AN EXPLORATION OF THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, THE FEMALE BODY AND
TRAUMATIC MEMORY
By
Siyi An
BFA (Cartooning), School of Visual Arts, 2018

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2022

© Siyi An, 2022

1

Abstract

This paper discusses my research and artistic practice during the MFA program. My research
is focused on how semi-autobiographical narratives in the form of graphic novels facilitate selfexploration and trauma representation. Through my art projects Tentacles and A Bouquet for
You, I explore and reconnect with my female body and my Chinese culture. Together with
graphic and narrative experiments conducted in comic form, I reexamine the relationship
between myself as the author, my body, and my memories.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

2

Table of contents

3

Acknowledgements

4

Utero

5

Amniotic Sac

7

Embryo
Project Tentacles

9

Tentacles Prologue I

9

Tentacles Prologue II

11

Tentacles

14

A Bouquet for You
Umbilical Cord

18
24

Placenta
Asterios Polyp

27

Fun Home

29

Perineal Laceration

32

Bibliography

34

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Acknowledgement

I wish to express my gratitude to the faculty at Emily Carr University of Art + Design for their
help in supporting me carrying out my research.
I am extremely thankful to my supervisor Justin Novak, who was very insightful and supportive
during the process of my research and his guidance and encouragement had been tremendously
helpful.
I thank my family and friends for their love and belief in me even in the times that were difficult.

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Utero
Because of the connection my research has to the female body and reproduction, I decided to
refer to sections of my research discussed in this paper as specific organs that exist in a
reproductive sequence, and relating to the biological human conceiving process. Often seen in
medical terms as a prefix, the word utero commonly represents the uterus, the womb, the female
reproductive organ. In this chapter I will make a brief introduction of this thesis support
document and my thesis project.

My MFA practice explores the personal relationship between myself, my female body and the
art form of the graphic novel. In this paper, the specific term comics often refer to a shorter
project or a specific section of pages from a bigger project, while the term graphic novel or
sometimes graphic narrative refers to the entirety of a project larger in scale. My projects will
all be discussed throughout the paper with the assumption that they will be printed and
published in a book form when finished.

In the creative research I conducted during the first year of the MFA program, I started to
conceptually explore the tangibility and physicality of comics as an art form. More specifically,
the comics I’ve made become a form of connecting with myself, the world and my readers. To
a certain extent, my past works are autobiographical. It is true that I make my works mainly
with the intention of expressing and discovering myself, but only with partial honesty. While
in the first semester, I was exploring the relationship between truth-telling and artistic
representation, slowly, with some experimentation, the exploration later became research about
the lack of an “erotic body” in my comics and how telling half-truths has been as a way of
searching for an authentic body.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s article “Corpus” [1] develops a discourse around body, signs and meaning. A
body is touchable, sharable, measurable, extendible, and also impenetrable. As my work
addresses, a body is given, unable to generate itself into existence relying purely on internal
will power, and it is external in its unarguable physical existence in relation to our mind.
However, the first step to recognizing and understanding one’s impenetrable body is through
5

the body’s manifestation of its interior. Nancy mentions that the actions of writing and reading
are a tactile gesture more than anything, and I have been considering whether my graphic novel
is a visual caress, an extension of my body touching outwards to my readers and simultaneously
gazing inwards.

My newest collection of short comics, which I developed as my second creative research,
depicts my own traumatic experiences. The project connects me to a concept derived from
Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” [2]. Erotic power is an energy that is connected deeply to
our ability to feel pleasure and to form an intimate and responsible relationship with our
spiritual and physical needs. By exploring our capacity for joy, erotic power grants us the
motivation to evaluate our lives.

My own works, while being generally devoid of the traditional definition of erotic elements,
are predominantly about individuals’ psychological needs. More specifically, they are about
how desires are repressed, and the subversive power such deprivation of fulfilment possesses.
The characters in my stories are always isolated and withdrawn from their pleasures and needs
because of either some environmental limitations or restrictions originating from within
themselves. These repressions not only obstruct their understanding of their erotic power but
also remove their agency and means of accessing that power. As a result, the characters are
often seen displaying behaviours that can be considered as euphemisms of poorly performed
attempts to reach for their erotic power. They live with numbed pleasure and experiential
paralysis and even their actions of rebellion are led astray by self-denial and self-destruction.
Sometimes they reach a realization of their needs, but their erotic power is already distorted
and contaminated. This is reflected in depictions from characters from my earlier work,
Tentacles, and in an auto-biographical artifice of myself in A Bouquet for You.

