Exploratory Essay

The Adventures of Jonas, created by Jonas McCluggage, is one of a subset of contemporary autobiographical webcomics characterised by their diary format and by having creators entering or emerging from young-adulthood as artists or aspiring artists. Other notable examples include Johnny Wander (started by Ananth Hirsch and Yuko Ota 2008) and DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary (started by Erika Moen in 2003). While comics studies is a relatively underdeveloped field (Freedman 28), significant work has been done in the way of justifying the artistic and literary value of comics (Freedman ). Autobiographical comics, or graphic memoirs, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s Funhome: A Family Tragicomic,

The comic’s pages were first uploaded on DeviantArt, an art-sharing social platform. McCluggage shifted to uploading the comic on his website (where it exists in its finished state) in March 2012, finishing in 2014. In her article, Refaie defines authenticity in opposition to the theory of visual modality, whereby “the performed identity of the comic artist seems to play a much more central role than any particular stylistic markers in generating a sense of authenticity” (Refaie 162). In this essay, I will look specifically at the way author’s notes, comments and alt-text mediate the experience of the comic in Adventures. I argue that the multimodal nature of these elements allows McCluggage to simultaneously mythologise and reinforce the authenticity of his narrative. I will show that McCluggage supports the idealistic visual self-representation with language that romanticises the experiences he depicts. At the same time, McCluggage fills the extra-textual space with reminders of his own subjectivity, such as with references to artistic techniques he is experimenting with, corrections to the comics, and thoughts on how sentiments he expressed in the panels have changed with time. In doing so, McCluggage builds a deep trust with his readers as well as builds himself up as a figure to look up

In “Eastbound - chapter page,” McCluggage uses the author's notes to reflect on his hitchhiking adventure with his friend Andrew Sindri. One of the conflicts of the chapter is Jonas’s refusal to beg for food or money — in the chapter page (at the end of the chapter), he notes "as for the asking/taking debate, it's still tumbling about in my head - but since then I've stopped thieving from supermarkets (it's come to my attention that it is not a victimless crime, im learning something new everyday) and I've been entertaining the ethical views of asking more. It's still a tricky topic for me but I found a compelling TED talks lecture and had a couple more good conversations .. its the song that never ends. whatever.” The deliberate imperfection of misspelled words, missing capitalisation, and unstructured sentences (imitative of speech) adds to the humanisation of his self-construct, as does his willing discussion of moments when he was