Word: memoirs
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Writing seems a fairly poor method for relating a memoir. For most of us, memories exist as visual experiences. As such, a more exact duplication of memory would require the use of a visual medium. Movies, obviously, would be one way, though cost and production are prohibitive. But painting and other static visual media have limited narrative possibilities. Comix therefore, offer the perfect vehicle for memoir, being not only inexpensive, but combining both the visual and narrative components essential to conjuring up the past. Two recent books, one about growing up with a disabled brother, the other about living through...
...Ride Together: A Brother and Sister's Memoir of Autism in the Family (Washington Square Press; 200 pp.; $20) by Judy and Paul Karasik alternates prose chapters written by Judy with comix by Paul. The resulting tag-team style provides two sides of a family's story of growing up with an autistic older brother. David Karasik, born in the 1940s, was first diagnosed as having "aphasia," or being "brain damaged," long before autism became a concept that TIME magazine would put on its cover. As the Karasiks describe him, David struggles to put order to a world that arrives...
...David's head is splintered, "Inside it's as tidy and rich as Fort Knox." At the end, in a sad twist the final panel shows Gorilla behind bars with David, calling him, "the best roommate a fella could want." This sort of visual editorial is what separates comix memoir from prose. But while Paul Karasik does a nice enough job of relating his brother's illness, his approach seems conservative compared to last year's intensely ambitious and beautiful "Epileptic," by David B. Also a memoir about a brother's mental illness, "Epileptic" dared to go beyond exploring...
...September 11, 2001. Living with his wife and two young sons in the Battery Park City complex of apartment buildings that were mere blocks from the catastrophe, his story gives a first-hand account of the chaos visited on lower Manhattan that day. While there have been many memoir comix about 9/11 (see TIME.comix reviews: part one; part two), most of them recount the mediated experience of those outside of ground zero. "Tuesday" gives us the first detailed, longform story of living through that nightmarish experience...
...Written in a visual language that would otherwise have taken up thousands of words of prose, comix allow not only for a more efficient and less expensive approach to memoir, but a richer one as well. "Ride Together" and "Tuesday" are just two fine examples of this arguably superior method of relating personal history...