“What Would Make Me the Most ‘Myself’”

Self-Creation and Self-Exile in Vanessa Davis’s Diary and Autobiographical Comics

anessa Davis is another cartoonist invested in what it means to serially represent the self on the page through vignettes or snippets. Characterized by multiple artistic modes and styles and a general lack of clear-cut panel divisions, her comics portray the self as a textured, patchwork entity that changes from moment to moment, depending on framing and context. Her sketches, as well as her narrative and diary comics, collectively and often humorously visualize this animated and inexhaustible autobiographical project.¹ Born in 1978, Davis’s comics represent another version of the postassimilated Jewish American female artist. Like the works of Aline Kominsky Crumb, many of her comics visualize the struggle of responding to and rebelling against preconceived notions of selfhood based in gendered, ethnic, religious, and regional identifications. But unlike Kominsky Crumb, Davis’s work does not evoke her religious or ethnic identities primarily as a response to stereotype. Rather, she frames her identities more centrally as revisable and individual processes that, though developed out of granular diachronic and synchronic realities, inevitably converge in the present tense of the artist’s composition.

In Need More Love Kominsky Crumb often looks back at the values of her parents’ generation and her childhood experiences in Long Island in order to understand how she has moved away from or past them. In contrast, in Davis’s graphic works the persona on the page is always in process, both in the past and present versions of herself, rather than an entity that has definitively changed, or moved beyond a previous iteration, over time.² In this way her graphic memoir, while also framed through dis-affiliations, can be considered a narrative of continual self-creation and revision, or a testimonial to the present, rather than a narrative hinging on a relatively static and unyielding past.

Davis has published two full-length books: Spaniel Rage, her 2005 graphic diary, and her most recent work, Make Me a Woman, a 2010 collection of comics and drawings, including diary entries and pages taken out of her sketchbook. The title of Davis’s more recent collection reinforces Simone de Beauvoir’s famous words about the construction of female identity, namely, that “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (283). But the title, presented ambiguously somewhere between a directive and a plea, also highlights the notion that there is always an active subject forging the creation of that woman. Whether the final authority over that subject lies with the author herself or with someone else is a puzzle that repeatedly surfaces in the many layers of her work, and it is a puzzle generally left unsolved. As Davis has pointed out, “The comics form might not come up with a lot of answers, but it can really illuminate the questions” (“Vanessa Davis Keeps It Complicated”). Thus Davis’s texts, like all the comics explored in this project, represent postmodernism as a form of inquiry that “calls all categorical thinking into question along with the modes by which categories are consolidated and maintained” (Gilmore 4). Both Spaniel Rage and Make Me a Woman are books that illustrate the process of becoming, while they also accentuate its mysteries, the blurry boundaries where private or inward explorations and public, published performances, exposures, and influences overlap.

This chapter will trace the movement from Spaniel Rage, a book of daily journal entries with almost no overt recognition of various categorizations of identity, to Make Me a Woman, a text very much rooted in typologies of the self, including especially gender and religious/ethnic identities. In Living Autobiographically, Paul John Eakin distinguishes between “self” and “identity” as follows: he marks “self” as a “larger, more comprehensive term for the totality of our subjective experience,” whereas “identity” points to “the version of ourselves that we display not only to others but also to ourselves whenever we have occasion to reflect on or otherwise engage in self-characterization” (xiv). This distinction similarly marks the change in emphasis between Davis’s two books. Many of the narrative comics included in Make Me a Woman were originally written for and published by the online daily magazine Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life, between 2007 and 2010. These comics, intended for such a publication, contain explicitly Jewish content, unlike the diary comics in Spaniel Rage.

As the shift in form from a book primarily consisting of diary comics to a hybrid text including both diary comics and narrative ones reveals, the move from an exploration of self as an undefined and uncategorizable entity to self as consisting, in part, of a struggle against a series of fixed categories reflects the more ostensibly public form of the second book. Although the diary can never exist as an entirely private work, its pretense of privacy is conducive to explorations of a more unspecified and “comprehensive” representation of selfhood. In other words, the self depicted in the diary is comparatively free from concerns of how it does or has appeared to an outside “other.” In contrast, a reflection of self as created in and for the public eye, as in Make Me a Woman, is more clearly based in predetermined visions of identity that are shared by disparate, sometimes overlapping communities. Throughout Make Me a Woman, Vanessa engages in a process of self-discovery by questioning and juxtaposing multifarious versions of self-knowledge. Even so, she is always aware of the various, predetermined categorizations of self—her Jewishness and femaleness, mainly—as public identities. In this way, although both texts convey self-revelation as a process located in an ever transforming and transformative present, they also reflect the manner in which genre conventions and imagined audience influence how such explorations get played out. Ultimately, despite their differing slants, self-creation in both works is simultaneously cast as self-exile: even while the artist literally composes and recomposes herself, she is never any closer to forming a complete image or understanding of her personhood as a single, unified, or chronologically representable entity. Both texts consequently reflect an antiessentialist point of view or an awareness that, as Zygmut Bauman has described it, “‘belonging’ and ‘identity’ are not cut in rock…they are not secured by a lifelong guarantee…they are eminently negotiable and revocable” (Identity 11). While part of a newer generation of Jewish female cartoonists, Vanessa Davis’s works, like Aline Kominsky Crumb’s, reflect how preestablished significations of identity can paradoxically lead postassimilated writers and artists away from essentialized or simplistic notions of the signified.

“But that is Only A Small Part of Why I Feel Like Total Shit”

Published in 2005 by the now defunct Buenaventura Press, Spaniel Rage is a collection of what Davis describes, on one of its title pages, as “diary comics and drawings that I made in sketchbooks from 2003 to 2004.”³ Assembled in a thin, soft-cover book about 10 inches tall and 7 1/2 inches wide, the text can most accurately be categorized as a graphic diary or journal. In this chapter, like autobiography theorist Philippe Lejeune and others, I do not distinguish between the diary and the journal. Some critics make a debatable distinction by correlating journal writing with an intended public audience and content that is less so-called personal. This distinction sets up a hierarchical dynamic—with the diary often cited as a “feminine” and the journal as a “masculine” form—between two modes of writing that have, despite their differing histories and genealogies, become otherwise indistinguishable. Davis’s collection does not include pagination, and one or more often but not always dated entries fill each page. As Lejeune explains in his essay on diaries, “On Today’s Date,” page dating is one of the characteristics that helps define the modern day diary and distinguishes it from other literary and nonliterary forms, including autobiography. The date scrawled or typed at the top of the page reflects “people’s relationship with lived time” (80); specifically, it demonstrates a particular awareness of the continual passing of and subsequent accounting for time. It also stands as a “pact of truth” (79) in that it “certifies the time of enunciation.” By tracking time on the page (or, for some, on the computer screen), the diarist testifies to what is beyond her control, while she also acknowledges her powerlessness over the situation, the inevitability of death and, consequently, of the diary project. That Davis dates some but not all her diary entries is significant, most importantly because it hints at her work’s ability to complicate stylistic conventions in order to create new composite forms of self-representation that defy normative expectations. As she explained in an interview, “I think that it’s important for people to try to be realistic and not strive to fit some template of what works or what sells or what’s popular or what’s considered legitimate. I think people should just do what works for them and see where that takes them” (“Interview: Vanessa Davis”). The structure of Davis’s journal as a whole also reflects this independent style. For instance, three-quarters of the way through Spaniel Rage, a book that otherwise includes no chapter or section divisions, she includes various short comics labeled “Other Stories” and marked as each having been published previously in other locations. The title of these comics, in stressing “otherness,” points to the difficulty of categorizing the various types of texts included in the book and therefore establishes what will become, in both of Davis’s works, a more general preoccupation with categorization and typology. The inclusion of these longer-form comics—each divided from the other by a single blank page—at the end of what is primarily a graphic diary also complicates the possibility that her works, in publication, will fit a particular, clearly defined genre or market standard. By incorporating images created for publication alongside images presumably drawn for her eyes only in what started as a sketchbook, Spaniel Rage thwarts the simple distinction often constructed between the two forms of creation. In this way her text questions the notion that authorial intention or imagined audience is ever clear-cut or formulaic. A resistance to such conformity is also pronounced in her later work, Make Me a Woman, which, also like Kominsky Crumb’s memoir, represents a dramatic departure from a categorizable literary product with an intended audience.

The structure of Spaniel Rage additionally draws attention to the published diary as a work that has inevitably been exposed to edits, and that has been transformed in the process of its publication. Lejeune and others have written extensively on the near impossibility of reading diaries, especially contemporary ones, in the form that they were originally composed, prepublication. Consider, for example, the fact that printed versions of diaries often do not reveal the various nuances of the original text, from handwriting (and changes in handwriting) to the spaces left between words (Culley, “Introduction” 16).⁴ The title page of Spaniel Rage is drawn in the handwriting of the artist, with watercolors filling in carefully bubbled, black-and-white cursive letters. Thus the title as well as the name of the press and city of publication are adapted in the pages of the graphic diary and reestablished as part of the diary composition itself. Davis’s work therefore blurs the distinction between “paratext” and main text, and preempts the possibility of ever fully differentiating between the two. As Gérard Genette explains in his seminal book on the topic, the paratext, a term encompassing elements like the author’s name, the title, or the introduction to a work, “surround…and extend” the text “to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book” (1).⁵ In the case of Davis’s work, the intimacy of the hand-drawn paratext prompts readers to approach the book as a unified project that does not distinguish between its creation by a single author and its publication history. The overall structure of the book therefore resembles the way that the self gets established in its pages, as an entity that cannot fully be understood by looking at isolated experiences, memories, or reflections but rather needs to be considered in the context of the work as a whole, including factors that take place outside of, or alongside, the author’s immediate creative control. The hazy boundary between text and paratext additionally destabilizes a notion of self as insider or as one who belongs, even in an iteration of one’s own life story. Just as the paratext is marked by the hand of the author, the journal entries themselves, creations emerging from and reflecting the inner life of the artist, are equally and easily subject to the taint of outside influences, including those of the publisher and of anticipated and actual readers.

