Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics

Frederick Byrn Køhlert’s monograph on autobiographical comics argues that ‘the form’s self-reflective engagement with autobiographical representations […] might matter politically, especially for people on the social and cultural margins’. He thus places his work explicitly in a tradition of scholarship that frames comics autobiography as a vehicle through which marginalised voices can be given a platform, developing works such as Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women and standing alongside more recent scholarship such as Elisabeth El Refaie’s Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives. To this end, his opening description of the history of comics autobiography emphasises its origins in independent publishing, and its historical position as a counterweight to the types of heteronormative power fantasies narratives constitutive of its most popular genres.

The Spirit of Abolition

In the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, the Hebrew prophet exhorts the reader to transcend rote ritualism and engage directly in service to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed. In exhorting his allies to do likewise, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison drew on this language frequently, most canonically in his 1833 “Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention” and his 1859 “Eulogy for John Brown.” In the generation in between, something extraordinary happened: the goal of ending slavery completely lurched from the cultural margins to the center. Inspired by this precedent, this chapter explores some of the extraordinary religious organizing taking place in the trenches under the banner of prison abolition, from Protestants and Catholics, to Muslims and Jews, to those who are spiritual but not religious.