As this is the first article I am writing for this new site (and hopefully the first of many), I thought I’d start by telling you a little about myself. My life is boring. I work a boring office job (soon to become a boring university degree), I go out once or twice a week to stand around dull bars being bored all evening without enough money to get drunk. I spend my evening playing Playstation, or round my mates playing Playstation, and when I’m bored of bloody Playstation, sporadic games of football just to really embarrass myself. And yet, somehow, I make autobiographical comics that people actually want to read. So how on earth did I manage to pull that one off? I think the answer to that is honesty; brutal, unflinching, painfully embarrassing, and pure fictional gold.

I love to read autobiographical comics, for the same reason I love to read other peoples texts, the same reason I might be irresistibly drawn to a diary in a girls underwear drawer. Because, like everybody else who does the same, I want some reassurance that I am not alone. I want to know that other people can be as pathetic as me, that they can’t pull for shit, that they’d love to go out with the nice girl from school, but end up copping a feel with the local whore simply because they couldn’t control their sexual urges, that they dance like a loon, that they have rituals for going to bed, or shopping, or that they take half an hour to write texts so that they look completely spontaneous and slipped out in a drunken moment, that other people have the same sexual fantasies and sordid thoughts as them. I want to know that everyone else is a pervert because it tells me I am normal.

This was first highlighted to me in ‘a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ by Dave Eggars, a book about a guy whose parents die in quick succession and he is left to bring up his younger brother. In it is a fantasy scene in which Dave applies for the American version of big brother, and it contains his musings on the nature of gossip. What really stood out for me was a long passage whose gist was, ‘if I tell you every detail about my life, how can you use that against me? Because once I have given the information freely it means that it no longer worries me.’ I think it is that simple statement that embodies the whole philosophy behind any good autobiographical piece of work.

This ‘gossip addiction’ we all have works both ways, because as Dave says, by describing to you the embarrassing details of my life, I am absolved from all ridicule simply because I told you it freely, I am laughing with the reader at my own ineptness and as such, my comics work as my confessions, once brought to light I am forgiven for all the wrongs contained within. I need to tell you, the reader, about my sins, so that I can move on, and you, the reader, need to know the gory details of my life so that you don’t feel like such a pervert. And because of this, autobiographical comics forge an emotional link with the reader that does not exist with other genres, and that is what makes them special, they are our friends and our comforts, and even though we have never met the creators, we have known them, they have confided in us like good friends.

Unfortunately this is not always the case. A worrying trend is for smallpress autobiographical comics to become vanity pieces, from creators who are so confident of how cool their ‘indy comic’ nature is, they just want to show the whole world that they are special. These comics tend to consist of the characters, usually on drugs (because that makes them really eccentric and unique), spewing forth some pretentious philosophies on the nature of life whilst at the same time wandering a foreign country while wracked with teenage/artist’s angst or recounting an instance in which they were particularly heroic or kind. Ultimately these works end up like blogs, unstructured messes desperately trying to inflict shallow opinions and false eloquence on a fictional audience of adoring fans.

But I don’t want to read that, I don’t want people telling me how cool or superior they are with their alternative lifestyle, how I will never understand them because their thoughts are on a completely different level to mine- I have superhero comics for that. I want to be part of a community that tells me it’s human to err, that can comfort me when something bad happens by showing me how others cope in times of trouble. I want to see that real poetry and genuine eloquence is found in the hesitant fumbling for words that occurs when asking a girl for a date, or an argument about whether the X-Box is better than the Gamecube, and not in the slightly altered lyrics of a ‘My Chemical Romance’ song that I can claim reflects my desire to commit suicide after being dumped in secondary school because I am the only 13 year-old in the world who has ever felt this much pain.

Good autobiographical comics aren’t just open diaries, they are communal diaries, because the emotions and themes contained within are universal, we’ve all had those conversations, we’ve all had those heartbreaks. We are all Eddie Campbell, we are all Joe Bloggs, we are the masses whose lives are barely ours to control, who have to muddle through the hard times and bear the shit because there I nothing else we can do.

Lets celebrate it.