ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to approach biography as a hybrid transtextual genre, focusing specifically on “Joycean biographics” that are discussed as an example of transmedia world-building. While the analysis centres on two graphic narratives, Alfonso Zapico’s James Joyce, Portrait of a Dubliner (2012) and Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (2012), it also draws on other transmedia adaptations of Joyce’s life in existing literary biographies, biofiction, and biopics. The discussion of transtextual layerings as central to biography’s worldmaking is framed through the aesthetic, epistemological, affective, ethical, and political shifts that occur in biographical adaptations as they travel across media and historical contexts. In particular, gender politics is put under scrutiny in Zapico’s and the Talbots’ comics, revealing significant contrasts in their respective constructions of masculinity and femininity. The chapter interrogates the choices of visual and textual strategies in both graphic biographies in terms of their compatibility with biography’s manifold goals of historical-literary commemoration, debunking, humanizing, romanticizing, commercialization, and entertainment.
