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With the objective of beginning to theorize graphic body studies, I
offer here an aesthetics of graphic cancer narratives and a taxonomy of
comics' aptness as a medium for the dynamic embodiment that is a shared
feature of diverse cancer experiences. First, representations of people in
comics are minimalist and figurai in their visual elements, a characteristic
with fascinating implications for reader-text intimacy. Comics also figure
the self as a visually dynamic presence that morphs from specificity to
indeterminacy in response to physical, emotional, psychic, and/or social
environments. Changing representations of the same character from frame
to frame - sometimes taken as a sign of a comics artist's technical weak-
ness - can argue against stable representations of the self, just as more
overtly purposeful alterations in an image (or even the line itself - stable
or labile - that forms a basic element of comics) refuse the fiction of the
unitary, stable self and engage the morphing embodiment that distinguishes
many cancer experiences. Second, comics are often visual and verbal at
once, intermixing two powerful registers of experiences to communicate in
a multimedia or intermedial mode. Layering, alternating, and/or blurring
the visual and verbal is an effective way to evoke cancer experiences, as
well as one rich in possibilities for complexity, irony, and genre disruption.
Third, comics invite readers to enter a distinctive relationship to time
and space. Not only do comics render time as space, rolling out frames in
potential sequences, but they also permit the reader an unusual degree of
self-determination in his/her relationship to time and space, selecting how
quickly to move and in many cases opting for multiple directional patterns
and their associated narratives. As Chute argues, comics - unlike film -
"[cede] the pace of consumption to the reader" (p. 8). This self-determined
relationship to reading - and the upending of chronology-based narrative
patterns such as the progress or decline narrative - is wonderfully germane
to, and potentially transformative of, cancer experiences. (148)
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