Introduction

This article discusses two American pro-choice comics in the wider context of (graphic) biofiction, a genre which, as David Lodge writes, ‘takes a real person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration’ (2007: 8). The first comics is Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli’s now legendary Abortion Eve, published in 1973¹ concurrently with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. The other is Leah Hayes’s Not Funny Ha Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard (henceforth NFHH). Hayes’s comics was published in 2015, at a time when abortion was legal in the U.S., albeit attacked by conservative activists and politicians, and foreshadowed future political and social developments: Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. While both comics were published 40 years apart—and symbolically mark the ‘beginning’ and the (looming) ‘end’ of legal abortion in the U.S.—they are united in their interweaving of the fictional/factual as well as the biographical/historical to tell a story of choice, agency, and exercising one’s political, human, and reproductive rights.

This article argues that both comics invent/create an everywoman, a character whose struggles are treated empathetically and are ‘generic’ enough to make her stand for more than just herself. While she is, in that sense, fictional, behind every (every)woman’s story there are real life dramas of individuals who remain anonymous, often for fear of abasement. Unlike some biofictions, neither comic ‘invad[es] the privacy of their subjects’ (Novak and Ní Dhúill 2022: 21–22). They explore the questions of fictional/factual representation by relying on both words and images to, to paraphrase Lodge, ‘imaginatively explore’ the past and present of American women and the extent to which they are subjects, not just objects, of historical and political decisions. The representations of the characters and their bodily autonomy in both comics inspire reflection on the role and agency of women in general. The methodological framework which comprises literary biofiction, comics studies, and feminist studies is thus further rooted in the bios and zóé distinction, where (every)woman’s story as the reproductive body (zóéfiction) intertwines with her selfhood (biofiction). It is in-between bios and zóé, and respectively between biofiction and zóéfiction, that Abortion Eve and NFHH signify. Considering these questions and interpretative goals, this essay begins by discussing biofiction and briefly contextualizing it in the field of comics studies. I then reflect on the category of (graphic) biofiction in the context of bios and zóé which paves the way for a discussion of both comics.

(Graphic) Biofiction as Agency, Aesthetic Form, and Narrative Possibilities

At first sight it would be difficult to see Abortion Eve and NFHH as examples of ‘classic’ biofiction, that is fiction concerned with a specific, identifiable, and often (though not always) renowned historical figure whose life is creatively reimagined, with the narrative very often being propelled by the critical clash between recorded facts and imaginative insights (cf. Lackey 2022). Yet, it is the very malleability of biofiction as a category in which I am interested. The goal of the discussion of biofiction that follows is not to identify a set of generic conventions or features that could be found in both comics but rather to reflect on the category’s ability to comment on social problems in and through individual lives.

‘Authors of the genre name their protagonist after an actual historical figure,’ Michael Lackey writes, but he immediately qualifies this statement with a caveat that ‘biofiction is fiction, and not biography or history’ (2022: 1). In other words, the fiction in biofiction endows it with potential for critique. In that sense, the naming of one specific historical ‘real’ person is not necessary, insofar as it is the fictionalization (fictional representation) of life that matters. Enter everywoman. Before she appears, however, let us engage further with the category of biofiction so that it may be bent, broken, and reimagined, creating a form that is open enough to account for the lives of the often un(der)represented.

Biofiction in literary studies has been positioned both in relation and critical distance to its non-fiction half-sisters, biography and history. Monica Latham argues that writers of biofiction ‘serve two masters,’ fact and fiction, ‘simultaneously’ and ‘successfully’ (2012: 355). Latham further writes that biofiction is ‘transgeneric life writing’ which ‘offers the reader a simulacrum of a real life’ (2012: 355). Lackey, who acknowledges his debt to Latham (2022: 4), points out, however, that not all biofiction writers ‘are doing biography’ (2016: 5); often, they ‘use history and biography in order to construct a narrative’ (2016: 7). Lackey expands on this foundation, pointing to the importance of locating the genre in, if you will, a league of its own:

