Absorb the Doom: Depression and Alienation in the Lyric Sketchbooks of Gabby Schulz

In this article, I propose a new category of autobiographical writing I call the ‘lyric sketchbook’. Drawing on Emma Winsor Wood’s conceptualisation of the ‘lyric diary’, I define the lyric sketchbook as a multimodal work consisting of fundamentally non-narrative fragments, rooted in a visual-verbal comics aesthetic and committed to representing a sense of self that is equal parts alienated and depressive. The article’s case study is two volumes of sketchbooks published by American cartoonist Gabby Schulz, titled Tell It to the Hole and God Damn Jewels. Whereas traditional diary comics rely on narrative rhythm, published sketchbooks are typically considered preparatory and are rarely read as a form of life writing. In reading Schulz’s two comics-inflected sketchbooks in the lyric mode, I aim to provide a generic framework for understanding and enjoying such work autobiographically. The article argues that despite their lack of structured narrative and a central self-representational character, Schulz’s two books amount to an autobiographical portrait of the fragmented and depressed self as it exists in the bleak political and cultural landscape of the early twenty-first century.