1. Robert Crumb: taking advantage of a drunken date (The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 17)
As the godfather of repellant autobiographical comics, R. Crumb has never been shy about portraying himself in less-than-flattering ways, or about admitting to misdeeds: He's filled in readers on nearly every wrinkle of his rampant misanthropy and preference for bizarre, demeaning sex acts. In the 1988 story "Memories Are Made Of This," Crumb recalls an evening in 1976 when he worked overtime to soften up a woman who was his exact physical ideal (tall, thick legs, big butt), and finally succeeded when she drank enough wine to be practically incoherent. Then he had his way with her, sticking his hand in her mouth, pressing her head to the ground, and mounting her from behind like a cowboy on a bronco.
2. Tom Beland: suffering through impotence with his dream woman (True Story, Swear To God: Archives Vol. 1)
Of course, not all unflattering sequences are necessarily because the writer did something wrong. In his ongoing series True Story, Swear To God, Tom Beland chronicles his surprising, spontaneous relationship with Lily, a Puerto Rican radio personality he happened to meet at a bus stop at Disneyworld. Their story is mostly achingly sweet, with bursts of temper or conflict over which Beland hesitates to assign blame. He's less forgiving about the intermittent impotence that makes him fear Lily will believe he isn't attracted to her. Considering how thoroughly they bowled each other off their feet, that fear is enough to turn him into a fetal, miserable, self-pitying ball.
3. James Kochalka: raging at his wife over nothing (American Elf Volume 1)
Comics funster and self-proclaimed rock superstar James Kochalka also routinely ends up as a self-pitying ball in the early years of his daily online comic diary American Elf, though generally with far less reason. In recent years, Kochalka's strips have mostly been more light-hearted illustrations of moments with his family, especially his older son, Eli. But the first two years were rockier, as Kochalka's irrational temper sometimes led him into abrupt, furious screaming matches with his wife, Amy. For every strip where they fight (or cry afterward), there's five more where they banter playfully, toy with each other's bodies, or find mild moments of beauty and humor in the world, but Kochalka doesn't flinch at portraying his own ugliness, whether he's making one of his frequent excretion jokes or freaking out because Amy won't give in to his random impulse to stick his finger in her ear.
4. Ivan Brunetti: exploring ingrown misanthropy (Schizo)
When it comes to self-hatred in autobio comics, Ivan Brunetti pretty much blows the curve for everyone. It's hard picking a single panel of his metaphysically misanthropic rant-comic, Schizo, that's somehow worse than all the rest: Just close your eyes, open a page at random, and point. Brunetti wallows in every suicidal tendency and sexual perversion imaginable, as if to prove his loathing of the human race by example—and he wields bodily fluids like Pollock did paints. His most disturbing and repellant panels, though, are the ones in which he cranks it down a notch and simply bangs his head against his own cracked self-image.
5. Julie Doucet: nose-picking (Dirty Plotte)
It's tough to separate fact from fiction in Dirty Plotte, Julie Doucet's hallucinatory comic book. Stories often begin with a sequence of completely plausible autobiography before rocketing into the outer reaches of Doucet's bruised, sweltering psyche. Case in point: Her story "At Night When I Go To Bed," in which Doucet nonchalantly details her nocturnal nose-picking habits. It's far from the most disgusting thing Doucet has drawn herself doing—she graphically fantasizes about growing to Godzilla size and drowning her city in menstrual blood, and her gleeful castrations are the stuff of nightmares—but it's the most casually believable.
6. Jim Woodring: mocking the handicapped, The Book of Jim
Although he's a capable, though somewhat bizarre, narrative storyteller, Jim Woodring includes in his Book of Jim collection only what he calls "Jimless Jim": unedited, unexpurgated transcriptions of dreams and waking nightmares of just the sort that got him started on his uniquely disturbing comics career in the first place. Unsurprisingly for a man whose psychotherapist dropped him as a patient after seeing his work, Jim keeps an autojournal filled with incriminating, upsetting imagery: Jim torturing a petty criminal in order to unleash the man's soul; Jim accidentally decapitating his cat after mistaking it for a rattlesnake. But none of his stories is more self-loathing than "Invisible Hinge," where, given a YMCA pass by a departed friend, Jim gets drunk on cheap whiskey and visits the communal pool. Once there, he spots a tanned, athletic figure, and immediately condemns him as a cheap phony who deserves to get beaten down by life—until the man emerges from the pool and turns out to be an amputee. Jim's reaction—and the reaction of the liquor curdling in his stomach—is unpleasant at best
7. David Chelsea: taking out his sexual frustrations on the world (David Chelsea In Love)
David Chelsea's early autobiographical graphic novel David Chelsea In Love is full of minor bad behavior, mostly related to sex—he seems to have little else on his mind most of the time, and while he fusses over the many loves of his unfaithful on-again/off-again girlfriend Millie, he doesn't hesitate to hop into the sack with any warm and willing woman himself. He also doesn't hesitate to pressure less-willing women, at one point groping and kissing a friend who's just said "No!" and pushed him away, then fuming at her for not giving in. He's alternately self-pitying and aggressive throughout his confessionally intimate book, though Millie—a mercurial, temperamental, self-serving flower-child flake with seriously bizarre expectations about commitment—comes off far worse. Still, he's at his least likeable when she leaves him sexually frustrated, and he compensates by joyously mocking and confronting beggars and proselytizers on the streets of New York, as if trying to drive them out of his city with the sheer force of his assholiness.
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