Seeing and Reading Incest: A Study of Debbie Drechsler's Daddy's Girl

This essay examines the comicbook Daddy's Girl, by Debbie Drechsler, in an effort to show that mixed-media texts provide a rich contemporary site for the study of rhetoric. Although comicbooks are commonly dismissed as a juvenile art form, I argue that Daddy's Girl both challenges this dismissal and makes a claim for the comicbook as a site that can address the reality of women's lives. By contrasting child-like drawings with the serious subject matter of incest, Drechsler powerfully depicts the corruption of innocence; in doing so, she subverts reader expectations concerning what is appropriate comicbook subject matter.