Book Review - Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form

reviewed by Marie Dücker, Assistant Professor (University of Graz)

Emmy Waldman. Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Graphic Narratives), 2026. 260 pp. ISBN: 978-1-009-54883-0 (Hardback). https://www.cambridge.org/9781009548830

Filial Lines opens with two passages that, as Emmy Waldman writes, stayed with her throughout the writing of this book: the “scribble game” at the start of Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!*, in which mother and son take turns making random marks for the other to transform into a recognizable picture; and the moment in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in which Bechdel’s father hands her a funeral director’s wall calendar to write in, his own neat script already filling the first line. Both scenes, Waldman observes, make “lines on paper”—whether figurative or autobiographical—a relational rather than a solitary act. Both are also grimly shadowed by the suicide of the parent involved. This pairing of opening images is a canny and affecting way into the book’s central argument: that the comics form is uniquely suited to the visual working and reworking of familial inheritance, trauma, and creative filiation.

The book is organized into two main parts and an epilogue. Part I traverses five decades of Spiegelman’s output—from his underground Arcade strips to his post-Maus retrospective projects and his New Yorker work—through three formal tropes derived from comics’ own visual grammar: boxes, spirals, and tic-tac-toe. Chapter 1 reads Maus as a Jewish text in formal as well as thematic terms, tracing congruences between Spiegelman’s panel-boxes, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the practice of Midrash. Chapter 2 turns to Breakdowns and the figure of the spiral, arguing, via Edward Said’s theory of the dialectic between filiation and affiliation, that the filial ghosts Spiegelman cannot quite exorcise are precisely what authorize his modernist ambitions. Chapter 3 excavates a previously underexamined autobiographical character, “OXO,” and reads Spiegelman’s one-page New Yorker piece “Lost” (2016) as a return to the unresolved questions of Maus through the lens of a children’s game. Part II turns to Bechdel’s lesser-discussed memoirs, Are You My Mother? (2012) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), through two further formal figures: mirrors (as a way into mimesis, the mother-daughter bond, and the question of whether imitation can be enabling rather than merely replicative) and webs (as a figure for the bodily, material work of putting lines on paper, and for the possibilities of queer kinship and feminist community). An epilogue on Tessa Hulls’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Feeding Ghosts (2024) extends the book’s arguments to a new generation of graphic memoirists, proposing the braided river as a final formal figure for comics' negotiation of heterogeneous, transnational, and matrilineal histories.

What distinguishes Filial Lines from other scholarly monographs on Spiegelman and Bechdel, which has become a crowded field, is the sophisticated and elevated playfulness of Waldman’s formal methodology. Waldman is explicit that she does not offer her five figures (boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, webs) as a strict taxonomy of the comics form, but rather as a “theatrical ensemble”: a cast of metaphors that help us encounter these works rather than simply classify them. This is a productive and intellectually honest distinction, and one that allows Waldman to bring psychoanalytic, feminist, and formalist frameworks to bear without forcing them into a false coherence. Her prose is consistently clear and vivid, and her close readings—whether of a single panel, a page layout, or the weight of a recurring motif—are among the sharpest I have read about in recent comics scholarship. The chapter on tic-tac-toe is especially pleasurable, yoking the grid of the gameboard to the grid of the comics page and using the mobile interplay of X and O to read the complexities of inherited trauma in Spiegelman’s largely neglected short work.

The book also makes a convincing case for rebalancing the scholarly attention devoted to Spiegelman and Bechdel’s most celebrated works. With only Maus and Fun Home to go on, Waldman notes, one might conclude that both cartoonists primarily come to voice through their fathers. Filial Lines demonstrates, by attending carefully to the fuller arc of each artist’s career, that it is the mother who looms largest across both corpuses—a reorientation that opens fresh critical ground. The juxtaposition of the two cartoonists is, moreover, consistently illuminating rather than merely comparative: Waldman traces a direct line of influence from Spiegelman to Bechdel while also mapping the significant differences in how each engages with modernism—Spiegelman through defamiliarizing formal experiment, Bechdel through a more ambivalent, affective working-through of the modernist canon as filial inheritance.

Filial Lines is highly recommended for scholars and students of comics studies, graphic memoir, feminist literature, Jewish American literature, and contemporary formalism. It is also, to a degree unusual in academic monographs on the medium, a pleasure to read: erudite, precise, and genuinely alive to what makes the comics form strange, beautiful, and necessary.