Salience of photos and drawings in a Norwegian autobiographical comic

Abstract

Photographs in comics have been at the forefront of comics research for decades. The different mediality of photographs in relation to the drawn medium and their closer relationship with reality has an impact on the way we understand the graphic novel as a whole. In my study, I explore how family photographs in Norwegian author Steffen Kverneland’s autobiographical graphic novel En frivillig død [Voluntary Death, 2018] serve as a means of graphic narrative to heighten the mental embeddedness of the situations depicted. At the centre of Kverneland’s memoir is a portrait of the father who committed suicide. The comic uses the framework of a family photo album, in which the images provide a passage between the diegetic and extradiegetic worlds, between the narrative self in the present and the thought world of the self experiencing the past, between the personal and the communal levels of storytelling. Photographs capture a slice of reality, but what really proves the authenticity of the narrative is that, together with their redrawn versions, they become dynamic elements in a work that depicts the plasticity of human memory. Through three examples of salience arising from the photo-drawing transformation, I show how textual elements, photographs and their drawn versions divert the reader’s attention from the primary function of the images to the sociocognitive complexity of the thought background of suicide and the mourning work of the relatives. The more distant aim of my study is to contribute to Hungarian comics research by drawing attention to this outstanding Norwegian graphic novel, which is an excellent representation of the rich comics literature of the Nordic countries.