Reconsolidate, Revise, Reframe: Narrativising the Past with Diary Comics
Fisher, Darren C. (2025) Reconsolidate, Revise, Reframe: Narrativising the Past with Diary Comics. In: Folio: Essays on Australian Comics. Palgrave MacMillan, Switzerland, pp. 299-316. ISBN 978-3-031-81144-9
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Diary comics are a readily accessible artistic and narrative practice that provides at least some of the benefits demonstrated in art therapy. In this chapter I make a case for graphic narrative reflection and self-narrativisation through diary comics, exploring this niche form of autobiography as a means of creative life writing, intentional identity formation, and constructive reframing of past experience. More than that, diary comics are offered as a portal for creativity and introspection, a methodology for slowing down, and a practice for developing sound artistic habits. I will outline the key distinctions between the two closely related fields of autobiographical comics and diary comics, drawing out relationships to art therapy modalities, and propose distancing and reframing as therapeutic mechanisms. I close this analysis of diary comic practices via a case study of narrative structuring in real-time, through the creation of my 2020 diary comic, Kicked Out During Coronavirus.
This is the Author Accepted Manuscript (post-peer-review, pre-typeset) of this chapter. It is deposited in accordance with Springer Nature’s Green Open Access policy. The Version of Record is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81144-9.
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