‘There is a certain self-reflexivity about graphic journalism that written journalism often lacks’
An interview with Mathijs Peters and Yasco Horsman about their book on the ‘autographic gesture’.
In 2025, the book Autobiographical Comics and Graphic Novels: Philosophical and Psychoanalytical Reflections on the Autographic Gesture was published by Palgrave Macmillan, written by the Dutch comics scholars Mathijs Peters and Yasco Horsman. We learned for the first time about their works at the Remix Comix conference in Novi Sad (2022). Both scholars appear to have a strong interest in graphic journalism. Hence, Drawing the Times spoke with the two researchers and asked: how does the autobiographical comic relate to the journalistic or the non-fiction comic, and what exactly is this concept of the ‘autographic gesture’?
Could you elaborate a bit on the prehistory of this book: how did you come up with the idea to write it, and how did it subsequently come into being?
The idea for the topic of the book was formed at the Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society, where we both work. We are interested in philosophical and psychoanalytical theories about the self, as well as in forms of popular culture, including comics and graphic novels. We noticed that several comics scholars had written about the self as it comes about in autobiographical comics and graphic novels – so-called autographics – but that the philosophical and psychoanalytical aspects of this topic had not yet been explored as thoroughly as we thought they could and should be. So we decided to write an article about it. We presented our first ideas at the 2022 conference on Comics, Heritage and Contemporary Art, in Novi Sad, Serbia. The conference brought together academics and artists, and we had so many productive conversations (with, among others, Ulli Lust, Boris Stanic, Aleksander Zograf, Guido van Hengel and Eva Hilhorst), that we realized that the topic was too rich to only discuss in one article. So we decided to write a book, in which we stage dialogues between, on the one hand, autographics by Zoe Thorogood, Riad Sattouf, Katie Green, Keiji Nakazawa, Peter Pontiac, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, and many more, and on the other hand philosophers like Sartre, Ricoeur, Nietzsche and Fichte, as well as psychoanalysts like Lacan and Milner.
In literature, autofiction and autobiographical fiction are trends and tremendously popular. How does this trend manifest itself in the world of (alternative) comics, and how would you interpret or contextualize it?
To some extent, the autofictional turn in comics preceded that of literature. In the late 1960s and early 1970s underground artists like Trina Robbins, Michele Wrightson, Robert Crumb, Justin Green, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb created comics that we now recognize as being autofictional. In the Netherlands, Peter Pontiac was a pioneer in this field. In their earliest comix, these artists drew versions of themselves, and told stories about themselves, that were always already mixtures of truth and fiction. Anthologies like Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits Comix, for example, did this to explore feminist issues, mixing representations of the cartoonists’ own experiences (and of their friends) with theoretical and political critique. Another very popular contemporary literary trend – autotheory – can also already be found in Alison Bechels’ Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), which combines autography with philosophical and psychoanalytic reflections on selfhood. So in a way, comics have been ahead on literature when it comes to these turns and movements. This may have to do with their form: in an autobiographical comic you narrate your life story but also have to depict yourself visually as a figure, seen from the outside. Therefore, in a comic the self appears on the page as an other, as it were. This opens up an experimental space in which one can explore oneself/one’s self from various angles.
On page 5 of your book it says, ‘Comics can think.’ That certainly sounds fascinating. How exactly do comics think, and what does it mean to say that they think?
We use this phrase to argue that comics are not only the object that we apply theory to. We think of them as theoretical sources in their own right. For us they are what Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Ball calls theoretical objects. Not only do many autographics (like Bechdel’s above-mentioned Fun Home) explicitly refer to theories, we argue that they themselves also think about selfhood. In Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, for example, we find a comic that tells how Art discovered MAD magazine as a child, while he was in a supermarket with his mother. Instead of depicting himself as a child, we see the adult Spiegelman holding his mother’s hand and walking through the supermarket. In subsequent panels, the depicted Art gets younger and younger. The drawn Art, furthermore, directly addresses the reader, from ‘his’ present to ‘their’ present, in text balloons. This is a way of visualizing and theorizing on the nature of memory, and the bleeding of past into present and present into past. Spiegelman’s comic thinks about these issues. But instead of using concepts or words to do this, he uses images.
