Not Playing Around: Games in Graphic Illness Narratives

Why do recent graphic narratives about illness play with metaphors of merry-go-rounds, board games, and games of pretend and performance to explain the experience of being ill? Play and game typically associate with nostalgia, with pleasure, and with a sense of freedom, none of which come to mind as viable images to discuss a struggle with difficult physical and mental illnesses. Acclaimed graphic narratives including Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (2006), Daryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales (2011), Ellen Forney’s Marbles (2012), Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen (2006), and Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer (2006) use the rich narrative ambiguities of game situations to work against the grain, correlating the gap between “player” and “played” with the gap between an active, organically healthy self and a self being unmade by illness.