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36days

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by Katya Robin Paul Flippen’s 36days records the final phase of his father’s life, a disabled veteran undergoing medical care. The title 36days omits the usual space between words, compressing the period into a single unit. Thirty-six image panels are interspersed throughout the spare sequential text. All the image panels are grey, daubed and abraded with a variety of textures. They remind me of miasma, the obsolete medical theory that disease was caused by bad air. Firm ink line drawings hold their space over these foggy backgrounds. Engineering diagrams, partial maps, medical equipment and ornamental swirls ooze from a telephone… Read More

All Death Matters

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by Felix Cheong You can dodge taxes (as many successful people have done). But the one fact you can’t avoid is death. Yet among Asians, we often wave away the word as if saying it aloud might bring on the death throes. No talk of wills, end-of-life care or funeral planning. Heck, we can’t even pen our autobiographies. At my memoir-writing workshop last year, one participant said his wife had tried to stop him from signing up because she believed writing your life story meant you were ready to give up the ghost! Which makes All Death Matters an unusual… Read More

The Nightingales

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by Cassy Lee In a small town in Oregon in 1985, Emil Wilson’s father made a decision to take in a coworker named Jim and his two dogs who had been evicted from their home. The family is told that Jim is dying of cancer, but it soon becomes apparent that he is a gay man dying of AIDS during the early years of the epidemic, when the disease remained poorly understood and was surrounded by fear, stigma, and misinformation. While Wilson’s mother is not pleased about bringing a stranger into their home, his younger sister, seventeen-year-old Lou, approaches Jim… Read More

You Died: An Anthology of the Afterlife

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By Katie Kidwell “We can see death as our enemy, and many do. But we can also choose to see death as a great motivator, the muse that has sustained artists for tens of thousands of years,” (page 6) writes Caitlin Doughty[i], a mortician and death positivity activist, in the foreword to You Died: An Anthology of the Afterlife. The writers, illustrators, and letterists of this eclectic graphic novel anthology bring their art together to create “a memento mori for the modern age,” (page 6) as Doughty describes it – a work gently reminding us that death is inevitable, equalizing… Read More

Us Two Together

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by Andy Smith   Us Two Together, written by Belgian artist Ephameron and translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchinson, describes the author’s perceptions and feelings surrounding the decline and eventual death of her father, who was stricken with a rare form of dementia in his late fifties. This book has somewhat sparse narrative, and collage drawings intended to convey emotions more than literal events, so it is important that the reader review the author’s intentions in the very well-written Preface of this book.  It makes clear that her father received excellent care, from a large network of family and… Read More

Dying for Attention

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by Ameena Batada   Susan MacLeod’s Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care takes readers on a personal-professional odyssey that only someone with MacLeod’s combination of experience and expertise could know and share in this way. MacLeod, an artist since she was young, intertwines her personal family journey with professional knowledge about institutional public health and communication in this playful and comic memoir. MacLeod focuses on her challenges as the primary caregiver obtaining quality nursing home care for her mother in Canada, an increasingly common scenario for adults in the “sandwich” (between parents and children) generation. According… Read More