Category: Health

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Barking (New Edition)


By Lucy Sullivan (Avery Hill)
ISBN: 978-1-910395-76-9 (HB/Digital edition) 978-1783528806 (2020 Unbound HB)

You might not think it, but there’s a lot of guts and inner fortitude demanded of making your inner worlds real – especially in autobiographical comics. In 2020 animator Lucy Sullivan released her first graphic novel: “an exorcism” detailing a deepening depression and personal mental health crisis and the concomitant failings of our overstretched, cash-starved health services in one of the most potent, powerful and damning explorations ever seen of the plight of in-need individuals in a “money-first-& foremost” health system.

Barking set new critical standards for a growing subgenre of candid and intimate experiential biographies and after being lost in the global commercial convulsions of Covid-19, returns here in a new edition that will hopefully find the major audiences the book always deserved.

Rendered in staggeringly expressive stark monochrome artwork capturing a spiky mood of mania and madness and pitched as a chilling horror story, it’s set between a life-altering period of days (October 25th to November 5th, if you’re wondering) and begins with ‘Hounded’ as a terrified young woman flees from a monstrous black dog.

Desperate and defeated, she finds a bridge and seeks surcease in suicide, but as reality and her inner world converge and congeal, she is picked up by indifferent cops who apparently have far more important things to do, and dumped on a standard 72-hour hold under the Mental Health Act in ‘Commit to Me’. The dog is with her all the way, as is a gang of scary men and a cacophony of voices that never let her rest. Never mind, there are plenty of readily doled out drugs for that in the ‘Rot Box’…

Alix might be in isolation but she’s not alone. Her passengers are delighted to keep telling her how bad and weak and useless she is. ‘Prone to Trouble’, she hears again how nobody wants her and why she lost her only friend. As treatment and assessments – dispassionate yet still somehow judgemental – continue, Alix enters the enforced society of fellow inmates/guests/ patients in ‘Just a (Rumination) Phase’, learning some harsh lessons pitched as vague threats and religious paternalism, all before being left to make her own recovery as best she can.

Between flashbacks, hallucinations and potentially lethal ward-companions her slipping back to ‘Unembodied Diamonic’ visions is inevitable. Fears that drive her regain their power and medical indifference, casually “phoned-in” care, too many drugs and economically driven treatments like group therapy and enforced isolation don’t deal with the personal demons. Nor do suggested cure-alls offered by her fellow inmates, but only war with Alix’s ever-present visions and in-situ inner tormentors in ‘Prognostication’, ‘Call of the Void’ and ‘Bruising the Fool’ before a gradual breakthrough and notional resumption of “normal service” augurs a return to stability and equilibrium during ‘Life Under Saturn’…

A Foreword by comics doyen Nick Abadzis details how the project first materialised – and his involvement in it – precedes the tale itself and is mirrored by the author’s revelatory Afterword at the back. This describes how Sullivan’s allegorical extrapolation of a very low point also seeks to address greater issues surrounding this country’s growing mental health problems and our literally insane simultaneous starvation of funding required to fix the rot. It’s supplemented by a wonderfully uplifting, self-deprecating Postscript for this new edition describing the understandably shaky course of a creative project about fear, isolation and incarceration that was published during a global lockdown…

Also crucially germane here is a copious Acknowledgements section, underscoring how vital human contact and collaborative input is: not just in story-making but in all aspects of living in the modern world…

A visually disturbing and emotionally shocking exploration of how grief and depression self-destructively feed on each other and how the fix for spiralling mental chaos is not getting a grip but getting help, Barking is not just a worthy and necessary read, but one that will stay with you forever.

© Lucy Sullivan, 2020. All rights reserved.

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Safer Places


By Kit Anderson (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-910395-77-6 (PB)

If you get a holiday this year and you’re one of those folk that like to read, here’s something a bit different that will certainly add to the desired sense of getting away from it all…

If you’re open to the idea, there’s wonder all around us. It’s not a new notion but remains a potently beguiling one that confirms its power in these interconnected vignettes exploring memory, imagination, inner worlds, nature, secrets, self-help solutions and isolation.

