awaiting review
Mis(h)adra
Guest Review by Adela Wu Mis(h)adra, the title of this remarkable graphic novel by Iasmin Omar Ata, breaks apart into “mish adra”, or I cannot in Arabic. Viewed another way, Mis(h)adra can also be “misadra”, a term for seizure. Trigger warning from Mis(h)adra and this review including mentions of self-harm and suicidality with some additional available resources: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255), Crisis Text Line: Text “Home” to 741741. Isaac, the main character, is a young Arab college student struggling with controlling his epilepsy and growing feelings of disconnection from the people around him, on top of wrangling his classes… Read More
Acme Novelty Library 18
Chris Ware does melancholy very, very well. I could read any of his many works and find themes of depression, alienation and anxiety within them. I have picked this one because it also deals specifically with disability. An unnamed girl, refered to as “Nanna” whilst working as a nanny for a middle class family, has suffered a below knee amputation after a road traffic accident in her teens. Her story was actually introduced to readers as one of Ware’s “buildings stories” in Acme Novelty Library 16. This volume covers her lonely life after leaving art school. Her self esteem is very… Read More
Black Hole
If you like the films of David Lynch… Black Hole is a kind of gothic teen horror story. It is about a disease, known as “the bug” which, once caught by sexual contact with an infected person, causes strange things to happen to the afflicted body. One boy develops an extra mouth on his chest, complete with tiny tongue, a girl periodically sheds her skin, another grows a tail, some are horribly disfigured facially by tumours or warty growths. The stigmata of the disease may be impossible to conceal, facial deformity for example, but some sufferers choose to try and… Read More
Janet and Me: An Illustrated Story of Love and Loss
The title really says it all. This is more an illustrated book with comics elements rather than a graphic novel per se. It is New York cartoonist Stan Mack’s homage to his lover Janet Bode who died of disseminated breast cancer, a touching and engaging account of their experiences in “Cancerland”. Unlike the other books about cancer listed on this site, this one is about dying rather than surviving. Written by the carer rather than the patient, it also covers the grief, lonelyness and legal complications of the immediate bereavement period. It covers similar themes to Cancer Vixen and Mom’s… Read More
American Splendour (sic)
A real-life file clerk in a Cleveland hospital, Pekar has been documenting the quotidian idiosyncrasies of his day-to-day life and work since 1976 in the cult comic series American Splendor. One of the first writers to think that everyday life could provide the basis for comic book stories, Pekar is interesting in the way he goes about making comics, writing the storyline , hiring various cartoonists (most notably Robert Crumb) to do the drawing, and then publishing and distributing the comics himself. British cartoonist Colin Warneford, who has Asberger’s syndrome (or “high functioning” autism) contacted Pekar and they collaborated on… Read More