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These two extraordinary graphic memoirs, Stitches, by David Small, and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, by Alison Bechdel, are about the artist coming of age while trying to understand the forces that shape his or her life and art. In both novels psychoanalysis figures as a lifesaving intervention, portrayed with seriousness rare in popular literature, including love and gratitude to the analysts who figure as characters in the stories. Quite different from each other in style, these are intelligent graphic novels for adults that take psychic development as their main theme. Both are superb examples of the sophisticated narrative possible in this form.
The graphic novel lends itself to representing subjective psychic experience. Like film, it has the advantage of the visual form for depicting fantasy, with the affordances of compositional techniques including framing, sequencing, cutting, and zoom. The ability to convey facial expression and body posture allows for efficient and nuanced communication of affect. In addition, the graphic novel has the benefit of using words in ways that are not possible in film. As in a dream, when there is text in a graphic novel, words are also “things,” and this concreteness opens more possibilities for blending language with the visual image. Freud (1900), in his discussion of the representation of logical relations in dreams, harks back to the prototype for the graphic novel: “In ancient paintings small labels were hung from the mouths of the persons