Explored over an initially undisclosed set of parameters and across myriad places and times, these are moments of shared-yet-exclusive realities that appear to be an example of a growing creative vogue/creative zeitgeist – as you’ll see when we imminently review similar but so different Avery Hill release Infinite Wheat Paste: Catalytic Conversions.

Here, however, cartoonist and tale-teller Kit Anderson merges mundane momentary travails with commonplace entertainment escape routes (wizard’s worlds, haunted houses, cyber-realities, alien mindscapes, fresh starts) to explore “liminal spaces and small magic”: digging deep to find the “something greater” we all crave and that must be waiting just out of our sight and other perceptions. Master of short form graphic narratives – you can just call them comics if you want – she hails from Boulder, Colorado but now lives near Zürich. Anderson was ceaselessly making graphic stories even before earning an MFA from The Center for Cartoon Studies in 2022. You can look for her stuff at Parsifal Press and The Rumpus for greater elucidation and edification…

Taking a year to complete, over 18 brief tales Safer Places melds inquisitive inspirations to contemplative cartooning and builds an interlocking sampling of other worlds, times and existences which all lead back to a common core. Blending pedestrian and surreal, employing a variety of art styles and colour palettes, it all begins with ‘Quest I’ as unseen critics speculate upon an old guy who seems to be a wizard who favours the wilds over civilisation, before a bereft boy looking for his cat finds something strange, wondrous and ultimately unsustainable in ‘The Basement’…

Tantalising travelogue ‘Wonders of the Lost City’ carries us to ‘Sleep Tape: Country Lane’ and a loving couple under strain and in need of calming talk therapies before the wizard – still moving in mysterious ways – pops back into view for ‘Quest II’, after which a boy in very uncharted waters takes a revelatory ‘Deep Breath’…

More calming tactics and rural idyls manifest in ‘Sleep Tape: Forest Walk’ for a woman too wedded to a Wi-Fi-enabled “Smart” world, whereas work pressure taking its toll on a watcher of post dystopian woodlands cannot be as readily assuaged in ‘Lookout Station’. At least the poetic ruminations of ‘Morning’, ‘Hills’ and ‘Waves’ carry us gently into ‘Quest III’ and the wizard’s dramatic interaction with a forest fox, prior to ‘Fallow’ detailing the shocking behaviour of an aged, burned out farmer making amends… and one last lifestyle change.

A computer nerd’s close encounter with digital ‘Wallpaper’ quietly segues into floral terrors as a student succumbs to transformative life-changing illness in ‘Weeds’ whilst ‘Quest IV’ sees a darker day dawn for the wizard before a harassed and lonely wage-slave finding solace and companionship thanks to ‘Sleep Tape: At the Seaside’…

‘Whump’ offers a contemplative laugh before a solitary walking tour takes a lonely wanderer to ‘The World’s Biggest Ball of Twine’ even as another recluse escapes connections by grabbing a bike and going for a ‘Ride’, all before the wizard heads home to recharge in ‘Quest V’…

Bemusing and seductive, these interlocking voyages reveal the cathartic force of creativity and therapeutic siren call of world-making. Come visit soon, yes?
© Kit Anderson 2024. All rights reserved.

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Proxy Mom – My Experience With Postpartum Depression


By Sophie Adriansen & Mathou, translated by Montana Kane (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-334-9 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-335-6

All human existence and every interaction is basically about chasing the same dreams and aspirations: do something, find someone, stay alive, be happy. Of course, it doesn’t always happen that way. That’s particularly true for women and never more clearly seen than in how our entire species now views perpetuating itself.

