Credit Where It's Due: A Few Stray Thoughts On The Brilliance Of Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia's "Marzi: A Memoir"
1 . The Strange Persistent Obsession With Auteurship Like a great many others, I'm convinced Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia's Marzi: A Memoir is a masterpiece. But I'm not convinced that the credit for the book's brilliance is always appropriately shared out. There's long been a tendency when discussing comics to concentrate on the supposed auteurship of the writer. For a variety of reasons, including the relative difficulty of recognising and describing the vital contributions of artistic collaborators, their contributions tend to get short shift. That tendency - as misleading as it is manifestly unfair - is only intensified when it comes to stories that are as emotionally captivating and politically powerful as Marzena Sowa's. Marzi: A Memoir depicts the first stages of Sowa's coming of age in the Poland of the Seventies and Eighties. If the stories were nothing but local explorations of that universal theme, they'd still be undeniably begu...