Autobiographical Comics - 1970s

1970s

• Justin Green is generally acknowledged to have pioneered the genre (in English-language comics, at least) in his "Binky Brown" stories, notably the 1972 comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, an extremely personal work dealing with Green's Catholic and Jewish background and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

• Also in 1972, Japanese manga artist Keiji Nakazawa created the story "Ore wa Mita" ("I Saw It"), which told of his firsthand experience of the bombing of Hiroshima. This was followed by a longer, fictionalized work, Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), which was later adapted into three films.

• In 1976 Harvey Pekar began his long-running self-published series American Splendor, which collected short stories written by Pekar, usually about his daily life as a file clerk, and illustrated by a variety of artists. The series led to Pekar meeting his wife Joyce Brabner, who later co-wrote their graphic novel Our Cancer Year about his brush with lymphoma.

• In the late 1970s Jim Valentino began his career with autobiographical comics which sprung out from him having literally sold pages laid out on the sidewalk as he'd sit there leaned against a store front. The series was called "Valentino". Later most of these were repackaged into a trade paper back through Image Comics called "Vignettes". Also, through Image Comics Jim created a semi-autobiographical series called A Touch of Silver about a boy coming of age and comics in the 1960s, but he stopped work on the series as it became too personal. Valentino is revisitng his autobiographical roots with a new book called "Drawing from Life", due out in May 2007.

• Throughout the 1970s, autobiographical writing was prominent in the work of many female underground cartoonists, in anthologies such as Wimmen's Comix, ranging from comical anecdotes to feminist commentary based on the artists' lives.