The question of audience and influence is especially important in a genre often mistakenly presumed to be written for the self alone. Margo Culley writes in her introduction to A Day at a Time, “The importance of the audience, real or implied, conscious or unconscious, of what is usually thought of as a private genre cannot be overstated. The presence of a sense of audience, in this form of writing as in all others, has a crucial influence over what is said and how it is said” (11–12).⁶ The framing of Davis’s text draws attention to the question of audience from the outset of the book. The image adjacent to the title page, for example, proposes Davis’s graphic diary as a work that does not simply fall into any preconceived notion of a public or private document (in intention or execution), but rather wavers somewhere between both spheres. Beside the handwritten, and in this way individualized, title page, there is a full-page black-and-white drawing, which is the first image we see of Vanessa (figure 2.1). She is pictured standing in front of her car in a supermarket parking lot. There is no verbal etching attached to the image but for the word Publix scrawled across a terra cotta roof and a Fresh Sushi sign leaning against the supermarket wall. Publix is an employee-owned supermarket chain, with most of its stores located in Florida, which is where Davis grew up and her mother now lives. The lack of context or narrative connected to this drawing prefigures the style and tone of the rest of the graphic diary, which does not focus on a directed accretion of experiences and reflections in order to form a narrativistic whole, but rather documents a paratactic and fragmented panorama of self, recorded in narrative and nonnarrative spurts over a single year.⁷ Vanessa stands looking down at the door of her car, ostensibly fitting her key into it, although this action is obscured by the vehicle (we see her arms but not her hands). The image presents her moment of passing or moving from a public space into a semiprivate one, an act that, in itself, is partially hidden and partially visible, cropped and directed from a corner angle overlooking the scene. Like this self-representation, the composer of the journal is similarly situated in a transitional framework. Whether or not she ever intends to show her diary to others, she is always at risk of having her work exposed merely by putting down words or images on a page. In this sense, she is always affected by, and maintains an awareness of, the possibility of an audience larger than herself. Her seemingly private universe, in being transcribed onto the page, is always part of a larger public landscape. As Lynn Z. Bloom argues, “it is a mistake to think of diaries as a genre composed primarily of ‘private writings,’ even if they are—as in many women’s diaries—a personal record of private thoughts and activities, rather than public events” (24). Diaries written with no intention of publication always involve some kind of awareness of a possible public audience since “the writing act itself implies an audience” (Culley, “Introduction” 8). Conversely, even if the author intended the work to be published from the outset, there are always private meanings hidden in the diary to which certain audiences will never have access.

Vanessa, as pictured at the opening of the diary, is documented at the cusp of both of these worlds, the private and public, reflecting the status not just of the writer of the diary but also the reader-viewer, who is about to enter someone else’s semiprivate world through the space of a semiprivate document. But this visualization of the diary writer’s stance, the image of Vanessa standing at the threshold, is further complicated by its transmission as an image, and a large, full-page image at that. From its outset, this diary is presented primarily as a visual document, framed not in and through the word but, instead, in and through structures of looking.⁸ As W. J. T. Mitchell, among others, has shown, images are presumed to invite viewers as spectators, as passive surveyors. The mere presence of an oversized visual depiction of the author at the opening of this diary thus also implicitly undermines the notion of the diary as a private text, as one not meant to be seen by others. Yet, even as the overwhelming presence of an almost wordless image at the beginning of the diary invites that problematic connection between the visible and public, between images and exposure, the angled, partially concealed content of the drawing nevertheless reinforces the disestablishment of such simple binaries. The scene is highly specific, a fragment of a fragment of a particular perspective. Further, the facing page is the aforementioned title page, which consists only of words, even if they are intimately, hand-drawn ones. It reveals nothing “personal,” relaying only the title of the book, its author, its publisher, and its publisher’s location. More broadly, then, when put in context, the opening of Davis’s book subverts the expectations audiences often assign to their readings of different kinds of texts, particularly the diary. In many ways this destabilization of genre conventions—the breaking down of reader expectations—is mobilized through the spatial and visual structures available uniquely through the graphic narrative form. By placing a full-paged image facing a hand-drawn, word-based title page, the reader is compelled to establish connections and comparisons. In this case these include the differences and similarities between texts that communicate primarily through images and those that communicate primarily through words or texts that presumably profess exposure and “truth” and those that potentially undermine such claims. By depicting various registers relationally, across several or numerous pages, Spaniel Rage reflects the means by which comics more generally can activate productive confrontations with categories like genres or mediums that are so often taken for granted.

2.1   Vanessa Davis, page adjacent to title page. In Spaniel Rage, n.p. Used by permission of Vanessa Davis.

The content of the diary beyond the title page and opening image also plays with the assumptions that frame expectations about audience and intention, particularly as they relate to narrative and nonnarrative representations of self as well as the constructed distinctions that are often made between public and private spaces and acts. A number of the journal sketches figure Vanessa in her apartment and, often, even more privately, in her bed—a repeated setting in both of Davis’s books. Other recurring scenes illustrated throughout include Vanessa at work, on the telephone, at a restaurant with a single companion or various friends and family, in bars with friends or on dates, at concerts, and commuting on a subway train. Many of these scenes are left either unnarrated or involve narration that consists only of dialogue without any overarching narrative voice to interpret or connect the various settings and spaces. These repeated representations emphasize the diary as a space in which the seemingly inconsequential gets recorded, where daily public and private experiences that might otherwise be forgotten—either because they are so often repeated and familiar or because, in memory, they fade easily into more significant events—are documented. But a closer look at such scenes also reveals the potential for connection and relevance, for construction and engagement within the presentation of such seemingly trivial or disconnected recordings.

In one early sketch, dated May 12, 2003, for example, Vanessa sits in front of her computer at her work desk (figure 2.2). The same event is depicted in three adjoining panels, drawn in heavy and light pencil lines with next to no gutter space separating them. The changes between the three carefully drawn images can be seen in the details: Vanessa’s arm moves from the mouse to the keyboard and back to the mouse again. Her chair swivels slightly. Her head tilts to the right, as she moves closer to a subtly changed screen, and then back again. A shelf in the background almost disappears by the final panel, as the perspective is slightly modified. In itself, the black-and-white entry featuring Vanessa at work presents a seemingly trivial slice of life. The cinematic quality of the diary entry, which looks like part of a filmstrip, imbues the images with the sense of time passing, but their static nature slows that time down and signifies the sense of monotony that comes from working long hours at a desk job. Nevertheless, the slight variations between the three images also ingrains these moments with a certain significance, recalling the keen eye, and careful hand, of the observing artist. The diary becomes a space not just for recording but also for studying and even sharpening acts and moments that might otherwise remain cloudy and inconsequential. The act of chronicling transforms the events and scenes being portrayed.

2.2   Vanessa Davis, opening page. In Spaniel Rage, n.p. Used by permission of Vanessa Davis.

In addition to the sense of attentiveness and constructedness that permeates individual entries, when an entry is amassed as part of a larger collective, when it is read in relation to another entry or in relation to many entries, it acquires other new meanings. This particular office scene is depicted on the same page as a much more intimate, smaller, and single-paneled entry, dated May 11, 2003. A woman’s breast, lightly shadowed and in profile, is the focal point of this loosely drawn rectangular panel, and a sketched face with pursed lips and clearly delineated long eyelashes looms over the pointed nipple. In the background a series of diagonal lines calls attention to the corner of a window frame, with several small branches recalling another world outside this very intimate space. Taken together, in such close proximity, this page of the diary evokes the complex and often paradoxical web of intimacy, familiarity, and distance that an individual experiences over short time frames. A secret, sexual act can be observed, in the diary as in the mind of a participant, from a cool remove, or it can be juxtaposed with scenes that feel otherwise incompatible but nevertheless potentially connect to those previous private moments. The images of Vanessa at her office desk, clicking away at e-mail messages that cannot be deciphered by the reader, similarly demonstrate how trivial experiences that occur in public places can potentially relate to more intimate moments.

These engagements additionally complicate the notion of the diary as a space reserved solely for the reflection or refraction of one’s intimate or “personal” thoughts and experiences. As many critics have pointed out, while the diary can focus on an exploration of a person’s “inward journey,” meaning her interior thoughts and emotions, “the reader must remember that the idea of the diary as the arena of the secret, inner life is a relatively modern idea and describes only one kind of diary” (Culley, “Preface” xiii). In other words, to presume diary making to be an act of confession and self-contemplation, one that focuses exclusively on an individual’s secret or private experiences and reflections, is an assumption that ignores not only many of the historical precursors to the modern day diary but also overlooks the many different functions of the diary that exist even today.

Another characteristic of Davis’s diary, for instance, is its frequent attentiveness to the process of its very construction. The entries are often spaces where the author can work out aesthetic issues and create or develop a method of cartooning. Indeed, various aspects of many of the illustrations throughout point to the diary’s use as, among other things, a workbook, in the sense of a book where work-related problems can be recorded and explored, or simply a place where writing and drawing habits are noted. In her introduction to Drawn In, a collection of sketchbook excerpts from various artists (with a preface by Vanessa Davis), illustrator and sketchbook creator Julia Rothman describes sketchbooks as serving this function, among others. As she explains: “Within sketchbook pages, one can trace the development of an artist’s process, style, and personality. Sketches emit a freshness and vitality because they are the first thoughts and are often not reworked. Raw ideas and small sketches are the seeds for bigger projects. Sketchbooks ultimately become the records of artists’ lives. They are documented visual diaries” (12). Within its pages, Davis’s journal, which, as mentioned, was culled from her sketchbooks, includes images and diary entries that reflect such a progression of her “process” and “style.” For instance, on a sketch dated May 24, 2003, the author draws a starred footnote in the corner of an image that says, “Not even close resemblances to Rebecca and John.” Several of the images include self-criticisms related to her work habits, like the introduction to an entry dated July 2, 2003: “I haven’t drawn in more than a week. But that is only a small part of why I feel like total shit.” This particular notation reveals how self-reflections in terms of work-related habits often overlap to combine with other, less specific considerations, such as a general ontological anxiety. Both the structure and content of Davis’s graphic diary thereby redefine the scope and practice of journaling as a space of relative freedom from conventional genre standards, expectations, and norms where diverse practices collide and interact to reflect a self in the making.

By juxtaposing various kinds of explorations and observations within the same text, often even on the same page or within the same image—those taking place in public spaces and those taking place in private ones, those formulated in a social setting and those framed in relative isolation, those focused on aesthetic issues and those testifying to daily experiences and modalities—Davis’s journal presents self-chronicling as a process that, despite its fragmentary nature, inevitably unifies to form a kind of assembly on the page. As Culley explains, “Keeping a life record can be an attempt to preserve continuity seemingly broken or lost” (“Introduction” 8). Indeed, by bringing together the various aspects of our lives that are normally thought of as disconnected, like significant life events alongside mundane everyday realities, or publicly located experiences and private ones, the diary, graphic or otherwise, can help create a sense of cohesion between various senses of self over time. In their introduction to Inscribing the Daily, Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff argue that the unique forms of diaries, unlike autobiographies or other forms of personal writing, “challenge us to question the boundaries between the public and the private; and they encourage us to assess the social, political, and personal repercussions of segmenting our lives, our texts, our culture, and our academic disciplines” (2). Davis’s diary entries reflect the ways that mapping together various forms of experience, through the many places and perspectives that inflect and inform those experiences, can actually lead to a stronger sense of a unitary self. In her graphic diary the multifarious geographies that make up the individual’s worldview are all leveled and consequently equalized on the surface of the page to be considered in relation to one another.