Expanding and building upon these two key concepts, I developed my research question: How
can I reconnect to my detached female and Chinese cultural body through the creation of comics?
I will introduce more comprehensively in this paper, the theories, research and principles that
have informed the creation of Tentacles and A Bouquet for You.
6

Amniotic Sac
The Amniotic sac is the container of amniotic fluid which encompasses the foetus during
conception. While it surrounds, protects and exchanges between the mother and the embryo, it
remains constant and grounding for the existence of both entities. In this chapter I will explain
my position in depth in relation to my creative projects.

Spending the majority of my life in China as a child born after 1995, my culture is deeply
influential to my artistic practice. My experience of growing up in this socialist country has in
various ways shaped my approach to research, engagement and the examination of my society.
Although in the collection of my first year MFA work titled Tentacles I never specifically named
a cultural reference, my Chinese experience has unarguably penetrated into the work.

Growing up in an era not long after the Chinese economic reform in 1978 when Western culture
had been slowly introduced to the Chinese public, the general understanding and media
depiction of the West was filled with curiosity and confusion. A common philosophy about
Western society in China during my youth was that there was a dichotomy between China and
the “West” which was often reinforced by mainstream media as well as school education. The
two cultures of the Chinese (the “East”) and the “West” were considered as always in conflict
with each other and a broad definition of Western culture was commonly used as a comparison
when developing our own theories on Chinese culture. This was a mind-set that could be easily
encountered in multiple mundane situations and even sometimes in academic discussions.
Growing up in this environment emphasised the existence and the concept of the “West” as a
foreign entity that I was constantly aware of in my younger years.

Experiences and memories with the influence of this dichotomy had essentially decentralised
my own culture within my home country, along with my personal understandings of the Chinese
culture. It is also important to know that my younger years took place during a period not long
after China started to reintroduce itself to the world as a special socialist country, and with the
development of internet technology Chinese citizens were able to exchange information with
other countries globally.
7

Accompanied by a sense of doubt regarding my culture and experience, my education during
adulthood, however, was mainly completed in “Western” countries. While living as a Chinese
person in North America, I familiarised myself with frequent feelings of torn detachments from
both my experience with Chinese culture and my understandings of it. It was absolutely clear
that there were differences and distances between my engagement with these separate cultures,
but the differences were not as simplistic as the well-known dichotomy seemed to inform. The
realisation of the decentralisation of my culture prevailed much more strongly the longer I lived
in North America. The works I make here are almost always about China and my culture and I
believe that could be because I am trying to recentralise or reposition my culture in my personal
philosophical space quite intuitively without a clear statement.

The time I’ve spent and the knowledge I’ve received here in North America has inevitably
created a gap between my adult self and my younger self and all my relationships that came
with it. I was also constantly reminded of my difference in this “Western” society as well, both
passively and actively, especially in academia. I am now stuck in this distance from both places
that is impossible to ignore anymore, as it has become an unwelcome constant in my life. My
relationship with Chinese culture was always under the lens of a colonised and Westernised
society that due to intricate historical reasons appeared to be rather isolated from the world, and
that isolation has shadowed and accompanied me on a personal level through most of my
educational life. I have decided to envisage such displacement within my art practice and to
consciously recentralise the relationship I have with my culture.

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Embryo
An embryo is a foetus in its early development stage when vital visceral structures are
developed. I have decided to employ this term when referring to my two current projects
because of the possibility of growth in the future. In this chapter, I will thoroughly describe my
two graphic narratives created during the MFA program.

Project Tentacles
Trained as a comic artist, my practice is focused on the creation of comics and graphic novels.
The culmination of my first year of study in the MFA program, Tentacles is a black-and-white
graphic novel comprised of fifty-five pages. Tentacles uses conventional graphic novel methods:
it is drawn fully with pencils by hand and touched-up digitally.

The two prologues that preceded this project were two short coloured digital works in which I
had abandoned my traditional drawing process. The return to my old hand-drawing way of
making comics for Tentacles was not a habitual or unconsidered decision, but rather a
reconnection and re-examination of my most familiar drawing gestures. The gestures, positions,
and movements of my body are integrated into the drawing process and recorded with my
pencils. Presenting as a meta-comic depicting an autobiographical comic artist’s journey of
creating, Tentacles is the third and the last work in the series of my critique of state cultural
moderation, especially in its control of cultural production and education by the state. I have
relied on my personal experience when constructing this work, but the specific state is left
ambiguous in this section of my work.

Tentacles Prologue I
Taking place in an old Chinese apartment building, Tentacles Prologue I depicts the story of
young children facing the horror of being consumed by an unknown entity residing in their
living space, while the adults refuse to validate that fear. I chose to create this narrative by
following a young boy’s journey of going downstairs to the gate of the apartment building, then
coming back to his fate of being eaten by his home.

