ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on graphic biography as a distinct comics life writing genre. Drawing on Leigh Gilmore’s method of studying limit cases that acknowledge yet exceed the conventions of a genre, I ask how best to study experimental, innovative graphic biographies that explore the visual-verbal possibilities of representing famous lives in a popular form. The central issues of genre, paratexts, style and affect, and remediation are at the core of the chapter’s proposal to locate a research methodology for graphic biography at the intersections of literary, film, comics, and life writing studies.