"When you learn you’re not alone in a secret you’ve kept for so long, you want to let others know they don’t need to hold those secrets either."

"Kind of like how my body image and perception of self have changed, my self-portraits have evolved over the past decade and I feel like the “me” I draw now is the right “me.”  I introduce the book with a narrative disclaimer that I was much more comfortable drawing myself than I was going out and being myself, and that I also wanted to represent myself “accurately” in case the reader judges me."

"many comics artists’ self-portraits are deliberately ironic and self-deprecatory, with some comics creators even reverting to overt caricature. Such cartoon drawings can, after all, sometimes reflect the authentic self more successfully than a photograph or a highly realistic portrait ever could"

"Another good example of ‘deliberate artlessness’ is Lynda Barry’s semi-autobiographical One! Hundred! Demons! (2002). Most of the full-colour pages in the book consist of just two square panels with vivid, quirky drawings and text boxes containing the narrative commentary, handwritten in large capital letters"

"Similarly, Linthout’s (2009) autobiographical comic about a man trying to come to terms with his son’s suicide uses intentionally unpolished pencil drawings, in which all the original sketch lines are still clearly visible beneath the darker outlines of the final drawings. This suggests a grasp of reality that is terribly vulnerable and constantly threatening to dissolve completely, and yet the story feels truthful in terms of the emotional realities it conveys."

"As Carney (2008: 196) rightly observes, many ‘alternative’ comics artists ‘infuse their work with a sense of the handmade and personal that deliberately evokes the “subartistic” and “amateurish” as a means of endowing an aura of the authentic and personal to the image and to the narrative voice of the comic.’"

• Deliberate Artlessness

to recalibrate the relationship between reader and autobiographer." p.13

"As Kylie Cardell has

argued, “comics literally enable new ways of seeing, new ways of being seen,

and new ways of representing the self”" p.13

"What means of self-representation does the medium of comics offer and what can it tell us about identity construction in life writing in general?"

"Nonetheless, the distinction can be fruitfully used to discuss how authors engage with different positions of the autobiographical self, often revealing their attitude to the depicted past, such as whether they lay emphasis on a sense of self-continuity or, on the contrary, a sense of dissociation from or inaccessibility of the I-then."

"While these three roles tend to be clearly distinguishable in the case of fictional texts, the boundaries between them become more blurred when we are dealing with autobiographical works." p.53

"“On the outside, we look like me, but we draw how the body and brain feels at the moment” p. 63-64

"When mirrors are used in self-portraits, they can form a potent visual metaphor for the ambiguity involved in seeing something that both is and is not “me,” as well as for our inability to pin down our fluctuating sense of self:" p.66