[o]f crucial importance in biofiction is agency, and there are three relevant forms (relating to the author, the biographical subject, and the reader). […] Understanding that the focus of biofiction is on human agency rather than biographical or historical facts has an enormous impact on the way we approach and assess the aesthetic form. […] [I]f we realize that biofiction signifies a rapture rather than continuity with historical fiction, then we would have to devise separate and distinct criteria for analyzing and assessing the aesthetic form. (2022: 13, 15–16)

Lackey thus acknowledges but also transcends the futile binaries of fact/fiction to focus on two aspects of biofiction that are both significant in their own right and affinitive to comics, agency and aesthetics. The focus on agency demonstrates that biofiction is indeed about possibilities and empowerment, insofar as it defies the deterministic, and perhaps also at times fatalistic, visions of past and present. It achieves this by altering the past, for example by endowing a character devoid of agency with the power to make decisions about their life. As such, as Lackey further writes, biofiction effectively tells the stories of ‘women and marginalized people’ (2022: 16) or, as I propose, women as marginalized people.

Respectively, Lackey also openly calls biofiction an ‘aesthetic form,’ that is, a form that is artistic, artificial, and interpretative. He refers to the visual arts, specifically to Édouard Manet’s Portrait of Emil Zola (1868), to reflect on the greater questions of biofiction and/as interpretation of the real (2022: 19–30). Lackey emphasizes that in studying biofiction as an aesthetic form, where the creative dominates over the historical/biographical, one should focus on the nature and role of the introduced alterations and ask:

What did the author find in the life of the biographical subject that is so important and inspiring? […] What is the function of created characters and invented scenes in relation to the actual person? […] And how does the author fictionalize the biographical subject to offer or propose an alternative and more life-promoting way of thinking and being? (2022: 30)

Lackey finds, as he puts it, creative and intentional ‘raptures’ with facts (2022: 16) crucial in assessing the impact of biofictions. It is through such ‘ruptures’ that agency may manifest itself in the story.

Ultimately, my reading, or perhaps a creative ‘misreading’ of biofiction,² is based on the three interlocking elements described by Lackey, namely agency, aesthetic form, and narrative possibilities. I argue that all three may be effectively employed in the study of graphic biofiction because they already inform our understanding of the medium of comics. Agency, respectively of the author, character, and reader/viewer, plays a significant role in comics studies, insofar as it is the artist who, literally, creates the structurally complex represented world that is then inhabited and brought to life by the reader/viewer. This phenomenon, as Scott McCloud famously argued, is called ‘closure’ (1994: 62–63) and it transforms ‘a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments’ into ‘a continuous, unified reality’ (1994: 67). Thierry Groensteen, respectively, sees comics as a semiotic system based on ‘arthrology’ (2007: 102–158) and ‘the spatio-topia’ (2007: 24–102), where the page, individual panels, respective sequences as well as captions and word balloons are read in a dynamic relation to one another. Hillary Chute, in turn, explains that ‘a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning’ (2008: 452). Aesthetic form, the ability of comics to interpret and not simply represent reality, poiesis and not only mimesis, also links it to biofiction. The style of drawing as well as composition (page layout)—those, as Lackey puts it, creative ‘ruptures’—are meaningful. They ultimately give rise to narratives that, as Lackey further writes, ‘use rather than represent the lives of their subject’ (2022: 44). As such, they embody the most important aspect of biofiction, its creative and critical, rather than documentary, nature both in literature and the medium of comics.

Between Biofiction and Zóéfiction

The focus on agency, aesthetic form, and narrative possibilities in literary and graphic biofiction, dynamic and productive as it may be, will be further expanded to acknowledge the unique nature of comics in question. As noted above, my goal is not to prove that Abortion Eve and NFHH fulfil the generic criteria of biofiction but rather to reflect on what new insights positioning both comics as biofiction offers. In other words, I do not claim that Abortion Eve and NFHH are, strictly speaking, biofictions but propose to read them as such to explore the interpretative spaces such a classification opens. In such a reading, to paraphrase Lackey, I ‘use rather than represent’ (2022: 44) the category of biofiction.

