Stranger than Fiction: Comics and Cartoons About Real Life

By Emmba K. Shibley

If you’ve ever sat at a desk with a piece of paper in front of you, chances are you’ve spent a moment (…or two) doodling in the margins. After all, it can be great fun to caricature an annoying colleague or doodle out a daydream, and doing so is in our DNA: humans have been documenting true events through visual art for 17000 years, dating all the way back to scenes of hunting triumphs painted on cave walls (Duncan et al 2016).

But what if making cartoons based on your own life was your profession?

For some comic artists, it is. Autobiographical comics, nicknamed autobios by the genre’s creators and fans, can range from daily or even hourly journal-like cartoons to hefty tomes of graphic memoir that tell the story of an entire lifetime.