Absent Eyes, Bodily Trauma, and the Perils of Seeing in David Small's Stitches

David Small describes his graphic memoir Stitches (2009) as a book that “started as therapy” (Allen, 2009). An award-winning children's book author and illustrator, Small departs from his usual juvenile audience with Stitches, speaking instead to teens and adults as he renders into image the chronicle of his abusive childhood. In the vein of Maus , Persepolis , and Fun Home —graphic autobiographies that chronicle their authors' traumatic pasts—Stitches also uses graphic form both to invoke a medium culturally associated with innocuous childhood pastimes, highlighting the young protagonist's perspective, and to subvert our understanding of “comics” by using them to tell a deeply emotional and terrifying story.

Traditionally overlooked by literary critics, graphic novels have recently begun to garner interest as sites of critical interpretive possibility. Due to the dual mediums of text and image that they utilize, any reading of a graphic novel must take the interplay of words and pictures into account. Of course, other art forms have long dealt with the intersection of words and images. In her seminal book on theater and art, director Anne Bogart writes about the relationship between words and pictures on the stage. Advocating that theater artists move past clichés, Bogart emphasizes the importance of creating stage images that contrast with the dialogue. The juxtaposition of images and words, Bogart asserts, creates a tension that truthfully expresses the contradictions inherent in life: “Opposition, or dialectic,