First person POV in comics

I read Blue Is The Warmest Colour and got into thinking about the whole thing with first person POV in comics, because it seems to be such a... kinda contradictory thing? The purpose of first person narration IS the extreme intimacy and subjectivity of hearing a story from a character's mouth, yet the comic as a medium necessarily robs us of that subjectivity by also giving us a view of the action that is only limited by the panel's focus.

You don't get to see a comic through a character's eyes because comics can't do the handheld camera bullshit and even film long since realised that an entire film emulating someone's POV would kill the audience

Anyway, I went over and did the count.


STATUS OF MY SHELVES, CA. NOW:

Maus (biography, ca. mid-seventies to mid eighties?): First person voice past (the father telling of his story) and present (Spiegelman's reflections upon his re-telling of it)

Hugo Tate (fiction, roughly nineteen eighties): First person voice used in journal entries and letters to friends and family that are so self-centred that they obviously are just journal entries in disguise (that is: present)

Odilou (fiction, mid-eighties to mid nineties?): First person voice present

Palestine (documentary, early to mid nineties): First person voice present

Understanding comics (documentary, mid nineties): First person voice present

Strangers in Paradise (fiction, mid-nineties to late noughties): First person voice of various characters, on different occasions, present except for in the epilogue

Persepolis, Embroideres (autobiography, early noughties): First person voice retrospective

Blankets (autobiography, mid-noughties): First person voice retrospective

Daisy Kutter - The Last Train (fiction, mid-noughties): First person, but sparingly used and mainly seems to substitute thought bubbles; retrospective in the epilogue

Elfquest: The Searcher and the Sword (fiction, late noughties): First person voice retrospective

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (fiction, late noughties): First person voice used in diary entries read within a frame story

Herr Merz (biography, coupla years ago): First person voice used by quoting letters and other writings on the subject

Are You My Mother? (biography/autobiography, coupla years ago): First person voice present



Very quick thoughts to this:
- Documentary is overrepresented, with well over half of the titles here being either non-fiction or lightly fictionalised real events (Maus, Persepolis, Blankets)

- Mainstream comics are also underrepresented, with only three titles whose open and stated goal is to be light and entertaining instead of some degree of "deep" (Daisy Kutter, SiP and that Elfquest one). The rest of them do clearly have various degrees of special audience that does not include the normal comic-reading lot. More telling about my comic tastes than anything, I guess: the non-artsy-fartsy titles are all independent.

- The topic-oriented documentaries on my list (Maus, Palestine, Herr Merz) dwell, to a surprising degree, on the artist's struggle with telling the story. Seriously: How often do you see documentary films, far less non-fictional book, that spend a good third of the story detailing how the documentarist is being torn about the topic they're uncovering? Understanding Comics is the one exception, but that one's more like a textbook anyway.

- Palestine and Understanding Comics are the only titles on this list that ultimately isn't focused on the life of one human being.



One interesting thing to note is that the only time I've found first person narration used in manga would be in four of the stories in Kaoru Mori's Anything and Something, all short and two of them instances of a one-sided conversation between a fictive, off-screen part through whose eyes the story is seen, and the on-screen, speaking part. This is probably where someone should comment on the creepy thing with this being scantily-clad women speaking indirectly to the reader of seinen manga, but that someone won't be me because Kaori Mori so very clearly loves women for something else than their butts even if she does have a thing for bunny suits.