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Traces of Madness – A Graphic Memoir

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by Karol Kovalovich Weaver Content Advisory: this review and book contains self-harm. The crisis Lifeline number in the U.S. and Canada is 988, in the U.K. it’s 999; and for elsewhere go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines.   Traces of Madness: A Graphic Memoir, written by Fernando Balius, illustrated by Mario Pellejer, and translated from Spanish by Richard Beevor and Mailén Sganga, depicts the experiences of the author, who hears voices and undergoes other physical, sensory, psychological, and personal issues associated with psychotic episodes. The author describes how life circumstances and the world in which people live impact voice hearing (understood medically as… Read More

The Parakeet

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by Liz Argall Content warning: this book contains attempted and completed suicide, teeth injuries, mental health institutions, physical restriction and electro convulsive therapy. The crisis Lifeline number in the U.S. and Canada is 988, in the U.K. it’s 999; and for elsewhere go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines. The Parakeet is done in a way that contains vivid images and use of color at times, but it is profoundly humanizing and fundamentally tender in its gaze.   Summary Espé (pen name pen name of Sébastien Porte if you’re struggling to find him on the internet) published Le Perroquet in 2017 and I applaud… Read More

Nightmare Scenarios

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Guest review by Eric Hoffman Matt Barrell is a London-based comic book artist with schizophrenia. In his short but powerful comic, Nightmare Scenarios, he provides twenty-four one panel-per-page depictions of the inner life of Londoners suffering from mental illness. There are no word balloons; the primitive yet effective illustrations, accompanied by first-person captions, provide a claustrophobic firsthand depiction of the disconnectedness of mental illness, of being trapped inside one’s own head, and the confusion and difficulty of interacting with a society which one is a part of, yet also apart from. Each page of Barrell’s comic presents a single frozen… Read More

The Road to God Knows

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awaiting GM review. Amazon blurb: ‘The road to god knows… is the story of Marie, a teenage girl coming to grips with her Mom’s schizophrenia. As a result, she’s struggling to grow up fast; wrestling with poverty, loneliness, and her Mom’s illness every step of the way. Betty, Marie’s Mom, can’t help; she’s living with an illness that’s slowly getting worse and increasingly frightening, and she just doesn’t have the resources left over at the end of the day to help Marie. With her Mom absorbed in her own problems, Marie is essentially alone while she learns to deal with… Read More

Swallow Me Whole

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Guest review by Penn State University graduate student in English, Derek Lee What would you do if you ever began hearing voices in your head? Would you try to eradicate them with antipsychotic drugs? Or would you accept them as an intrinsic part of your life, scarcely different from your own thoughts? These are some of the questions raised by Swallow Me Whole, a beautiful and complex graphic novel that challenges many of our assumptions about reality, perception, and the mentally ill. With this wonderful work, Nate Powell, the author of Please Release and Tiny Giants, has created a comic… Read More