CARTOON AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Katerine Farmarreviews My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, by David Heatley Pantheon, 128pp. £16.99
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IS one of the best-represented genres in comics. In the words of Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, "Writing cartoons about my own life is a sort of guilty pleasure, a potent mix of self-indulgence and self-flagellation . . . Cartoonists get away with being obsessively self-absorbed in a way even memoir writers don't". The most successful autobiographical cartoonists are sometimes those who have led unusual lives, but more often they are ordinary people who try to communicate the universal aspects of mundane experience. Sometimes they fail, and produce flaccid exercises in navel-gazing; but sometimes, like David Heatley, they succeed in capturing the fragmentary wonder of life in a way that no other medium can manage.
As if to establish his credentials as a navel-gazer, Heatley begins My Brain Is Hanging Upside Downby recording several of his dreams about sex, and then embarks on a comprehensive review of every sexual encounter he has ever had, from childhood onwards. Genitals are censored with bright pink strips, but apart from this minor concession, Heatley is unflinchingly frank. Youthful fumblings, petty cruelties, kinks, failures, rejections, disappointments; all are recorded in the same matter-of-fact way as the incidents that cast him in a positive light.
Indeed, Heatley's technique of dividing the page into 48 equally tiny panels has a curious flattening effect. Typically comics artists vary the size of panels to direct the reader's attention to the most important incidents: the bigger the panel, the more important its contents. But Heatley's panels are all the same size, and that and the unvarying crudeness of the drawings force the reader to give equal weight to every event he records. This, too, is a form of honesty.
The book is divided into five thematic chapters, "Sex", "Race", "Mom", "Dad", and "Kin", but beyond this rough categorisation, Heatley does not try to neaten his life for our consumption or shape it into a story of a kind we have all read before.
Iris Murdoch once described one of the motives driving the creation of art and literature as "the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world . . . by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble".
Heatley's touch is so light in some ways that it might seem that he leaves the "senseless rubble" exactly as it is - but not so; it's just that his way of shaping it doesn't involve conventional storytelling. Like the pioneering comics writer Harvey Pekar, creator of American Splendor, Heatley presents the incidents of his life without comment, without trying to draw an explicit moral or infer cause and effect.
At first it can be hard to read, since the normal rules of reading do not apply. One instinctively gropes for the plot that isn't there. It takes a few pages before Heatley's bare-bones writing and art become comfortable to read, but once they do, they are utterly mesmerising.
THE EXTRAORDINARY power of comics to present to the reader a vision of the world as filtered through the artist's consciousness has a down side when the artist's personality is unpleasant. Not everyone has a taste for Robert Crumb's misanthropy or Joe Matt's compulsive masturbation, and it's no fun to come away from a graphic memoir thinking "Well, (s)he's talented, but what a horrible person (s)he is!".
There's no such danger with Heatley, who seems to be an ordinarily nice guy, neither a saint nor a demon, with a well-developed sense of perspective on his life. Throughout the first four chapters, we can see the growth and development of this perspective, in tandem with the development of Heatley's drawing style, which becomes smoother and more polished as time goes by.
My Brain Is Hanging Upside Downis impressive not just because it's funny and entertaining in an unexpected way, but because of the warmth and sweetness Heatley manages to convey in between the difficult moments. It's not pretty or safe or easy, but like life itself, it's worth the effort.
• Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer and co-author with Ben Murnane of the forthcoming Dublin on a Shoestring. She blogs about comics at puritybrown.blogspot.com and forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog