Zoe Thorogood and the Two-World Paradoxes of Graphic Memoir

First, a thank you to John Cunnally for inviting me to submit a paper proposal to his College Art Association Conference panel, “In Memoriam Trina Robbins: New Research in the History of Women Cartoonists,” which is scheduled Saturday, February 15, 11:00 AM at New York Hilton Midtown. I admit the location was especially tempting, since it means I can visit my son (who lives in Brooklyn) while there, and visit my daughter (who lives in Philadelphia) on my way driving back and forth from Virginia.

I met Trina Robbins at a comics conference at the University of Florida back in 2013, and I have two of her books on my shelves next to my desk where I’m typing this, so I also admired the call for papers:

“With the passing of Trina Robbins (1938-2024) we have lost not only an outstanding artist, writer and editor of comic strips and comic books by, for, and about women, but a prolific historian and curator, author of a dozen books and catalogues on that subject, from Women and the Comics (1985) to Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age (2020). Signing herself just “Trina,” Robbins was the most productive of the ardent feminists who contributed to the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 70s, and a founder of the comics anthology Wimmen’s Comix which ran from 1972-1992. In remembrance of comics creator and feminist historian Trina Robbins, this session focuses on new scholarship about the struggles and achievements (often forgotten or misunderstood) of women, past and present, in the creation and production of comic strips, comic books and graphic novels.”

I was most interested in the “present” part and thought Zoe Thorogood would be an especially strong comics creator worth celebrating. So I submitted this abstract:

“Zoe Thorogood’s 2023 “auto-bio-graphic novel” It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth not only documents Thorogood’s personal and professional struggles and achievements as an emerging comics artist and winner of the 2023 Eisner’s “Most Promising Newcomer” award, it provides fundamental lessons in the “metanarrative” qualities of graphic memoirs specifically and the comics form broadly. From her norm-breaking approach of drawing multiple interacting self-representations that reference disparate corners of visual media, to her use of her personal Instagram feed to present the novel as an evolving and interactive work-in-progress produced in real-time, Thorogood challenges the traditional confines of comics as a publishing medium and as a form of artistic self-expression. The presentation will draw from Michael Chaney’s Reading Lessons in Seeing to analyze Thorogood’s multiple “I-cons,” as well as comics scholarship on metafiction, including essays by Roy Cook, Thomas Inge, and Orion Kidder, to construct a unified theory of metacomics that Thorogood both illustrates and augments. In prose memoirs, meta elements are either absent or are invisibly redundant because of the nature of nonfiction understands author and reader to exist within the same world. Because comics are multimodal and memoirists represent themselves both verbally and visually, the form reveals gaps between actual authors and the partial fictions of their nominally nonfictional self-representations. While many comics artists obscure these conceptual gaps, Thorogood exploits them to unique effects that push the comics medium into new twenty-first century terrain.”

As seems inevitable, my paper has evolved a lot since that initial description, but it’s still in the same ballpark. I’m in the process of expanding it into a publishable essay, but I think the panel slides cover the core ideas. Or at least I think they could be interesting to look at even without my voice droning in the background.