Filial Lines

Emmy Waldman
“Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form”
Waldman previews her new book, which explores the autobiographical projects of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel, focusing on new and neglected works. The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes – boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs – through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Together, these figures show what makes the comics form particularly suited to negotiate complex familial and creative inheritances and manage layered, relational identities. Interweaving accounts of Jewish identity, female embodiment, legacies of modernism, and feminist praxis, the book traces how two of our most celebrated graphic memoirists visually work and rework their filiations and affiliations through form. Ultimately, thinking with boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs helps situate the comics medium as a privileged site and staging ground for arguments about the enabling possibilities of form now.