9

Both the character and the readers are only given limited and repetitive views of the
environmental setting, while the characters are composed of ambiguous shapes with minimal
identifiable features. The dialogs are deliberately restrained as well, and some of the visceral
images are intentionally manipulated graphically to create a distance between the fictional
brutality and the readers.

Siyi An. Tentacles Prologue I. p. 6.

Throughout project Tentacles, my artistic style varies to reflect different parts of the story.
Drawing inspiration from old English textbooks for Chinese children, Tentacles Prologue I
adopts a childish, simplistic language that divulges little information both graphically and
textually even with the horrifying events happening around the characters.

10

To reflect this, I chose to use a slightly didactic tone for the narration and conversational
dialogues. Combined with an almost architectural visual style, I try to create an aloof and
detached point of view for the readers to evoke a sense of doubt regarding the factuality of the
brutal events taking place in this constructed space. By dividing panels into uniformly small
boxes of fixed shots of an old apartment building, the third-person perspective suggests that the
readers are at a place of observing as a detached spectator.

Siyi An. Tentacles Prologue I. Cover page.

Tentacles Prologue II
The perspective changes in Tentacles Prologue II, and is mostly told in first-person with a
Chinese girl as the protagonist. She is often shown watching her own body in the mirror and

11

trying to battle for control with her organs and body parts. Compared to the first part of the
story, the monochrome style is a reduction of colour which also represents the reduction of
people’s humanity as a consequence of cultural control from the state.

Siyi An. Tentacles Prologue II. p. 23

The graphic novel as a medium, with either printed or digital distribution, contains the quality
of privacy and freedom for the readers. As shown in the image above, an intimate moment is
being represented by digitally drawn lines. The readers are watching the young woman
watching her own reflection, while being unaware of her audience. This indirect interaction
between the characters and my readers is essential for this part of my project because it allows
the reader to be in a position of power and to gaze at the protagonist as she’s gazing at herself.
From the image above the readers can see the reflection of the protagonist brushing her tongue.

12

This scene and many other similar scenes from Tentacles Prologue II put the readers in the
position of an intruder who’s peeking at a private moment. The protagonist especially in this
work is, ultimately, only drawn marks on paper to be interpreted, in the subjective minds of
either the reader or the author, as the fictional existence who is an object being showcased that
is unable to give consent.

The page-turning aspect of my medium is an embodied movement that parallels the reducing
action depicted in the artwork: A physical thinning and consummation of the printed material
during the reading process becomes the readers’ unwittingly participatory action, serving as a
metaphor for the protagonist’s digestive reduction of her own body. With each page turned, the
reader consumes the content. The turning of the page echoes the protagonist’s actions in the
story.

As a work with four chapters in total, the first three chapters are represented as peaches, grapes
and oranges. Each of these chapters contains three smaller sections which are named by months
chronologically. The naming and the images accompanying these names become another
indicator for the consuming action, in the sense that fruits are being eaten, and time is being
spent. I have experimented with storytelling methods in these three fruit chapters where the
narrative presentation varies from chapter to chapter to metaphorically utilise the different ways
the three varieties of fruit are consumed or reduced. The narration of the peach chapter follows
the process of skin peeling, meat-eating, then core revealing; In the grape chapter the stories
are divided into equal segments that parallel each other but happen in a linear timeline; The
orange chapter however is an accumulation of unnaturally cut/consumed scenes with a leftover
skin as the result. With each fruit chapter, I have assigned a specific colour to serve as the visual
connection from the story to the fruit, and they are combined digitally to render the colour of
the fourth and the final chapter in a rusty red. Stripping away the fruit metaphors in the last
chapter reveals the visceral cannibalism the young woman committed of herself and her foetus.

13

Siyi An. Tentacles Prologue II. p. 7

The two prologues of Tentacles are not done chronologically, as the second story was driven
by a more primitive fear of mine thus was created the first after the concept for the cultural
moderation was confirmed.

Tentacles
The linear timeline of my movements as the artist during this project is split between references
to my own image (a young woman in front of a mirror) and drawing images from my memory
(the old apartment building). The third part of Tentacles again went back to using myself as a
reference. As the only black and white comics of this project, the deprivation of colour is
another element to describe the reductive consequences of cultural moderation.

14

Siyi An. Tentacles. p. 40,41.

15

This reduction of the self is then further internalised by the “author”-character in the story when
her body, memory and expectations are challenged by the existence of the “character”. I sought
to honestly record my movements, decisions and thoughts during the creative process to better
incorporate these into the character of the “author”. And while my thoughts and emotions had
transitioned onto paper as planned, my actions--including the labour of making comics--were
ignored and were deliberately insufficiently presented in the form of drawings and panels. This
neglect of the comic itself is tightly related to my current research where I seek to reconnect
myself with this form.

