calling Dr. Laura, 4 Cute aesthetics, 145, 146 Canada, 108, 111, 115, 116, cuteness, 146, 147, 187, 201, 118–120, 127n2, 171, 222 204n16, 234 Carabí, Àngels, 18, 171, 212 Caricature, 5, 6, 12, 34, 38, 48, 91, 104n4, 133, 158, 165, 173, 177, D 231, 233 Daddy Lightning, 6 Cates, Isaac, 183, 197, 202n6 Daddy’s Girl, 4 Chabon, Michael, 228n9 Dadoir, 17, 26n16 INDEX 239

Dadvertising, 21 Edge-work, 149 Dale, Joshua Paul, 146, 187 El Refaie, Elisabeth, 10, 12 Darkroom. A Memoir in Black Emasculation, 165 and White, 5 Emma, 1, 24n2, 24n3, 179n8 Darth Vader and Son, 228n10 Empathy, 12, 25n12, 67, 187, 210 Death, 6, 9, 25n5, 43, 45, 49, 50, Ethics, 14–17, 85, 103, 141, 201, 55n18, 59–62, 72, 74, 76, 78n2, 224, 231, 232 109, 112, 114–117, 119, 120, moral judgment, 16 122, 125, 126, 128n10, 164, Even More Bad Parenting Advice, 7 167, 178n6, 179n13, 190, 209, Exhaustion, 5, 153n16, 175, 176, 215, 217–219, 228n9 192, 196 Deception, 60, 77, 83–103, 225, 232 Delisle, Guy, 6, 7 Depression, 126, 143, 175, 179n12, F 186–188, 190, 200, 201, 204n15 Fab 4 Mania, 35 Detective work, 83–103 Family Guy, 20 Diary, 10, 36, 69, 79n11, 124, Farmer, Joyce, 226 183–189, 192, 194, 196–199, Fascism, 112 201, 201n2, 201–202n3, 202n5, Father 202n8, 203n12, 203n13, absent father, 69–75, 108, 111, 205n25, 216, 228n9 116, 123 Díaz, Junot, 204n15 bumbling father, 7, 131, 233 Dienhart, Anna, 18 dad bod, 21, 175 Discrimination, 5 dadcore, 21 Disenchantment, 20, 187 dad joke, 21 Domestic life dad-rock, 21 domestic labor, 1, 20 deadbeat dad, 20 domestic space, 1–3, 9, 10, 21, 22, feminist perspectives on 24, 38, 70, 72, 77, 88, 116, fatherhood, 17 164, 192, 222 good father, 2, 20, 103, 147, 177, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, 9 184, 192, 209, 223, 225, 231 Doucet, Andrea, 17 stay-at-home father, 6, 88, 143, Dow Adams, Timothy, 12, 232 200, 205n24 Drawn Together, 22, 132, 141 superdad, 18 Drechsler, Debbie, 4 Fatherland, 22, 86, 89, 107–127, The Duke of Deception, 14, 85 127n4, 128n6 Dykes to Watch Out For, 62, 77n1 Fear, 8, 34, 45, 135, 137, 152n10, 157, 159, 160, 177, 188, 190, 199, 209, 213, 214, 217, E 219, 224 Eakin, Paul John, 12, 16, 78n3, Feasey, Rebecca, 20 101, 232 Feminist struggle, 2 Earle, Harriet, 10, 48 Filiation narrative, 14, 23, 75, 84 240 INDEX

Forgiveness, 85, 92, 201, 204n16, 210 Homophobia, 213, 214 Fossoul, Nikita, 151n3 Homosexuality, 60, 70, 214, 227n6, Fraud, 83 227n7, 228n8 Freadman, Richard, 14, 102 Humor, 5, 9, 12, 35, 44, 61, 138, Fresh off the Boat, 20 149, 151n8, 153n17, 164, 168, Friedan, Betty, 34 177, 186, 187, 195, 231 Fun Home, 22, 40, 59–77, 89, 99, self-deprecating humor, 23, 53, 97, 108, 117, 119, 123, 128n11 159, 200, 211, 232 Funny Misshapen Body, 212

