Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics

Abstract

Frederick Byrn Køhlert’s monograph on autobiographical comics argues that ‘the form’s self-reflective engagement with autobiographical representations […] might matter politically, especially for people on the social and cultural margins’. He thus places his work explicitly in a tradition of scholarship that frames comics autobiography as a vehicle through which marginalised voices can be given a platform, developing works such as Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women and standing alongside more recent scholarship such as Elisabeth El Refaie’s Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives. To this end, his opening description of the history of comics autobiography emphasises its origins in independent publishing, and its historical position as a counterweight to the types of heteronormative power fantasies narratives constitutive of its most popular genres.