Skim carves out a life that is survivable for her, and resists the compulsion to perform happiness while she does it. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim features a protagonist, Skim, who is rendered an outcast because of her body, her hobbies, and eventually her process of mourning. Importantly, none of those attachments require that she forgive him for past violences, or that she overwrite his life in order to shift focus onto the positive. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison finds multiple nodes of attachment with her deceased father through the process of writing his history. I make a case for productive spaces inside of the unbelonging represented in my chosen texts. Coming-of-age graphic novels in this category often depict complex engagements with trauma and history, and couple those depictions with the loss of attachments: the subjects represented in these texts usually do not belong. In my dissertation, I bring together the fields of comics theory, biopolitics, and queer theory in order to read contemporary coming-of-age graphic novels that represent characters (and sometimes lives) at the margins.
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