YOUTH CULTURE IN COMICS 721
and independent artists that fl ourished in the 1980s and 1990s. It also allowed authors to
experiment with drawing and narrative styles as well as storylines. An example of the in-
fl uence of this movement in the storylines of following decades is the work Binky Brown
Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green (1972). Th rough this work, Green explores
with great honesty how he suff ered from an incipient obsessive-compulsive disorder
during his childhood and teenage years in an environment dominated by Catholicism.
Th is comic is one of the fi rst examples of autobiographical work or memoir in the com-
ics medium. Interestingly, it focuses the narrative on the author’s youth, something that
has become common in contemporary works, such as Craig Th ompson’s Blankets (2003),
Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life (2000), and Chester Brown’s Th e Playboy (1992).
Th e biographical content of these titles demands very distinctive styles, voices, and sto-
rylines, each of them representing three diff erent ways of looking back on one’s past.
In short, Blankets looks at the confl ict between the religious family and envi-
ronment Th ompson grew up in and his fi rst romantic and sexual relationship. Th e
semi-autobiographical A Child’s Life shows a diff erent story about childhood and
adolescence; it focuses on the life of Minnie, an abused teenager who early in her life
had extreme experiences with sex and drugs. Even the rather humorous Th e Playboy
discusses sexuality and the obsession with pornography in terms that were probably
inconceivable without the edgy and experimental years of underground comics.
Th e example of underground comics and the changes in distribution brought by the
direct market supported the birth of independent publishers and the self-publishing
phenomenon. Two authors who emerged under these circumstances are John Porcellino
and Ariel Schrag. Both cartoonists bring a distinctive perspective to the analysis of ado-
lescence in the comics medium. Porcellino is a well-known author mainly through his
minicomic King-Cat. His piece Perfect Example (2000) collects several stories about Por-
cellino’s adolescence previously published in this minicomic. In these stories, Porcellino
presents himself as a quiet teenager who is dealing with an incipient case of depression.
With a style that can be described as simple but not simplistic, Porcellino transmits his
emotional state and how it aff ected his social life and fi rst romantic relationships. Th e
slow and controlled pace of Porcellino’s work markedly contrasts with Ariel Schrag’s
lively and noisy style. She fi rst self-published her stories to later release them under the
label of Slave Labor Graphics. One of the main peculiarities of Schrag’s work is that it
is not an adult refl ection on her past teenager years; her comics are contemporary to the
experiences, therefore, the reader gets a more visceral and raw account of Schrag’s life:
her growing doubts about her sexuality; her experimentations with drugs and alcohol;
her parents’ divorce; and especially her ever shifting obsessions with diff erent bands.
Shrag’s autobiographical work brings a richness of detail and energy seldom found in
other titles. She managed to keep a similar tone in the volume she edited entitled Stuck
in the Middle , in which authors such Joe Matt , Daniel Clowes , and Gabrielle Bell dig
into their own memories about what it was like to survive middle school.
Th ese titles mentioned are extremely diffi cult to categorize under any other label
than that the general one of memoirs. Th e drawing styles, the character’s voices and
