Review by Bethany Mannon, PhD Good Eggs narrates Phoebe Potts’ work to conceive in her mid-thirties, after years of expecting that she could become pregnant “the natural way.” “Each month I get my hopes up,” she writes, alongside an image of herself sitting on the toilet and reaching for a tampon. “Each month I count nine months out to see when I might have a baby. And each month, despite charting and timing & peeing & trying – I’m still not pregnant” (xiv). Good Eggs joins Paula Knight’s comic Spooky Womb, Emily Steinberg’s graphic memoir Broken Eggs. and many prose… Read More
Sky in Stereo
Book Review by Kevin Wolf I recommend this black and white graphic novel which is narrated in the first person by Iris. Starting in 1989 Iris’ mom, Gina, becomes a Jehovah’s Witness. Gina’s live-in boyfriend is skeptical about the Witnesses. Iris initially joins her mother’s new belief system through supporting “evidence” in the apocalyptic messages in her childhood Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Iris finds the Kingdom Hall meetings tame relative to the end-times that they’re supposed to be awaiting. Iris becomes frustrated in her teen years, flees the conservatism of her mom’s religion, and turns to illicit drugs to… Read More
And God Remembered Sarah
Sarah Lightman, Artist, Curator and co-founder of the marvellous Laydeez Do Comics of which Graphic Medicine is so fond, is currently working on a book, The Book of Sarah, for Myriad Editions. In this exerpt, featuring drawings of eggs, deals with Sarah’s feelings about starting a family. As Sarah explained to Paul Gravett in an interview for ArtReview (May 2013): ‘my life has many parallels with my namesake. The whole aspect of uncertainty in relation to parenthood is one of them. My title for my strip published in ArtReview is And God remembered Sarah, from Genesis 21:1, where Sarah finds herself pregnant as God… Read More
Family Fun
A couple of months ago I heard a talk given by a comics artist who goes under the name of Una. One of her projects is a comic about dealing with psychosis in a relative, including being with them while they undergo the process of being detained under the mental health act. The series is in development and will be launched as a comic book at an exhibition in Leeds in February http://www.leeds-artexhibitions.co.uk Here is a sneak preview:
The Ride Together
I really, really like this book. It is only half a graphic novel: chapters alternate between text and comics, Judy taking care of the prose, Paul the strips. I am an old, world weary cynic, but this book tugs at my corroded heart strings. Warm and happy and sad and gentle, it is the story of Paul and Judy’s elder brother Dave, who has autism. Dave is loved by his family but can be a handful, violent at times and the book follows the families attempts to find Dave an appropiate caring community in which he can live, be himself… Read More
I Never Liked You
To include this great little book in a list of “medically themed” graphic novels may be stretching the point somewhat, or tending towards the medicalisation of normal life (doctors are good at that, but maybe not as good as Big Pharma). I include it because of the thread narrative that concerns Chester Brown’s relationship with his mentally ill mother. The main theme of this memoir is Brown’s somewhat troubled adolescence, growing up in the 1970’s in a Montreal suburb. Chester is the slightly geeky teenager whose quiet, thoughtful manner and skinny, longhaired good looks get him plenty of (seemingly unwanted)… Read More
Mom’s Cancer
Brian Fies originally chronicled his family’s struggle to come to terms with their mother’s metastatic cancer in an anonymous serialised web comic. He had no idea how the story would end when he started posting it, but he hoped that others similarly affected would find some comfort in knowing they were not alone. Reader numbers increased by word of mouth (or email) recommendation and the strip was picked up and published as a hardback book in 2006. It has subsequently won several awards, including an Eisner. It is a beautifully produced book, with understated graphics, mostly in black and white… Read More
The Complete Maus
I include the Complete Maus here for three reasons: firstly, it is generally held to be one of the benchmarks against which other graphic novels are judged, a work that has made people who don’t like comics read comics, and a pinnacle of achievement that Spiegelman has spent the last twenty years trying to either live up to, or get away from. If you only ever read one graphic novel….(Actually, Art Spiegelman doesn’t like the term “graphic novel”, even though he is credited as being one of the Godfathers of the medium. He prefers plain old “comics” or “comix”). Secondly,… Read More