This book places the larger autobiographical projects of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other for the first time, drawing on a range of previously unanalyzed works. It argues that the structurally layered, word-and-image form of comics is particularly well-suited to negotiate complex filial inheritances and manage identity in the face of transgenerational trauma. Each chapter is organized around a different formal trope that highlights an aspect of the visual language of comics and its material processes: boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs. From Jewishness to gender, from high modernism to lesbian feminist communities, Filial Linesshows how the comics form is capacious enough to accommodate the push–pull of inheritance and invention, enabling both creators to negotiate their place in (or beyond) various lines of familial, cultural, and artistic descent. Integrating formalist and psychoanalytic frameworks, and parsing alignments and differences with different forms of practice, the book situates today’s graphic memoir canon as an unexpected outpost – and expansion – of avant-garde formalism long after the modernist moment of form.