Our Cancer Year, and: Janet and Me: An Illustrated Story of Love and Loss, and: Cancer Vixen: A True Story, and: Mom’s Cancer, and: Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story, and: Epileptic, and: Black Hole (review)

A news article in the journal Editor and Publisher recently announced that on October 4, 2007, the character Lisa Moore, of the comic strip Funky Winkerbean, would die of breast cancer. This event was newsworthy because Funky Winkerbean is so popular; it has been running since 1972 and is syndicated in 400 newspapers. Its author, Tom Batiuk, is a survivor of prostate cancer. And the character, Lisa, who was mother to a young daughter, was first diagnosed in 1999. Although this event might appear to be of merely momentary significance, less than a month after Lisa’s death, Kent State University Press republished her storyline as a graphic narrative titled Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe, part of their Literature and Medicine series.

That a nationally beloved comic strip character died this fall is not so much a sign that serious content is finally coming to comics—this has actually been the case since comics’ inception in American newspapers around the turn of the nineteenth-century—but rather that, increasingly, the complex representation of illness and its effects is finding a home in the medium of comics. Comics is, in fact, a distinct form—a medium in its own right—not a lowbrow genre of literature or art, as it is often understood. And while newspaper comic strips, which today might qualify as comics’ most sanitized format, show us one place that cancer, for instance, is deeply considered, there is a significant body of work in the long-format graphic narrative—almost all of it published within the past five years and much of it about cancer.¹ In this review, I consider the properties, commonalities, differences, and contributions of a swiftly growing, yet diverse, body of graphic narratives about illness in order to explain the current profusion of such texts and to account for why the graphic narrative is a distinctly effective (and affective) popular form for such stories²

To begin to understand how and why graphic narratives about illness operate, we must first turn to the history of the genre in the United States. Much of this work develops out of a tradition of autobiographical cartooning born in the early 1970s as part of the comics (or “comix”) underground. This revolution in comics-making developed out of the taboo-shattering and leftist politics of the 1960s, in which authors outside mainstream publication and distribution networks broke barriers in both radical content and form. Underground comics introduced an openness to confessional modes of comics storytelling, as evinced by Justin Green’s pioneering 1972 “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,” a forty-page narrative about masturbation and Catholic guilt. This text set the stage for more prolific artists like Art Spiegelman, author of the pathbreaking, nonfiction Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, to explore the parameters of autobiography. “Without Binky Brown there would be no Maus,” writes Spiegelman. “I guess one point of my pentagon-shaped Pulitzer prize belongs to him.”³ In praising Green, Spiegelman also indicates how significantly Green’s work altered comics: “Before Justin Green, cartoonists were actually expected to keep a lid on their psyches and personal histories...