by Laboni Das Some illnesses begin with a virus. Others begin with a rumour. Felix Cheong’s A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria, illustrated by Ritwick Roy and Riddhi Trivedi, opens with an event that sounds too strange to be true. Set in Singapore in October 1967, the graphic novel revisits one of the country’s most unusual episodes of collective fear: suo yang, when hundreds of people believed their genitals were retracting into their bodies and that death would soon follow. For many readers outside Southeast Asia, this episode will be entirely unfamiliar. Yet Cheong wisely refuses to treat it as… Read More
ET-ER: True Universal Healthcare
Review by: Elizabeth Trembley The two-story collection ET-ER—soon available in comic book shops October 13, 2021—by writer Jeff McComsey, artist Javier Pulido, and letterer Dezi Sienty, arrived on the webcomic scene right at the start of a global pandemic. To many of us in March 2020, daily life seemed other-worldly. It felt as if, somehow, we had woken up in a new galaxy, where spiky COVID spheres hummed through the foreign air. This new world of empty streets, hospitals in crisis, and healthcare worker heroes faced all of us, in one way or another. Access to healthcare took… Read More