List of autobiographical comics

1880s

• Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro "made an attempt of an autobiographical comics exercise" in his 1881 graphic reportage book No Lazareto de Lisboa, by including himself and personal thoughts. Some of Bordalo Pinheiro's panels and strips were also autobiographical, such as self-caricatures of personal anecdotes from his travel in Brazil.

  1910s

• Fay King drew herself as a character later used as Olive Oyl in autobiographical strips portraying her reportages, opinions, and personal life.
• Hinko Smrekar drew and wrote a 24-page booklet Črnovojnik about his experience in the army and army prisons. This self-ironical proto comic has been published in 1919 – two years after he finished it. All of the pages have up to four illustrations, some include typical comic book balloons. The complete text was handwritten.

  1920s

• Carlos Botelho had a weekly comic page in a "style that mixed up chronicle, autobiography, journalism, and satire" running from 1928 to 1950 in the Portuguese magazine Sempre Fixe.

  1930s

• Henry Kiyama's The Four Immigrants Manga. These 52 two-page strips drew from the experiences of Kiyama and three friends, mostly as Japanese student immigrants to San Francisco between 1904 and 1907, plus material up to 1924.

  1940s

• The artist Taro Yashima published his autobiographical graphic works The New Sun in 1943 and The New Horizon in 1947. The first book describes his early life as well his as his wife Mitsu Yashima's imprisonment and brutalization by the Tokkō in response to their antiwar, anti-Imperialist, and anti-militarist stance in the 1930s. The second book describes their post-prison life in Japan under militarist rule up until the time they emigrated to the United States in 1939.
• Miné Okubo published Citizen 13660, a collection of 198 drawings and accompanying text chronicling the author's experiences in Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Named after the number assigned to her family unit, the book contains almost two hundred of Okubo's pen-and-ink sketches accompanied by explanatory text. Published in 1946, the book has been in print for more than 75 years.

  1960s

1960s in Japan

• Shinji Nagashima created Mangaka Zankoku Monogatari in 1961.
• Yoshiharu Tsuge published in 1966 his autobiographical story "Chiko", depicting his daily life as a struggling manga artist living with a bar hostess making most of their money. Published in the seminal magazine Garo, it started the movement of Watakushi manga. These short graphic nonfictions were also represented by Yu Takita, Tadao Tsuge, and Shinichi Abe.
• Yu Takita started in 1968 his Terajima-cho stories. They were series of vignettes about 1930s life in this Tokyo district where his parents ran a tavern.
• Tadao Tsuge started in 1968 his personal stories, later collected in Trash Market.

  USA

• In 1969, Justin Green published his first autobiographical comic strip in Gothic Blimp Works #3 titled, "When I Was Sixteen 'Twas a Very Bad Year."

  1970s

• Justin Green, Binky Brown Makes Up His Own Puberty Rites published in Yellow Dog #17, March 1970
• Sam Glanzman started in April 1970 his U.S.S. Stevens autobio stories about his war service, as 4-pagers in DC Comics's title Our Army at War. Beside memoirs of war actions he witnessed, many are personal vignettes of embarrassing moments, including as an artist. As comics historian John B. Cooke noted, those "autobiographical tales about the sometimes mundane, frequently horrifying experiences aboard a Fletcher-class U.S. navy destroyer during World War II were beginning to appear regularly, debuting two years before Binky Brown."
• Shinichi Abe started in 1971 his autobiographical series Miyoko Asagaya kibun for Garo magazine. It chronicled his 1970s bohemian life with his model girlfriend Miyoko in the Asagaya district of Tokyo.
• Justin Green, though not the first author of autobio comics, is generally acknowledged to have pioneered the confessional genre in English-language comics, because of the immediate influence of his "highly personal autobiographical comics" on other creators. This was done through the veiled autobio of his alter ego's "Binky Brown" stories, notably the March 1972 comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, an extremely personal work dealing with Green's Catholic and Jewish background and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Binky Brown continued his adventures in "Sacred and Profane" with a story called Sweet Void of Youth.
• In October 1972, Japanese manga artist Keiji Nakazawa created the 48-page story "I Saw It", which told of his firsthand experience of the bombing of Hiroshima.
• Aline Kominsky followed Green in November 1972 with her veiled autobio 5-pager "Goldie, a Neurotic Woman".
• Art Spiegelman followed Green in 1973 with his 4-page "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", about his feelings after the suicide of his Holocaust-survivor mother.
• Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky released in 1974 Dirty Laundry Comics #1, a joint confessional comic book documenting their budding romance, though depicted aboard a fantasy spaceship.
• In 1976, Harvey Pekar began his long-running self-published series American Splendor, which collected short stories written by Pekar, usually about his daily life as a file clerk, and illustrated by a variety of artists. The series led to Pekar meeting his wife Joyce Brabner, who later co-wrote their graphic novel Our Cancer Year about his battle with lymphoma.
• In 1977, the Italian magazine Alter Alter starts publishing Andrea Pazienza's Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal, in which the author details in a stream of consciousness his own experiences with drugs, arts, politics, counterculture, and the Movement of 1977, through a thinly veiled alter ego.
• In 1978, Eddie Campbell started his autobio strip "In the Days of the Ace Rock 'n' Roll Club".
• In 1979, Malaysian cartoonist Lat published his childhood memoir The Kampung Boy.
• In the late 1970s, Jim Valentino began his career with some autobio minicomics, released in the early 1980s. In 1985, he published his autobio series Valentino. In 1997, he created the semi-autobio series A Touch of Silver about a boy coming of age in the 1960s. In 2007, he revisited autobio with Drawings from Life.
• Throughout the 1970s, autobiographical writing was prominent in the work of many female underground cartoonists, in anthologies such as Wimmen's Comix, ranging from comical anecdotes to feminist commentary based on the artists' lives.

