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A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria

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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

The Sickness, Volume 1

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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… Read More

Emotional Support Animals: Anonymous Fuzzball Comics + Workbook

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by Cassy Lee Nicole Georges has created a powerful piece of graphic medicine under the guise of a cute little animal self-help gift book. While it does indeed feature adorable animals in cardigans offering nuggets of wisdom Georges herself gleaned over years of therapy (see Fig. 1 p. 10-11 below), it also invites the reader to actively participate in their own healing by engaging in the worksheets and practices she created for herself to get through tough times (see an example in Fig. 2 below). Fig. 1, pages 10 – 11, Emotional Support Animals No stranger to tough times, as… Read More