The starting point for almost any of my school projects is the format of the graphic novel, and
usually they begin with an abstract concept. But accompanying these concepts, many images
and visual aspects of the project simultaneously develop in my imagination. I can depict the
general tone of the project and a few detailed moments that are essential for my work. The first
step of my process, by comparison, is similar to the process by which a sculptor carves a
dissembled human figure out of a piece of stone. Because my chosen medium is primarily a
visual experience, organizing the creative process of abstraction in my head is absolutely crucial
for my works to come into existence.

Being deeply influenced by traditional Chinese art and literature, the prominent use of metaphor
in my work is a way of carving physical elements out of the conceptual rock that is my
imagination. I use the bodies of objects and life forms to create symbols and signifiers of things
that I am incapable of speaking about plainly. This euphemistic redirection is my attempt to tell
the truth but also reflects my inability to do so. It is my unmasking, without unveiling. However,
in Tentacles, along with its two prologues, because I have never closely examined personal
issues in my work before, my emotional reaction towards the subject both fuelled and restrained
my expression at the early stages of the production.

After exploring my internal responses with journaling notes and writings, I started composing
a rough structure for the storyline. But to my own surprise, I was unable to envision the full
picture of the story. This was a work I could only understand by following the process. An
16

omnipresent author’s perspective was no longer applicable as I had given my control of the
characters and stories away to my unconsciousness when I projected myself into this work.

Siyi An. Tentacles. p. 7.

At first, I followed my habitual process. I tried to predict my characters’ actions. I started
making layouts and writing scripts for the first few pages because I had limited time. It did not
occur to me that this inability to foresee was the solid consequence of my choice of subject,
and it was unavoidable. My unwillingly divergence and my reluctant pencilling was not an
accident caused by a shortage of time. Without the full picture ahead, the layout phase was
crowded with doubt for I could not use as many comic techniques and effective panel
arrangements as I used to when I lacked the personal investment in the story. But the uncertainty

17

forced me to be less technical and focused on my body in that present. After making a few
pages of layouts, I started to plan them out on a larger paper. I made a conscious decision of
reducing the amount of my panels because I felt that the full-page panels of me past works were
limiting. The pencilled drawings came then rather smoothly. The entire process consisted of
this back and forth movement and headspace between planning and labour. The labour of
drawing squares, lines, letters, blocks of black consists of such highly repetitive movements
that I can barely retrace my exact body at those times. This mindlessness which overtook my
rational consciousness felt dangerous in its surrender of control.

Accompanying the paralleled labour visually manifesting itself on the page, the story arc
following the author character also reflects my own state of mind during the process of creating
this work. The “author” in the story continues to dehumanize the “character” by reducing its
existence purely to its function while ignoring the potential signification of its “birth” and
rejecting the visceral connection between the “author” themselves and the “character”. This
reflection of my own fear and hesitation of touching my inner self, while earning for the
acquirement of my erotic body, was presented with metaphoric images and sequences.

The final stage of this piece was not to be presented as pencilled papers but instead as scanned
digital images which may be understood as more valuable from a utilitarian perspective in this
modern world with its potentially wider reproductive value and digitalised distribution. The
pencilled pages on which I had recorded most of my movements remained in my folder and
were never taken out again.

A Bouquet for You
(The description of this work is incomplete because it’s still a work in progress. -)

Transitioning from the first year of the MFA program to the second year, I found myself at loss
after the creation of project Tentacles. While the struggle of my estranged detached body stayed
unresolved, I felt that my hesitant expression in Tentacles has exhausted my fear towards the
actions of control and being controlled. Horror, one of the most commonly used words in
18

critiques commenting on the entire three parts of project Tentacles, summarises my intention
and emotion towards the willful dehumanising of pieces of myself manifested in my first-year
project. Inspired by artists like Alison Bechdel who I will be introducing more thoroughly in
the following chapters, I felt at this stage of my studies that I was ready to reclaim control of
my experience of dehumanisation instead of rejecting my traumatic memory, and this has led
to my new project A Bouquet for You.

A Bouquet for You is a collection of short comics with each chapter named A Flower for You. I
have made the choice of creating each chapter with different artistic styles as a way of
experimenting with visual narrations in the limited time I have through the MFA program. The
story is an autobiographical record of my memory of a moment when I experienced child sexual
abuse. It was the first time I realised that my body is a sexual object. I remember that moment
as the beginning of my sexually related trauma. Using flowers as a visual and textual indicator
for the female reproductive system, I present this work to my readers and myself with the hope
of reclaiming my erotic body.

