{"id":6337,"date":"2010-10-11T09:00:51","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T13:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=6337"},"modified":"2010-10-11T09:00:51","modified_gmt":"2010-10-11T13:00:51","slug":"vanessa-davis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=6337","title":{"rendered":"Vanessa Davis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019ve really been looking forward to Vanessa Davis\u2019s new book, Make Me a Woman<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019m a great admirer of Davis\u2019s zaftig ladies and of the minimum of lines she uses to describe them\u2014round, undulating, bumpy, and squiggly, but always lively. The image blown up on the cover is a great example: The long, rubbery curve of the figure\u2019s leg, foot, and arms, the off-kilter half-moon toenails. The tiny smudges of red polish outside the lines, which signifies her imperfect painting technique, is splendid. I also love her characters\u2019 upturned noses, bubble mouths, and the occasional double chin. She\u2019s generous in the way she draws people, not just in size (not everyone is voluptuous) but also in breadth. These autobiographical comics\u2014divided between published strips and pencil drawings from her daily diary\u2014are often as much about her as everyone around her.<\/p>\n

Wimmin\u2019s Comix <\/em>debuted in 1972 as a forum for women cartoonists to publish work that dealt with issues they were interested in and to represent themselves in more realistic terms, and much of this work took the form of autobiography. The popular lineage of these diaristic narratives can be traced to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diaries kept by women as a way to be involved in the construction of literature and to depict their daily lives in relation to the world. But it wasn\u2019t until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and artist\/writers like Marie Bashkirtseff and Ana\u00efs Nin, that diaries changed from factual records to a place where anything could be\u2014and was\u2014said; these more recent versions were revelatory of women\u2019s psyches, a means of awareness and therapy. Davis, however, has found a balance between observation and confession in her autobiographic approach to comics.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Hers isn\u2019t autobio as an event-driven narrative (Alison Bechdel\u2019s Fun Home<\/em>, David B.\u2019s Epileptic<\/em>, David\"\"<\/a> Small\u2019s Stitches<\/em>) or as scathing self-analysis (Ivan Brunetti\u2019s Schizo<\/em>, Joe Matt\u2019s Spent<\/em>). Instead, Davis probes life\u2019s mundanities over a long period of time. Harvey Pekar is the exemplar of this mode: quotidian obsessions, annoyances, and joys writ large over the course of many years\u2019 worth of work\u2014the \u201cautobiography written as it\u2019s happening,\u201d as he described American Splendor<\/em>. Bechdel did it, too, with Dykes to Watch Out For<\/em>. And Davis\u2019s comics hew more closely to Bechdel\u2019s: There\u2019s a buoyancy to their stories, and the sense that a span of time, presented either as stretches of many years or as excerpts, leavens the more terrible events that life brings. (A fiction equivalent is Love and Rockets<\/em>.) It\u2019s a kind of realism that I think only long-term comics narratives can create.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve really been looking forward to Vanessa Davis\u2019s new book, Make Me a Woman. I\u2019m a great admirer of Davis\u2019s zaftig ladies and of the minimum of lines she uses to describe them\u2014round, undulating, bumpy, and squiggly, but always lively. The image blown up on the cover is a great example: The long, rubbery curve of the figure\u2019s leg, foot, and arms, the off-kilter half-moon toenails. The tiny smudges of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[47,551,813,1343],"class_list":["post-6337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-bechdel","tag-pekar","tag-love-and-rockets","tag-vanessa-davis"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}