Brighton conference presenter Rachel Abrams sends news: “I’m delighted to share news with you that my long-gestated project, Pins and Needles, about Gen X women navigating fertility, is finally up online and out in the world.” You can check out her new project site here: http://www.gotpinsandneedles.com
Loving Each Other Safely (Books Beyond Words)
awaiting GM review Amazon blurb: ‘Loving Each Other Safely is part of the Books Beyond Words series of picture books that help people with learning and communication difficulties to explore and understand their own experiences. A loving relationship can be exciting and fulfilling. It can be difficult for people with learning disabilities to find a healthy way to look for intimacy in their lives. Use this book to help people explore their hopes and experiences. Guidelines are provided (as text at the back) for carers and supporters, health and other professionals providing support to people with learning disabilities. There is… Read More
The House That Groaned
Awaiting GM review Karrie’s talk at Comics and Medicine: Visualising the Stigma of Illness Amazon blurb: “141 Rottin Road ‘A cosy, one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a charming Victorian conversion. Newly decorated and with a separate kitchen and reception room. Located just a bus ride away from a wide range of shops, restaurants and bars.’ Welcome to The House that Groaned and the six lonely inhabitants of its separate flats, characters so at odds with themselves and their bodies that they could only have stepped out of the pages of a comic novel. There’s Barbara, our make-up artist heroine and… Read More
Love S.T.I.NGS
Awaiting review. Want to write a review for us? View the comic in PDF here.
Monsters
The funniest book about herpes you’ll read this year. Let me make my opinion clear from the outset: this book is superb. A work of genius. I don’t think anyone is able to graphically imbue their characters with such a sense of anxiety and dejection as Ken Dahl does. Many thanks to Martha Cornog for allerting me to the work of Gabby Shulz, a.k.a. Ken Dahl who, according to his blog, still plods on in a series of day jobs in order to pay the bills. He deserves great things, indeed he has just won an Ignatz Award for Monsters. This… Read More
Daddy’s Girl
Originally published in 1996, reprinted in 2008, Daddy’s Girl neatly illustrates the reason I think it is pointless to try to divide graphic memoirs from graphic fiction. It is a “quasi” memoir, based on Drechsler’s childhood experiences but narrated by two adolescent girls who both suffer abuse at the hands of older males. The naive style and heavy monochrome brushwork complement the teenage language. Most of the book is concerned with Lily, who, among her 3 sisters, is singled out for sexual abuse by her father, a working man who, in his spare time likes to do charitable work distributing goods… Read More
The Minotaur’s Tale
Following on from The Spiral Cage, this is a fictional novella concerning a deformed man, known as Banshee, who is saved from the misery of sleeping rough by kindly people who have suffered their own fair share of hardship. A black lesbian couple, Etty and Jenny, take him in and, ultimately, he goes on to find love and happiness with a doctor who is stigmatised by a large port wine birthmark that covers half her body. The story is shot through with incidents of cruelty and violence towards the “ugly” and the unfortunate. The main narrative is counterpointed with an alternative… 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
Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story
Blue Pills, by Swiss artist Frederick Peeters, chronicles his relationship with Cati, a wild, vivacious girl he meets at a New Years Party. They connect and become lovers. Before long Cati tells Fred that she and her three-year-old son are both HIV positive. He is filled with a mixture of passion, pity and desire, but he does his best to act cool. Although disconcerted, he wants the relationship to work, and so it does. The book charts Fred’s evolving relationship with Cati’s son, cataloguing his periods of illness, his stays in hospital and the routine of his medication- the blue… 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