Two decades after its original release, Brian Fies’ graphic novel Mom’s Cancer has returned to shelves in an expanded anniversary edition. Depicting his family’s experience when his mother underwent treatment for lung cancer, the story originally started as a 2004 webcomic posted anonymously by Fies before being collected by Abrams for its then-nascent ComicArts imprint in 2006. Since that time, it has inspired a small revolution of graphic novels about health care, drawn international award recognition, and been translated into seven languages. Publishers Weekly spoke with Fies about coming back to the formidable work, its impact, and his own creative journey.
How did the decision for an expanded anniversary edition happen?
It was Abrams editorial director Charles Kochman’s idea. We decided to add some more material. Mom's Cancer originally ends abruptly. Partly because I was just exhausted from the process of making it, and partly because we thought the story was over...but it turned out there was more story that happened after the end. I wanted to take the opportunity to give the story a proper ending. We've added 22 new pages of comics, and then another 10 pages with a new forward and afterword.
What has happened in those 20 years since its debut?
I did Mom’s Cancer because I wanted to draw this roadmap for people coming along behind us. What happened that I didn't expect was how Mom’s Cancer turned out to be a catalyst for what has become a branch of medical humanities.
It's not the first work of “graphic medicine,” it’s not even the first comic about cancer, but Mom’s Cancer caught on with the right people at the right time. It was seen by physician Dr. Ian Williams in the UK and nurse MK Czerwiec at Northwestern University in Chicago. They came together and started having these graphic medicine conferences. They invited me to the first one in London in 2010. That started this whole field of literature and medicine that is taught in medical schools now. Two or three times a year I give a lecture or a Zoom talk to medical students, which is wild. The teachers feel the book gives new doctors, new nurses, the perspective of what it's like from the other side.
What was it like coming back to the piece?
It was daunting. It has a reputation and it has this value that has built up. I didn't want to be the guy who defaces that. It was also surprisingly emotionally troubling because I hadn't really put myself in that head space in a long time. Of reliving those days when my mom was ill, went into remission, got ill, and then passed away.
I interviewed my sisters for the 2026 edition. It was the first time in twenty years we'd sat down and talked about these things in depth. It dug up some old feelings that I didn't know they had, and they heard some things from me that surprised them. The twenty-two pages of new material is both the end of that story set back in 2005/2006, and also a 20-year update with the perspective of time.
The new material is a chance to put a proper period at the end of the Mom's Cancer sentence, it also felt like that with me and my sisters too. It's like now we understand each other, we've put the period at the end of that piece of our lives together.
It was deeply moving for me, actually. Deeply moving to revisit that world. Even just the trivial things, like trying to remember how I drew the characters because my style has changed a bit in 20 years.
After Mom’s Cancer you went immediately into fiction. You didn't return to non-fiction for a long time. Was that deliberate?
I had an opportunity to tell the kind of stories I would have told if Mom's Cancer had never happened. I did Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow (Abrams, 2012), and a webcomic called The Last Mechanical Monster (collected by Abrams, 2022). In 2017 my house burned down in a horrific fire storm in Northern California and I needed to tell this story in A Fire Story (Abrams, 2021).
What's interesting about the fire is I came out of it with a different attitude about my work and my cartooning. I'd like to spend the rest of my cartooning career, for what it's worth, doing work that no one else but me could do. That's the highest, best use a creative person can put their talents to.
