Comics Exploring New Parenthood
It’s been a year since our child was born, and it has felt, somehow, like both a blink of an eye and an eternity. A strange paradox, but one I’m sure most people with children have found. I come from a small family, and our baby is the first to be born into my side for more than thirty years- both my partner and I came from parents who had children late and we have followed this tradition. Something about how it wasn’t certain we would have a child? So, I feel that I was coming into this whole parenthood thing knowing less than many, even those childless by choice who have more children in their peer groups. There is much, I think, that I wasn’t prepared for, but then, a lot came naturally as well, too.
As a stay-at-home parent, I’ve been learning hands-on about how to care for a baby and how quickly things change. New parenthood classes have been a great community resource, comparing with other new parents who might have previous children, getting some of that advice born from lived experience. Of course, being me, I’d been reading a lot of books on the subject of parenthood with my partner and putting more on my reading list.
My favorite reads, though, were the comics and graphic novels expressing the personal parenthood experiences of some acclaimed cartoonists and comic artists. After dealing with tons of sometimes contradictory advice, it was a great resource to look at accounts that explore the more day to day realities of early parenthood, without falling into the stereotype dichotomies of “it’s an incredible experience that will change your life forever” or “your life is over.” I have found graphic novels to be a great medium for memoir, making them some of the most accessible materials I looked at over the year, and helped put things into perspective for me. From pregnancy to toddlerhood, these works each explored different aspects of parenthood in different ways. Expressive and intimate, they helped me feel less alone in my new parenting responsibilities in ways both funny and poignant. Reading them while cuddling my quickly growing child during a nap was a highlight of the year for me.
As my partner went through her pregnancy, I did my best to be a supportive partner myself, though that was an experience I could not share. A couple of these works were great resources for the particular challenges and anxieties of pregnancy, which I feel are often left unsaid in our culture.
In Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, cartoonist A. K. Summers fictionalizes her experience with pregnancy with an artistic tribute to Herge’s Tin Tin, following the experience of Teek, a masculine gay woman living in NYC, and the anxieties and contradictions of pregnancy in queer spaces. As a cisgender straight-passing guy, I still found Summers’ humor and raw experiences struggling with gender identity and the life altering weirdness of being pregnant along with her more traditionally feminine partner Vee, who opts not to get pregnant. Written in the early 2000s, Summers discusses in her forward introducing this 2013 edition some of the incorrect and harmful ideas her character expresses regarding trans and genderqueer people, illustrating how quickly attitudes have changed even in the LGBTQ+ itself. Pregnancy, I feel, remains for obvious reasons an extremely gendered phenomenon and Summers, all in all, writes an interesting exploration of how it is experienced by someone whose gender identity is not completely feminine.
As Lucy Knisley notes in her thoughtful, evocative work Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos, she has used her comics to ambitiously chronicle each aspect of her life, her culinary upbringing, love of travel, and her relationships, reflecting on her life in an introspective, navel-gazing sort of way, which can definitely prove relatable, but I feel that this comic is her most grounded so far.
With Kid Gloves, Knisley details her pregnancy with impressive candor and earnestness, in a way that feels all too rare. As my partner and I embarked on our own fertility and pregnancy journey over the last couple of years, Kinsley’s even-handed informative work, expanding on the history and culture of childbirth throughout time was a great, inspiring companion to our own journey. But a frightening one, too. An important and educational work, she reflects on the sordid history of care for pregnant women through the centuries and makes clear how even today in the US, women face too much of this alone, with a medical system passive. Knisley shares the joys and deep traumas, ones that we identify with all too well.
Like all of Knisley’s work, Kid Gloves is an easy read, her clean and gentle watercolors providing a light feeling she conveys well, though the subject matter she shares here is among the heaviest she has ever done. These are subjects rarely discussed in comic format, which I feel was an effective way to approach this fraught and charged subject.
A follow up to Kid Gloves, Go to Sleep (I Miss You): Cartoons from the Fog of New Parenthood is a much less ambitious, polished work than Knisley has published in a while in her career of contemplative memoir comics. Having a child does that to you, I guess! I can certainly relate as I try to keep up with my reviews while serving as a caregiver to a growing and always-changing baby over the last year.
Here, Knisley shares casual sketches humorously documenting her and her partner’s life as young parents with a new child, from the gross to the adorable. Of course, it’s all adorable, even the gross, which one can appreciate even through the haze of sleep deprivation. While every baby is different, it’s always comforting to see someone else going through the same stuff as you are, that the sleep thrashing is nothing to worry about, as well as getting previews of all the stuff we have to look forward to. Knisley is incorrect in only one assertion, as I can tell you with some authority that my wife and I have the best baby in the world. Obviously.
