ABSTRACT
The fact that there are a growing number of independent graphic narratives where food plays a central role is closely related to the rise of autobiographical comics internationally (Gravett 2013), but overwhelmingly in the United States of America (USA), where it has been in the making since the 1960s, when the underground comics movement fostered the creation of graphic narratives for adults, against the model established by mainstream publishers such as Marvel or DC (Sabin 1996). Independent comics have, since then, become increasingly successful, even though they may not benefit from the same level of cinematic attention lavished on superhero comics. The subject matter of comics for adults may thus fall into one of two broad categories, fictional and autobiographical. In the USA, the first full-length autobiographical narratives in comic book form were published in the early 1970s, and graphic life writing now includes a wide variety of sub-genres and topics. While some studies focus on the genre as a whole (Chaney 2011; El Refaie 2012; Precup 2013; Mickwitz 2015), others address more specific topics, such as the representation of childhood in autobiographical comics by female cartoonists (Chute 2010), the depiction of disaster in non-fiction comics (Chute 2016), and the contribution of Jewish American cartoonists to the graphic memoir (Oksman 2016). Fictional comics have also benefited from close critical attention in monographs and edited collections that either focus on key topics such as the graphic gothic (Round 2014), representations of multiculturalism (Ayaka and Hague 2015), and monsters and marginality (Bukatman 2016). Both autobiographical and fictional comics are closely studied by theoreticians who ponder specifically what the medium of comics can bring to storytelling, particularly in conjunction with other verbal-visual narratives such as film (Gardner 2012) and photography (Pedri and Petit 2013), but also the specific vocabulary of comics (Postema 2013; Cohn 2013).