Located at the intersection of fact/fiction, biography/autobiography, and graphic medicine/memoir, both comics complicate the meanings of bio in biofiction. Connected to ‘biography,’ that is a history of individual life and an established literary genre, bio or bios (Greek βῐ́ος) in biography and biofiction means ‘life,’ but not just any form of life. ‘The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events,’ Hannah Arendt writes, in dialogue with Aristotle, in The Human Condition, ‘is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography’ (1998: 97). Bios is ‘an autonomous and authentically human way of life’ (Arendt 1998: 13). Respectively, biological life was called zóé (ζωή) in Greek: ‘[c]yclical, too, is the movement of the living organism, the human body not excluded (…). Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear’ (Arendt 1998: 96). The question of bios and zóé has over time been discussed in more contemporary political context. Foucault wrote about biopower (2019: 139–140), while Agamben reflected on ‘bare life’ (1998: 1–10), trying to understand how politics governs it. ‘Does it concern a governing of life or over life?’ (Esposito 2008: 15).

The distinction between bios and zóé, between eventful and biological life, further critically and creatively complicates the category of biofiction, which does not seem to properly convey the gravitas of abortion stories, where the physicality of the body matters. I thus propose to read both comics through the lens of what I call zóéfiction. My working definition of zóéfiction, a term I coined for the purpose of the present study, is fiction which engages with the body.³ This body is no longer ‘textual’ but also very much ‘physical,’ not least because, as Rosi Braidotti writes, ‘flesh and blood’ inform the understanding of subjectivity:

The celebration of femininity reduced to metaphors of the void, lack, non-being, the valorization of woman as textual body, rather than female-sexed body, hides one of the most formidable types of discrimination exercised against women in recent years. What is missing from these ‘becomings’ are women, not only as a revolutionary political movement, but also as flesh-and-blood human beings (…). (1991: 134)

If biofiction is agency, aesthetic form, and narrative possibilities, then zóéfiction, rooted in the physicality of existence, reveals that one’s life story should also acknowledge one’s (relation with one’s) body and the horizon of objectification to which women have been and continue to be subjected. Biofiction and zóéfiction are not meant to be read as binary opposites, especially in light of the feminist critique of the mind-body dichotomy (see, among others, Bordo 1993; Brook 1999: 1–21), but rather as conceptual vantage points between which the (im)possibilities of narrativizing women’s lives in relation to their reproductive rights and their violation extend.

The above discussion is meant to demonstrate, especially in the context of pro-choice comics, that the stories of women’s lives are conditioned by their status as bodies, specifically wombs (Bordo 1993: 81). Politics inflicts on their agency and bodies:

The impact of political power over abortion means greater biopolitical governmentality of women’s bodies and their daily lives in the way that the American state seeks to discipline women and teenage girls (Foucault 1974: 210). The collision between politics and reproductive health policy has led to a redefinition of women’s ‘personhood’ (…) in terms of people questioning the limits imposed on their self-autonomy and agency over their own relationships and lives. (…) The realities are that abortion is gendered. Abortion impacts on the embodiment of women and girls (…). (Coen-Sanchez et al. 2022: n.p.)

The reading of Abortion Eve and NFHH through the combined lenses of biofiction and zóéfiction presented below is meant to point to the urgency of pro-choice comics.⁴ They make the reader/viewer reflect on women’s lives as always suspended in-between being the subject and the object of history, politics, and reproductive policies.

Beyond the Focus of Individual Life

Both comics invent/create an everywoman who is meant to find strength in exercising agency over her life understood as both bios and zóé. In taking everywoman as their chosen subject, the comics in question recognize the significance of the lives of many often unnamed women whose reproductive rights have been either denied or compromised. Everywoman’s struggles elicit empathy and engagement. She is ‘generic’ but, in that sense, also a relatable fictional character. Though fictional, everywoman’s story is based on real life. The reading of fiction as fact and fact as fiction is reminiscent of the duck-rabbit illusion where both exist simultaneously. Lackey writes that ‘the ethical use of a life in literature will add depth and context to human experience and thereby suggest more humane ways of thinking and being’ (2022: 118) and that is what both comics try to achieve. The message of critical and creative duality and doubling is also communicated in comics at the level of form in and through words and images which are read in relation to one another.

