Seizing the day
IN “Mom’s Cancer,” Eisner Award-winning artist Brian Fies does a simple reality face-off with his mother’s illness. Fies’ excellent graphic novel, which started as a weekly Web comic, describes his mother’s cancer treatment with neither sentiment nor hysterics, and the effect is quietly devastating.
Fies’ art is simple, with a big-jawed, 1950s look, like the friendly art found in old public service announcements. The characters have plain-Jane names: Mom, Nurse Sis, Kid Sis and the unnamed narrator. As the story opens, Mom has a stroke-like episode that turns out to be a symptom of a brain tumor. Like the educated, middle-class people they are, Nurse Sis, Kid Sis and the narrator make phone calls and try to pull strings to get their mother the best treatment. Soon, Mom is a patient at Impressive Hospital (all people and places have aliases), with a diagnosis of large-cell carcinoma: stage-four lung cancer.
The image Fies gives us of Mom in a recliner, her bald head in a bandanna, her body wrapped in blankets and a chemo pump in her arm is an icon we fear the way the medieval mind feared hell. Later, her radiation-burned skin starts to slough off. Her kids never tell her the odds of survival.
Meanwhile, the ex-husband, a doctor-turned-hippie, thinks Mom should simply accept death and die. Although the ex is Fies’ punching bag for everything silly about boomers, he has a point. No one discusses the trade-off between the odds of survival and the amount of suffering. When the oncologist tells Mom she will be one of the 5% who make it, Mom breaks down sobbing: “Five percent?! If I’d known it was that bad, I never would have put myself through this!”
Fies mixes in surreal moments of lightness. He draws Mom as the patient in the 1970s game, “Operation,” here called “Inoperable,” referring to the state of her cancer. At one point, he and his siblings turn into superheroes in which they become hyper-emotional versions of themselves in capes and tights. But Mom, Nurse Sis, Kid Sis and the narrator are exactly like everyday middle-class people. This story is nerve-wracking because it hits close to any of our homes.
Each character grows up. Nurse Sis comes into her own as the family’s real adult; Kid Sis, who once bounced around bit parts in Hollywood, finds she is stronger than she thought; the narrator finds his own sense of purpose in chronicling his mother’s fight. And Mom gets a puppy (a “whirling, vibrating poof of fur”), names him Hero and learns to grab and savor the life she has. She moves to Southern California.
What may earn this book a spot in oncology offices, self-help groups and, probably, medical school curricula, is how carefully Fies tells the truth about what happens to people. “Mom’s Cancer” doesn’t soften any blows. It gives us a woman getting through the most horrible episode of her life. She could easily be one of us.
Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo’s series, “Bluesman,” is equally powerful -- but for far different reasons. The struggle of two 1920s blues musicians to escape the misery of sharecropping in a nearly feudal world might be unfamiliar territory for most readers. But the characters’ yearning to be masters of their own destinies is something anyone can understand.
Vollmar and Callejo begin “Bluesman” with excerpts from a folklore article about bluesmen in the Deep South: “While life on the road could be arduous (and sometimes even deadly), the benefits of playing in jukes ... often represented the better of two situations, the alternate being a life of ... uniform squalid poverty.”
Still, better doesn’t mean easy. After a night sleeping in a barn, singer-guitarist Lem Taylor and piano player Ironwood Malcott find themselves in Hope, Ark., without a penny. They’re nearly thrown out of a local flophouse. “I am a God fearing woman,” says the proprietress, “and I won’t have no blues musicians in here peddling sin.” But blues and gospel are close cousins. Ironwood preaches to her, and he and Lem get a free meal. Someone whispers the name of a juke joint in their ear, and soon Lem and Ironwood have a gig at Shug’s place, a shack serving corn liquor out in the middle of the fields.
At Shug’s a scout for a record company hears them -- it’s the 1920s, and the names Charley Patton and Fats Waller are on everyone’s lips -- and he tells the two bluesmen to be in Memphis the following week to record for Eastern Star Records.
To Lem and Ironwood, it’s a chance at cash and a life. But their seize-the-day philosophy leads to trouble when they get involved with two beautiful women, one of whom is a white man’s mistress. The two musicians get entangled in the murder of the local landowner’s son, and the local idea of justice for black people involves a lynch mob. “[I]f we can’t have the truth, sheriff,” one of the townspeople says, “I’d say that just about any [black man] would do.” Ironwood is killed, and a recording session at Eastern Star Records becomes a lost dream.
Callejo’s artwork is reminiscent of Lynd Ward’s in “Gods’ Man,” a 1920s novel in woodcuts about an artist who sells his soul. But unlike Ward, Callejo aims for a sense of narrative movement that feels uneven. Still, the heavy ink drawings of white crowds suggest how frightening white power might have seemed, and the strange tilts and close-ups fit with the concept of a society that is off-kilter. Tenderness moves to violence without logic; one minute Lem is a sweet lover, the next he’s hunted like a dog.
To deal frankly with racism takes a subtle hand, and Vollmar’s and Callejo’s characters are too over-the-top for the job. Still there’s enough suspense and atmosphere here to make anyone grip their chair and feel transported. The plot is full of unexpected twists as well as kindness among the outcasts. Lem and Ironwood only have each other. And they make the most of it. *