Emmy Waldman, "Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Yeah, we've both mentioned now that the book is not organized in terms of here's Spiegelman, you know, chapter one, here's Bechdel, chapter two.

It's organized somewhat differently.

So now that we've clarified that that's, you know, it might be somewhat unexpected for readers.

How is it organized? What kinds of formal tropes are we looking at to kind of answer these questions you've raised? Yeah.

So

there are five formal tropes or metaphors or figures.

I spent a long time trying to figure out what exactly to call them.

The best metaphor for the metaphor that I could think of was a sort of theatrical trope uh sorry theatrical troop um of these five sort of characters that come on stage and do their bit um as sort of organizing um principles for for the chapters um and so the the five are and actually there are six if you count the epilogue but um The five that are specific to Spiegelman and Bechtel are boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs.

And they're not quite, although they sort of might be tethered to elements of the comic's grammar.

So, for example, in the parlance of cartooning, a box is what you might call a panel, which the individual frame that makes up the strip.

Similarly in Tic-Tac-Toe, the sort of most immediate like hit you over the head analogy would be between the Tic-Tac-Toe game and the comics grid, especially given that the sort of standard page grid is this nine panel three by three as in Tic-Tac-Toe.

But especially as you start moving through the book, it becomes less about elements on the page and more about sort of procedures of creating.

or the sort of processes of formation that go into the finished page.

So with mirrors, I'm thinking more about the sort of long August history of mimesis and what that might entail for a graphic memoirist.

So less mirrors than mirroring as a sort of verbal thing.

And then in webs, I'm thinking about weaving and the sort of technique of creating a graphic memoir and also sort of processes of intertextuality as well.

Okay, so probably more than we can fully cover in a conversation, but that definitely gives people, I think, a sense of what the book covers, and I'm sure we'll talk about at least some of them in more detail later.

Now, I do, however, want to do one other kind of foundational part of our conversation, which is putting together, I suppose, the two things you've told us so far, right? Your interest in Spiegelman and Bechdel and your interest in these ways of thinking about comics.

Because realistically, if we had kind of just taken out the first part of your answer, you hadn't talked about Spiegel and Rebecca yet, and just told us about the metaphors you've just described, one could, and maybe other people will, apply that way of thinking to all sorts of different comics.

Obviously, you're interested in these particular authors for this project, but can we put those together? Why look at those ways of thinking with these authors especially?

Yeah, so there are many reasons to put Spiegelman and Bechtel together.

I think you're asking a way more interesting question, which is why these formal figures with this sort of duo of artists.

One thing to say is that the sort of... formally playful method that I've developed for reading these works is not a sort of solitary, like me applying this to the text because I felt moved to do so only.

Each figure has its origins in the The imaginary of one or the other or sometimes both of the cartoonists.

So thinking about Boxes was me sort of like continuing this decades-long riffing that Spiegelman has done on Boxes and comics as Boxes.