In Alison Bechdel’s The Ordinary Devoted Mother, Bechdel uses the illustrated graphic novel format to portray her difficult relationship with her mother. A frame I found particularly striking was on pages 104-105, where Bechdel illustrates a sequence of polaroids on a desk. The polaroids display the author as an infant mimicking her mother’s coos. Displayed around the photos are art supplies such as pencils, erasers, and paint brushes, giving the appearance that the reader is not looking at the actual photograph but rather the author’s illustrations. Speech bubbles containing snippets of a conversation with Bechdel’s mother and text boxes of the author’s own interpretation of the photos float along the page. The center of page 104 contains