Part of It: Comics and Confessions

"Ariel Schrag, who’s now in her late thirties, started doing autobiographical comics about her life when she was in high school. She did a separate comic book series for each year of high school; they have separate names and series names like Awkward and Definition and Potential. She’s very good, though not as prolific these days, so it’s so exciting to have a new autobiographical work from her. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book has an ingenious structure. It flows year by year through her young life, through collected chronologically-ordered autobiographical stories each labelled with a title, a year and an age. The first story is called “Jilly,” which is the name of a childhood friend. Unlike Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who weaves in and out of fantastical stories, we can follow this protagonist’s development, including her attempts as a young person in middle school to fit in, and then her coming out and then her attempts as an older person to fit into different kinds of social scenes. The dominance of digital and internet and online everything in our lives has made us all more sophisticated about the interplay between words and the images that inundate us, the logos, graphics and photographs. But there is something specific to the simplicity and intimacy of the dynamics between drawing and words that makes comics more relevant today. I feel like all of the work that I chose exploits that intimacy in different ways."