Abortion Eve is structured in-between biofiction and zóéfiction, together these form a whole that effectively represents fictional-as-real and real-as-fictional life. Part one, ‘The Rap’ (Chevli and Framer 1973: 292–307), talks about the characters’ motivations and part two, ‘A-Day’ (308–323), is an almost documentary representation of abortion. In NFHH the planes of biofiction and zóéfiction constantly intertwine as two everywomen—‘a girl we’ll call “Mary” and a girl we’ll call “Lisa”’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.)—decide to have abortions. The reader/viewer follows their life stories across over 200 unnumbered pages. While everywoman’s agency is at the center of both comics, they employ different poetics. Abortion Eve utilizes a grid-like structure and abundant word and thought balloons, emphasizing the role of dialogue and dialogical practice. NFHH works with the entire page and free-floating text, giving rise to a slower and more reflective reading in which the experience of going through ‘something hard’ is also acknowledged.

‘The Rap’ introduces the reader/viewer to a host of fictional women of different ages, ethnicities, and economic, social, and religious backgrounds (the same message is communicated on the cover which shows them discussing their reproductive choices). All of them are in one way or another called Eve (Evelyn, Eva, Evie, Eve, Evita), the name both a reference to a religious tradition and its conservative doctrines and a nod towards everywoman, who, in being Eve(s), has been split into different subjects. The individual life stories and choices that these characters represent are meant to be emblematic of many American women. They all meet at the office of Mary Multipary, a sexual health counsellor, who is ‘not only a recurrent character from Farmer and Chevli’s Tits & Clits, but also carr[ies] a distinct resonance of Mary Magdalene’ (McGovern and Eve 2019: 6). This affinity can be read as another religious reference, a reminder about a social force that proved discriminatory for women (see Reagan 2022: 222).

The reader/viewer is first introduced to the 42-year-old upper-class Evelyn—an academic (Chevli and Framer 1973: 290). As a mother of four children, she cannot imagine giving birth to another one, especially at her age. Her husband supports her decision, though it later turns out that Evelyn was having an affair, and her lover got her pregnant. Eva Flowers, a free-spirited hippie, is next. She is Evelyn’s former student (which Evelyn realizes much to her embarrassment). She does not use contraception systematically and directly asks Mary to ‘give [her] the address [of the clinic] again’ (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 292). The 16-year-old Evie, who is dating Evelyn’s son (Evelyn is embarrassed still further), then arrives. Emotional, not to say desperate, she considers unexpected pregnancy to be shameful and regretful (‘the priest said I’ve sinned;’ ‘I’m too young to have a baby! My father will kill me! I don’t want to get married! But my mother will make me!’ (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 293)). Eve Jones enters the room next. She is a confident black woman in her late twenties or early thirties who abruptly interrupts Evie. ‘What’s this? A true confessions meeting,’ she asks, unapologetically declaring that she needs an abortion because she has ‘enough little troubles without one more’ (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 293). Last is Evita Martinez, a Latina and a mother of three daughters who struggles financially. Her husband (who would stop Evita if he knew she was pregnant) is not doing much to help. The question of shame and guilt resurfaces once again as Evie asks, ‘Aren’t you a Catholic, Evita?,’ to which Evita confidently responds that ‘the guys who make the rules never raised any kids’ (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 294).

While they are united in their need for abortion, the Eves disagree on certain issues and do not partake in the ‘utopian vision of sisterhood evoked in a feminist movement’ (hooks 2000: 56). Instead, Abortion Eve creates a composite image of everywoman which, in its engagement with agency, gives rise to graphic biofiction that extends beyond the focus of individual life. The intention is not to spin a web of essentialized femininity around the comics but to widen the horizon of experiences beyond white middle-class women, which was something that many second-wave feminist texts failed to do: ‘mass media (…) whitewashed the movement by focusing on the activities of a relatively few selected spokeswomen (…), drawn most consistently from the “older,” bureaucratic, and liberal branch of feminism (e.g., Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan)’ (Roth 2024: 7). For instance, bell hooks writes that white women ‘entered the movement erasing and denying difference, not playing race alongside gender, but eliminating race from the picture’ (2000: 56). Abortion Eve as a second-wave feminist comix and graphic biofiction tries to both acknowledge and challenge such biases, showing how the intersections of race, class, and gender inform the discussion about reproductive rights in the U.S.

