Framing and Unframing Grief in Leela Corman's Autobiographical Comics

• In Event: Jewish Women and Autobiographical Acts

Abstract

Cartoonist, illustrator, and educator Leela Corman established her reputation with graphic novels (Queen's Day, 1999; Subway Series, 2002; and Unterzakhn, 2012) focused on telling stories about the everyday lives of fictional contemporary and historical women. More recently, following a personal tragedy, she began publishing short non-fictional pieces addressing her experiences as a grieving mother and granddaughter in relation to communal traumatic events, particularly the Holocaust. In her 2013 comics essay, "Yahrzeit," originally published in Tablet, for instance, Corman visually and verbally connects her grandfather's story of being a survivor with her own grief in the wake of her daughter's death. In a frameless image depicting her alter-ego walking around an inky black, curved road--a path emerging from the spindly opening of a tunnel--she carries a featureless and skeletal figure on her back. The written text alongside the image too connects her burdens, and her journey, with his. "I have thought of him often over the years," the narrative reads. "How he carried his losses. I draw strength from him."

In this presentation, I will examine Corman's depictions of the ways personal and communal grief inevitably intersect, and the limitations of such crossovers. I will discuss not only the formal and narrative aspects of the individual essays she has recently published, that bring together such explorations of mourning, grief, absence, and loss, but I will also look at the publishing history of the essays and the ways that the platforms in which they are presented ultimately shape the messages conveyed. In the end, I am invested in exploring, via Corman's autobiographical comics, the broader question of whether one can ever be anything but alone in her grief.

Author

• Tahneer Oksman, Marymount Manhattan College