The first “flower” is a direct representation of the traumatic event itself. Characters are
deliberately designed with a cartoony and childish style, and I have chosen a digital watercolour
brush to paint this chapter. The colour palette consists of a pastel blue and a soft pink, but
because of the transparent aspect of the brush, the colour can become intensified to a bloody
red when layering together. This specific attribute allows the story to transform visually from
innocent childish conversations to sexual trauma. As my memory suggests, I have trapped an
adult me in a gender-neutral room. Starting with using the bed and my sleeping position as the
grounding objectification of vulnerability and privacy, the insinuation of an intimate moment
of sleep and domestic safety is then violated by a sudden transition to a narrative from the past.
The neutrality is then broken into a childhood me with feminine attire trapped in a room with
masculine decorations. The privacy is also damaged by inserting the existence of two other
boys as the narrative of sexual abuse unveils.

19

Siyi An. A Bouquet for You. p. 8.

The first chapter starts this work by addressing the traumatic event itself, and the second chapter
depicts the echo of that particular memory. The visual style changes drastically in the next
“flower” from pastel watercolour to black and white pencil drawings. From the violent ending
of the previous chapter to the contained, suppressed, and unconnected memory about a goldfish,
this chapter creates a shadow that calls for attention to its existence under the mask of the
mundane. The drawings in this chapter are relatively realistic compared to the previous chapter
as my distance from my memory shortens during the creation of the work. I made a crosshatching pattern to fill the spaces of furniture in another unfamiliar, enclosed room, and that
specific pattern polluted the goldfish as its life is being taken away. The girl (my younger self
as a character) and her sexualised body stare straight into the pattern meant for objects, as her

20

attention was averted from her dehumanization to the supposed death of something else, only
to find the insignificance of both.

Siyi An. A Bouquet for You. p. 16.

The third chapter transforms from enclosed rooms to an open space of my childhood apartment
building. The transition of artistic style from the previous chapter to the third “flower” is
gradual, as the narrative starts with a modern me as a character drawing scenes in the last
chapter. It suggests that the process itself of creating this work is a process of reflecting and
reconnecting. Trying to test my ability with colour and environments, I have placed my
childhood character in a wider setting while the narration is introducing the backstory of the
traumatic event. Although the character is no longer in an isolated room, the loneliness

21

continues to prevail throughout this chapter. In this chapter, I wish to address the “you” from
my titles, and that you are whoever may be reading this work, including myself. My experience,
in the creation these pages, envisages my childhood trauma while the character stares right back
at me, directly out of the pages, with uneasiness. I only made her exist under the shadows.

Siyi An. A Bouquet for You. p. 20.

Due to the limited time of the program, there are some noticeable clumsy aspects in the latter
portions of the work. I do not present this as a finished work, but as a work in progress. My
intention for the remaining portion of the project involves more of my experimental transitions
of graphic style and storytelling. The creative decisions in this project are made with
mindfulness, honouring my emotional process in response to my traumatic memory and my

22

own expressive desire. As it will be indicated in the next chapter, in which I will explain my
methodology in detail, it is the process of creating that I cherish where I conduct my selfexploration and artistic research.

Siyi An. A Bouquet for You. Cover.

23

Umbilical Cord
Functioning as one of the most essential connections between the host and the embryo, the
umbilical cord is the vital anatomical organ of blood transmission for the embryo’s
development and survival. I will in this chapter discuss the methodology of my MFA projects.

As I have explained in my position statement during the previous chapter, my cultural
background forms an important focus in my research and practice. However, as my recent
works have reflected, the most prominent stories are mostly centred around my female body
and emotional and psychic experiences of that embodiment. Almost echoing the examination
of my own culture through another more dominant culture’s lens, my experience of
understanding my female body is through the male gaze. My exploration of psychological
challenges that resulted from the structures of patriarchal violence that I experienced all lead to
the discourse of social power structure.

Although coming from a male-dominated industry, like many other forms found in the art world,
graphic novels are now appearing to be more and more feminist as female authors started using
this form to voice and address their sexuality and experience, especially in recent years.

Images and texts in graphic narratives are used by female authors as a means of reaching inside
their bodies and trauma, and then expressing them to the world. Quoting from Cathy Caruth,
“…to be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event [3]”, and images in
graphic novels hold the weight of transcending traumatic narratives into a reading experience
between shown and not shown, told and not told, touched and not touched. In order to be distinct
from films, which comics and graphic narratives are often compared to, and even considered
as interwined in both the art industry and academia, in my work, panel images, empty spaces
in gutters, and the suggestive gestures of texts and dialogues are private, intimate, repetitive,
insistent, stubborn, static, fragmenting metaphors of traumatic memories. At the same time the
entire picture of the page is laid visible. Through the research process, I have found Graphic
Women [4] by Hillary Chute tremendously helpful in articulating my experience as both an
author and a reader of graphic narratives. This work is significantly informative in situating my
24

research on expressing my own trauma through the form of comics. It offers insight into the
relationship between drawn representations and real-life experiences and how the stories of
these female artists change what the industry’s perception of comics.

