The marriage of the visual and the emotional can be found in the graphic memoir, where raw biographies can be flipped through with the ease of a comic book and admired with the power of a Greek narrative.
Artists Harvey Pekar and Alison Bechdel will engage in an evening of discussion about the graphic memoir in UCLA Live’s “Titans of the Graphic Novel” at Royce Hall tonight at 8 p.m.
Both Pekar and Bechdel have used the medium to depict their lives in succinct black- and white-paneled detail, amassing critical acclaim along the way.
Considered an icon in the comic world, Pekar wrote and created “American Splendor,” a graphic memoir series about the monotony of life while working as a file clerk in a Cleveland Veteran’s Administration Hospital.
“American Splendor” was eventually made into a movie and garnered an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay in 2003.
Longtime cartoonist Bechdel grasped the confessional nature of comics with her 2006 graphic memoir, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” an account of her childhood and her complicated relationship with her father.
“The memoir was published about growing up in a strange family, with my closeted father who probably killed himself right around the time I came out as a lesbian, which is a very complicated story,” Bechdel said.
The usage of the graphic novel as a confessional medium has provided a visual element to the old hat of divulging one’s life.
While the graphic novel has gained a reputation of being inundated with conflicted superheroes and vigilantism, the biographical nature of this genre reconceptualized the use of comic strip images, whether it be with Pekar’s tales of monotony or with Bechdel’s depiction of her father’s repressed sexuality.
“The world of comic changed in 1980, where comic books at that time had a breakthrough, where it was about not just real life, but painful elements of real life. This opened up possibilities about writing about evolving tradition and background, while telling a story graphically,” Bechdel said.
As stacks of written memoirs load the shelves of libraries and bookstores all around, graphic memoirs have become more prominent in literature, with other acclaimed works such as Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus.”
“The graphic novel is actually an exceptionally well-designed format for memoir,” said Anastasia Betts, a UCLA Extension instructor who teaches a class on graphic novels.
“It’s liberating because the authors and the artists use the memoir form to show things that would be difficult to write about but can show with a combination of images and text,” she continued.
David Seidman, one of the founders of Disney comics and who has taught comic book writing at UCLA, sees the graphic memoir genre as an exceptional breed, which both Pekar and Bechdel have conquered with their respective works.
“There’s been some outstanding work done in the field, including works by Alison Bechdel and Harvey Pekar,” Seidman said.
“As far as the quality of work, the attention and critical acclaim for people doing memoir and confessional comic and graphic novels has been a remarkably high level. Certainly, books like “˜Fun Home’ and Harvey Pekar’s books fit that bill, as they are really extraordinary work,” Seidman added.
Bechdel will also be discussing the aspects of gender and race in her work, from witty feminist banter to the poignant and sometimes personal moments of familial discord in “Fun Home.”
“For me, this is part of what I’ll be talking about at the UCLA Live, is what being a graphic artist means for me,” Bechdel said.
Bechdel said she believes that the visual aspect of the graphic memoir contains more power than written word alone, which will be one of the featured topics of the discussion in Royce tonight.
“Images are powerful,” Bechdel said. “Word and image together have tremendous potential to communicate things, and through both, I feel I can emote very complex things and convey a lot of complex material.”