Conflict or Compromise? An Imagined Conversation with John Hicklenton and Lindsay Cooper about Living with Multiple Sclerosis

This strip is part of an ongoing project using comics to express, conceptualize, and cope with my experience of living with multiple sclerosis (MS). I produced the first installment during a postdoctoral residency in University of the Arts London's Archives and Special Collections Centre at London College of Communication, roughly two years after I was diagnosed with MS. The residency also resulted in the production of an autobiographical comic, So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, now held in the Wellcome Collection Library, London, and the winner of "Best One-Shot" in the 2020 Broken Frontier awards.

Rather than attempting to present an unmediated voice and hand as signifiers of confessional truth-telling, this comic adopts graphic languages from work held in the archive to depict episodes from my initial experiences of coping with my diagnosis and symptoms. Placing incidents from my own life into the nonsensically cruel universe of Mark Beyer's Amy & Jordan strips highlights the sense of dislocation and inevitable "why me?" that follows diagnosis. Evoking the ribald underground cartooning and scatological humor of Ivan Brunetti's Schizo #1 allows me to reframe a humiliating incident of loss of continence as a piece of gross-out slapstick. My self-presentation in these strips also mimics the mood of its source material: the "Beyer me" is tentative and fearful, while the "Brunetti me" displays some of the misanthropy of Brunetti's early work.

In more recent work, I've begun to address more directly my understanding of my still relatively new status as a "disabled" individual, and have incorporated aspects of my archival research that were not reflected in the earlier comic: the experiences and reflections of musician Lindsay Cooper and cartoonist John Hicklenton, both of whom suffered from MS.

This comic begins with first-person narration, but my fictionalized selves quickly reassert their presence, commenting on and questioning Hicklenton's and Cooper's approaches to disease management, and then engaging them in direct and sometimes confrontational dialogue. Despite the occasionally heated nature of the conversation, I hope that these pages stand as a record of, as Cooper recommends, learning from their experiences and using them to understand what might happen to me.