We might call this strategy, then, authentication through artifice, or more simply, ironic authentication: the implicit reinforcement of truth claims through their explicit rejection…, paradoxically, glorify the self through a form of self-abnegation – that is, through the very denial of an irreducible, unified identity, one that cannot be falsified through artistic representation. This irony comes into sharper focus if we invoke Merle Brown’s distinction between the fictive and the fictitious: a story may be fictive, yet truthful, insofar as it “implies as part of itself the art of its making ” in contrast, a story (autobiographical or otherwise) that does not acknowledge its own making is merely fictitious… Crumb, Clowes, and Hernandez, finally, do not disallow autobiography as such, but ironically reaffirm its power by demanding recognition of its implicit assumptions. Yet these pieces still demand and play on the reader’s trust: they still purport to tell truths. They carry us to the vanishing point where imagination and truth collide. If autobiographical comics take as their starting point a polemical assertion of truth over fantasy, then these comics serve to reassert the fantastic, distorting power of the artist’s craft and vision. Hatfield concludes that the modality linking these disparate representations of non/fictional selves is irony: This elegant and theoretically savvy series of readings culminates in an examination of Gilbert Hernandez’s parodic “My Love Book,” which “teases the reader with a disjointed series of confessional vignettes, between which his visual personae shift so radically that we can confirm their common identity only through the repetition of certain motifs of in dialog and action” and which ends with an ironic suicide that “adverts to the limitations of autobiography” and “muddies its own assertion of truth.” Crumb in order to assert that the seemingly unanchored “fictitiousness” of Clowes’ perspective actually is a “truthful” representation of the plasticity of identity. He then opposes this naturalism to the fantasy mode typically associated with “mainstream” comics, outlining the transformative impact Pekar’s naturalism had on the scope of the “comic book hero.” He next tackles the far more theoretically ambivalent territory of autobiographical subjectivity, beginning by emphasizing the ways in which comics resonate and amplify autobiography’s inability (identified and emphasized by Autobiography Studies in literature) to escape the inherently fictive attributes of narrative subjectivity: “comics pose an immediate and obvious challenge to the idea of non-fiction.” Dan Clowes and the heightened formalist self-awareness in Just Another Day is read first, for insight into how the unavoidable fictitiousness of cartoon selves “distills and mocks Pekar’s ethic of fidelity to mundane truths,” then linked to R. The concept is worked out in the comics of male cartoonists: Hatfield first offers a compelling account of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, claiming it as the origin point of a comics tradition of realist-naturalist autobiography (which he just calls realist). I ask that question provocatively, but sincerely. How useful is Charles Hatfield’s notion of “ironic authentication” for understanding the autobiographies of women cartoonists?
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