Review by New York Times Review
Comics that check your temperature, diagnose your disease and maybe even offer some medicine. DR. IAN WILLIAMS, a Welsh-born physician, started publishing comics under a pseudonym in 2007, the year he began a website devoted to so-called graphic medicine. Currently located in Brighton, Williams is now one of the primary creators of what has become a rich field combining comics and health care, broadly conceived. A group of artists, academics and medical professionals now maintain a resource-rich version of the website (graphicmedicine.org), sponsor an annual international conference and oversee a book series. In 2015 they issued the "Graphic Medicine Manifesto," a part-prose, part-comics title this paper reviewed favorably. Williams, one of the manifesto's authors, is now out with his second book of graphic fiction, the lady DOCTOR (Penn State University, $24.95), which, like his first, "The Bad Doctor," is set in a small town in Wales and offers the engrossing perspective of a hardworking and fallible physician. Lois Pritchard, 40, single and a secret smoker, wears a sharp black bob and pointy highheeled boots. A general practitioner, she also works part time at the local Genitourinary Medicine clinic, treating various problems of genital and urinary origins that the book selectively illustrates, including numerous S.T.D.s ("muck in the fuel pipe," as one man puts it). Although Lois is an appealingly fleshed out-character, the plot points of "The Lady Doctor" are nothing special: Lois's mother, who abandoned the family when Lois was small, now wants Lois to help her with a liver transplant; Lois and her journalist buddy take psilocybin mushrooms, in an almost-skippable section; there are standard romantic ups and downs. Instead, what makes this book fascinating is its sensitive portrayal of Lois's interactions with a range of patients. In recurrent, wordless pages throughout, in his clean and fluid black and white, Williams illustrates the rhythm of Lois's professional routine through who and what she encounters: an assortment of faces, body parts and affects streaming by in an even staccato. While in an early scene Lois and a fellow doctor wonder about their ability to achieve empathy with patients, "The Lady Doctor" itself illuminates something justas profound: her coolheaded receptivity to nominally depressing and gross manifestations of humanity, her rejection of the judgmental in the service of tending to the body. In one scene she removes a curtain finial lodged deep in a patient's vagina; in another she vomits, in private, after examining a man's feet; and there are plenty of drawings of genital procedures that may make the reader squirm but that Lois treats calmly and clinically. Lois is human - "Please God, kill me now," she thinks after the foot episode - but Williams reveals, in his careful attention to her work as a doctor, how seriously she understands her profession and how open she is to patients. Lucy Knisley's KID GLOVES: Nine Months of Careful Chaos (First Second, $19.99) falls squarely into a different, dominant area of graphic medicine: patient memoirs. There are already meaningful traditions within comics for personal chronicles of cancer and mental disorders (witness American comics' inaugural work of autobiographical storytelling, Justin Green's 1972 "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary," about obsessivecompulsive disorder). And while pregnancy, the subject of Knisley's book, is not an illness, Knisley details the many junctures in her life in which pregnancy (first, to avoid it; later, to enact it; finally, to see it through) has made her, sometimes quite painfully, a medical patient. The prolific Knisley, 34, has been publishing autobiographical comics since her early 20s (like the recipe-dotted "Relish: My Life in the Kitchen"), and this book covers her most trenchant topic. "Kid Gloves" is the story of Knisley's struggle to get and stay pregnant, following two devastating miscarriages, and her harrowing delivery: She suffered a seizure, along with dangerous blood loss, and was unconscious when her son was born, later spending a week in the I.C.U. Knisley's personal journey can be compelling and quite funny - for instance, in depicting her intense struggle with morning sickness, she draws herself sweating and shaded a solid mint green. But the book, with its jaunty colors and friendly black line art, works best as an extended public service announcement. Knisley deploys diagrams to break down medical and cultural contexts around miscarriage, infertility and pregnancy, along with their symptoms, and she illustrates myths as well as facts, letting them visually stack up against one another. These didactic interludes, often marked off as separate chapters, provide a charming, informative guide; the pages breathe easily, cleverly composed and uncluttered. Knisley is a former art school student of a certain generation, and "Kid Gloves" is slangy and full of abbreviations and sound effects - "ugh," "ralph," "kack," "yak," "gak!" - some will appreciate and others will not (1 did). Less successful are the many moments when the book, which walks the line between cute and cloying, reproduces black-and-white photo booth strips of Knisley and her husband (and eventually their son) doing wacky, loving things for the camera (lifting up shirts, kissing pregnant stomachs, etc.). The photographs neither add to the aesthetic nor amplify the story; rather, they present a visual layer of self-indulgence to an otherwise nuanced account. The French blogger Emma's the mental LOAD: A Feminist Comic (Seven Stories, $18.95), translated by Una Dimitrijevic, picks up where Knisley leaves off: with a household run by a man and woman who are new parents. "The Mental Load" is an uneven collection, but eminently worthwhile if only for the story that provides its title. (That story, which went viral in its original webcomics form in both French and English, is actually called "You Should've Asked," but is commonly known as "The Mental Load" after its central concept.) A computer technician by day, Emma describes her drawings as "ugly sketches," but with their even blocks of color and rough shapes, her comics beckon in their unpretentious, stripped-down simplicity - despite looking a bit at sea in book form, awash in so much white space on the printed page. As in Knisley's work, they show how comics can break down something that seems complicated with utmost clarity. The idea of the mental load shines attention on how women so often become, by default, the household manager, organizing what needs to be done, so that a man expects to be asked to do tasks instead of executing them on his own initiative. The story creates an intimate flowchart of household routine; Emma illustrates just how effective even the most basic comics can be at crystallizing social dynamics. Hillary chute is the author of "Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Covering her childhood, traveling abroad, coming of age, and getting married, Knisley's hearty handful of previous graphic memoirs (the latest of which is Something New, 2016) are standouts in the genre. In this recollection of getting pregnant and giving birth to her son, Knisley once again writes and illustrates her life with an introspective transparency that, even for a topic as not-new as having a baby, feels totally novel. Knisley interrupts her narrative with enlightening interludes that share facts and historical oddities of pregnancy a topic she found fascinating since she was a kid. Even in her signature neat and bright cartooning style, Knisley relays the despair of miscarriage in dark squiggles and visual metaphors, the yucky first trimester in a desperately green-faced Lucy, and the terror of her son's birth in a spare black and white section narrated by her husband, John. The book's title contains perhaps its greatest takeaway that the unexpected difficulties of becoming a mom taught Knisley to be a little gentler with herself, to handle herself with kid gloves. In sharing her journey's bumps and switchbacks, Knisley assures that there's no perfect pregnancy story and that even a lot of strife won't dim the joy of a child's ecstatic arrival.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This funny and sometimes harrowing memoir, in which Knisley (Relish) shares her birth experience, is hampered by an emotionally detached narrative style. The Chicago cartoonist intersperses each chronological step of her pregnancy with cleverly scathing facts about the history of obstetrics as well as the superstitions surrounding giving birth. Knisley shines in those segments, with her didactic narrative voice and clever cartooning solutions being well suited to the material. The stories about her miscarriages, a detailed account of each trimester, and her near-death experience while giving birth are all intense and intimate. However, her art is too clean and cheerful to adequately convey the intensity of these experiences. The artifice of Knisley's narrative style clashes with the raw emotion of her hardships, making it feel as though she's writing about someone else. The book's most affecting moment comes when Knisley's husband relates the story of the near-fatal birth from his point of view. If the book sags when Knisley discusses her own pain, it soars when she offers blunt opinions about the myths she's heard or the insensitive treatment she received. Despite its tonal problems, the book is worth reading for Knisley's fierce wit, strong point of view, and well-paced storytelling. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
The subtitle to Knisley's latest autobiographical comic is "Nine Months of Careful Chaos." But her experiences with reproductive health began in high school. As a teen, Lucy volunteered at a Planned Parenthood peer-to-peer educator program and tried numerous birth control methods. Fast-forward nearly a decade later, and she and her husband John are ready to have a kid, but are finding it much harder than her younger self might have thought. After her first miscarriage and laparoscopic surgery to adjust the shape of her uterus, she finally gets pregnant. Next comes intense nausea, unsolicited advice from strangers, and fears that motherhood will affect her work. Finally, while Lucy is in labor, previously undiagnosed eclampsia leaves her unconscious for two days. As always, Knisley's illustrations are cheerful and colorful and her writing witty, but this powerful narrative doesn't shy away from bleak and terrifying moments. In one especially moving scene, John describes seeing his wife ailing in the hospital. As Lucy regains consciousness, the colors fade in from black-and-white sketches to a color frame of a recovering Lucy holding her new baby. The author also explores the often disturbing treatment that pregnant women have endured throughout history, stressing that all women should have control over their bodies. VERDICT Knisley's nuanced look at pregnancy and her message of bodily autonomy will resonate with teens, especially those who appreciated the graphic anthology Mine!-Anna Murphy, Berkeley Carroll School, Brooklyn © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