An irreverent graphic memoir of pregnancy and early childhood, Emily Flake’s comic Mama Tried: Dispatches from the Seamy Underbelly of Modern Parenting is a relatable and funny, if a little raw, account of how parenthood changes you. It’s definitely less cutesy than, say, Lucy Knisley’s work, but also a little less insightful.
All in all, Flake takes a much more droll and flippant approach, which alternates between Flake’s personal recollections of her pregnancy and her daughter’s infancy up to becoming a toddler and amusing doodles, her loose watercolors having a bit of a Far Side type of absurdity. From demon-possessed babies to various exaggerated examples of parenting styles, Flake mocks the fraught state of the contemporary parenting industrial complex which pressures parents, especially mothers, into feeling like they are doing everything wrong, which is a refreshing point of view. At times, though, her humor can punch down a little, feeling kind of ableist at times for instance, but it definitely captures that kind of hip jadedness fitting Flake’s New Yorker style.
In contrast, Philippa Rice’s Baby: A Soppy Story is, like Rice’s previous work Soppy, a pretty adorable little book, published originally on her blog. I found Soppy, a sweet autobiographical collection of anecdotes from her burgeoning relationship with her now husband to be very relatable as I started my own relationship, and her follow up, Baby, continued this as we went though our baby’s birth and first year. Rice’s art style is simple, elegant, and light, making it a nice little piece to read when you are looking for something a little British. Her simple, cartoonish drawings using only white, black, and red, make it an easy one to flip through. I loved the way that she illustrated her and her husband’s life with their new baby and how it changed them or how their lives stayed the same as well.
I read A Matter of Life from the low-fi memoir comic artist Jeffrey Brown a decade ago, but it stuck with me, so I reread it last year and felt like it had new meaning for me. Stepping away from hopeless romantic relationship comics, here Brown explores his parent-child relationships, and, even more interestingly, his shift from belief to non-belief. I have always enjoyed Brown’s heartfelt comics, but A Matter of Life, which explores Brown’s childhood, felt particularly recognizable to me.
Focusing in particular on his relationship with his father, as a pastor’s kid, and his slow drift away from Christianity, he reflects on how his own childhood shaped him and how he can pass things on (or in the case of religion, not) to his own son, Oscar. Brown’s signature scratchy artwork compliments the pensive but inspiring feelings of this comic, making me glad I returned to it. As my own child is growing, this reflective feeling of considering how your own life relates to your child’s, is something I can really identify with even if faith wasn’t as big a thing for me growing up.
All in all, these works really captured those difficult to express feelings, the positive and negative changes, the joys and fears of watching a new human change and grow in real time, in an understandable and balanced way. I really appreciated how these authors expressed this experience without falling into the extremes often describing parenthood in popular culture, that of “you will never be the same, your life is now complete” or its opposite extreme, “your life is over, you belong to the kid now.” It is definitely a life changing experience, of course, as these comics illustrate, but you are still you. Having a child definitely increases self reflection and feelings of nostalgia, though.
Since our kid’s birth a year ago, we’ve been kind of searching around for good picture books to start reading once the baby starts to pay attention a little bit more, which I think will be any day now. Reading out loud now usually ends with the book wrenched from our fingers and pushed into a mouth, but I can see that changing soon as his curiosity about the world is endless. Here are a couple of good choices illustrated by some prominent comic writers we’ve found as well.
While our little one is still a little too young to appreciate this (his interest in books focuses on texture and mouth feel), Lucy Knisley’s You Are New certainly appeals to happy parents and caregivers excited at bringing this new life into the world. Knisley’s simple but expressive watercolor art here expresses the diverse joys of babyhood, and her simplistic rhyming scheme makes it a quick and melodic read.
You Are New would, I think, be a great gift book for new parents, as it is amazing how quickly they grow.
In her charming picture book King Baby, acclaimed cartoonist Kate Beaton writes a silly but accurate vision of those early months of having a baby, in which your new child demands so much time and attention, taking over your life in a way that can feel slightly despotic at times. This was, I think, perhaps the most relatable work we’ve read for this entry. Beaton’s cute art, full of fun details on each page, and the witty proclamations of the King Baby really capture that mix of feelings that occur in life with your new baby. We can’t wait to share King Baby with our baby to illustrate their earlier reign.
In the meantime, I’m continuing to read books of the more advice giving types, hoping to gain more insight into raising a kid.