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.
