We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter examines life writing in comics through the influential zine King-Cat Comics and Stories, created and independently self-published by John Porcellino since 1989. The various forms of expression employed in King-Cat generate a kind of unmediated directness between Porcellino and the reader, where the mode of address, tone, and style is constantly modulating. King-Cat is a form of life writing that uses the zine format and, in this case, comics featured within the zine, to foreground its aporetic nature. Constantly making the reader switch gears between different kinds of information in different forms, King-Cat makes the aporetic experience almost second nature for the reader. The intra- and intertextual dynamics created by Porcellino’s life writing practice implicate the reader in an animistic medium of uncertainty, where what the text “asks” of the reader shifts in register even in sections of the same page. This kind of reading process challenges traditional linear notions of time and suspends the location of identity within a text, thus suggesting a dynamic communal vision for life writing and, perhaps, for viewing life itself.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.