MK Czerwiec interviews Rick Louis and Lara Antal on their collaboration creating Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars. Rick Louis allows the reader a look into his experiences having a child with Tay-Sachs disease. He worked with Lara Antal to make the graphic memoir a reality. Rick and Lara discuss how their partnership started and how they communicated to make the best possible story. During the interview Rick Louis mentions a quote: The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel. It is attributed to Horace Walpole quote, but also might have been… Read More
Billy, Me & You: A Memoir of Grief and Recovery
Guest review by Dr. Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Anu Mary Peter, National Institute of Technology, India. Review Published in 2011 by Myriad Editions, Billy, Me & You: A Memoir of Grief and Recovery (hereafter Billy, Me & You) is a graphic memoir by Nicola Streeten, an illustrator and academic. Serialized initially in Liquorice magazine, Billy, Me & You was later collected into a graphic novel thirteen years after the death of Billy, author’s first child who died after cardiac surgery at the age of two. Suffused with subtle humor, if the memoir chronicles the complexities of human grief and bereavement it also deftly records the emotional… Read More
Tangles: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me
guest review by Nathan Sethu Tangles, A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me is a graphic memoir created by Sarah Leavitt who writes both prose and comics. Her writing has appeared in Geist, The Globe and Mail, Vancouver Review, The Georgia Straight and Xtra West. Tangles is her first book and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Canada and printed in China. The Memoir published in 2012 was widely appreciated by media and Alzheimer associations of different countries. The New York Times has described the book as, “A poignant account…. Illustrations bring home the daughter’s pain as her once vibrant, protective… Read More
Raised on Ritalin: A Medicated Memoir
This work in progress is being serialized online. Chapters 1-3 were published as a zine in Summer 2013. Chapters up to four available as of this posting here.
Autography as Autotherapy: Psychic Pain and the Graphic Memoir
Autography as Autotherapy: Psychic Pain and the Graphic Memoir Ian Williams Journal of Medical Humanities. 2011 Dec;32(4):353-66 Abstract: Over the last three decades, the graphic novel has developed both in sophistication and cultural importance, now being widely accepted as a unique form of literature (Versaci 2007). Autobiography has proved to be a successful genre within comics (the word is used in the plural to denote both the medium and the philosophy of the graphic form) and within this area a sub-genre, the memoir of the artist’s own disease or suffering, sometimes known as the graphic pathology, has arisen (Green and Myers 2010). Storytelling and… Read More
Truthiness: Penis Rays, Self-Loathing, and Psychic Voodoo
Truthiness: Penis Rays, Self-Loathing, and Psychic Voodoo