One way of better understanding how this unification through fragmentation occurs is by recognizing the integral difference between the practice of autobiographical and diary writing. As Lejeune writes in his essay, “The Diary as ‘Antifiction,’” “the problem of autobiography is the beginning, the gaping hole of the origin, whereas for the diary it is the ending, the gaping hole of death” (201–2). Since the diarist never knows what will happen next, life is presented as a series of unfolding events without any “retrospective point of view” (Cates 213). For this reason, as various critics of diary writing have pointed out, fictional diaries often sound overly contrived and constructed. It is this sense of an unknown future that is so difficult to replicate in the fictional realm.⁹ Generally, there is no way of knowing what past events will gain in significance over time or become irrelevant, so in a nonfictional journal all events, experiences, and reflections stand within a certain range of equality on the page. In this way diaries, unlike autobiographies, represent a relatively unsentimentalized or unfiltered view of everyday life, as much as that is possible. This unfolding more closely resembles life as it is actually experienced, with the act of representing one’s self and the places one inhabits as something always entrenched in the present, with no clear or definite sense of what the future holds or how the past will link to that future. This structural difference between diaries and other forms of personal writing and composing ensures that even the most public nonfictional diary—a diary, for example, created with the intention of publication—always maintains some pretense of itself as a private document. The underlying narrative structure of the diary can never be fully decoded since the future arc of the story always remains a mystery to the writer herself. Even, or perhaps especially, for its writer, though also for its audience, the diary is a somewhat contained and mysterious text.

As a mode of life writing that always involves some mysterious elements and hinges on an unknown future, the graphic diary therefore differs dramatically from the recently popularized “graphic novel memoir,” like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, in which the story line frequently pivots around an often traumatic event or series of events from the past. As Isaac Cates explains, “A memoir, in comics or in prose, requires a degree of structure, a degree of deliberate storytelling, that is not available to diary comics, because the diarist can never entirely see the larger plots and arguments that his life will eventually fulfill” (214). By presenting life as a set of vignettes without any obvious links between individual images, the graphic journal more clearly reflects the absolute integration of past experiences and settings of all kinds into an animated present, especially because there is rarely a definite sense of how one location or experience will relate to another over time. It is in part for this reason that Davis’s diary showcases a self reflective of Eakin’s “totality of [a] subjective experience,” rather than, as in Make Me a Woman, a self composed of predetermined public identities. The added autobiographical narrative element incorporated into Davis’s second book allows for a more focused self-analysis. It could be said, then, that in Spaniel Rage Davis introduces many of the themes she later and more directly explores in Make Me a Woman. The graphic diary allows her the freedom to pose questions without necessarily answering them. It serves as a kind of dress rehearsal for a more fully developed and manifestly public exploration of what eventually reveals itself, for the author, to be a most urgent and vital set of questions about self-representation and self-knowledge, and which is evoked most explicitly in relation to representations of Jewish identity.

“So the Big Day Finally Came”

From its opening pages, Make Me a Woman is a text that both resembles and differentiates itself in important ways from Davis’s earlier work. Like Spaniel Rage, Make Me a Woman is a book that illustrates the very private and individual nature of the process of becoming. But it also highlights the boundaries that are blurred between personal or inward explorations and public performances, exposures, and influences. The book includes previously published and often brightly full-colored comics alongside black-and-white journal and sketchbook entries. Will Eisner has discussed the connections between color and tone in comics. In an interview about his sepia-colored A Contract with God, he explained, “it was the only way of introducing color in a way that gave the book a tone. I felt it developed an intimacy between me and the reader, as if we were talking in hushed tones” (“The Walk Through” 86). Eisner and McCloud agree that black-and-white comics demand closer, more careful readings, whereas comics drawn in colors call attention to the text as surface.¹⁰ The divergent uses of color in Davis’s work propose various narrative tones, with more muted black-and-white sketches and ink washes suggesting intimacy and brighter, colored pictures reinforcing the distance between reader and text. In addition, the entire text of Make Me a Woman does not include page numbers, a formal omission that adds to the sense of timelessness in the way identity gets figured, again and again, in the present, as though each time it is being (re)made anew.

As at the beginning of Spaniel Rage, the introduction by Davis describes what is included in the book, which could otherwise be seen as a slapdash or arbitrary collection of comic art. The introduction to this second memoir is longer, more informative, and conscious of the larger audience that will be reading the book due to the artist’s increased exposure in, among other places, the “alternative” comics world. The publisher of this second work, Drawn and Quarterly, attests to this fact. A publisher of independent comics, Drawn and Quarterly represents many of the most internationally popular cartoonists. In her introduction Davis writes: “This book collects comics and drawings that I made between 2004 and 2010. Some are as yet unpublished strips and sketchbook pages. I moved: Diary entries take place in New York, where I used to live; California, where I moved in 2005; and Florida, where I grew up and where my mom still lives. A lot of the stories were printed in zines and anthologies. And a bunch of them appeared on-line as part of a monthly column I did for Tablet magazine.” The introduction implies that the text loosely tracks some kind of structured narrative based in the author’s geographical relocations over time—the move from Florida to New York to California—although it also reinforces the possibility that the works contained in the collection, as well as their arrangement, are somewhat arbitrary. This introduction complicates audience expectations, given the size of Davis’s text, which is a hardcover, 9-by-11-inch book, and the often inaccurate association of that format, the “long-form” comic, better known as the “graphic novel,” with the “structure, breadth, [and] coherence” of the novel” (Hatfield, Alternative Comics 5). What the reader encounters over the course of the memoir, instead, is a chronicle of the process of recording the self as it is made, unmade, and remade within a particular time frame that nevertheless encompasses a past and future outside of its pages.

Just as the opening of Spaniel Rage can be read as a prelude to what is contained over the course of the book, the opening images of Make Me a Woman can also be considered precursors to the graphic narrative that follows. There is, as in Spaniel Rage, a self-portrait of the artist on the page opposite the title page (figure 2.3). This opening image reinforces the instability of all life writing and drawing as precariously situated on the border of public performance and private act. In this colored self-portrait, Vanessa sits naked, on a stool, with a guitar covering her “privates” and a harmonica lodged in her mouth. She is positioned outside of any particular time or space and she looks nonchalantly at the reader. The image portrays her as preoccupied: her hands and mouth, the tools of creation of her verbal and visual narratives, are engaged. Like visual artist Alice Neel’s famous 1980 Self-Portrait, a commanding oil painting that depicts the nude eighty-year-old artist sitting on a striped couch with a brush in hand, confidently exposed, Davis’s image, which could also be read as a “portrait of the self as ‘other,’” evokes the female nude as “conscious and aware” (Lewison; Bauer 21).¹¹ If the opening sketch of Spaniel Rage presents an artist teetering between two worlds, a bit unsure of her place even as she is located in a very particular setting, this solidly drawn artist exhibits confidence in her self-exposure, while she also conveys herself as almost too busy to notice the audience that inevitably watches her. Since Make Me a Woman is a text that includes both previously published comics and diary entries, from its outset it reveals itself as a work intended for and aware of a public audience, although it also continues, like Spaniel Rage, to flaunt the unstable boundary between the public and private. Much like the cover of Kominsky Crumb’s Need More Love, this somewhat satirical image advertises a kind of easy access into the author’s most intimate self. But in Davis’s text the added element of the conspicuously covered privates, the muted color scheme, and the artist’s location outside any frame, floating in a clean, white space, also offers up the pretense of private engagement and inevitable secrecy. Certain parts will remain covered.

Additionally, the book includes a whole series of full-colored portraits of women interspersed between various narrative comics and diary entries, challenging the notion that an autobiographical narrative must consistently feature the self as principal actor.¹² With one exception, these images do not reflect a clear relationship to the comics that come before and after them, and they are accompanied neither by narrative explanations nor clear indications of who is being portrayed or where they are located.¹³ Although some of the drawings feature a woman who resembles Vanessa—generally, a brunette with brown hair, freckles, and a curvy figure—many are images of women who are clearly not the same as Vanessa, as indicated by their hair color, body types, and certain ethnic/racial features, like skin color. A good number of these “anonymous” portraits display bodies in motion, with colorful outfits contrasted against the white background of an otherwise empty page (figure 2.4). As the subtle but significant movements of the bodies captured in these images reveal, these are not women who are merely being looked at and drawn as they have been adorned, or as adornments in themselves, but, rather, these are women engaged in the process of being looked at, who are somehow consciously and actively involved in the making of themselves as visual subjects. Their accessories—hair styles, jewelry, purses, shoes—as well as their basic outfits point to individual histories that have been woven together on these pages through the eyes and hand of a single artist. Their fashion choices, along with the disorienting white backgrounds, have the capacity both to unite and distinguish them from one another.¹⁴ The dancing, moving portraits, set between other types of image-text combinations, contextualize a self in the making amongst a larger community of women or, more generally, a self-portrait created alongside other self-portraits.

2.3   Vanessa Davis, page adjacent to title page. In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

By including this collective of anonymous women in an autobiography, the text reflects its interest in exploring what Hillary Chute describes as “the self in conversation with collectivities” (Graphic Women 104). Chute uses this description to talk about Lynda Barry’s Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Coloring Book, a work that Barry created after discovering a pack of pornographic playing cards in Las Vegas displaying and advertising fifty-two women. As Chute explains, Naked Ladies! “is a book that involves but decentralizes the self,” revealing a “desire to move beyond the individual” (104, 105) by displaying a sequence of images of women alongside a seemingly unrelated prose narrative about a single self. Like Barry’s work, Davis’s Make Me a Woman is a text that foregrounds an individual narrative, but immerses it in a sea of the dynamic postures and poses of anonymous women. In this way both texts attempt to show how conceptions of self and identity are inextricably, and often ambiguously, located in portrayals of the self in relation to various communities, however dislocated these are. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue in Interfaces, “Identities materialize within collectivities and out of the culturally marked differences that constitute symbolic interactions within and between collectivities. But social organizations and symbolic interactions are always in flux” (10). The portraits of women included throughout Make Me a Woman visually represent Vanessa’s affiliations at the boundaries of many different communities, both real and imagined. In addition, the range of colors depicted in these images connects these women not only with the self-portrait that opens the book (though, because of its coloring, that portrait comes across as a more subdued version of the others or like a precursor) but also with the many full-colored narrative comics contained within it. These communities are bridged together through surface-level resemblances, like colors, shapes, styles, and clothing, which act as a unifying backdrop to the diverse themes explored in greater depth and given particular settings through the lens of Vanessa’s individual life, particularly as portrayed in her narrative and diary comics.