The graphic novel form aligns subtly with the female experience of reforming one’s relationship
of one’s body and potentially traumatic thought formation, in the sense that the duality of the
whole self and the isolation, objectification, penetration, and compartmentalisation of the self
exist simultaneously when being looked at and gazed upon as the alienated object. Although
graphic novels seem to act inherently as the passive object for the readers, the authors discussed
in Graphic Women including Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry,
Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel chose to present traumatic narratives that also inevitably
exhibit their own bodies and memories as the object in their self-alienating process of creating
the traumatic narrative. For the creators themselves, the laborious process of drawing,
pencilling, inking and lettering of the graphic novel are most commonly divided into different
time slots in the work schedule, whereas it is the prior layouts and scripts contain the vision of
the entire project. Metaphorically the creation process, with its intensive gestural movements
becomes the author’s exercise of reattaching or reconnecting to their bodies in a physical and
conceptual way.

Essays and articles from Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art [5] are
another source that helped the establishment of my theoretical analysis on comics, graphic
novels and semi-autobiographies. Edited by Jane Tolmie, this book consists of essays by writers
including David M. Ball and Yaël Schlick. This collection of essays focused on the discourse
of “memory and subjectivity without a strict definition of autobiographic form. [6]” The variety
of relationships between readers/authors/characters and the distance between graphic
autobiography and the accurate transmission of real-life experience are two of the most critical
questions involved in my work. The examination of artists like Debbie Drechsler, Alison
Bechdel and Lynda Barry’s works discusses how they utilise the graphic elements of comics to
summon the rawest emotions from readers in a way that pure text or image can never achieve.
This book is immensely helpful in articulating my own graphic ideas with drawings, and
25

grounds my drawing process. It reminds me constantly of being vigilant of wandering astray
from honesty to my erotic body.

My personal experience with working on graphic novels has resulted intentionally and
unintentionally in moving in closer and closer to re-examine my detached relationship with my
female body and memory. In my most recent works, I purposefully deemed my body as the
object for me to touch, to reveal, to hide in metaphors and euphemisms when exploring
potentially subversive narratives. Adapting the familiar gesture of drawing which is a
movement I have practiced constantly in my life, I find that reacquiring my awareness of the
physical body using drawn images and hand-written texts is immensely helpful in my hesitant
and tentative approaching of trauma. The images drawn on paper are representative illusions of
desires and fears that I had no courage of facing in any other situation.

My hand marking the paper during my creation process asserts my control over my techniques,
emotions, and experiences. I offer myself assurance and comfort in the form of visual language
to exhibit intimate graphic dialogues to the public. Evidently, the research process does not end
at a certain stage during the creation but is significantly intertwined with my physical and
psychological journey throughout the pre-existence and the existence of the artwork.

With the periodical conclusion of each piece of graphic narrative, I examine my process. This
forms a part of my research into my relationship with my body and sequentially into my
relationship with comics and graphic novels. Many narrative graphic moments I created are
partly autobiographical, and by creating characters as my agents and putting them in
environments simulating particular situations, I can experiment with many of my personal and
intimate questions through the creative process. Conducting experiments through a controlled,
safe, occasionally limiting environment is a widely used research method and I’d like to think
that drawing semi-autobiographic stories aligns with that methodology. This parallels real-life
events but always includes variables that differentiate themselves from the outcomes or
experiences in reality.

26

Placenta
The placenta offers nutrition, and storages waste. I will be introducing my artistic influences
in this chapter and examine how have their works become the inspiration in the comic culture
framework.

Asterios Polyp
The critical examination of other’s works has helped me better situate my own creations. My
works are influenced by artists and creators from a wide spectrum of fields, but I wish to inform
my readers about the two comic artists who have had profoundly positive influences on my
own practice.

The first artist I’m introducing whose influence is vital to my artistic practice is David
Mazzucchelli. He is a New York-based comic artist and writer. In his early career he worked
on mainstream superhero comic books like the Batman and Daredevil series. He then moved
on to more personal projects like a graphic adaption of Paul Auster’s City of Glass and several
indie comics magazines. The work I find most significant in shaping my graphic language is
Asterios Polyp [7]. It was a graphic novel published in 2009 which Mazzuchelli worked on for
decades. According to Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp was the essence of his dedication to comic
art. Asterios Polyp is also the name of the protagonist in the story who is an architecture
professor teaching at a New York University. This book tells the story of Asterios Polyp’s
childhood memories, his troubled marriage, his work as an auto mechanic after his retirement
from university and how he faced his own imperfections during different time periods in his
life.

