This article examines the dynamics of father–son relationships and the problems of intergenerational collaboration in Art Spiegelman's Maus I and II, Seth and John Gallant's Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea: Memories of a Prince Edward Island Childhood during the Depression, and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. All three authors are critically acclaimed cartoonists and graphic novelists who use the mixed medium of verbal–visual narratives to tell stories about biological and symbolic fathers. These works reject dominant notions of masculinity and fatherhood through various forms of collaborative auto/biography and intergenerational semi-auto/biography that gravitate towards an aesthetics of smallness. The article concludes that, even as these three projects stage a reconciliation between fathers and sons, past and present, public and private, they nevertheless question the politics and practices of representing self and other in popular graphic form.

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Several recent graphic biographies tell the stories of the early days of nuclear research, from the discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s to the United States atomic bomb testings of the 1950s. 1 Some are both celebratory and complex, such as Jim Ottaviani and Lelan Myrick's colorful Feynman (2011), a full biography of the larger-than-life American theoretical physicist, educator, and writer Richard Feynman. Ottaviani and Myrick use his famous Feynman Diagrams, which look like squiggly line drawings, as a motif throughout the book so that science meets art to depict the life of a man who thinks in pictures. In a quite different mode, Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010) is a double biography of the private and professional lives of this famous pair of chemists. Redniss incorporates cartoons, drawings, photographs, diagrams, and words into a visual-verbal collage of the discovery of radium. She also extends beyond the Curies' lifespans to depict how their discovery of radioactivity eventually led to theories of the nuclear atom, the development of the atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Nuclear history personalized through the lives of scientists is also the theme of two graphic biographies that focus on Robert Oppenheimer: Jim Ottaviani's collaboration with seven illustrators in Fallout:

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The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service.