2.4   Vanessa Davis, full-page color drawing. In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

The inclusion of anonymous women in Make Me a Woman also points to one of the key differences between Davis’s graphic journal and her memoir. Whereas Spaniel Rage is focused on tracing the moments that make up a self in the present, through narrative and nonnarrative reflections on the significant and mundane experiences of that self’s daily life, Make Me a Woman is additionally invested in exploring the documentation of a self through questions of identity and categorization—questions inevitably linking that self with larger publics. The book takes up the Jewish question, not as a way of isolating one version or aspect of the self, but instead as a connective approach to reading identity as always relational and locational.

One of the earlier comics in the memoir, the black-and-white “Make Me a Woman,” reflects this spatially based understanding of identity in just a single page, setting up the larger framework of the book as a whole. Drawn in careful, often heavy pencil lines, the comic first pictures Vanessa standing at a podium in front of a crowd reading her bat mitzvah Torah portion (figure 2.5). The narration begins, “So the big day finally came…” while her speech bubble reads, “Tamar showed lots of INITIATIVE when she tricked her fiancee’s father into impregnating her by posing as a prostitute.” The irony of the seriousness of Vanessa’s pose juxtaposed with what the twelve-year-old narrator is saying highlights one of the recurring themes of the text, which is the contradictory nature of Jewish identity for women, and especially young, unmarried women, who often figure as second-rate citizens in Jewish culture and history. At twelve Vanessa, who attends an all-Jewish day-school, has no means of evaluating her place in the community or of assessing the narratives passed on to her as “empowering.” She has no community to contrast with her own, no sense of what else empowerment or “initiative” could potentially mean for her. In this setting, even though she momentarily maintains a position of relative power beside the rest of the community—she is, after all, on a stage, standing at a podium—her pose remains somewhat subservient and isolated, as her hands grasp the piece of paper in front of her in a submissive and dependent gesture. Though differentiated from the other Jews around her, who are depicted as distanced, sketchy fragments, she remains an inevitable part of this closed community, gridlocked in a limiting posture.

2.5   Vanessa Davis, panel from “Make Me a Woman,” 2005. In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

Taken as a whole, this full-page comic nonetheless reflects the ways that Vanessa’s stance in that first image represents only a fragment of the process of “becoming a woman,” or only one of many points of perspective that ultimately contributes to her ever shifting sense of identity both in time and over time, her ultimate dis-affiliations. In the following image a young woman sits in a chair being drawn by a cartoonist, while the narrator explains of her bat mitzvah that “my party didn’t have a theme, but we did have kind of a mean-spirited caricaturist.” Since there are no clearly defined boundaries between Davis’s panels, a reading of the “following” panel as the one just under the first is my own interpretation. While the page generally suggests this particular sequence, as it is chronologically sound, one might also read the comic from left to right in three segments going down the page. This “alternative” reading is especially likely upon the reader’s first encounter with the page, since most English-speaking comics are meant to be read from left to right. In any case, the young woman, who could be, but is not necessarily, the same person as Vanessa, is drawn by the cartoonist with wild, unkempt hair, an upturned nose, and long, exaggerated arms. Her representation is trapped in a rectangular frame, while her actual self sits meekly in a chair with arms folded, her body leaning into the background that surrounds her. In both the narrator’s recitation of the story about Tamar as well as the drawing made by the bat mitzvah cartoonist, the young Vanessa, or someone like her, is frozen in place, the object of projections that are being passed on to her by others. It is not a coincidence that the “mean-spirited” caricaturist is engaged in a vocation that Vanessa will take up later in life, perhaps, in part, in order to revise this earlier, passive, and static portrayal of herself and others like her.

By the end of the comic, Vanessa is finally able to acknowledge this earlier limited perspective when she includes a reflection about her bat mitzvah from the point of view of the present-day artist drawing on this memory. “Years later,” the narration begins, stressing the temporal distance between this narrative voice and the one that dominates the rest of the page. Vanessa goes on to describe how she thought differently about her own bat mitzvah upon watching a television show called The Wonder Years and recognizing the distance between the main character’s experience and her own. The Wonder Years was a popular and acclaimed show that aired from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. It followed a man recalling his coming-of-age in a middle-class American suburb in the 1960s. As Vanessa explains, after verbally indicating that temporal shift, “I watched the wonder years where Paul has a sweet bar mitzvah party at a rec center and I was embarrassed because mine was so fancy.” In being presented with another version of this religious rite of passage, even so long after her own, Vanessa recognizes her own perspective as rooted in the context of a particular time and place, and specifically, in this case, in her economic background. This consciousness about growing up in a privileged class, and the realization that it was not a universal background for all American Jews, reorients her in relation to her own history and sets her on a path to understanding her Jewish identity as highly individualized or a matter of location.

Despite this verbally indicated shift in time and perspective, in this final image Vanessa is still pictured at her bat mitzvah; indeed, despite the accompanying text, she is drawn here engaged in the tradition of being lifted in a chair, alongside her mother, by a medley of guests. The bat mitzvah setting unites all of the images on the page and reveals how “Make Me a Woman” is not simply a narrative of present-day Vanessa revisiting and then revising her past. Instead, past and present perspectives reciprocally influence one another and accrue, as the spiraling construction of the page—free of typical grids and borders, reflective of joyful as well as complicated emotions, and banded together by stylistically complementary images all tied to a single past event—reflects. The comic’s black-and-white nature also levels the various time frames and spaces depicted, as though all experiences are taking place simultaneously and on the same plane. Formed collectively in the same penciled shades of gray and united on a single, clustered page, word and image, past and present, here and there converge until their oppositional postures settle. Vanessa cannot erase her past outlooks, though she can represent them as points that come together in a much larger and always expanding constellation of self. It is as a self in relation to other versions of the self, as well as in relation to other, often overlapping collectivities, that she can productively reflect on her earlier life and integrate past perspectives into a dynamic and textured present.

Davis’s explorations of her Jewishness throughout Make Me a Woman thus reflect the two dimensions—the diachronic and the synchronic—integral to Charmé’s model of Jewish identity and the means by which the comics medium supports the visual integration of these two dimensions. The narrative comics, both on their own and also when considered in relation to the diary comics and sketches included throughout the book, represent a self whose perception of her Jewish identity has changed over time as well as a self who is always conscious of the many other identities that intersect with and help define her understanding of Jewishness as something that is never independent or isolated in its existence. The structure of Davis’s individual comics, as well as the arrangement of the text as a whole, reinforces this notion of a spiral development of identity—what Charmé, in borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre, describes as “a series of revolutions that preserve the past but also move on to higher levels of integration” (122). These “higher levels of integration” are reflected on the page, for example, as Davis’s comics generally lack clear borders between panels; instead, as in the single-page “Make Me a Woman,” various panels bleed into one another, both across and down. Most of the comics included in the book generally do not include gutters, the spaces between panels that have so often been theorized in conversations about the way comics function and are read. Building on the theoretical groundwork laid by cartoonists like Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner, many comics theorists have written about the gutter as “host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics” (McCloud 66). These spaces between panels require the participation of the reader, who must use her imagination to fill in gaps or account for time lost between panels, and this kind of reader participation is generally unique to the experience of reading comics.

In contrast, Davis avoids drawing panels completely on most of her journal entries, and even her longer-form narrative comics often meld into one another or are separated by white spaces filled with the swirling and loopy handwriting of the author. Davis has described this style as reflective of a desire “to be spontaneous…to feel out the process…. Also, I found panels intimidating, as I had to pre-plan things too much to structure the comic that way. And I liked how the open space left room for details, and improvisational visual connections. I wanted to have as much page space as possible” (“A Womanly Chat”). This visual tactic makes the author more accountable for the work in one sense—the reader, after all, cannot fix spaces that do not exist—while allowing the reader greater freedom in how she chooses to read the page as a whole. The lack of spaces between panels additionally visually compounds the past and present, as the moments of transition between time frames, generally marked by the gutter, are excised. In this way the design reinforces the notion that impressions of past experiences are always connected to, and somehow based in, previous understandings and reflections—a “spiral” integration of the past into the present.

A diary entry pictured around the middle of the memoir, dated September 1, 2005, demonstrates this spiraling anatomy of the book as a whole through its anticlimactic visual execution, which structurally mirrors the “Make Me a Woman” comic previously discussed (figure 2.6). The September 1 entry marks the moment of the text when Vanessa first mentions, and reflects on, her move from the East to the West Coast, a shift that shapes the overall structure of the narrative. This entry is unique—it is a full-colored drawing instead of a black-and-white sketch—yet it is also the first in a miniseries within the text, preceding a number of similar, full-colored diary entries. These diary entries involved preplanning rather than spontaneous drawing. They figure somewhere between sketchbook drawings and long-form finished narrative comics (coloring takes time and is unusual in a diary entry or sketchbook), and were made to appear as finished works.¹⁵ The juxtaposition of the September 1 diary entry among a series of full-colored entries downplays this particular page’s significance and instead presents it as one of many equally weighted experiences. Like the “Make Me a Woman” comic, the September 1 entry also lacks panel divisions. The opening narration bubble introduces the thematic illusion of time passing while it simultaneously encapsulates the emotional paralysis that overcomes Vanessa in reflecting on this life change. “I’ve been gradually freaking more and more out about moving away,” she states, and the sentence is presented in short line breaks, like poetry. In format as well as in syntax—the phrase freaking out is divided by a slow but steady increase in anxiety marked by the words more and more—the wording emphasizes the fragmented sense of time that dominates this individual comic as well as the book as a whole. Similarly, the serialization of Vanessa’s image reflects an anxiety that is both fluid and weighted; her head is drawn a total of five times from different angles and displaying a subtle variety of expressions of general angst and worry. Speech bubbles emanate from Vanessa and her friends, crowding the middle of the page. These almost overlap and offer only snippets of longer conversations. All these formal elements combined thwart a simplistic or chronological delineation of Vanessa’s emotional states. Instead, the page visually represents the impact of Vanessa’s move as a series of small shocks whose significance can only be fully distilled through their compounded effect. Additionally, the images are shaded in dark and rich reds and browns, a color scheme that embeds the manifold, disparate figures and elements of the entry into a single amorphous mass, almost, but not quite, frozen in time.

2.6   Vanessa Davis, “September 1, 2005.” In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

The impression of time simultaneously passing and slowing down, with past and future experiences and emotions blending into one another, evokes the notion of “integration” that Charmé attributes to his spiral model. Vanessa, about to leave her job, experiences varied, sometimes conflicting thoughts and reactions regarding her impending move between coasts. “Don’t people leave New York all the time? Everyone’s lives go on! Things change!” she asserts at one moment, although at another she is pictured sobbing in response to an email asking her if she feels scared. “I—I doooo!” she types onto the computer screen. These confused and sometimes contradictory reflections mark a moment in the text when Vanessa’s perspective is dramatically unsettled. She is moving from the East Coast, where she lives among a community of others ostensibly like her, including but not limited to Jews, to the West Coast, where she exists in what she later describes as “self-exile.” Yet the chaotic nature of time, frozen but still passing, that this diary entry relates highlights the ways that Vanessa’s past experiences, perspectives, and identifications continue to affect and influence her, no matter what changes she endures over the course of the entire text. In a way, this spiral representation of time captures Vanessa’s sense of self over the course of the entire memoir; it reveals how an impending and pivotal shift in her point of view is tied not, as it may seem at first, to a single event, but rather to a journey of self-exploration that begins much earlier, and ends much later, than this particular geographical relocation. It is a sense of self, and identity, that is always extending off the page and outside the binding.

