Decoding the Visual Rhetoric: Memory and Trauma in Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!

Abstract

Memory is an important tool in Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) as she reconnoitres in non-linear fragments the personal trauma she faced while she was growing up. Layered into nineteen disjointed chapters, Barry’s graphic narrative is an amalgamation of images, collages and photographs, often following the pattern of a scrapbook style that justifies not only the events drawn in her narrative but also the motive of visual rhetoric in comics where visual images communicate and concretize meaning. Initially published as web comics (slate.com), each chapter consists of hand-painted vignettes of multifarious themes which are directly or indirectly linked to Barry’s life, covering from her childhood to adulthood. In the backdrop of these tools, techniques of visual rhetoric the objective of this paper is to investigate the form of the graphic narrative, the visual language employed in order to explore the traumatised childhood, memory and truth-telling in comics.