This chapter studies the expression of queerness, gender and sexual identity, and diversity in comics and graphic novels. It identifies several stages in the history of the medium, from earlier coded or implicit representations of queer identities designed to circumvent the Comics Code Authority to increasingly and openly acknowledged visualizations of non-heteronormative subject matters in contemporary works. The chapter offers close readings of various coming-out narratives that use the graphic memoir form as a space for self-excavation and self-disclosure, drawing connections with a wider social of familial context (Howard Cruse, David Wojnarowicz, and especially Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home catapulted queer graphic novels into the mainstream). It also contrasts the “normalization” approach of mainstream publishers, who focus on diversity and support equality by featuring queer characters in ensemble casts, albeit at the risk of presenting a superficial image of queerness, and the more exclusive focus of alternative publishers and individually produced comics-zines, more centered on personal experiences.

This chapter addresses the graphic novel as a new form of the “Great American Novel” (GAN). This possibility is seen as the result of two interacting processes: canon formation (Which are the graphic novels that can gain inclusion into the mainstream canon?), and literary validation (Can graphic novels be judged with the same criteria as literary novels?). The chapter discusses the critical debates on the recognition of comics as a form of literature and the role of academia and other institutions in the making of a graphic novel canon. It studies the progressive literarification of comics and graphic novels, before focusing on the notion of the GAN, a label that refers to works picturing the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence (J. W. DeForrest), preferably with a high degree of realism. The chapter critically discusses this notion and concludes with a close reading of four graphic novels that constitute good candidates for the title of GAN: Ghost World, Fun Home, American Born Chinese, and Asterios Polyp.

The history of comics and graphic novels often coincides with a history of marginalization of women and misogynistic stereotypes. Conversely, this chapter examines the representation of women by women in graphic novels, with a particular focus on women’s lives. It recalls the early efforts of women cartoonists within the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Julie Doucet, who produced different representations of femininity and sexuality than their male counterparts. It considers the contributions of seminal graphic memoirs by Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, which blended stories of personal awakening with a political context and message, offering new templates for future works. It also highlights the recurrence of the theme of childhood trauma in autobiographical works by women authors, such as Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002), as well as the depiction of unequal work, career, household, and parenting demands placed on women. Finally, it reflects on the manner in which graphic novels by women authors may portray women’s experiences such as motherhood, abortion, and menopause, and considers graphic works that expand the notion of women’s discourse beyond binary identities.

This chapter shows how graphic novels have not only become more colorful over the last two decades but also more visually complex. The chapter surveys discussions of the graphic novel’s literary complexity, from Richard Corben’s early Bloodstar to Alan Moore’s Watchmen. This reappropriation of a modernist strategy models itself on the rise of the novel but also reacts to a long-term audience decline for comics. Section 4.2 builds on recent uptakes of complexity in digital literary and digital film studies to advance computational measurements that combine image and text recognition. The final pages return to Moore and Alison Bechdel to assess the relevance of complexity for the popular success and cultural prestige of individual comic books.

Despite both its rhetoric and its intentions, activism is often ableist. A contemporary project to crip feminism is fundamentally epistemological and requires re-evaluating the state of embodiment, forms of social justice, and choices towards which we understand ourselves to be moving. Disability scholars seem increasingly interested in studying not just what we read (a matter of representation) but how we read and how narrative is formulated (a matter of knowing). Many recent imaginative works by women take up illness and disability not as classic metaphors for limitation and disenfranchisementor even just to create realistic portrayalsbut as specifically and emphatically phenomenological modes of engaging the world. With readings of Chicana feminist fiction (Ana Castillo), graphic memoir (Alison Bechdel) and black speculative fiction (Octavia Butler), I argue that the body under duress becomes a source of rewriting the terms under which identities and social relationships are defined. In this sense they speak and write directly into a moment in which it is the capacity to think courageously, and expansively, about what things 1mean that we must rigorously safeguard.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the role of the writer as artist. It focuses on three auto/biographical texts which document the ugly difficulties of writing the self: Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012). None of these texts is a pure autobiography: Bechdel’s graphic memoir follows her psychotherapeutic unravelling of her relationship with her mother; Heti’s ‘novel from life’ recounts a crucial friendship between Sheila and her artist friend Margaux; and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines is part memoir, part biographical essay about female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Vivien(e) Eliot, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who she dubs the ‘mad wives’ of modernism. All three texts are interested in female genius and tell of the unravelling of the self from others en route to becoming an artist. I argue that ugliness is crucial to their aesthetic projects: the ugliness of the self and its secrets, the ugliness of writer’s block, the ugliness of betrayal, and the ugly terrain of genius.

Contemporary receptions of Homer reflect the gamut of Western social thought, including those informed by feminism, modernism, existentialism, and conservatism.