This first chapter introduces the focus of the book: the selfhood shaped in autobiographical graphic narratives, or so-called autographics. The chapter presents the argument that this selfhood emerges through what it defines as the autographic gesture. This gesture, the chapter argues through a reading of panels from Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future, refers to (1) the leaving of traces as an embodied self, which (2) transform into a drawn figure that represents this self and acquires a certain autonomy as a character, and which (3) are embedded in a narrative that tells all or part of this self’s life story. By combining the semiotic logics of trace, image, and narrative, the chapter argues, autographics perform this gesture and shape a specific form of selfhood. The chapter contrasts this claim with the tendency within comics studies to foreground the destabilising character of autographics, which is said to result in fragmented, postmodern selves. To counter this dominant approach, the chapter coins the notion of the autographic pact as an autographic answer to Lejeune’s autobiographical pact. The chapter also introduces the theoretical framework that the book employs: philosophical (mainly existentialist phenomenological and hermeneutical) and psychoanalytical (Winnicottian and Lacanian) theories of the self.