Loss can be overwhelming to live through, let alone write about—but drawing can enable authors to convey what words alone cannot. As such, grief is a perennial theme in graphic nonfiction, exemplified by breakout titles like Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? and Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning.
“For me, it’s about feeling seen,” says Jesse Mechanic, whose debut graphic memoir, The Last Time We Spoke: A Story of Loss (Street Noise, Sept.), chronicles his mother’s death from cancer when he was a teenager and his ensuing obsessive compulsive disorder. Mechanic’s drawings immerse readers in his psychological experience through “spacious, architectural, and often cannily symmetrical” comics art that will feel “painfully familiar to anyone who has stumbled around in the darkness of grief,” per PW’s starred review.
Mechanic’s book is among a slate of new and forthcoming graphic nonfiction titles that tackle loss, related mental health challenges, and ultimately healing. They’re also part of an emerging genre called graphic medicine. Examples include Your Baby Will Find You by Madeleine Garner and Giorgia Lupi (BenBella, out now), a hybrid of affirmations and art designed to comfort readers experiencing miscarriage or infant loss, and Black Cohosh by Eagle Valiant Brosi (D&Q, June), an “unsparing yet mirthful” graphic memoir, per PW’s starred review, that follows the artist from a fraught childhood on a back-to-the-land commune to caring for his mother during her terminal illness.
Eisner nominee Carol Tyler returns with The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief (Fantagraphics, Sept.), which documents her journey into a whimsical, disorienting space she calls “Griefville.” This land is populated by what she terms “symbols of reflection and memory” and managed by pointy-fingered figures named Clorins, whose eyes resemble slotted screw heads. In the wake of multiple family deaths and a painful rift with her daughter, “Griefville took the weight of sorrow from me,” Tyler says, “because I was able to define it.”
Instead of being held hostage by grief indefinitely, Tyler poured herself into creating. She even made paintbrushes out of pet fur and sticks. “Pay attention to your exact situation,” she is advised by a six-legged calf in Griefville.
Artist Katarina Thorsen’s debut, Salt Green Death (Conundrum, out now), takes a historical approach to examining how society often isolates people in extreme grief. Her scrapbook-styled investigation mines archival materials around the tragic life of Joseph O’Dwyer, an Irish Canadian who was institutionalized after a psychotic break following the deaths of multiple family members and the aftermath of WWII. It’s an “indictment of an era of psychiatric hubris” that “fuses dogged scholarship and visceral empathy,” per PW’s review.
“I was not trying to make it a horror story, like Cuckoo’s Nest,” Thorsen says. It was important to her to extend her empathy to practitioners as well as patients, even as she depicted O’Dwyer going through a series of torturous treatments. “Those were the cutting edge at the time.”
Art therapy
“We have art that soldiers created in trenches,” says comics librarian and Toronto Comics Arts festival director Amie Wright, who notes that creativity often helps people process trauma.
When chronicling struggles with mental health, comics can uniquely depict the dissonance between internal and external experiences. A scene in a comic can juxtapose drawings of real and imagined actions with spoken and internal dialogue and narrative. Graphic memoirs are thus “simultaneously first and third person in this seamless way,” says cartoonist and literature professor Rocco Versaci, author of This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. For readers, “there’s therapeutic value to that when you’re wrestling with your own conflicts.”
Comics can be informational, Wright says, or they can limn the emotional side of what creators are going through. “We all live in linear time, but what’s going on internally is discombobulated. Anyone moving through grief has had that mundane experience, for example, of going through the subway turnstile while your head is somewhere else.” In comics, such dueling experiences can be visually constructed in a single, immediately digestible panel or page.
When creating their memoirs, both Tyler and Mechanic describe tapping into a well of images that came to them in a rush after years of marinating in grief. “OCD was the main component that made me decide this needed to be a graphic work,” says Mechanic, who draws intrusive thoughts as a giant, human-shaped black scribble. “This bully figure who is also you, who is a doppelgänger, wants to destroy you.”
One of the perks of being a memoirist, Versaci says, is that everything is material. His travelogue That Hidden Road includes comics; he currently posts diary comics online. When recovering from cancer surgery, Versaci encountered a complication that found him “gushing” lymphatic fluid. Having to walk across the parking lot to the hospital, he says, “I’m holding all these towels around my abdomen, leaving a trail behind me, and what was going through my head was how this is going to be a great post.”
Panel prescriptions
Graphic memoirs often offer readers catharsis. But for those who might prefer more practical self-help, there are comics for that, too. Joe Biel, founder of the long-running indie outlet Microcosm, observes a generational shift with contemporary comics fans receptive to books that take mental hardship head on. In June, Microcosm will release both a graphic adaptation of counselor Faith G. Harper’s popular backlist title, now called Unfuck Your Brain Graphic Guide: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-Outs, and Triggers, drawn by Gerta Oparaku Egy, and cartoonist Reid Chancellor’s graphic memoir Hardcore Happiness: A Graphic Journey to Find Punk’s Positivity.
“When we did books like these 15 or 20 years ago, people would pick them up, clearly be interested, then get uncomfortable and say, ‘I want to leave this for someone who has real problems,’ ” Biel recalls. “That’s my Generation X in full effect. Your problem could never be bad enough to require outside help. I think it was millennials that changed it. Thank you, millennials.”
Unfuck Your Brain explains how to coax each part of the brain into acting for, rather than against, a balanced mind. “Rumination... continues to feed our emotional response (like anxiety or fear), deepening the groove,” Harper writes.
Another self-help offering, cartoonist Mariah-Rose Marie’s A Quick & Easy Guide to Healthy Relationships (Oni, Dec.), is just what its title promises, offering tips on boundaries and communication skills drawn with cheery comics vignettes, particularly applicable for younger adult readers. The “Healing and Forgiveness” chapter lays out paths back to trust following a rift.
Mechanic, who has worked in the mental health field, credits discovering punk and hip-hop—and specifically the way those genres communicate pain—with helping him deal with depression and suicidal ideation, and influencing his decision to “stick around.” That sentiment is echoed in Chancellor’s Hardcore Happiness, which describes how punk’s positive subgenres inspired him to “get up and live my life like I was starting today.”
For readers and creators, graphic nonfiction can provide a sense of solace in shared experiences. Writing his way through cancer treatment, Versaci says, also “gave me a distance that I needed. It allowed me to see myself as a character.”
“Grief,” Carol Tyler says, “is a bigger presence in our lives than we realize. It’s a shaper. You have to find your own language and your own method of negotiating with it.”
Cheryl Klein is a PW comics reviewer, author of the memoir Crybaby, and a coeditor for Mutha magazine.
Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly characterized Eisner Award–nominated author Carol Tyler as an Eisner winner.
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