Mazzucchelli used plot, dialogue and most importantly visual representations to explore the
idea of duality. Asterios Polyp has a stillborn twin brother whose voice exists as the narrator
and readers are introduced to the story through the perspective of a dead and conceptual twin
protagonist while simultaneously peeking into the physical Asterios Polyp’s life. Occasionally
we are shown Asterios Polyp’s abstract realm where he explains some philosophical
dichotomies between rational and emotional, life and death, destiny and free will.
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The most prominent duality throughout this graphic novel is between Asterios Polyp and his
wife, Hana. One of the most obvious visual cues is that Hana is represented by the colour pink
while Asterios by blue. Although superficially these two colours are the stereotypical
representations of boys and girls, male and female, in this work this particular visual
representation is exhibited as a false dichotomy that evolves together with the subjective
opinions of the protagonists. The use of colour engages with the narrative and the emotional
journey of the main character.

David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp. p. 59, p. 149.

As an example of how Mazzucchelli utilises graphic elements that flow with the narrative, these
two pages have shown the dynamic in Asterios and Hana’s marriage. The lines around the
figures and objects are purple which is the combination of pink and blue (a visual clue hinted
also by the cover and the printing process). But a division of these two colours fills the
background as the focus changes from one character to another. It is an indication of Asterios
Polyp’s narcissistic tendencies when the metaphorical spotlight shifts from Hana to himself
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with Hana retreating further back on the page. Mazzuchelli’s storytelling is highly visual and
this quality is deeply influential to my methods of creating a graphic narrative. His knowledge
in comics is a great inspiration for me in terms of finding a fluidity and freedom within graphic
storytelling. I have learned a lot from him about what kind of panel arrangements work with
which intentions, which relationships between text and images are best suited for certain
situations, and most importantly, how to build a scaffolding to conceptualise a graphic narrative.
Many comic techniques that have become an intuitive to me when visualising my voice and
thoughts are acquired under his guidance.

Fun Home
The second artist that I am influenced by is Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist. Fun Home
[8]

is an auto-biographical memoir published in 2006. This graphic memoir records mainly

Allison’s relationship with her father who committed suicide when she was 20 years old. In this
book, Allison Bechdel shares her struggle with her family, gender, and sexuality. With a nonlinear narrative Bechdel divulges some of her past trauma through anatomical texts and a
drawing style that recalls Western cartooning traditions.

The memoir starts by introducing Bechdel’s father’s meticulous passion in maintaining the
family’s Victorian home. Later, readers learn that the father, Bruce, was an English teacher who
had inappropriate sexual relationships with young boys. Coming out to her parents as a lesbian
when Bechdel was in college, she then learned from her mother that her father had been having
many affairs with different men through the years before and after their marriage. Growing up,
her father was always a distant figure and within this story she seeks the opportunity to have
some connection after her coming out. However, her father does not disclose his sexuality
directly to her, possibly as a result of his own shame and self-disgust.

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Alison Bechdel. Fun Home, p. 221.

This page acts as an example of how Bechdel conducts her graphic storytelling choices. It
shows Bechdel on the way to the theatre with her father when she came home from college
after her coming out. This brief conversation was the most intimate conversation they had
before her father’s possible suicide. The repetitive images, incomplete conversations and the
abundance of internal dialogues are often nostalgic and suggestive for readers to recollect a
similar moment from their own lives. The drawings are coloured with a minimal palette, which
was a consistent aesthetic choice with the story’s non-linear structure and fragmented narrations
as they work together to put distance between the readers and narrator and at the same time
implying the narrator’s own distance between her experience.

Each chapter of the graphic memoir is oriented around a literature reference as literature
occupies a significant portion of Bechdel and her father’s life. Bechdel shows connections
between characters from classical literature to characters in real life throughout Fun Home. As
the plot continues, the literary characters Bechdel makes from her own family members raise
one of the most important questions of an auto-biographical memoir. The line of honesty and
representation is blurred and with the literature references overlapping with real personcharacters, readers are made to question the integrity of the narrator and the either
unconsciously or intentionally twisted truth.

