Fun Home Photographs

Almost in direct contrast with Sacco, Bechdel uses literary devices to her advantage in Fun Home and brings the reader into her non-fiction reality in an effective and seemingly effortless manner. The juxtapositions and dualities of her and her father, literary allusions and analogies in literature, and metaphors of snakes/mud/etc all effectively advance Bechdel’s memoir without challenging its believability. [Perhaps it is unfair to categorize Safe Area Gorazde in the same context as Fun Home, however, as the former is literary journalism and the latter memoir. For a reader, it’s much easier to enter the “truth” in a world of someone’s childhood than in a political and influential war-zone. But if it’s important to recognize the works’ difference in categorization, it’s equally important to note why shared (or singular) literary devices work well in one context and not the other.]

Bechdel uses one particular graphic device - the retracing of photographs - to help verify her story’s alignment with reality. The retraced photographs that appear at the beginning of every chapter reinforce the “real” people that Bechdel depicts. The comics inside the chapter are likely drawn to depict reality, but the stroke and form of the characters are more comic-like and steer away from the painstaking details that appear in the photographs. Bechdel didn’t need to present her non-fiction work in a strictly realistic manner (in fact, Bechdel goes so far as to give characters lines and dots for mouths, even when they speak!) Instead, Bechdel uses the comic form to her advantage, adding in retraced photographs only when prompted by her discoveries in the story. Photographs that Bechdel discovers of her family, father and Roy (47.6, 100-101, 102.1-3, 120) help tell her story alongside her narrative, strengthening the reader’s perception of the characters and adding credibility to Fun Home overall.

But where photographs work well in Fun Home, SAG lacks any realistic variations in its overtly comic form. If memory serves, Sacco doesn’t employ a single image or character in photographic realism. Even when given the chance to present one small image (the television screen in 122.2) to mirror actual images from the war, Sacco still employs a more comic-like style to portray “reality” and leaves me wondering whether or not he overlooked an opportunity to help his case of the “real truth.” In the end, this is just one of many devices that Sacco seems to have misused or, in this case, forgotten altogether.