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)
