What’s So Funny? A Cartoonist’s Memoir is one long therapy session or twenty-six sessions (aka, chapters). It includes 107 drawn illustrations, mostly the author’s single panel cartoons from The New Yorker, and a few family photographs. I highly recommend this work for its honesty, portrayal of some inner working of this cartoonist, and serious and not-so-serious laughs.
Hummingbird Heart
Guest Review by A. David Lewis In her book Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability, Eszter Szép analyzes Joe Sacco’s The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo in terms of haptic vision. Drawing on the work of Laura U. Marks, Szép explains haptic vision as the visible made tactile, “a mode of visual perception that is synesthetic in nature: It connects tactile and kinesthetic sensibilities with vision without the actual act of touch” (120). She describes the thickly cross-hatched backgrounds of The Fixer as “haptically charged” (121), causing the reader to pause and to experience Sacco’s own embodied… Read More
This Week in Graphic Medicine (10/26/18)
‘This Week in Graphic Medicine’ highlights relevant articles (and tweets) about comics in medicine published during the week (Saturday – Friday). Links are typically presented without commentary, unless clarification of relevance is necessary, with credit given to those who flagged them up where possible. So without further ado… Matthew’s Pick of the Week… This week’s pick comes with a content warning for suicide. As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Lunarbaboon, a webcomic series about parenting, depression, and nerd culture (my description). I periodically feature them below – but not every week and certainly not every… Read More
Years of the Elephant
Willy Linthout’s only son, Sam, commited suicide in 2004. This remarkable, poignant work follows Linthout’s thinly disguised avatar, Charles Germonprez, through the awful months and years of grief following that tragic event. The lines between reality and fiction, perception and fantasy are blurred as Charles struggles to carry on living without his son, Jack. His wife is present in the strory only as an ‘off screen’ voice, emphasizing the developing gulf between the two bereaved parents, who are trying to cope in their own different ways, their marriage heading towards breakdown. Jack becomes a real presence as the silent, yet… Read More
Mother, Come Home
This is a beautiful book. The whole work is understated and subdued, from the cover to the promotional artwork at the end. An atmosphere of Ware-eque melancholy pervades it, the graphics are all somber colours and clear line style. A father and son struggle to come to terms with the death of the mother, an event that has plunged the father into a deep depression. As only children or oldest siblings are want to do, Thomas, the seven year old son feels great responsibility for much of what goes on, assigning himself a commanding and caring role. He has appointed… Read More
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) chronicles the events of Bechdel’s childhood in the early 1970’s and her entry into adulthood and homosexuality at university. Her father was a repressed, unhappy aesthete, trapped in family life in his home town in rural Pennsylvania, running the family funeral home and teaching at the local school to make ends meet. He was a closet gay who had affairs with young men an ended up in court for plying teenage boys with alcohol. His death, most probably a suicide, haunts the book, an “extended meditation on history, memory, identity and trauma”… Read More