Abortion Eve may be and has nevertheless been criticized for its ‘melodramatic’ undertones and ‘soap-opera dialogue’ reminiscent of ‘the agony-aunt pages of a women’s magazine’ (McGovern and Eve 2019: 2). And while ‘the melodrama and apparent cliché of this text is in keeping with the prevailing aesthetic of many underground comix of the period and should be seen through such a historicist lens’ (McGovern and Eve 2019: 2), I still read this ‘melodrama and apparent cliché’ as representative of everywoman and real life problems. In 1973, everywoman is ultimately able to exercise her reproductive rights. The ‘fiction’ of that easy access to the procedure is important, as it was not a historical reality in the U.S. at the time (see Reagan 2022: 245).

Indeed, it is in how actively Eve(s) as everywoman embrace(s) her/their rights that Abortion Eve is most productively read as graphic biofiction. Lackey, in his reflection on alternative narrative possibilities, emphasized the importance of ‘fictionalizing the biographical subject to offer or propose an alternative and more life-promoting way of thinking and being’ (2022: 30). In the fictional/factual world of Abortion Eve, all characters, as everywomen, choose to visit Mary Multipary’s office. They take that first step. Importantly, in terms of aesthetic form, the comics emphasizes, even doubles, its message of agency as it is structured as a dialogue between the characters. It is in and through a dialogue of voices in speech balloons, at times even overwhelming in their size and number, that Abortion Eve makes the reader/viewer recognize the importance of discussion and choice (Figure 1). Comics is, after all, inherently dialogical—it is composite, compound, and dynamically constructed in the process of reading individual panels as a whole. It relies on, as Chute wrote, an ‘often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning’ (2008: 452). The panels alternately show individual characters (often focusing on their faces) and how they interact with others. In ‘The Rap,’ the room, as the setting, is represented rather vaguely and without attention to detail. The focus is on the women talking. The grid-like structure with, for the most part, three rows of panels per page, further endows the graphic narrative with critical potential. Speech balloons and the characters themselves often challenge the frames through bending and protruding them, visualizing the primacy of the dialogical self over constraining structures (McGovern and Eve 2019: 9).

Figure 1

Abortion Eve by Lyn Chevli and Joyce Farmer, p. 297. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2023. Copyright © Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantagraphics.com).

In a dialogical framework that runs still deeper, the biofictional is informed by the zóéfictional, that is, by the physical aspects and consequences of access to reproductive rights or lack thereof. The comics was published in 1973 in a direct response to the landmark ruling which decriminalized abortion in the U.S. While agency exercised by Eve(s) as everywoman is emphasized, the comics also implicitly points to the fates of women before 1973, when bios could be reduced to zóé. Many were either forced to complete their pregnancies or seek help illegally, unfortunately sometimes from doctors in name only who could subject them to fatal medical risks. Post WW2 anti-abortion laws were especially restrictive in the U.S., giving rise to the pre-Roe v. Wade abortion underground (Reagan 2022: 15). Even if abortions were legal in certain cases (e.g. when pregnancy posed a threat to life or mental well-being), by and large, only ‘white women with private health insurance’ could have them, whilst women of color and working-class women were practically forced to seek abortions illegally (Reagan 2022: 193).

Abortion Eve, as biofiction and zóéfiction, speaks of the fears associated with the procedure in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, including unlicensed and unskilled providers, serious health risks, sexual abuse, and high prices (see Reagan 2022: 200). As biofiction and zóéfiction, the story creatively visualizes such anxieties. The 42-year-old Evelyn fears dangers ‘inherent in any surgical procedure’ (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 293). The teenage Evie is afraid that her body might be ‘messed up for life’ (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 297), as an image of, for lack of a better word, a sleazy man holding a metal hook is seen looming next to her head in a thought bubble (Figure 1).