Generally speaking, nowhere on Earth does a significant proportion of male humans ever get hands-on with childrearing – at least until the next generation are largely ambulatory, vocally communicative and self-sustaining if not self-supporting. In fact, as increasingly seen in most first world countries, actual day-to-day maintenance of infants, as well as the majority of household domestic duties are regarded (with near-religious devotion and fervour) as the female human/recent mother’s sole responsibilities…

Moreover – as so many deucedly-reasonable chaps on the internet keep insisting – once a lass has completed all the icky female stuff involved in hosting a burgeoning biological parasite inside them, finished undergoing frequently life-threatening physical stresses and appalling corporeal changes, ceased playing natal roulette with medical midwifery systems and/or other far-less-rational religion-poisoned birthing alternatives and at last delivered – in the shame-packed, painfully embarrassing human equivalent to extracting at excessive speed a tugboat from the basement it was unwisely and so rashly built in, any new mother should be up and about: offering sex, biscuits, resumed cleaning services and due deference to the hard work the guy put in by having sex. This she should do in a miraculously fully-restored pre-birth nubile body by the time nurses have taken the infant’s details and recorded its footprint…

Then again, there’s this differing view.

Having a wanted baby is magical, but a moment’s passion demands massive commitment from all involved, right up to and definitely including the national and societal levels. Incubation of a baby inside a completely separate, autonomous human causes massive alterations – many permanent and some of them life- and mental health-threatening.

Smartly underscoring these points by sharing their own expertise as mums, exceedingly well-educated bande dessinée novelist, author and comics writer Sophie Adriansen (Max et les poisons, La vie d’adulte, Nina Simone in Comics) and similarly super-schooled artist/ illustrator Mathilde (Nina & Bruno, Dans le coeur gros d’Anouk, Peurs bleues) Virfollet – AKA Mathou – here compile a cartoon precis of the whole farago from dance floor to domestic domination by relating what so often happens and subsequently deconstructing the so-useful eternal myth of “maternal instincts” as manipulated by men and their mothers…

As La remplaçante, Proxy Mom was first released in 2021 and with wit, brevity and deceptive jollity detailed the story of a woman doing all the right things. Marietta was young, free and single, with a good job and friends. She met Chuck, they fell in love and settled down. One day they decided to have a child together.

And that’s when Marietta’s problems started…

In seductive cartoon style, Marietta discovers every minute of every day what being pregnant means: body-downs and ridiculous changes, diminishing capacities and limitation of faculties, how nine months feels like 40 years and a thousand more minor but ever-escalating shocks and surprises.

This is no scary story shocker and there are no major medical mishaps. That’s the point. This account is all about little stuff that gets to be too much. Chuck is not a first-time dad, and his easy ability to negotiate stuff Marietta is overwhelmed by makes her feel inadequate and unable to cope, as do her friends and relatives who see new baby Zoe but seemingly forget Maritta is still there.

And that’s not even considering the days before the weeks before the birth: extended and terrifying Braxton-Hicks contractions, debilitating pre-partum episodes of “patience and pain” compounded by a frankly sub-par, poorly managed delivery apparently done for the hospital’s convenience.

In the hours and days post-delivery Marietta wallows in acute discomfort, indignity, mounting mental stress and with a growing sense of loss and failure. Even Zoe “latching on” to feed sparks heartfelt conviction of ineptitude and inescapable failure. No wonder Marietta in her doldrums invents the concept of a “proxy mom” to subtract all that pressure and unrevealed further inadequacies before it’s too late…

Gradually, however, stability returns as confidence grows and new mom digests the knowledge that it’s okay to feel crap (like when castigating herself for forgetting to read hospital leaflets on hormones and postpartum depression): admitting that at least she is not that worst of all failures… a Bad Mother…

Ultimately, peppered and forearmed with salient alternative ways women anywhere but Here and Now have stepped up and congregated to raise kids by actively supporting new mums, Marietta weathers her crisis, stops seeking validation and throws off the toxic, hostile pressures of societal expectation…

Delivered lightly and breezily but deadly serious for all that, Proxy Mom finds cheery ways to provide encouragement, support and vital information that will delight women and girls and might just get through to some guys also in need of guidance and tutelage…
© Sophie Adriansen, for the text, 2021. © Mathilde Virfollet, for the illustration, 2021. All rights reserved.

Proxy Mom – My Experience With Postpartum Depression is scheduled for UK release June 18th 2024 and is available for pre-order now.

Most NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads go to NBM Publishing at nbmpub.com.