Possibilities of portrayal a critical study of selected graphic biographies

Abstract

Through the critical analysis of selected graphic biographies, the thesis highlights the experimental possibilities of pictorially embodying the enormity and complexities of a biographical subject, approximated through facts, myths, histories and fiction. The medium of graphic narratives exhibit a plethora of detail through the visual and verbal significations. The interplay of the two in the graphic biographies has managed to portray through a new idiom; the polarities of an identity, the introspections of self and the politics of the private. The chapters are structured on four graphic biographies on Che Guevara, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Rosa Luxemburg and each is performed through a different style. The texts selected for study furnish a vibrancy of narrative and aesthetic detail through chiaroscuro contrasts, tribal art motifs, photorealistic sketches and caricaturing in the sfumato technique. The spatio-temporal function of the comic s medium is executed in these narratives to rhythmically portray a life of incidents, accidents and revolutions. The expressivity executed through styles of the author-artist visually embodies the impalpable and the chaotic into a refined form of interpretive possibility. The idiosyncratic styles of the author-artists extend the semantic potential of the narrations and allow the biographer to participate through his handprint. The formalist study of the texts celebrates the heterogeneous styles, the sensibilities of artistic forms and the dynamics of the hybridity of the visual-verbal; that narrate, perform and dramatize the biographical subjects and their lives through diversified embodiments. newline