“Isn’t Homesickness Just Part of Self-Exile?”

Various critics have written about contemporary Jewish American women’s literature as preoccupied with a desire to reflect on, remember, and sometimes even return to the past. In her 2006 essay “Recalling ‘Home’ from Beneath the Shadow of the Holocaust: American Jewish Women Writers of the New Wave,” Janet Handler Burstein argues that unlike works from the earlier part of the twentieth century, which featured narrators leaving home in order to find themselves, contemporary Jewish American women’s writing from the last thirty years or so often depicts women who set out on journeys to understand and connect with their pasts. Burstein explains, “women’s writings of the new wave…seek continuities, often imagined as reconciliation with people long estranged from the writer” (39). What many of these women writers want, in an effort to better understand themselves, is to reunite with a notion of home that “has been lost or denied,” or “to retrieve what they believe has been withheld” (43). Similarly, in her 2003 essay “‘The Girl I Was’: The Construction of Memory in Fiction by American Jewish Women,” Sylvia Barack Fishman argues that “fiction by American Jewish female writers in the second half of the twentieth century often depicts women remembering their past” (145). For these authors, many of whom are the children or grandchildren of immigrants, if not immigrants themselves, “home” is often an estranged relationship to a person, history, or place. The desire to find or return “home” resides in a need to better understand their relationships to the present, and how their identities as women and Jews connect with the experiences of the generations that came before them, especially the worlds of their mothers.¹⁶

In some ways, Make Me a Woman is a text that enacts this move away from and subsequent search for “home” within its pages, beginning with the diary comic from September 1, 2005. In Davis’s book, as in many other contemporary works of Jewish American women’s literature, this notion of home is principally metaphorical and consistently aligned with the pursuit of a secure and familiar sense of self. But Davis’s memoir is not primarily interested in a return to or reflection on the past so much as it is focused on an integration of past experiences and reflections in the present moment or a revised understanding of “home” as something that both is and is not bound to a particular place or concept. This rejection of a conventional notion of home is at the root of Davis’s Jewish dis-affiliations. Her work establishes home as an idea that is not simply tied to a particular time and place but is instead an expansive concept that changes over time, encompassing many differing versions of familiarity and estrangement, intimacy and isolation. Make Me a Woman is a book that emphasizes not a return to, or move away from, some lost or locatable place or past, but rather identifies the question of home as one that persists over the course of a lifetime and one that, for the artist, must be contended with afresh through every piece of self-representation. The search for home thus serves as a repeating trope in her work, bridging together the ontological and narrative pursuits of coming to terms with one’s various identities along with the aesthetic enterprise of representing those identities. No single artistic form or style—from fragmentary, loosely drawn black-and-white sketches to carefully posed full-colored portraits—therefore represents the artist’s “home,” as each instead forms part of a larger mosaic of self.

The second half of Make Me a Woman tracks Vanessa’s journey as she leaves New York City for California, her move away from home. But this coastal move is not presented as a clear or seamless shift. Instead, various diary comics noting experiences that happen in New York City venues, on the subway, in SoHo, or at an East Village café, for example, are suddenly interrupted by the September 1 entry. The diary entry is then followed by other comics that also take place in New York locales and then several comics that do not give any clear indication of where they take place. In fact, these entries, including one dated September 3, 2006 (a full year ahead of the September 1 comic, though positioned only seven pages later) and a narrative comic titled “Nightmoves,” convey a sense of confusion and chaos regarding time and space, as Vanessa finds herself thrown together among groups of people, many of whom are strangers. Several pages later, the three-page comic “Crispy Christmas” begins with Vanessa explaining that she normally goes home to Florida, where her mother lives, “for Christmas,” while her boyfriend, who is first officially mentioned in this comic, though in passing, stays in California. What the book’s sprawling structure demonstrates above all, as in the nonchronological and somewhat sudden depiction of this move from the East to the West Coast, is the somewhat arbitrary nature of the concept of home.

As the book begins to focus on Vanessa’s experiences in California, the three-page, full-color narrative comic “Stranger in a Strange Land” conveys the feeling of “homesickness” that she experiences in her new surroundings. As she explains on a page in which the narrator’s tightly rendered cursive prose fills up the spaces between wide panels, “Every place I’ve lived, from my upbringing in South Florida, college in the Midwest and South, to even a short stint in Central America, I’d always been around New York Jews. I couldn’t imagine any place being THAT different.” She describes Santa Rosa, her new locale, as a “funny place” with a “limited number of professional opportunities, bars, and guys to date.” One broad, watercolor drawing of bright green and brown fields on the opening page—the only image in the comic that does not picture people or speech or thought bubbles within it—accentuates the difference between her new and old cities, as this new locale is at least initially distinguished by its vast unpeopled landscape. In fact, the main element that sets apart Santa Rosa seems to be Vanessa’s converted sense of her relationship to the spaces around her, a sensibility that, as the remainder of the comic shows, is actually rooted in her relationships with people. As she confesses, what baffles her sense of orientation in this new place is not the number of Jews she encounters but the new and unfamiliar ways they relate to their Jewish identities. She states that there are “some Jews here…and they’re my friends. [But] I think that they might connect with their Judaism in a different way than me—I’ve never been in a situation where I had to feel like it made me different.” Below this textual explanation, in a set of three interconnected images, Vanessa is seen having a conversation with a friend about growing up Jewish on the East versus West Coast (figure 2.7). Her friend explains, “Yeah, when we were little, we just didn’t tell people we were Jewish!” Vanessa replies, “That is so weird! And you guys are only half Jewish anyway so what’s the big deal?” In the third and final image tracking this dialogue, her friend looks annoyed, and Vanessa sheepishly admits, “Oh my gosh I didn’t mean it like that! I’m sorry—I’m an idiot!”

2.7   Vanessa Davis, middle of second page from “Stranger in a Strange Land,” 2009. In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

As with the black-and-white diary sketch picturing Vanessa at her desk at the beginning of Spaniel Rage, this experience is broken into three pictured moments that are nevertheless tied together in one larger, horizontally positioned rectangular panel. The subtle shifts in each of the three matching images reflect a careful unfolding, as each player’s facial expression slowly transforms in reaction and relation to the visual and verbal behaviors of the other. The conversation demonstrates the alienation—the feelings of disorientation—that Vanessa experiences in her new element. No matter the location, a common Jewish identity, much like any other shared affiliation, does not necessarily or easily unite her with others. Instead, as in this particular case, it can become a fracturing identity, dividing two people presumably belonging to the same community. Visually, the comic reflects this separation between the two women as Vanessa’s friend is slowly silenced over the course of the three panels, her smile transformed by the third panel into a scowl as Vanessa’s expression subtly shifts to one of budding remorse. Despite their spatial closeness on the page—drawn adjacent to one another, their bodies are almost superimposed—they are nevertheless portrayed as detached, their postures and language moving in separate directions. Vanessa’s friend’s body faces forward while hers remains in profile, and her friend’s speech bubbles disappear while hers take on more urgency and space. These relational stances suggest a powerful distancing between the two women even within these narrow frames.

Here, even though Vanessa finds herself in close conversation with a Jew from the West Coast, an affiliation reinforced by the narrow proximity of this intimate space, she still feels homesick for what she calls “the ubiquity of Jewishness in East Coast culture—how lots of people seem kinda Jewish, the diversity of Jews there.” It is not necessarily “being” or identifying as Jewish that unites Vanessa with others or makes her feel comfortable around them, but rather a more intangible characteristic of being “kinda” Jewish, an identity that cannot easily be summed up, pictured, or defined. It is a matter of perspective, as the differing standpoints of the two women reflect. By revealing identity to be at least partly dependent on an individual’s point of view, the comic reflects the slippery nature of the term Jewish as something without an essential core or home, a term as dependent on the person who uses or adopts it as on the setting in which it is claimed and the person who receives, reacts to, or witnesses that identity label.

Additionally, in the context of the spiraling chronology of the memoir as a whole, Vanessa’s homesickness can be read as a feeling that is not altogether new to her, but rather a state of being that has followed her from the East to the West Coast. Although this particular narrative comic seems to align a comforting sense of being “kinda Jewish” with those living on the East Coast, as opposed to those living on the West Coast, the earlier narrative comics and journal entries in Make Me a Woman make it clear that this set of binaries—Jewish, East Coast, and home versus not Jewish, West Coast, and exile—is not straightforward as it seems. For example, even early on in Make Me a Woman, in various configurations and settings Vanessa often undergoes the sense of being an outsider or different from others. She encounters this feeling of marginality both as a member of a tight-knit Jewish community and, later, as one who has moved outside that community. “Modern Ritual” and “Preparation Information” are two comics stylistically linked with “Make Me a Woman,” and they were all originally published in Arthur magazine in 2005 and 2006. The three one-page black-and-white comics are presented on consecutive pages at the very beginning of the book, and each is similarly drawn in pencil on a single page, dated 2005. In the first two comics of the set, which trace Vanessa’s thoughts about Judaism just prior to her bat mitzvah, even when steeped in settings that suggest formative and immersive experiences of Jewishness, she already recognizes the apprehensions she feels about her relationship to certain religious and cultural aspects of being Jewish. “Modern Ritual,” another spiral-shaped comic, begins with Vanessa explaining how she grew up “almost exclusively around Jews”—and the characters drawn on the page are all presumably tied through this Jewish affiliation. Despite her continued exposure to Jewish life, rituals, and personalities, however, before her own bat mitzvah she finds herself experiencing “some doubts,” a sentiment visually reinforced by her continually confused and uncomfortable facial expressions over the course of the page. Her rabbi somewhat alleviates these concerns with his observation that “the Torah is full of metaphor!” and his suggestion that she take her religion less literally. But, as her continually rounded and often contorted mouth and eyes reflect, she continues to experience strong misgivings.