I G The Impostor’s Daughter, 22, 83–103 Gardner, Jared, 12, 13, 59 In ‘t Veld, Laurike, 10 Gay, 17, 60, 128n5, 168, 214, 233 Isä, 9 Geek, 158, 168, 211 Gender, 9, 17–20, 34–36, 40, 51, 53, 79–80n16, 127n3, 144, 145, J 148, 159–162, 169–175 Jennifer’s Journal. The Life of a Georges, Nicole J., 4 SubUrban Girl, 5 Ghost, 73 The Job Thing, 35 Gilmore, Leigh, 16, 94, 111 Gilmore, Mikal, 94 Gloeckner, Phoebe, 4, 149 K Goblet, Dominique, 151n3 Kalinich, Lila J., 18 Gothic, 70, 71, 73, 77 Kaplan, Ann E., 12 Green, Justin, 35, 37, 54n7, 55n18 Kaufman, Gayle, 18 Grief, 6, 9, 13, 49, 50, 52, 60, Kemp, Rob, 21 204n18, 220 Kids Are Weird, 146, 215, 228n10 Guilt, 140, 150n1, 159, 176 Kimmel, Michael S., 17, 18 King of the Hill, 20 Kochalka, James, 22, 23, 160, H 183–201, 210, 211, 225, 227, The Handbook of Lazy Parenting, 7 228n9, 231, 232 Hanuka, Asaf, 8, 25n10 Kunka, Andrew J., 10 Hart, Tom, 6, 54n10, 60 Hatfield, Charles, 10, 12, 185, 232 Heartless, 107, 108, 111, L 127n3, 128n5 Landsberg, Alison, 11, 12 Hirsch, Marianne, 3, 11, 38, 51, LaRossa, Ralph, 18, 19, 24, 26n17, 110, 232 34, 35, 44 Hitler, 24n5, 44, 46, 47, 55n17 Late Bloomer, 35, 36, 54n6, 54n7, Hobson, Barbara, 18 55n18, 174, 179n12 Holocaust, 2, 3, 24n5, 110 Lejeune, Philippe, 102, 138, 184 INDEX 241

Lesbian, 62, 233 Mirkoff, Heidi, 21 Lightman, Sarah, 10 Modern Family, 20 Little Things: A Memoir in Slices, 212 Moisseinen, Hanneriina, 9, 10 Luckhurst, Roger, 25n12 Momoir, 17 Mortality, 217 Mother, 1, 3–6, 8, 10, 13, 19, 21, 22, M 26n17, 35, 43, 44, 50, 53, 53n2, Mackintosh, Ross, 9 54n6, 55n14, 55n18, 55n20, 62, Magill, R. Jay, Jr., 101, 233 63, 67–69, 73, 76, 78n7, 79n12, Map, 13, 70, 109, 115, 120, 121, 83, 85, 93–95, 102, 115–118, 124, 128n11 120, 122, 128n10, 139–141, 143, Marlon, 20 150n1, 151n3, 152n10, 153n16, Marsiglio, William, 18 161, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, Marzi, 8, 25n11 179n12, 189, 205n24, 211, Masculinity, 17–22 214–216, 220, 221, 223, 227n7 alternative masculinities, 18, 23, motherhood, 19, 55n19, 55n20, 144, 145, 149, 160, 167, 168, 174, 175, 179n12 177, 210, 214, 234 See also Maternity hard-boiled masculinity, 149 Mourning, 4, 6, 9, 13, 59–61, 72, hegemonic masculinity, 16–18, 111, 120, 199 23, 137, 143, 149, 158, My Troubles with Women, 22, 134, 160, 171, 211–213, 215, 137, 143 226, 233, 234 toxic masculinity, 211 See also Emasculation N Maternity, 175, 179n12 Nabizadeh, Golnar, 10, 59, 73 Maus, 2, 3, 11, 12, 14, 24n4 Narcissism, 95 Memories are Made of This, Narrated “I,” 12, 23, 25n13, 61, 62, 134–138, 152n12 67, 147, 232 Memory Narrating “I,” 12, 25n13, 60, 76, 147 postmemory, 3, 11, 38, 51, 110, Neglect, 49, 115, 116, 118, 126, 165 123, 125, 127, 232 Ngai, Sianne, 146, 187 prosthetic memory, 11, 12 The Night Porter, 112 unreliability of memory, 10, 68, 232 Nostalgic, 8, 40, 67, 75, 116, 146 Mental health, 54n3, 85, 95, 131, 186, 190, 191, 201n2, 231 See also Sexual assault O Mental load, 1, 24n3, 179n8 Old age, 161, 162, 164, 167, Michael, Olga, 25n6 173–175, 219, 226 Mickwitz, Nina, 10 See also Mid-life crisis Mid-Life, 22, 23, 157–177, 184 Ollmann, Joe, 22, 23, 107, 157–177, Mid-life crisis, 143, 159, 160 183, 189, 231 Midwest, 34, 209 The Owner’s Manual to Terrible Mihăilescu, Dana, 25n11 Parenting, 7 242 INDEX

