Mother’s Day Reading: Great Moms in Graphic Books
Happy Mother's Day! As a tribute to all moms everywhere, and for all you TCAF-goers out there, I offer you these great graphic narratives about mothers and motherhood:
The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom
In this charming graphic memoir, Katherine Arnoldi shares her experience of becoming a mom at age 17 in a working class town, with little support from her family, and a determination to get a college education. Although the subject matter is serious and often heartbreaking – her pregnacy is the result of rape, she is abandoned by her sister and mother, and exploited in her workplace – the black and white illustrations are sweet and even cheerful, and her message is ultimately a positive one for teen moms everywhere.
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
Alison Bechdel's mother is an avid reader and amateur actor, but also a remote figure who is unhappily married to a closeted gay man, and who stops kissing her daughter good night at the age of seven. In this emotionally honest and visually captivating graphic memoir – the sequel
to Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic – Bechdel draws on psychoanalytic ideas and literary works to explore her fraught relationship with her mother, as well as her own development as an artist.
While looking through her paren'ts' dresser drawer, Catherine Margeret Flaherty (a stand-in for author Catherine Doherty) discovers her own adoption papers. So begins her search for her birth mother, told here in a wordless graphic narrative that earned her a nomination for the 2001 Eisner Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition.
Brian Fies' graphic memoir tells the story of his mother's life-altering cancer diagnosis and its effect on his mom as well as the entire family. Mom's Cancer was originally published online in serial format for which it won'the 2005 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic.
This debut graphic novel tells the story of a father and son struggling to come to terms with the death of the family's mother. Told mostly from the perspective of the seven-year old son, this is a very sad story about grief, loss, and mental illness, very beautifully told. If you love Jimmy Corrigan or Wes Anderson, you are sure to be a fan of Paul Hornschemeier.
In simple black and white illustrations and clear, direct prose, Sarah Leavitt recounts the story of her mother's transformation from a sharp, outspoken, and vibrant woman to a forgetful and fearful shadow of her formal self, suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Tangles was nominated for the 2010 Writer's Trust Award, the first graphic narrative to be a finalist in that category.
Zahra's Paradise is the fictionalized version of real-life events: a mother's determined search for her son, a young protestor who disappears following the 2009 elections in Iran. Originally published anonymously online, Zahra's Paradise was nominated for the 2011 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. You can read an excerpt here.
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