In “Preparation Information,” the following one-page comic (which is succeeded by the third and final comic in the series, the previously discussed “Make Me a Woman”), these misgivings culminate in a fainting spell, which occurs on the day she practices her Torah portion—the section of the Torah she has been assigned to read in honor of her coming-of-age—in front of a cantor. The accompanying image hides her face, as though only in this moment of presumably uncontrollable bodily disengagement can she stop marking her resistance in the passive but nevertheless consistent manner of disgruntled facial expressions. The comic ends by focusing not on the religious aspects of this rite of passage, but on the social and commercial traditions surrounding the bat mitzvah, like the excesses related to those having the parties. The shift from the spiritual to the material reveals the complexity of Vanessa’s relationship to her Jewish identity. Her questioning stance, which in this context defines her understanding of what it means to be Jewish and is often reflected in her face, is more than a strictly religious issue—a difficulty with believing in a monotheistic god, for example. Instead, Jewishness is, in this case, a highly stressful classification linked to the expectations of others, whether those in her peer group or religious representatives and authority figures. In the final image, though her face finally looks somewhat content, her eyes cast a sidelong glance at her peers, as though she needs to read and mirror their facial expressions in order to secure a sense of belonging. This early ambivalent and often dis-affiliatory response to Jewishness is one she maintains over the course of the book, which reveals itself almost entirely through her interactions with others. It is an outlook that simultaneously encompasses her affinity with, and her separation from, a consistent or communal notion of what it means to be Jewish or to identify as Jewish.

Several years after her bat mitzvah experience, Vanessa finds herself having switched from a private Jewish day school to a public school. Like her move from the East Coast to California, the change in environment leaves her with conflicted feelings. As she recounts in “Dyspeptic Academic,” a three-page full-colored narrative comic included early in the memoir, she finds a resemblance between these two communities in the fact that “at both schools I was ensconced in a small, tightly-knit community, where we were told we were special.” Below this narration Vanessa is pictured sprawled in a domestic space, hugging a pillow as her friend lounges on the couch and knits. The phrase tighly-knit is visually echoed, suggesting an evolving kinship between the two women that is both connected to and contrasted with the sense of belonging precipitated by the vastly different educational environments. Like a close friendship—a chosen affiliation—being part of a closed community appeases Vanessa’s desire to belong. But this very exposure to public school, particularly conversations that Vanessa has with those who are not part of her early, religious community, compels her to recognize how much she is concurrently connected to and distanced from that earlier affiliation. In another panel from the same comic, separated from this one by several lines of the narrator’s cursive prose, Vanessa argues with her public school social studies teacher about a map of Israel that marks the West Bank and Gaza Strip as disputed territories. “No it isn’t! Israel won it in the Six-Day war!!” she argues. Several panels later, on the following page, in a conversation with a public school peer who likens the “situation in Gaza” to “ethnic cleansing,” Vanessa, pictured with a scowl on her face, thinks to herself, “What do I even know about ANYTHING anymore!” These two incidents highlight her confusion when hearing, possibly for the first time in her life, opinions about Israel that question what she once seemingly took for granted. At the same time, she experiences an equal discomfort in a dialogue she depicts between herself and a peer from her Jewish day school after she has left that school—a conversation pictured just above the Gaza panel, with no clear space separating the two scenes. As her childhood friend talks about the religious persecution of the Jews and how, as a result, they too deserve affirmative action, Vanessa counters, “Jews weren’t brought here as slaves and then terrorized for 100 years after!” The distance that Vanessa experiences from her childhood peer, visibly reinforced by the dense speech bubbles dividing the two women in dialogue, reflects her aversion to the view of Jews as victims or as a persecuted minority in modern-day America.

These disparate conversations are visually connected to one another, as they appear close together on a series of pages with limited indicators separating the different scenes from one another. As these swirling, tied reminiscences disclose, during interactions with others in both public and private school Vanessa consistently finds herself sounding out the voice of a questioning minority or at least expressing her disagreement through noticeably irritated facial expressions and sidelong glances. Her status in both these communities is strongly defined by her ability to question, and oftentimes reject, the majority opinion. Even in the context of being at “home,” then, Vanessa is not necessarily always an insider, just as she is not always an outsider in situations that imbue her with a feeling of homesickness, as in the conversation she has with the woman she identifies as not authentically Jewish. By depicting fragments of conversations and experiences side by side on adjacent pages, with her questioning stance linking these otherwise disparate fragments, she continually disorients and reorients her relationship to past and present conceptions of self and identity by documenting them as most decipherable in relation to her own recurrently questioning posture.

As revealed in these early comics, Vanessa’s Jewish identity surfaces often at the moments she confronts and interrogates the opinions and expectations of those around her. Regardless of their affiliations, she feels most “Jewish” when she engages with others in dialogues that allow her to express her differing opinions or lead her to moments of internal crisis about the status of her own points of view. These moments of crisis or challenge are marked by layers of verbal and visual expression that acquire new, more complex meanings when read and looked at in relation to one another. In each encounter she experiences a kind of satisfaction from voicing, thinking, or facially expressing her oppositional viewpoints, even though the conversations generally lead her into further lines of inquiry regarding her own identity instead of presenting her with definitive answers. These earlier encounters thus connect to the conversation she has with the woman she describes as “only half Jewish” in the later comic “Stranger in a Strange Land.” As this particular conversation concludes, Vanessa apologizes for her comment, while her friend stands silently as the minority or outsider, as the one challenging a majority (in this case, a Jewish one). The idea that someone is Jewish only if she was born to a Jewish mother is a belief expressed by some in more conservative or orthodox religious Jewish communities, presumably like the one of Vanessa’s day school upbringing, as the result of a religious statute. For Vanessa, whose own experiences have revealed to her the myriad ways that a person can be Jewish, this utterance reveals her own internalization of an ignorance and insensitivity to the importance of allowing others to take charge of their own identities and self-expressions and to question a dominant opinion.

The comic “Stranger in a Strange Land” ends with Vanessa sheepishly, and somewhat reluctantly, accepting the reality of her new home, open-ended and confusing as that reality feels. In the same dense cursive writing, sprawled over the final rectangular, horizontal panel, she narrates, “Oh, well. I moved here partly to get away from East Coast sensibilities and values. Isn’t homesickness just part of self-exile? Isn’t it a Jewish legacy to not fit in really anywhere? Isn’t it always that you can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but not Brooklyn out of the girl?” The open-ended questions here link this comic to earlier childhood experiences, depicting incidents in which questions were posed but never fully answered. Under this set of questions, three consecutive images of Vanessa in bed, holding Philip Roth’s famous 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint (figure 2.8), are pictured, with, once again, no clear divisions separating these panels. In the first image Vanessa enjoys the novel, as illustrated by her entertained facial expression and speech bubble, “Ha!” In the second image she looks annoyed, her eyes rolled upward instead of focused on the novel. In the final image she is asleep, one of her hands still touching the book and the other clasped at her side.

This series of expressive drawings prompts a connection between Vanessa’s reactions to a touchstone of contemporary Jewish American literature with her feelings of rootlessness in relation to her personally located sense of Jewish identity, thereby linking the experience of stigmatizing someone else on an individual level with the experience of having been part of a stigmatized collective. Vanessa’s recurrent sense of exile, and her consequent, responsive adoption of an active sense of self-exile, connects to her experience of being a Jewish woman whose own image has been narrowly written and established in mainstream Jewish American literature.¹⁷

Much has been written about images of women that emerged from a Jewish American literature or, at least, from a publicly visible “canon” that is too often based on misogynist stereotypes. As mentioned in relation to Kominsky Crumb’s works, Riv-Ellen Prell argues that the fracturing that occurs within minority groups, as between Jewish men and women, often reveals the dynamic of the group as a whole in relation to mainstream society. She writes, “One is not simply in or out of a group, assimilated or merely acculturated. Rather, relations between members of the minority group continue to mirror relations between the minority and majority groups” (Fighting 20). According to this model, the ways that some visible Jewish men have depicted Jewish women over time is partially a reflection of the ways Jews have been treated by and reflected in American culture and society more generally. In her introduction to Talking Back, Joyce Antler chronicles the resulting stereotypes that some Jewish men have created of Jewish women, which so often mirror Jewish men’s own anxieties and humiliations. These include, for example, “The Yiddishe Mama, the Jewish Mother, and the Jewish American Princess” (1). Antler argues, “Such contradictory images of Jewish women—domineering and vulnerable, manipulative and quiescent, alluring and unattractive—highlight the impressive yet threatening aspects of Jewish women’s roles and their power.” Both Antler’s and Prell’s books additionally trace the ways Jewish American women, especially since the second wave of the feminist movement, have responded to such representations in their own art and writings. Prell, for example, discusses 1970s feminist novels as counter-representations to earlier depictions of Jewish women’s bodies, as they “envision…a Jewishness that does not depend upon the consuming woman as an icon because Jewishness is not defined primarily in terms of acculturation or membership in the middle class. Jewishness, instead, constitutes an identity from which an artist can question and critique the dominant culture” (242). Kominsky Crumb’s comics, which utilize and exaggerate stereotypes of Jewish women in order to render them absurd, can therefore similarly be understood as a kind of “talk back art”—an art that is very much focused on, and inspired by, earlier (mis)representations of Jewish women.

2.8   Vanessa Davis, bottom of final page from “Stranger in a Strange Land,” 2009. In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

Davis’s representation of Vanessa in bed reading Portnoy’s Complaint is also, at least in part, a response to such earlier representations of Jewish women. However, unlike other “talk back art,” Davis’s work is not primarily focused on looking back at stereotypical representations of Jewish women. Instead, as the comic “Stranger in a Strange Land” demonstrates, her exploration of stereotypes begins with the very personal and present question of what it means to be an artist engaging in acts of representation that involve the danger of oversimplifying the subject at hand, whether that subject is the self or someone else. The comic begins with Vanessa talking to a friend about a column she has been hired to write for a Jewish organization, Nextbook, publisher of the online Tablet magazine, and it is a conversational tidbit that emphasizes Vanessa’s controlling status as artist and creator. At other points in this same comic, as in the scene with her friend, she recounts conversations that reflect her propensity to categorize others as well as her struggle to understand this inclination. As another example, in a set of panels pictured halfway down the final page of the comic, she somewhat apologetically e-mails a former Israeli lover to tell him that the film You Don’t Mess with the Zohan reminded her of him. This 2008 American comedy starred Adam Sandler playing an Israeli soldier who has left his life combating terrorism to become a hairdresser in New York City. The film is loaded with satirical stereotypes of Israelis, not to mention Jews, Palestinians, and Arab Americans. In the Israeli lover’s response, he tells her, “An obnoxious reason indeed! It’s like if I told you I saw some dumb American girl at McDonald’s doing her stupid American thing and thought of you!” By depicting Vanessa’s personal experiences stereotyping others alongside her experiences of being stereotyped as part of a larger collective, Davis’s comics reveal the porous divides between those on the inside of a particular community and those on the outside, between those who have been stereotyped and those who stereotype. Her work thus both responds to and creates anew representations of identity across various communities, as her comics engage with and account for her artistic imagination, which is always tied to the personal and cultural influences that affect her artistic choices and enterprises.