P Rape, 4, 134, 137, 138, 205n24 Parenthood, 20 The Realist, 8, 25n10 Parenting, 2, 6, 7, 35, 51, 53, 55n18, The Realist: Plug and Play, 8, 25n10 140, 152n10, 159, 198, 200, 210 Reconciliation, 62, 63, 96, 104n6, 110 See also Peerenting; Self-parenting Regret, 36, 54n8, 85, 114, 116, 135, Parker, Kim, 7, 107, 137 138, 140, 148, 153n16, 167, Patremoir, 16, 17 172, 176, 180n15, 193, Pedagogy 194, 226 education, 69 Rosalie Lightning, 6 teaching, 65 Rosenkranz, Patrick, 132 Pedri, Nancy, 12, 13, 122, 124 Roth, Philip, 14 Peerenting, 200 Rothberg, Michael, 25n12 Pennsylvania, 59, 60, 79n12, 128n11 Rothe, Anne, 50 Perpetration, 42, 43, 51, 108–110, 120–126 perpetrator, 43, 107–127, 137, 215 S Pew Research Center, 19, 205n24 Sabin, Roger, 133, 134, 146 Photograph, 3, 9–14, 22, 39, 40, Sandell, Laurie, 15, 22, 83–103, 225, 62–64, 76, 78n7, 89, 111, 122, 231, 232 127, 162, 164, 165, 179n14, Satouff, Riad, 8 189, 226 Savoia, Sylvain, 8 Podnieks, Elizabeth, 17, 20, 26n16 Seeds, 9 Poe’s Law, 149, 153n17 Self-parenting, 69 Porter, Roger, 14, 18, 76, 84 Serbia, 112, 115 Postema, Barbara, 13, 122 Sexual assault, 131, 137, 147, 172, Pregnancy, 21, 68, 117, 140, 152n9, 200, 205n24 174, 189, 198, 216 Sexuality, 15, 137, 142, 145, 213 Priv-lit, 84, 87, 100, 103 Shirani, Fiona, 160 Psychopathy, 95, 104n7 Shot in the Heart, 94 Silhouette, 73–75, 77, 80n17, 120, 121, 125–127, 128n6 Q Silly Daddy, 5, 6, 25n8 Queer, 60 The Simpsons, 20, 141 See also Bisexuality; Homophobia; Sinclair, Neil, 21 Homosexuality; Lesbian Skinn, Dez, 132, 151n8 Quintero Weaver, Lila, 5 Slapstick, 5, 6, 22, 41, 48, 61, 92, 140, 184 Smith, Sidonie, 10, 12, 14, 25n13, 59, R 67, 69, 75, 76, 109, 110, 147, Race, 5, 134 184, 212, 232 Raeburn, Paul, 18 Social media, 61 INDEX 243

Soldier’s Heart, 16, 22, 33–53, 71, 89, Tyler, Carol, 15, 16, 22, 33–53, 89, 108, 123, 124, 179n12 108, 123, 124, 134, 149, Sowa, Marzena, 8 173–175, 179n12, 225, 231, 232 Spaas, Lieve, 18 Special Exits, 226 Spiegelman, Art, 2, 3, 11, 12, 14, U 24n4, 24–25n5 Ultranationalism, 112, 120 Spiegelman, Vladek, 2–4 Undeleted Scenes, 211, 212, 216 Spock, Benjamin, 26n17, 69 Underground comics, 16, 35, 131, Statistics, 19, 23, 161, 171, 202n3, 132, 137, 149, 174, 185, 200, 233 205n24 Unlikely, 212 Streeten, Nicola, 60 Unreliable narrator, 137 Suicide, 7, 71, 95, 117, 125, unreliable narration, 233 126, 190 A User’s Guide to Neglectful Survivor, 2, 50, 109, 116, 117, 200, Parenting, 7 205n24 The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, 132, 146, 147, 149, 150n1 V Sympathy, 38, 69, 160, 170, 200 Vermeulen, Peter, 51 Vermont, 183, 201n1 Vietnam, 83 T Violence, 2, 4, 49, 93–96, 110, 115, Taboo, 132, 133, 147, 176 118, 120, 124, 133, 134, 148, Talbot, Bryan, 9 149, 193, 194, 215, 234 Talbot, Mary, 9 Visibility, 22, 51, 232 Teenage, 48, 55n18, 77, Vulnerable subject, 15, 142, 233 164, 179n7 Terrorist act, 127 This Will All End in Tears, 158 W Thompson, Craig, 118, 222 Watson, Julia, 10, 12, 14, 25n13, 59, Trauma 65, 67, 69, 75, 76, 80n16, 109, PTSD, 33, 36, 39, 45, 47, 48, 52, 110, 147, 184, 212, 232 94, 118 Webcomic, 1, 24n1, 179n8, 198, transgenerational trauma, 3 202n3 Truth Weirdo, 35, 134, 140, 143, 152n12 crisis of truth, 60, 77 Why Can’t We Talk about Something truthiness, 77n1 More Pleasant?, 226 Twisted Sisters, 35, 174 Wimmen’s Comix, 35, 133, 151n4 Two and a Half Men, 20 Wolff, Geoffrey, 14, 85 244 INDEX

World War II, 16, 33, 38, 40, 48, 50, Yugoslavia, 107, 108, 111, 114, 109, 115, 124, 233 115, 119–121, 124, 126, Wrought, 62–65, 72 127n1, 127n5

Y Z You’ll Never Know, 33, 35, 38, 39, Zany, 160, 187 53n1, 53n2, 54n5 zaniness, 187, 201 You Should’ve Asked, 1 Zwigoff, Terry, 148, 150n1