Essays that query the roles of trust, truth, and family memories in autobiographical comics

Jane Tolmie is associate professor in gender studies, English, and cultural studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She is a poet; feminist activist; editor of Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, published by University Press of Mississippi; and coeditor of Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature.

Jane Tolmie's profile page

Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art is an excellent collection of essays on such highly regarded memoirists/cartoonists as Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi and Art Spiegelman, but the book is especially noteworthy for its inclusion of texts and paradigms less common in comics studies: Martin Vaughn-James's The Cage, sexual trauma, Joseph Cornell's influence on Chris Ware, the manga-influenced work of Frédéric Boilet. The result is a diverse collection that advances and energizes the conversation about comics autobiography.

Craig Fischer, Appalachian State University