The images pictured at the end of the comic, of Vanessa reading Roth’s novel, can thus be read as an epilogue to the narrative reflecting a complicated response to stereotypical depictions of Jewish women in American media and culture. Significantly, in the first image in this series of three, Vanessa finds enjoyment in the book—an important acknowledgment that although Jewish women as depicted in Roth’s novels in many ways hurt Jewish women’s perceptions of themselves, not to mention Jewish men’s perception of themselves, they also contribute to a persistently influential cultural celebration of Jewishness in America, however flawed and contradictory that celebration. As Davis pointed out in an interview, “Portnoy’s Complaint was important—those depictions had never been put out there, that Jewish voice was important to hear, for so many reasons” (“In Search” 180).

The following central image picturing Vanessa grimacing at the novel reflects more typical and public feminist responses to his works, not to mention reactions to other important Jewish American male literary figures, as well as comedians, from the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁸ Yet this image is followed by a third that is perhaps unique to a generation of Jewish women coming of age in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whose relationship to feminism differs from the generations before them. In this final image Vanessa has fallen asleep, and drool emerges from the corner of her mouth. One of her hands still clutches the book, but the other is aimed away from it. The connection to the past is still there, in traces, but the postassimilated Jewish woman artist, as depicted here, has also moved forward; she is fully engaged in an imaginary dreamworld that still barely grasps at what engrossed her before she fell asleep.

Presented as a series with no panels dividing them, these carefully composed watercolor drawings are visibly and structurally linked to the set of images pictured on the previous page of the comic and representing Vanessa in conversation with her friend. By including these two mirroring sets of panels in the same narrative about homelessness and self-exile, Davis’s work connects the violence of publicly feeling exiled from one’s own identity with the private everyday interactions that often lead one member of a group to marginalize another within that group. That Vanessa presents her response to Roth’s novel in the intimate space of her bed—heart-covered pillows propping her up—suggests an inevitable muddling of public and private spaces when it comes to self-perception. Homesickness is therefore a state of feeling like an outsider at “home” as much as it is a state of feeling like an outsider far away from “home.” It is a recognition that the notion of home, of itself, like identity, is a concept that changes over time, but that also holds many sometimes contradictory meanings within the same present.

“That’ll be A Funny Panel in Some Future Comic Where I Flashback on My Non-Jewish Boyfriend!”

In addition to recording Vanessa’s journey between coasts, but not necessarily away from “home,” or into “exile,” Make Me a Woman is a book that tracks her experiences dating both Jewish and non-Jewish men over time as yet another fraught indicator of her ever changing understanding of and connection to her Jewish identity. For many contemporary Jewish American women artists and writers, the theme of relationships between Jewish women and non-Jewish men is a recurring one that allows them to explore the false presumption that non-Jewish men lead Jewish women into a state of separation from their Jewish ties and heritages or that relationships with such men represent a condition of not being “at home” with their Jewish identities.¹⁹ Like Kominsky Crumb, Davis often paints her alter ego as uncomfortable around Jewish men, a discomfort that similarly stems from her overfamiliarity with them. In the previously discussed comic, “Dyspeptic Academic,” for instance, Vanessa reflects on her negative experiences with Jewish men in grade school: “Sometimes I think that this overexposure to developing Jewish boys has contributed to a lifelong romantic aversion to them.” Below this narrative, she is pictured in a classroom, seated at a desk with a scowl on her face as a young boy next to her, leaning over, inquires of her and another pictured female classmate: “Hey can you guys shut your legs? I really hate the smell of TUNA!” In the adjoining panel, Vanessa is depicted as an adult in bed with a man, and as she leans her body toward him—much like the adolescent boy once leaned toward her—he turns away, asking, “Can you get off me? I feel like I’m being smothered!” By presenting these two scenes in close proximity to one another, Davis draws a connection, however tenuous, between incidents that might otherwise remain isolated from one another. In a sense, by linking these experiences textually as well as visually—the boy and man wear matching hair colors and expressions—she engages in and compounds the very narrowed categorizations of “other” that, elsewhere and in relation to her own identity, she works hard to reject. But as a reading of the comic in its entirety reflects, such stereotyping can also be a means of honestly and critically reflecting on how outside communal expectations often interact with and influence an individual’s most intimate desires.

In the final two panels of the same comic, for example, Vanessa sits at a “big Jewish wedding,” her face tilted longingly toward a man, labeled “Jewish TV writer,” who sits across the table. The adjoining panel portrays a daydream in which, wearing an almost identical expression and posture, she is dancing with yet another man, who is presumably not Jewish, and asking him, “If we ever have kids, I can raise them Jewish, right?” In the first of these two images, Vanessa’s gaze is directed toward the TV writer, but also in the direction of the panel in which she embraces her non-Jewish partner. In this way the images associate the fantasy of affiliating with a non-Jewish man with the fantasy of fulfilling obligations that have been passed on to her—through her family (predominantly her mother) and community—of maintaining a link to her Jewish heritage, especially of transferring that heritage onto her hypothetical children.

In Davis’s work, then, we see both a repetition and a revision of the anxieties and desires of earlier Jewish American women’s writing about exogamy.²⁰ Vanessa is able to question the expectations of Jewish womanhood that are passed on to her without fully rejecting them. She modifies these expectations to suit her own particular needs and desires, all the while maintaining an awareness and acceptance of the impressions these outside pressures have made on her. Additionally, by framing her fantasy question about having children with a non-Jewish man as an event that is a hypothetical and not a definite plan, an “if” instead of a “when,” she rebels against the cultural assumption and expectation that, as a woman, she will ultimately procreate, or at least want and attempt to procreate—even as she leaves it open as a possibility. Vanessa’s fantasy, draped on the page in the folds of a heap of gray and chalky storm clouds, possibly ominous, possibly animate, simultaneously reconciles her need to accommodate herself to the expectations of others, a need she has adopted into her own “sense of identity,” as she admits of the daydream, with her desire to question and rebel against those very expectations.

Several other comics throughout the first half of Make Me a Woman, before Vanessa finds herself in a monogamous relationship with a non-Jewish man in California, additionally trace her interactions with various men, and these comics similarly address the question of how to dis-affiliate. For Vanessa, this means how to acknowledge the desire to maintain a Jewish identity without bowing to the expectations of others or disavowing one’s own needs, motivations, and appetites, however jumbled these may be. In the three-page narrative comic “Wild Ride,” for example, she describes the time she spends with an Israeli in New York City. “Jewish American girls and Israeli guys—isn’t that our REAL birthright?” she quips in the opening panel, as the Israeli man lets out a chuckle. Vanessa goes on to describe him as “insufferably charming” and “strangely familiar”—characterizations mirrored and echoed in his variously awkward postures, attire, and proclamations. These depictions correspond with the e-mail exchange with her Israeli ex-boyfriend in “Stranger in a Strange Land” in which she reveals her own predisposition toward lumping Israelis together, a tendency that evokes often misdirected feelings of nostalgia and familiarity. As Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen argue in their introduction to Divergent Jewish Cultures, many presume a connection between Israelis and American Jews, in part because of the shared “impact of European Jews on both societies” (2). Nevertheless, as they go on to show, “Israelis and American Jews lack intimate knowledge of one another. They tend to hold stereotypes rather than real people in mind when they think of each other, despite their similar origins” (3).²¹ For Vanessa, the candid descriptions of her stereotyped perceptions of Israeli men reveal yet another dimension of the way she conceptualizes her Jewish American identity. For her, as for other American Jews raised to perceive Israeli culture and history as an extension of their own heritage, Israel presumably marks a kind of “home away from home.” According to this model, Israeli men represent the “strangely familiar,” in the sense that they are Jewish but not American. A relationship with an Israeli man therefore could potentially serve to bring together Vanessa’s conflicting needs to rebel against and simultaneously maintain her Jewish identity in the ways that others expect her to; it might conceivably satisfy her desire to affirm and cultivate the “insider-outsider” status she experienced as a child and teenager, the very sense of enforced “rootlessness” that she brands her own “Jewish legacy,” although her comics reveal the simultaneous sense of connection she often feels both in and out of this very Jewish legacy.

The opening images in the comical “Wild Ride” visually reflect Vanessa’s overly idealistic fantasies of what this relationship with an Israeli man could mean for her, even in the face of their obvious incompatibilities (figure 2.9). One early panel depicts an extreme close-up of their faces, with him telling her, “Just so you know, this is just for tonight.” Her eyes look skeptically away from him, as her thought bubble reads, “No kidding!” Yet, despite what seems like an acknowledgment of the casual status of this relationship, the panel is followed by another, in which she sits at her computer with one arm on her chest and another on her forehead as her speech bubble emits her swoon. She is reading an e-mail in which her Israeli lover once again attempts to maintain an emotional distance, as he has written to her, “It probably won’t go anywhere, but let’s meet up.” Vanessa’s swoon is surrounded by red hearts that connect the previous panel, in which she reveals what can now more clearly be read as only a superficial skepticism, with a panel depicting her inability to break out of the fantasy she has created from an ideal of the Israeli man as her “birthright.” The two images are additionally linked, once again, by her gaze, which is focused on the idealistic fantasy that evokes the swoon, even as she is engaged in a close embrace with the object of her purported affections.

The rest of the comic slowly breaks down Vanessa’s illusion, as this man’s individual quirks and behaviors disclose how much her Israeli fantasy lover is less than an ideal mate. The move toward reality comes slowly for Vanessa, who says almost nothing over the course of the comic once she has announced that initial “birthright” proclamation. What this story line humorously records, most significantly, is a superficial relationship between two characters who seem to be communicating on different planes. Vanessa’s idealistic fantasy, which turns her Israeli lover into a characterization of who and what she wants to identify herself with, is matched by his comment, on one of their dates, that “I always wanted to be an artist. Instead, I just date artists.” The glimpses that the comic imparts of the Israeli’s personality hint at his own superficial reasons for spending time with Vanessa, a motivation mirroring her own desire to be defined by the person she chooses to date. Though the two are consistently visually linked throughout the comic, coupled together in all panels but one, their interactions ultimately reflect two people who never actually see or hear one another; they are proximate to each other, like Vanessa and her friend in “Stranger in a Strange Land,” but nevertheless maintain an unbridgeable distance.

2.9   Vanessa Davis, middle of first page from “Wild Ride,” 2009. In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

Vanessa’s fraught attitude toward being pressured into a relationship with a Jewish man is tracked throughout Make Me a Woman, as she negotiates the complicated desire to get around this expectation—to remain “open-minded,” as it were—all the while somehow keeping up a link to her Jewish identity. The plotlines that hinge around her dating reflect her struggle toeing the line between outside expectations and personal needs, between the urge to rebel and the yearning to fit in or feel like part of a community. Her contradictory impulses and inclinations are traced on the page both explicitly—generally, through clear and careful verbal examinations and explanations—as well as implicitly—through omissions, silences, and often nuanced or ambiguous postures and expressions that potentially link to verbal narratives in unsettled ways.

