Intimate Publics and Graphic Art: Chronicling Self and Career in Will Eisner’s Life in Pictures and Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life

This presentation expands current discussions on comics and life writing by examining the autobiographies of two of the world’s most important graphic artists: Will Eisner and Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I will explore how these writers blend the narratives of their lives with the chronicle of the development and growing importance of forms of comics in the United States and Japan in their books A Life in Pictures (2007) and A Drifting Life (2009), respectively. I will focus particularly on the sections in these books that highlight the connection between personal life and career, which, in these texts are doubly significant. We see how comics illustrate (on two levels) the making of the graphic artist—though the story and the drawings themselves. Autobiographical representation is thus complicated in these texts which blend accounts of historical events of the mid-20th century with the chronicle of the development of an alternative artistic scene. Recent developments in cultural studies suggest that cultural products—graphic narratives among them—are highly performative—they construct as they recount. This approach to professional autobiography thus links our notions about processes of self-inscription to the forms of production of historical and cultural knowledge. Specifically, I want to ask: what relationships can we establish between Eisner’s and Tatsumi’s personal life and artistic commitment? Can we argue that the graphic artist’s disciplinary training functions as a technology for shaping one’s life writing? By reading these graphic narratives in the context of theories of autobiographical writing, I hope to unveil the particularities of these artists’ strategies of self-representation and their visions of the private, public, and the professional in its widest sense.