Following the appearance of autobiography as one of the comic form's dominant non-superhero genres over the last few decades, several critical studies have been published, including Elisabeth El Refaie's Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012) and Michael A. Chaney's Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel (2016). While these and others have made valuable contributions to the scholarship surrounding this dynamic and fast-evolving corner of contemporary comics, no single volume has so far provided a complete overview of what is by now a mature field in terms of both primary texts and secondary criticism.

Andrew J. Kunka's Autobiographical Comics, which is part of Bloomsbury's new Comics Studies series, arrives to fill this gap. In comprehensive and fully up-to-date sections detailing issues of definition, history, critical questions, social and cultural impact, and an overview and discussion of key texts, Kunka assumes the centrality of autobiographical comics both to the form itself and to comics studies as an emerging academic field. Organized to allow the reader to either take in the volume as a whole or dip into individual chapters or sections, all of which are copiously cross-referenced to other parts of the book, Autobiographical Comics works both as a valuable overview for scholars already working in the field and as an entry point for students and general readers curious to learn more about the genre. This is not least because of Kunka's clear and accessible writing style, even when discussing complex theoretical concepts such as Lacan's mirror stage as it relates to the frequent use of mise en abyme in autobiographical comics. Throughout the book, Kunka takes his time to thoroughly unpack and explain the many different historical considerations and scholarly approaches covered, and the book is a pleasure to read from beginning to end.

In the introduction, subtitled “What Are Autobiographical Comics?”, Kunka outlines the existing scholarship on the genre, including questions of definition, the many different theoretical approaches, concerns about cultural status, and the stakes involved for both artists and readers. Here Kunka also carefully explains the differences in terminology that often confound both comics studies and life-writing studies, such as the differences between a comic book and a graphic novel, and between autobiography and memoir. The next section, on “The History of Autobiographical Comics,” is the book's most revelatory, as Kunka rejects the standard narrative that the genre began with the publication of Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary in 1972. Looking instead to several examples of what he terms “proto-autobiographical comics” from as far back as the early twentieth century, Kunka firmly establishes a long-standing tradition for autobiography in the form that should inspire scholars to revise existing histories and look beyond 1970s underground comix and the work explicitly inspired by them in future discussions of the genre.

The next section of the book, on the “Critical Questions” concerning autobiographical comics, discusses such theoretical approaches to the study of the genre as narrative focalization, ocularization, the difference between the narrating and the narrated “I” in comics, Philippe Lejeune's concept of the “autobiographical pact,” and the use of photography as a (sometimes) legitimizing technique. Here as elsewhere, Kunka uses examples to illustrate the many different concepts covered, including a welcome and very fine reading of Chester Brown's seminal short story “Showing Helder,” which encapsulates many of the central concerns of the genre, including questions of truth and authenticity. Next up is a section on “Social and Cultural Impact,” which covers the genre's capacity for personal expressions of trauma, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, among other issues, as well as “graphic medicine,” which has in recent years appeared as an especially dynamic area. The chapter also has a long-overdue discussion of Raina Telgemeier, whose phenomenally successful comics have so far been all but ignored by scholars. Finally, the book includes a section with lengthy discussions of “Key Texts” and their impact, as well as a series of valuable appendices, including a roundtable discussion between several prominent autobiographical cartoonists, an interview with comics artist Jennifer Hayden, a few short meta-comics addressing various formal aspects of the form, a glossary, and a list of both primary and secondary resources to inspire further reading and research.

To include all this in one relatively slim volume, and to present it in a clear and accessible style, is a major feat of scholarship. Kunka's book is an impressive work of comprehensive synthesis that provides what is easily the best introduction to autobiographical comics and their field of study so far, and it is likely to remain the authoritative standard volume for quite some time.