The vision of a man with what appears to be a medieval torture device in his hand must refer to the abortion underground which Evie, since this is her first pregnancy, has fortunately never encountered. Still, she must have heard stories. This single image, half-truth and half-fiction, positioned towards the edge of the frame, marginal yet invading and threatening Evie’s personal space, points to the zóéfictional aspects of the narrated experiences. It summons the historical reality of the abortion underground with botched procedures and deaths.⁵ Leslie J. Reagan, among others, cites a gruesome example of Doris B., ‘a twenty-six-year-old black woman in Chicago,’ a mother of four who could barely make ends meet—since she could not afford to travel to New York for a legal abortion she opted for a ‘cheaper’ illegal procedure in Chicago which proved fatal (2022: 242). Unlike the real Doris B., everywoman may exercise her reproductive rights effectively and safely. A critical gap between the real and the fictional summoned in Abortion Eve thus points to a critical gap between legislation and women’s lives.

Still, instead of dwelling on the negative understanding of zóéfiction, Abortion Eve returns agency to its everywoman, thus inspiring change, so that all women, regardless of their economic and social backgrounds, might have access to safe abortions. A detailed step-by-step representation of the procedure that follows is rooted in zóé, but it does not objectify the individual (McGovern and Eve 2019: 14–15). The hippie Eva describes her abortion to other women (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 298–299). Mary Multipary then joins in, explaining the differences between local and general anesthesia as well as between surgical and instillation abortion, and lists all the possible side effects (bleeding, nausea, etc.) (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 299–303). An understanding of the procedure and the body’s reaction dispels fears associated with it, helping the (every)women reclaim their subjectivity. Importantly, the possibility of choice is also supported by ‘the older generation,’ thus countering the claims that it is more conservative. Evita says that her mother, in support and solidarity, is babysitting her children during her procedure (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 310).

At one point, the everywomen all meet at the clinic for their scheduled abortions. Evita and Eve begin to discuss politics and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision. Eve delivers what is probably the most powerful speech in the entire comics, advocating for bodily and legal autonomy—agency in regards to both bios and zóé:

But I get mad when they control my body by their laws! (…) But bring in a woman, an’ if the problem is below her belly button and it ain’t her appendix, man – you got judges an’ lawyers an’ priests an’ assorted greybeards sniffin’ an’ fussin’ an’ tellin’ that woman what she gonna do an’ how she gonna do it! (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 311)

This everywoman speaks her mind, also on behalf of so many other women today, yesterday and, as it turns out, tomorrow. The procedure is shown in detail in the panels that follow (Chevli and Farmer 1973: 316–317). Eve is attended to by a nurse, counsellor, and doctor. Each panel corresponds to a step which is also explained by the counsellor whose comments appear in speech bubbles.

This focus on the role of choice, the essence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade which relied on the right to privacy as, importantly, a form of agency, also informs the choices of (every)women in NFHH. Though the comics was published in 2015, when abortion was legal in the U.S., it nevertheless seems to acknowledge the political and social climate which led to the overruling of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Between 2004 and 2014, ‘the number of states considered hostile to abortion rights,’ Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz writes, ‘more than doubled’ and they would ‘severely restrict minors’ access to services, mandate waiting periods, and/or state-scripted counselling designed to deter women seeking abortion, and target abortion providers with unnecessary regulations’ (2019: 92). Lisa and Mary, as the two everywomen of NFHH, in and through their choices reaffirm their constitutional right to privacy, thus reminding the reader/viewer that in the Roe v. Wade ruling, ‘for the first time, the state recognized women’s role and rights in reproductive policy. Roe v. Wade declared that the right of privacy included “a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy”’ (Reagan 2022: 244). In doing so, however, NFHH also acknowledges that the entire process might be emotionally and physically challenging, constructing its everywoman in-between biofiction and zóéfiction across 200 unnumbered pages.⁶

