The Sickness, Volume 1

by Dr. Javier A Suarez

The Sickness is disgusting and scary. A trite observation based on the cover, but one that extends into the themes of the work beyond its initial oozing hook. The book shoves you face-first into a vile swamp of squelching entrails and dripping orifices. However, the spectacularly grotesque art from Jenna Cha barely scratches the epidermis of this deep flesh wound that gets worse the more you peel it apart. The book is not scary because it has unnerving imagery, but because of what those images represent. There are motifs of uniquely American war-time anxieties, and an omnipresent conflict between a material and supernatural understanding of the world.

At its most superficial, The Sickness is a horror story about a seemingly disparate set of individuals across time and (American) space who meet an untimely end after hallucinating increasingly disturbing sights and sounds. There are two parallel protagonists: Daniel, a young boy living in Stillwater, MN who is battling the affliction in 1945, and Dr. George Brooks, a physician in Lakewood, CO studying the condition in 1955. Their stories are interesting enough on this level, with Daniel serving as the reader’s window into the disturbing visions and Dr. Brooks as the straight man seeking to bring sense to the insanity. As the story progresses, we are shown glimpses of the darkness underlying the sickness; never so much as to break the tension or make the problem solvable but enough to keep you engaged and desperate for answers. Daniel’s father is in jail and his mother is now with another man, whom Daniel does not trust. His friends are crass and tease him constantly. He is terrified by the implications of nuclear weapons, but no one else seems to share his concerns, least of all his step-father who works in weapons manufacturing. Daniel embodies the sensation of powerlessness that comes with seeing a tsunami in the distance and watching nobody bat an eye as you run for high ground. There is a general concern for unalterable power causing incalculable damage that seeps into the work.

This measured, methodical approach to story-telling is what makes The Sickness actually scary. Nadler’s script makes the afflicted and, by extension, Dr. Brooks feel isolated, plagued by a relentless terror that nobody can understand or even seems interested in trying to. Cha’s art and Otsmane-Elhaou’s letters excel at shocking you with loud, creatively upsetting imagery (there can always be more holes, more worms, more tendrils, more teeth than you think), and subtly keeping your sympathetic nervous system active against your will. Indeed, few comics so directly demand you scan the details of the background in each panel, triggering a macabre curiosity that must be sated with each turn of the page. The creative team not only depicts the dread of hyper-vigilance; it instills it in the reader and amplifies it over the course of the book. This mastery of both comics and horror is spectacular to behold.

The centering of a physician as one of the main characters and of course the title of the work evokes a connection to the medical world. The book does an admirable job of depicting the afflicted as believably paranoid individuals who are experiencing frightening hallucinations, their words and body language display their despair. The fictional sickness shares characteristics with real-life psychiatric illnesses, such as worsening of symptoms under stress and onset of symptoms after a traumatic event, but the collective hallucination of a strange man raises the unique question of a supernatural phenomenon. Dr. Brooks is immediately relatable to those who take care of patients; his drive to establish a diagnosis after experiencing a bad outcome while caring for a patient with a mysterious ailment is as recognizable as it is admirable. That said, the script uses him more as a detective than a medical doctor. The aesthetic of a tortured man devoting his energy to a case at the expense of his own well-being and that of his relationships is just as easily at home in a noir detective tale as it is here. While the process of building a differential diagnosis is indeed that of a physician, we never see Dr. Brooks actually practice medicine save for performing an autopsy, staunchly challenging my suspension of disbelief as I stared in awe at a hospitalist performing the duties of a pathologist. His poring over medical journals (in a library, no less, and without a Ctrl+F function) could be substituted for an investigator looking through old newspaper headlines, and perhaps this direct parallel is purposeful. I have described the structure of the story as a mystery, and mysteries tend to have detectives looking to solve them. Since the mystery is ostensibly portrayed as an illness, it makes sense to have a physician be the detective.

A word on horror comics in general and how The Sickness excels as a work in this space. Horror is a particularly difficult genre to create in comics. More specifically, genuine fear is a difficult emotion to elicit with the comics medium. This is the thesis of an essay by Steve Foxe in issue 4 of Razorblades, a horror magazine collecting comics, short stories, single art pieces, and interviews with horror comics creators – perhaps ironically, issue 1 of this magazine contains an apparent prequel to The Sickness from the same creators called “She’s Got It,” in addition to multiple other works lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. Foxe describes how the static visual imagery required to make comics robs creators of the intentional pacing and information scarcity that are so effective in movies and prose. In his words: “we must show something, because we are a visual medium. And we have no control over how long the reader lingers on an image.” This relinquishing of control is why, according to Foxe, so many horror comics use body horror as the primary scare tactic – a visual medium creates fear with visually uncomfortable images. The creative team behind The Sickness are certainly not hesitant to lean into this trope, Jenna Cha is responsible for some of the most repugnant figures I have seen in any medium (this is a compliment). What makes The Sickness special, then, is how truly scary it is. The team creates tension through mystery. We are never explicitly told what this sickness is, why it exists, if it is truly supernatural or not. For a physician, the lack of known pathophysiology in a universally fatal disease is a terrifying prospect. For a reader without a medical background, the unknowns are just as frightening because of how viscerally we experience their consequences. The sickening art is just the bloody, purulent icing on a dreadful cake made of existential horror.

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Dr. Javier A Suarez is a movement disorders neurologist at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. He received an MD degree from Feinberg School of Medicine, completed neurology residency at Mass General Brigham, and completed a movement disorders fellowship at the University of Minnesota. His clinical interests include the management of movement disorders with deep brain stimulation.  He has worked on improving healthy equity education in neurology residency as well as improving accessibility to neurology educational materials generally through open-access videos. He has presented work on the neurology of comics at the American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting. He remains an avid reader of comics and graphic novels.