Excavating Childhood: Fairytales, Monsters and Abuse Survival in Lynda Barry’s What It Is

This article investigates the excavation of abused childhood in Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Looking at the centrality of childish play, fairy tales and the Gorgon in the protagonist’s effort to cope with maternal abuse, it argues that comics complicate the life narrative and allow the feminist reconfiguration of the monstrous mother of Western psychoanalysis and art

Filling the silence: Giving voice to gender violence in Una’s graphic novel Becoming Unbecoming

Written in the style of a memoir, Una’s graphic novel, Becoming Unbecoming (2015), takes readers on a poignant journey of a young girl’s experiences of silence, shame and blame after being subjected to male sexual violence. The protagonist’s story is played out against the backdrop of the rapes and murders committed by the notorious Yorkshire Ripper. This paper examines the text’s multilayered narrative, which uses a range of graphic strategies and artistic styles to challenge its readers to make meaning, fill in the gaps, and piece together their own version of events. The text’s fragmented and disconnected sequences mimic the nature of traumatic memory, and the shifting linguistic-visual narration moves between fact, story, experience and emotion

Girly porno comics: contemporary US pornographic comics for women

In the past fifteen years there has been a substantial increase in the visibility of and interest in pornography produced by and for women. Within both comics studies and porn studies, while there has been much, important and well-deserved, academic attention paid to Boy’s Love manga and some smaller amount of consideration of shõjo manga, pornographic comics by and for women produced and published within the Anglophone US market have been discussed very little so far. In this context, this article discusses the work of two contemporary American creators – Jess Fink and Colleen Coover – who produce pornographic comics for women that explore and represent women’s sexual desires and pleasures in ways they argue were lacking from previous pornographic comics. In these comics, women’s sexual desires and pleasures are presented as central to the narrative and, through the use of the specific structures of comics as both legitimate and diverse. Through the use of voyeurism and the sexual imagination as both themes and structures within their respective comics, these creators also interrogate the representation of women’s sexual desire in comics, encouraging both identification and critical analysis from their readers