Purdue University Press spoke with author Cynthia Laborde about her new book Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge, a French-language book published as the newest volume in our Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures series.
Q: Could you give a brief description of your book?
My book focuses on the representation of health, illness, and the medical world in autobiographical comics written by French, Belgium, and French speaking Swiss authors. In these works of non-fiction, I was particularly interested in exploring how artists chose to express abstract notions such as pain. How does one draw feelings? Comic books creators have the unique talent to use both words and images, which makes their work incredibly rich. As these authors mostly focus on themselves, the notions of identity and intimacy are also embedded in their work about their health. Very much like your mind and your body work together -when one isn’t doing well, the other generally isn’t doing well either; this book also examined how words and images work together to deliver powerful stories.
Q: What is the goal of your book? What motivated you to write it?
I have always been interested in literature, life stories, as well as psychology. The very root of my desire to focus my research on autobiographical graphic novels came from seeing the animated movie “Persepolis”, which is an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by Marjane Satrapi. That’s really when I learned that there was so much more to comic books than superheroes. As a medium, they are still too often categorized as being for children. With my book I wanted to add to the growing body of research proving that it is far from being the case, that comic books are able to tackle on any topics and do so with incredible depth.
Q: What are a few things that are being studied for the first time in this book?
Many of the artists I discuss in this book have never been studied academically. A couple of them are well-known by comics scholars, but the majority are not. Some of that is due to their work not being always translated in other languages, or their work being self-published on a small scale. I spent many hours in France roaming specialized bookshops and libraries, as well as searching on the internet authors’ pages or blogs, to find books to integrate to my corpus. Additionally, a lot of the previous studies that have been done on adjacent topics do not focus on French comics in particular. Others don’t focus on autobiographical works, and include fiction. The autobiographical aspect for me was really important as a central notion in my book is the notion of intimacy- how much authors’ reveal and how much they withhold in works where they portrait themselves emotionally, and also sometimes physically, naked.
Q: Is there anything that shocked or surprised you while working on this project?
First, I’ll never stopped being amazed by the authors’ creativity. While they have a lot of things in common because culturally there are many inconscient norms on how to represent certain things a certain way, they also all have their own perspective, which I break down in this book. Second, while these works are incredibly private, and pertain to someone’s unique story, they also have this astonishing ability to make readers relate to them. We have all experienced the feelings that they portrait, and health is something that touches us, as well as everyone around us. What is highlighted in my book is all the ways in which they are able to achieve this relatability, able to convey something universal through something deeply personal.
You can get 30% off Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering from our website and using the code PURDUE30 at checkout.