Graphic nonfiction is becoming an increasingly compelling medium for using comics to tackle serious subjects. Meanwhile, the visual arts are being enlisted in exploring the most private nooks of mental health, with projects like Bobby Baker’s visual diary of depression and children’s drawings of living with autism. Now comes Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal (public library) — a remarkable visual chronicle by New York-based artist, writer, and curator Matt Freedman, who was diagnosed with a rare form of cystic carcinoma in the fall of 2012, an aggressive cancer that had already spread from his tongue to his throat and lungs by the time it was detected. Before beginning the grueling treatment, Freedman, who teaches in the Visual Studies program at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, received a blank sketchbook as a gift from his colleagues and students. Over the course of his reality-rupturing experience, he proceeded to fill it up with simple sketches that emanate incredible honesty and humor — perhaps our two greatest weapons in the face of helplessness.

Freedman writes in the preface:

I was facing about seven weeks of radiation and chemotherapy. If I completed just four pages a day, I would fill the entire 240-page book by the time I was done. That looked like a good trade: a notebook filled with words and pictures in exchange for simply living through an unavoidable ordeal…

Completing the process and completing the book took much the same underwhelming commitment: day-to-day incremental progress that led to final results that were impossible to imagine at the beginning.

From trying to figure out what might have caused the cancer (was it the mouthguard he had made, which “sort of worked, but not really, and not for long” and which his dog licked every chance she got?) to grappling with the inevitable why me anger (“I believe I am average and that only average things can happen to me.”) to surrendering to the anguishing anxiety of the uncertain outcome, Freedman rigorously recorded the psychoemotional roller-coaster of his two-month radiation therapy.

He began each of his daily sketches like he did his treatment: with no guarantees, not knowing where things would go. Fittingly, the unpolished rawness of his sketchbook style mirrors the reality of his experience — sometimes frantic, sometimes uneventful, sometimes dark, sometimes hopeful, often messy, always imbued with the courage of simply showing up for life and its unforgiving curveballs. What emerges is not a grand philosophical epiphany but a tapestry of details, reminding us that life often happens in the small moments between the big news, the diagnoses, the traumas and the triumphs.

Relatively Indolent But Relentless is stirring and beautiful in its entirety, and draws as close to delightful as its subject allows. It comes from indie publisher Seven Stories Press, who also gave us graphic artists’ reimaginings of the literary canon.

via Steve Heller