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This graphic memoir is presented as a painfully honest confession on Allison Bechdel’s life and
her traumatic experience. It leads me to reflect on why graphic narratives are so appropriate for
expressing memories, recollections and traumatic events. When I try to recreate images about
my own experience, I struggle to find the line between illusion and truth. This book offers me
a great example of a way to deal with intimate visual conversations in the form of a graphic
novel. Although its form is a graphic memoir, Fun Home creates a comprehensive narrative
that can not be easily regarded as a direct representation of lived experience. In multiple scenes,
Bechdel illustrates private conversations between other characters, images and environment
settings, when it would be impossible for her to acquire such detailed memory. Bechdel makes
it clear that the narrative is an altered memory, that the memory itself is usually unreliable, that
there is a difference between the narrator of Fun Home and the author herself. The attempt of
organizing the chaos of her life and memory and the inability to do so is a constant presence
throughout the graphic memoir. “Fun Home yearns for elegance and order, for a means of
closing the gap ‘between word and meaning’, while knowing the endeavour to be impossible.
[9]

” This earnest presentation of the struggle with authenticity of subjective experience and its

graphic representation has helped me to reconsider my process. Maybe instead of trying to
completely disregard my earlier euphemistic attempts to process trauma (Tentacles prologue
I&II) as unsuccessful experiments, and expecting my later direct approach to traumatic events
(A Bouquet for You) to overcome those limitations, I should embrace the process itself, of
struggling to find a structure, as a valid part of my MFA research and experience.

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Perineal Laceration
A perineal laceration is a possible tear of the flesh and tissue to the vaginal area during the
process of childbirth.

The process of creating Tentacles and A Bouquet for You is ultimately, a conversation with
myself. My intention to reconnect with my female body started with the literal metaphor of
self-digesting female organs (Tentacles Prologue II), then resided briefly in a detached nod to
my childhood memory (Tentacles Prologue I), and subsequently evolved to the layered tension
of pretence, and the unveiling of myself in Tentacles. The intention then stopped being just an
intention after the laboured solitude during which Tentacles was made with my hands, retracing
the familiar comfort of the drawing gesture. I started to re-examine my relationship with
drawing, sequential images and comics.

It was abundantly clear to me that my deeply metaphoric reinvention of traumatic events in my
past works came from a place of avoidance and hesitation. The images in the two prologues of
Tentacles that I chose to create digitally are an active gesture of masking any truthful dialogue
with myself, with the visceral depiction of body parts and the dream-like recreation of my
childhood home (the old apartment building). As a result, those two short works display as
more voyeuristic than conversational.

Looking back at my hand-made marks on the original drafts of Tentacles after months of its
creation, I noticed that the pages are filled with dirty fingerprints as an indication of me marking
the pages with not only pencil but with also my hands and sweat. I have returned to a more
honest approach to recreate the less filtered or self-censored images and texts in conversation
with my body and identity. Other than seeking the familiarity of the drawing gesture, the
graphic narratives that I produced echoed with my natural storytelling flow with less intentional
play with technicalities that were often too present and were sometimes even the focus in my
past practice.

A Bouquet for You is my attempt to manifest an authentic traumatic event. The labour-intensive
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creative process forced me to envisage the actual trauma repeatedly without the obscurity of
metaphors and graphic manipulations. I must emphasise that the process of drawing and
producing such a graphic narrative about trauma is essentially more revealing to me as the
creator than the finished graphic novel as a readable object. The action of reconnecting to my
body happened, is happening and will continue to happen in the process of drawing, inking,
lettering, and editing of the possibly endless collections of flowers for you.

As an artist, I used to be hesitant to find the courage of bridging gap between me and my erotic
self. But maybe the courage can be given to me internally, instead of trying to find it elsewhere.
My struggle is mirrored in my work in which I ask myself if I possess that energy to find a
resolution. I do not believe that the end of the MFA program marks the end of any projects of
mine that were mentioned above. I anticipate that my effort to reconnect my body using graphic
narratives will continue being one of the major themes in my future practice without any
foreseeable conclusion to my exploration.

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Bibliography
[1] Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Corpus.” The Inoperative Community. Ed. Kejun Chen. Trans. Yongguo
Chen. Shanghai People’s Press, 2007, p. 358-377.
[2] Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press
Feminist Series, Crossing Press, 2007, p. 53.
[3] Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory,
p.4-5. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
[4] Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia
University Press, 2010.
[5] Tolmie, Jane, editor. Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art. University
Press of Mississippi, 2013.
[6] Tolmie, Jane, editor. “Introduction.” Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic
Art. University Press of Mississippi, 2013, p. viii
[7] Mazzucchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. Pantheon, 2009.
[8] Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Mariner Books, 2007
[9] Schlick, Yaël. “What Is an Experience?” In Jane Tolmie, ed., Drawing from Life: Memory
and Subjectivity in Comic Art. University Press of Mississippi, 2013, p. 31-32.

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