Drawing from the Archive: Comics Memory and the Contemporary Graphic Novel

This thesis focuses on comics memory in the twenty-first-century North-American graphic novel. It argues that the archive has become a major site of concern for contemporary cartoonists, who are constantly engaged in redrawing past comics into the present, effectively acting as diplomats of comics memory for their readers and for commercial and cultural institutions. They handle past comics in a variety of practical ways—exhibitions, designed reprints, anthologies, essays, prefaces, pastiches, quotations, and appropriations—that express and materialize knowledge about the medium and its history. In describing these various acts of memory, I suggest that cartoonist-historians explore the liminal space that separate making and archiving, exploring the stakes that engage us in our relationship to the past and memory of comics.