The later comics in the book continue to explore this complicated question, as Vanessa’s non-Jewish boyfriend, Trevor, becomes a more consistent presence. Like Vanessa’s move from the East to the West Coast, however, her perception of what it means to be in a serious relationship with a non-Jewish man is not chronologically traceable. Indeed, while Trevor appears several times in the first half of the memoir, his presence is generally not explicitly referred to early on; instead, he is an often silent actor in Vanessa’s narrative. In the previously discussed comic, “Dyspeptic Academic,” for instance, the man pictured in the final panel looks like Trevor, and his humorous response to Vanessa’s question about whether they would raise their kids Jewish—“I was thinking we’d raise them Zoroastrian!” he responds—aligns with the way Trevor’s personality is portrayed in other comics. This surreptitious introduction into the narrative can be explained by the nonchronological arrangement of the book: “Dyspeptic Academic” is dated 2009, although it was likely placed at the beginning of the book due to its focus on Vanessa’s early Jewish life. But Trevor’s understated presence, which continues, to an extent, in the latter half of the book, also crucially signifies Vanessa’s movement away from her fantasies and desires and into an actual, and not imagined or underdeveloped, relationship with a man, who is also notably an artist.²² In another three-page narrative comic placed early on in the text, and titled “Framed!?” Vanessa recounts her experience trying to push herself “to be open-minded” by dating a non-Jewish man who proudly shows her his full-sized tattoo of Jesus being crucified; the image is splayed across his chest in thick ink, with the words “Praise the Lord” sprawled beneath it. Although the comic is centrally focused on Vanessa’s attempts to wrestle with her dating history prior to her long-term, monogamous relationship, Trevor’s once again downplayed presence in one of the opening panels is telling. He sits beside Vanessa, a scowl on his face, as her mother, who coordinates a Jewish film festival, suggests that the three of them watch “an animated documentary on circumcision” after dinner. In this case Trevor’s scowl mimics the pained expressions that Vanessa often wears when she is made uncomfortable or feels out of place. But his posture, so closely aligned with hers as they jointly face her mother, also suggests a close affiliation, or consensus, between them. Vanessa’s exclamation (“Mom!”) serves to reinforce that bond and even suggests that it is in the space of Vanessa’s connection with Trevor that she finds herself most able to fully express herself, to feel at home with her questioning posture.

In the second half of the memoir, Trevor is often pictured in diary comics conveying an intimate and loving relationship between equals. The two are frequently pictured together in bed, as in a panel from “Holy Rollin,’” a three-page narrative comic in which Vanessa struggles with her connection to Jewish traditions and rituals. In this panel Trevor faces Vanessa, his expression attentive, as she somewhat mindlessly prattles on about the future, her hands clutching at the bedspread and an ambiguous drip—of sweat or a tear—pictured on her face. The narrative text above their heads reads, “Judaism is a lot about personal responsibility, and I like that. Also, I don’t even trust my own beliefs much of the time—it’d be hard to stay in sync with a whole community.” Trevor’s calm posture here contrasts with the animate and always slightly off-key (in Vanessa’s eyes) Israeli in “Wild Ride.” Too, their intimacy in bed, and particularly Vanessa’s comfort with expressing herself verbally and affectively while he remains silent but interested, recalls the image from “Dyspeptic Academic” in which Vanessa pictures herself with a neutral expression, leaning over her Jewish lover as he claims she is smothering him. In contrast, Trevor’s often unpronounced presence throughout the book, in diary and narrative comics where Vanessa freely expresses herself, suggests a sense of comfort that is unattainable with other pictured male counterparts. While Vanessa often attempts to orient herself in relation to those others, through verbal and visual gestures and postures that suggest a contrived intimacy, with Trevor that sense of connection appears often seamless. Like his unannounced integration into the text, their daily interactions and intimacies are generally presented without metacommentary.

While he is in many cases a silent counterpart to Vanessa, when Trevor participates more actively in the narrative his expressions and contributions serve to enhance and complicate Vanessa’s self-reflections, as in a diary comic dated March 18, 2008. Drawn rhythmically in six evenly spaced panels, and partially light watercolor, the comic opens with Vanessa sitting at her computer as Trevor is pictured in the background, his face hidden. “Purim is a fun holiday!” Vanessa exclaims, and he turns to hear her description of the food eaten on the Jewish holiday, asking questions and asserting, “That sounds fun,” when she describes the tradition of drinking “till you don’t know the difference between good and evil.” When Vanessa describes hamantaschen, the triangle-shaped cookies traditionally eaten to celebrate the day, he responds, “Yeeuch! Sounds like more gross Jewish food,” even as Vanessa dreamily pictures the cookies in a thought bubble floating over her head. The next panel is untitled, as Vanessa stares at her boyfriend, who sits with a self-satisfied look on his face. His eyes are closed, and two lines beside his lips reveal a slight grin while she looks on expressionlessly. This silent moment between the otherwise engaged couple reflects a pause in the narrative, as Vanessa presumably absorbs the conversation and contemplates a response. Captured in this constructed series of unfolding narrative bits, the recorded conversation affords the otherwise silent-on-the-topic couple space to finally address aloud what it means for Vanessa to be dating a non-Jew.

In the end, the final two panels of the comic depict a playful acknowledgment of a conversation between two intimates revealed to be equals (figure 2.10). Facing her computer again, and this time with her eyes closed—wearing an expression almost identical to Trevor’s expression in the previous panel—Vanessa tells him, “Well, that’ll be a funny panel in some future comic where I flashback on my non-Jewish boyfriend!” As in the collaborative comics drawn by Aline Kominsky Crumb and Robert Crumb, this image humorously addresses the question of who is allowed to speak for or about a minority group and how the context of the conversation affects what is or is not presumably permissible for its participants to say. Although noncollaborative, this diary comic reflects a dialogue originally held in a private space that has been made public by its visualization.²³ The statement that Vanessa will “flashback” on her non-Jewish ex-boyfriend in a future, imaginary panel reinforces the actuality that this is a conversation being translated onto the page by a cartoonist who is consciously turning her everyday life experiences into art that will be visible to others. The comic has been created in part for laughs, but it also captures and records an otherwise private moment between intimates whose relationship, as a Jew dating a non-Jew, has been repeatedly misunderstood and caricatured in the public eye. It revises that characterization in a public way. By exaggerating her reaction to Trevor with a comedic comeback, Vanessa presents the two as on par with one another even as she is the person drawing the comic. The depiction productively exposes and exploits the stereotypes associated with their coupling—namely, that the non-Jew will never be able to look at the Jew without categorizing her, through idealizations and/or degradations, or even by engaging in overt acts of anti-Semitism. By putting these portrayals in Vanessa’s hands, so to speak, the story line turns the victim-persecutor formula on its head.

2.10   Vanessa Davis, final two panels from “3/18/08.” In Make Me a Woman, n.p. Images from Make Me a Woman copyright © Vanessa Davis, provided courtesy Drawn and Quarterly.

Indeed, in the last panel on the page, titled “Epilogue,” Vanessa’s boyfriend giggles in bed as he reads a book about Hitler entitled The Early Years, while Vanessa looks over at him angrily, the covers drawn tightly up to her neck. The comedic depiction of this intimate space—Vanessa is leaning, in the panel, on the same heart-covered pillow pictured in the Portnoy’s Complaint panels—exaggerates preconceived, stereotyped roles of the Jew in conversation, or in bed, with the non-Jew. This interaction, depicted playfully alongside the many other comics in the book that document a loving relationship, ultimately discloses a partnership between two people—both, notably, cartoonists—who are clearly at home with one another. In the end, it is, ironically, in the private space of her bed that Vanessa can “talk back” to the many unseen but influential presences that have informed, however surreptitiously, her current sense of what it means to belong.

“What Would Make Me The Most ‘Myself’?”

Throughout Make Me a Woman, Vanessa often calls up her mother’s words in narratives through which she explores her Jewish identity. Toward the end of “Holy Rollin,’” for example, in a square panel picturing a close-up of her mother’s face poised in front of a cozy, flowery couch, she recalls her mother as “always” saying: “wherever I am in the world, if I’m around Jews I feel at home!” In the following, adjacent panel, Vanessa faces her mother’s persona in her own close-up, wearing a scowl and with her eyes rolled. Though a blue background unites the two women, Vanessa’s likeness is not tied to any particular space here, in contrast to her mother’s familiarly depicted couch. Vanessa’s cynical thought bubble, drawn in a cloud of smoke beside her, reads, “When are we EVER not around a bunch of JEWS?” Here Vanessa mocks her mother’s words, but, as the rest of the page reflects, she does not completely reject them. Instead, depicted as a prelude to the remainder of the page, but also as an epilogue to the first two pages of the comic, these words prompt relational explorations. Over the course of the comic, she visually and textually experiments with notions of home and not home, the familiar and the unfamiliar, cast alongside one another, much like the neighboring images of mother and daughter. These disorientations and reorientations are important gestures, signifying not an omission of or disidentification with the world of her mother, but rather an integration of that point of view into her own ever evolving perspective.

In the final three-page narrative comic included in the memoir, “Fast Forward!” Vanessa attempts to move from her focus on the past and present, and especially the past as part of the present, to concentrate on the future. She begins by recalling her move to California and how her life since has felt “like a bit of a time warp.” She lists the many changes that her friends, near and far, have gone through over those years, changes that have made her feel left behind. As she narrates, “I don’t know what to do next. I don’t totally know what I want,” she once again inserts her mother’s presence into the story line. When Vanessa poses the question “What would make me the most ‘myself’?” the image underneath pictures her as an adolescent sitting beside her mother in the intimate space of a car. This time the two are in close proximity to one another, their bodies overlapping in the space of the same panel, and they look at each other with matching sidelong glances over the frames of two sets of eyeglasses. Her mother asks her, “What do you consider yourself FIRST: A woman, a Jew, or an American?” Framed also as a question, these words obliquely mirror Vanessa’s own rebellious journey to understanding her identity as open-ended and never definitive, a continued investigation focused on unraveling possibilities instead of insisting on clear-cut truths. Beneath the image of the two of them in the car, the narrator adds an open-ended statement from her mother: “She’s also told me, ‘Be here now.’”

This panel brings together the main thematic explorations of Make Me a Woman—what does it mean to choose one identity over another? is there a way to best understand or represent the self as a distinct entity? how do relationships and experiences from the past affect present outlooks?—while it reiterates the memoir’s continued emphasis on past-as-present as the most formative moment in any exploration of self and identity. Looking forward requires a kind of open-endedness that comes from integration, from recognizing the many connections between synchronic and diachronic versions of the self that are always in dynamic conversation with one another. For Vanessa, chronicling the self is a process based not on choosing one representation over another, but on recognizing the diverse truths inherent in all self-representations created over time and connected on the page. It is through the process of composition, of piecing the self line by line, that the artist can finally find and claim a space of belonging.