“There’s something really empowering about telling your own story” So begins this powerful, mixed-media graphic tale. It is a phrase that encapsulates one of the principles of narrative medicine, and so graphic medicine, too. Many graphic stories deal with trauma; the ones I find most powerful tend to come from first hand experience, told in raw, unfiltered words and images. This is one such work. Hats off to Singing Dragon, purveyors of some excellent comics, for publishing this book, which challenges the misogyny and rape culture that seem to permeate our popular media and society. Part visual diary, part interior monologue, the narrative is not… Read More
Something Terrible by Dean Trippe
Book Review by Kevin Wolf Everything about this graphic memoir is brief, but it packs a wallop. It’s only fourteen pages plus a four page epilogue, a foreword by Kate Beaton (Hark, a Vagrant), and afterword and closing thoughts by the author. Something Terrible is about surviving childhood sexual abuse and its continued torment into adulthood. The book is stark, in black and white with a gray wash and one color page and a just preceding color panel. The book is often wordless, allowing the images to carry the weight. This was a very courageous memoir for the author… Read More
Why I Killed Peter
When Olivier is twelve years old, he is sexually abused by Peter, a liberal Catholic priest, a friend of his parents and grandparents who supervises a children’s camp. He tries to rationalise what has happened, but doesn’t disclose the abuse for many years. The event has emotionally scarred him and Olivier develops mental health problems and a chronic need to psychologically exorcise the abuse. He writes the story down and his friend, the comics artist Alfred, agrees to turn it into a strip. Hearing that Peter is dead, they decide to revisit the scene of the abuse, the children’s camp,… Read More
The Tale of One Bad Rat
Rather than coming from direct experience of the author, this is a fictional story based on Talbot’s research into child abuse and incest. The main character, Helen, runs away from home after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her self-centred father and emotional deprivation from her self-pitying mother. Begging in London and living in a cardboard box, she manages to dodge further molestation before falling in with a group of rough but friendly squatters who give her food and shelter. Her only real friend is a pet rat she has rescued from the dissection laboratory at her school. Understandably,… Read More
A Child’s Life and other stories
Disturbing, compelling, brilliant. Phoebe Gloeckners is an american cartoonist, illustrator, painter and novelist. This explicit tale of child abuse, drug abuse and sex is disturbing from the outset, with a teeth-jarringly confessional, but embarrasingly funny, introduction by Robert Crumb, a personal friend of the artist and her mother. I call it ‘disturbing’ because I was brought up in comfortable middle class England, and to someone like me, conditioned to think of myself as ‘average’ but probably actually a from a minority cohort, the type of life that Gloeckner describes here is rather alien. To vast numbers of readers, however, A… Read More