The invention/creation of the 23-year-old ‘Mary’ and the 31-year-old ‘Lisa,’ behind which the reality of exercising one’s reproductive rights lies, is meant to lessen the feeling of isolation unfortunately still associated with the procedure, increasingly so in the 2010s and beyond. One of the free-floating captions in the opening part of the comics, reminiscent of a note found in a diary or a notebook, reads: ‘if it makes you feel better, let’s talk about two different girls who went through two different abortions. There are a zillion girls who go through this, but despite knowing … it can still feel very lonely at times’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.) Another free-floating commentary makes it clear that ‘the point is: both girls chose to go through the same thing, no matter how they got there’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.), thus emphasizing their right to privacy as a form of agency. The message of privacy and agency is doubled in and through handwritten lettering—what looks like a personal note actually functions as a political message.⁷

Unlike Abortion Eve, which begins when the everywomen choose to visit Mary Multipary’s office, NFHH depicts what might have taken place before reaching out to a medical professional. Lisa frantically takes five pregnancy tests and grows increasingly anxious when each is positive. Still, she finds comfort in sharing the news with her mother and sister who support her decision. Mary, similarly, is helped by her best friend. As both everywomen embark on their respective journeys in search of the right doctor, clinic, and method—Lisa will choose a surgical abortion and Mary will eventually choose a medical abortion—their anxieties and vulnerabilities are also visualized.

Once she finds herself in the clinic’s waiting room, Lisa seems isolated, even though she is surrounded by ‘women of all ages, colors, backgrounds’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.), some of whom are talking and some of whom sit in silence. While many different (every)women may share the experience, it is not the same for everyone. In one interview, Hayes said that she tried to convey both the universality and individuality of the situation: ‘You’re all wearing the same hospital gown and little booties. You’re stripped away of indications about class and age and you’re just all these bodies together. In that way, there was a togetherness, but nobody, in my experience, was really chatting with each other’ (Casey 2023: n.p.).

In its affirmative take on zóéfiction, similarly to Abortion Eve, NFHH represents the procedure in an almost step-by-step manner; however, thanks to the narrative possibilities (and choices made), the reader/viewer is also able to see Lisa return to her apartment, assisted by her sister, trying to recover both physically and emotionally. The latter, as the caption reads, ‘might take longer’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.). In a fictional reality that is less celebratory and more matter-of-fact, marking a clear distance between the realities of 1973 and 2015, Lisa does not deliver a powerful speech at the end. As everywoman, she no longer fights for her rights but exercises them, although in an increasingly hostile political and social environment. The anxiety she experiences simply renders her more human, because, as another free-floating caption explains, ‘when you are about to do something scary, it’s funny how different the world can suddenly seem’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.).

Mary, respectively, may be seen going through medical abortion at her place, supported by a friend. She takes the pill prescribed by the doctor and waits for it to work. Again, the zóéfictional aspects of the process are thoroughly acknowledged. Mary experiences, as informed by the medical professional, cramps, nausea, vomiting, and heavy bleeding, going ‘in and out of the bathroom to change pads’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.). In the end, like Lisa, she also reflects on her physical and emotional state, as both bios and zóé: ‘she walked home from the office. She wanted to be by herself and think about everything that her body had been through, and what it all meant to her… because sometimes it is the part that takes us the longest to figure out’ (Hayes 2015: n.p.). It is in the shift from ‘she’ to ‘us’ that the experience of everywoman is once again emphasized. NFHH thus accomplishes the greater goals of (graphic) biofiction, insofar as, as Lackey argues, ‘by illuminating the human condition more generally’ it has ‘a much broader reach than the personal’ (2022: 118).

Apart from the focus on agency represented in and through narrative possibilities which extend beyond individual life, NFHH also employs an aesthetic form that makes the reader/viewer further reflect on the visualized experience. Instead of utilizing panels and grids, as seen in the ‘dialogical’ poetics of Abortion Eve, Hayes works with the entire page or the double page as her chosen semantic unit. The process of reading thus slows down as the reader/viewer is encouraged to dwell and reflect on the pages and respective moments in the entire process, both positive (moments of support) and negative (fulfilling mandatory requirements), acknowledging that underneath minimalistic and sketchy vignettes there lies ‘something hard.’ Indeed, the classic ‘grammar’ of comics, or what Groensteen refers to as the fundamentals of the spatio-topical system (panels, frames, gutters, margins), is abandoned for the sake of sheer sequentiality, a succession of frameless images—at times one and at times more than one—which take up the entire page or the double page. As if stripped down to its fundamentals and each moment due to its placement on the (double) page, the graphic narrative is thus endowed with even more significance.

