8 Graphic Novels About Relationship Shifts Between Parents and Children

Screenshot from This is Us After my mum died, I decided I had to do something with her paintings. She’d painted as a hobby throughout her life, and they’d accumulated in drawers all over the house. I felt that if I didn’t do something with them, who else would? I imagined they’d eventually become my kids’ problem and they’d get quietly disposed of when they no longer had room to store them. The thing about the paintings that I particularly loved was the stories they reminded me of. The way they were a backdrop to my childhood. I decided to write a graphic novel, using the paintings to illustrate moments from my family’s life. Putting the paintings into context in this way felt more real than exhibiting them in a gallery. Sorting through the paintings helped me see how my relationship with her had changed over the years. How, despite leaving home and having my own children, I’d always felt partly like a child around her. How, when her health declined and she became less mobile, my sister and I had to take on a more caring role. This changing relationship with our parents as we, and they, age is familiar to many of us, and is a theme that occurs in lots of writing. I’ve chose to look specifically at comics and graphic novels as that’s the area I work in. All the examples below are written and drawn by a single creator, unlike the more well known superhero comics where a team of writers and illustrators may work on a single issue. The visual language of comics allows artists to present ideas, and communicate their message, in unique ways, differently to how a writer presents a work of prose or poetry. Eve by Una Eve is a dystopian, fictional graphic novel set in an imaginary town in the north of England. It is a political book which raises questions about the polarization between the left and right, and how we respond to the climate emergency. The book discusses what it is to be a daughter and a […]

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