In your book you argue that comics are not only about images and words, but also about traces. Could you explain this third element and why it is so important?
The comics on which we focus in our book are drawn by hand, which means that they are the traces of a bodily gesture. This hand-made nature gives comics a certain intimacy. As readers we feel close to the cartoonists that created them. This means that the self, as it comes about in autographics, is not only shaped through words that tell a life story (as in a written autobiography), and through images that represent the cartoonist, but also through traces that are made by the embodied self of the cartoonist. These traces are marks, as it were, left by the cartoonist’s body. If you only focus on words and images, you overlook this intimate and material dimension of autographics.
What struck me in your book was a passage about the Autographic as it was developed in early 20th-century photography. As a platform for graphic journalism, we are particularly interested in the difference between the Autographic in photography and, on the other hand, in comics. What makes comics substantially different in terms of autographic reflection compared to photography?
We discovered that the phrase ‘autography’ was used in the 19th century, as well as in the early 20th century, to refer to machinic processes of copying, as well as to an invention by Kodak to write with a steel pencil on photographic film. We use this discovery in our book to argue that the notion of autography refers to processes of doubling. One of the main differences between photography and comics, for us, is that this doubling is done in comics by a drawing body. This brings us again to the above-mentioned logic of trace: there is something very intimate about the materiality of traces that cannot be found in photography. The above-mentioned Alison Bechdel, for example, often made photographs that she then copied by hand and included in her autographics: this copying by hand, again, adds a very personal and intimate dimension to the depicted scene, as if she is ‘present’ in the drawings that are about herself/her self.
One of the most well-known comics artists is Joe Sacco, a self-proclaimed ‘cartoonist-journalist’. What are your thoughts on graphic journalism or comics journalism? Can autobiographical or autographic comics also be journalistic in nature, or should the autobiographical genre remain outside the realm of journalism?
We are very much in favor of mixing, and of transcending limits and boundaries. The brilliance of Sacco’s works already shows that autographics can be journalistic. We also do not really see the autographic as a specific genre – it is perhaps better to understand it as a modus. As a way of shaping – through traces, images, and words – a form of selfhood. We use the concept of the ‘autographic gesture’ to refer to the process of knotting these three logics together into a self. And this gesture can come about in journalistic graphic narratives as well.
What risks are inherent in graphic or drawn journalism, especially with regard to journalistic standards such as truth-seeking, fairness, transparency, and the reliability of sources?
On the one hand, it could be argued that there is a danger of fictionalization: since one draws oneself as a figure, and tells journalistic stories in which narratives about this self play a role as well, truth and fiction, the general and the personal, may entwine. On the other hand, there is a certain self-reflexivity about graphic journalism that written journalism often lacks. Since, for example, the works of Sacco include rather cartoony drawn versions of Sacco himself, narratives in which he reflects on himself, as well as traces that refer to the embodied self of Sacco, his texts tend to foreground their own constructiveness. In this way, journalistic autographics indicate to readers that they present only a perspective on a specific story or situation. A perspective that is linked to the embodied existence of the cartoonist/journalist. As such, they foreground the journalistic cartoonist as an embodied witness. This self-reflexivity adds a critical dimension to graphic journalism, which signals the text’s own limits, and emphasizes the observation that no piece of journalism can ever be completely neutral or objective.
Which drawn comic characters have you ever encountered in real life and what was that experience like?
At the above-mentioned conference in Novi Sad, the Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust drew us as we were presenting some of our ideas on autographics. She then published the four-panel comic strip in which we figure on her Instagram. As we describe in more detail in a publication linked to the Remix Comix project, this means that we ourselves were turned into drawn cartoony figures, pulling us into a cartoony spiral from which we are still recovering. Of course, this also means that we, at the Novi Sad conference, met Ulli Lust, as well as Aleksandar Zograf, who have both created amazing autographics. Furthermore, we have met Dutch cartoonists like Jeroen de Leijer and Joost Swarte. What makes these experiences fun, is that you meet the real-life version of the figures that you have, until then, only encountered in drawn form – as if you are drinking Loch Lomond whisky with Captain Haddock. Furthermore, it means that you shake the hand that has left the traces in the autographics in which you first met these selves as they came about through these traces. This makes encounters like these into autographic short-circuits.
