This is the first book to place the autobiographical projects of canonical comics authors Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other, focusing on new and neglected works (and with an epilogue on the Pulitzer Prize-winning tour-de-force debut of Tessa Hulls). The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes-boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs-through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Built around rich close readings, it shows what makes the comics form particularly suited to negotiate complex familial and creative inheritances and manage layered, relational identities. Interweaving accounts of Jewish identity, female embodiment, legacies of modernism, and feminist practice, the book traces how contemporary graphic memoirists visually work and rework their filiations and affiliations through form, situating the medium as a privileged site and staging ground for arguments about the enabling possibilities of form now.

‘Emmy Waldman is hands-down brilliant. It is a rare pleasure to read such a work of scholarship: surprising, elegant, lively, conceptually rich. Filial Lines bursts with knowledge and provocative turns, inviting the reader along a fascinating journey into form, aesthetics, and relationality.’

Hillary Chute - author of Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere

‘Emmy Waldman’s Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form is a book as packed with insight and intelligence as it is a pleasure to read. Drawing from a range of sources and methodologies-from psychoanalysis and narratology to author interviews and material considerations-Waldman richly analyses each of the texts she writes about, yielding surprising insights at every turn. Filial Lines is an invaluable prototype for thinking about the relational, in comics and beyond.’

Tahneer Oksman - author of ‘How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?’: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

Filial Lines is a masterpiece of comics scholarship. Waldman reinterprets the most fundamental building block of sequential art--the drawn line and its many permutations on the page--as a figure that both connects and distinguishes generations across time and space. Waldman shows how, in the hands of two comics pioneers, seemingly childlike and playful figures of classic cartooning become potent metaphors for the ways that children confront, make sense of, and emotionally integrate the complex familial relationships that shape their lived experience. Thus, Waldman identifies comics as a potent creative tool for the difficult but worthwhile work of healing from familial trauma, while also literally and figuratively redrawing the lines of affiliation, kinship, love, and communion. In a world increasingly beset by collective loneliness and cultural alienation, what greater imaginative gift could one ask for?

Ramzi Fawaz - author of Queer Forms (2022) and The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016)

Emmy Waldman's Filial Lines sheds new light on two of the most celebrated cartoonists, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel, moving beyond their known comics to deeply analyze the lesser-known parts of their oeuvres and examine how they deploy the comics form to grapple with autobiography. In her epilogue, she considers how contemporary artist Tessa Hulls contributes new stylistic forms in this tradition. Waldman's seriously innovative and deeply playful study invents new modes of comics analysis in its interdisciplinary approach and invites readers to think alongside her about the multifarious ways that comics fit into and participate in cultural history.

Margaret Galvan - author of In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s