  1980s

• In 1980, Art Spiegelman combined biography and autobiography in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, about his father's Holocaust experiences, his own relationship with his father, and the process of interviewing him for the book. This work had a major effect on the reception of comics in general upon the world of mainstream prose literature, awakening many to the potential of comics as a medium for stories other than adventure fantasy.
• In 1982, Eddie Campbell's Alec stories started with the Scottish/Australian artist as a young man drifting through life with his friends, and followed him through marriage, parenthood, and a successful artistic career.
• Campbell's English colleague Glenn Dakin created the Abraham Rat stories, which began as fantasy and became more contemplative and autobiographical.
• Spain Rodriguez drew a number of stories, collected in My True Story, about being a motorcycle gang member in the 1950s.
• In the mid 1980s, Carol Tyler shifted from making paintings to autobiographical comics. Her first published comics piece appeared in Weirdo in 1986.
• Underground legend Robert Crumb focused increasingly on autobiography in his 1980s stories in Weirdo magazine. Many other autobiographical shorts would appear in Weirdo by other artists, including his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Carol Tyler, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Dori Seda.
• In 1987, Sam Glanzman released his WWII graphic memoir A Sailor's Story, a more personal extension of his 1970s U.S.S. Stevens war stories.
• In 1988, Andrea Pazienza releases Pompeo, his last graphic novel, depicting the gradual downfall of a heroin addict, up to his eventual suicide.
• Jim Woodring's unusual "autojournal" Jim combined dream art with occasional episodes of realistic autobiography.
• David Collier, a Canadian ex-soldier, published autobiographical and historical comics in Weirdo and later in his series Collier's.
• In 1987, DC Comics' anthology Wasteland featured, unusually for a mainstream title, as well as more conventional forms of black comedy and horror, semi-autobiographical stories based on the life of co-writer Del Close. One of the stories also parodied the autobiographical stories of Harvey Pekar, portraying a version of Pekar's famous appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, in which Pekar's vehement critique of General Electric had earned him a longtime ban from the program.
• In 1989, John Porcellino started in his long-running autobio series King-Cat Comics.

  1990s

• Maltese-American Joe Sacco appeared as a character in his journalistic comics, beginning with Yahoo and Palestine.
• In the anthology series Real Stuff, Dennis Eichhorn followed Pekar's example of writing true stories for others to illustrate, but unlike Pekar, emphasized unlikely tales of sex and violence. Many of the Real Stuff stories took place in Eichhorn's native state of Idaho. In 1993, Eichhorn received an Eisner Award nomination for Best Writer and his Real Stuff series received nominations for both Best Continuing Series and Best Anthology. In 1994, Real Stuff again received an Eisner Award nomination for Best Anthology.
• One of the most popular self-published mini-comics of the 1990s in America, Silly Daddy, depicted Joe Chiappetta's parenthood and divorce, sometimes realistically and sometimes in a parallel fantasy story. The story continued in trade paperbacks and as a webcomic.
• The Job Thing, 1993. Carol Tyler details her troubles with low paying jobs. A collection of stories originally published in Street Music Magazine.
• Julie Doucet's series Dirty Plotte, from Canada, began as a mix of outlandish fantasy and dream comics, but moved toward autobiography in what was later collected as My New York Diary.
• A trio of Canadian friends, Seth ', Chester Brown ', and Joe Matt, gained rapid renown in North America for their different approaches to autobiography. Brown and Matt were also notorious for depicting embarrassing personal moments such as masturbation and nose picking. Seth created some controversy by presenting realistic fictional stories as if they had actually happened, not as a ploy to fool writers but as a literary technique. However some readers did get fooled.
• Keith Knight's weekly comic strip The K Chronicles began in the early 1990s, exploring themes relevant to Knight's racial heritage, as well as current events, both personal to Knight and general to the world.
• Howard Cruse's graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby told a fictionalized version of Cruse's young adulthood as a gay man in the South during civil rights conflicts.
• Phoebe Gloeckner created a series of semi-autobiographical stories drawing on her adolescent experiences with sex and drugs in San Francisco, collected in A Child's Life and Other Stories. She later revisited similar material in her 2004 illustrated novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures.
• Seven Miles a Second, written by painter David Wojnarowicz and illustrated by James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, was based on Wojnarowicz's life and his response to the AIDS epidemic.
• The graphic novel David Chelsea in Love described the eponymous author's romantic difficulties in New York City and Portland.
• Rick Veitch told the story of his twenties entirely through a dream diary in the Crypto Zoo volume of Rare Bit Fiends.
• Ariel Schrag's tetralogy Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise, about discovering her sexual identity in high school, was unusual in having been mostly completed while in high school.
• Jim Valentino's A Touch of Silver portrayed his unhappy youth in the 1960s.
• English artist Raymond Briggs, best known for his children's books, told the story of his parents' marriage in Ethel & Ernest.
• James Kochalka started to turn his daily life into a daily four-panel strip starting in 1998, collected in Sketchbook Diaries, and later in the webcomic American Elf.
• Swedish cartoonist Martin Kellerman launched the autobiographical comic strip Rocky in 1998, focusing on an anthropomorphic dog and his friends in their everyday life in Stockholm. Rocky is based on Kellerman's own life. The comic has since been translated into Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Serbian, English, Spanish, and French, either as a running strip or collected in book form.
• Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, written by Samuel R. Delaney and illustrated by Mia Wolff, is an autobiographical graphic novel about a gay science-fiction writer meeting a homeless man who becomes his partner.
• Brian Michael Bendis' three-issue American comic book limited series Fortune and Glory is the story of the author's attempts to break into Hollywood by writing screenplays for his hardboiled comics. The series was nominated for Eisner Awards in three categories.