The (double) page should, at least in theory, provide ample space for the graphic narrative to resound and the everywomen to be represented in their entirety, insofar as ‘[f]ull-page panels rely on a normatively able-bodied subject for maximum effect, a body that is able to extend vertically and take up space on the page (…)’ (Fabricius 2020: 86). Hayes, however, chooses to alternate images of wholesome moments (e.g., when Lisa and Mary are supported by their loved ones and/or medical professionals) with pages where Lisa’s and Mary’s bodies are either pushed to the edge or ‘fragmented,’ often with their heads or other body parts visually ‘cut off’ by the edge of the page (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Not Funny Ha Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard by Leah Hayes, unnumbered page. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2015. Copyright © Leah Hayes. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantagraphics.com).

The latter often represents moments of nervous anticipation (putting on a gown, waiting for the doctor), undergoing medical examination prior to the procedure, and abortion itself (where, regardless of the medical professional’s best intentions, zóé comes to the fore). Figure 2, for example, shows Lisa—or rather Lisa’s legs in stirrups—before the procedure starts. She is visually reduced to her bottom half, to her reproductive organs. Her head and face, metonymically read as representative of a subject endowed with agency, are missing. In the wider political context of 2015 and the ongoing restriction of abortion in the U.S., such reliance on the poetics of fragmentation, fracture, and dismemberment may be also read as a commentary on ‘the surveillance and policing of women’s lives’ (Fixmer-Oraiz 2019: 147). The drawings of fragmented bodies seem to imply that everywoman’s private choices are nevertheless subjected to scrutiny and heavily politicized. The women are not seen as subjects but as objects—mere bodies. While subjectivity is ultimately regained—visually communicated on the successive pages in and through complete drawings of both everywomen—the looming threat is nevertheless coded in the graphic biofiction narrative.

Conclusion

This ‘creative misreading’ of biofiction in abortion comics was meant to illuminate genres, texts, authors, and themes that often fly under the radar of more traditionally oriented studies of this category. Instead of focusing on a single identifiable historical figure whose life is creatively reimagined, Abortion Eve and NFHH explore the lives of women who otherwise might not have been acknowledged. Neither comics explicitly shows their fictional/factual everywoman against the greater historical or political background but instead tells their stories in relation to their reproductive rights and limits the represented world in which they act to counsellor’s offices, clinics, waiting rooms, and their homes. Their private little worlds are governed by and yet so distant from the world of history and politics. Or are they? Abortion Eve and NFHH as graphic biofiction – defined in terms of agency, aesthetic form, and narrative possibilities and not solely engagement with historical figures – accomplish the greater goals of biofiction as a form that aims to make a difference, insofar as by exploring the productive field in-between fact and fiction as well as past and present they show how individual choices may challenge oppressive societal and political structures. Also, as biofiction and zóéfiction, that is narratives about lives and bodies and lives-as-bodies, both comics further question how reproductive rights as political rights inform American women’s roles as subjects and objects of political decisions.

Perhaps the best form of conclusion would be to return to the questions posed by Lackey in reference to the greater tasks of biofiction (2022: 30). I shall try to answer them in relation to Abortion Eve and NFHH. ‘What did the author find in the life of the biographical subject that is so important and inspiring?’ Their determination to exercise their reproductive rights in a world that would deny it. ‘What is the function of created characters and invented scenes in relation to the actual person?’ They endow them with agency and return control to them. ‘And how does the author fictionalize the biographical subject to offer or propose an alternative and more life-promoting way of thinking and being?’ After the 2022 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court the answer is clear.

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was funded in whole by National Science Centre, Poland [Narodowe Centrum Nauki], SONATA Grant No. 2022/47/D/HS2/00054 (The pregnant body and reproductive rights in American comics and graphic novels (1970–2022)).

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Editorial Note

This article is part of the Special Collection: Graphic Biographical Fiction, edited by Nancy Pedri and Maria Juko, with assistance from the editorial team.