How good is Mom's Cancer? So good that I had to come out of my recent retirement to write about it. Mom's Cancer won the first ever Eisner for best webcomic, and now it has been reproduced in a swanky print edition to get out to a wider audience. Mom's Cancer is in the tradition of books like Pedro & Me and Persepolis, tales drawn from personal experiences that were painful or difficult, but which end up in the hands of a talented cartoonist an uplifting and entertaining experience to read about. The subject of Mom's Cancer is pretty clear from the title of the book, and it's one of those things that might put a lot of people off. "Dear God," you might say, "I can't imagine wanting to read a comic about something as depressing as a family member suffering from cancer!" However, Fies makes the story of Mom's Cancer inspirational as well as depressing, funny as well as sobering, incredibly engaging as well as moving. When you come out the other side of this graphic novel, having seen the story of Fies's mother from diagnosis all the way through to its end, you feel like you have met an incredible person and witnessed her going through a difficult, but inspiring, personal journey. Fies never makes himself or his family out to be saints, but nor does he shy away from the courage that can be found in each one of them in the roles they play in the story, and the result is a story that is very approachable reading, despite its dire subject matter.
I can't really judge how Mom's Cancer worked as an online comic, because the presentation here is entirely different. Clearly, it worked well enough to win an Eisner award, but if Fies was using any particular formatting in the online world that made it work particularly well, you certainly don't notice the loss when reading the printed version. Mom's Cancer is a slick little production, a small hardcover book bound at the end so that the pages are longer than they are tall, with about 22 pages featuring some kind of spot color, but most of it in black and white. Fies writes in a format that features two to seven page chapters, all building into a larger story, essentially serving as a hybrid of comic strip and comic book. Mom's Cancer is without a doubt one big story, fitting for a graphic novel, but the chapters can be read and enjoyed on their own as well. I'm reminded of the earliest issues of True Story Swear to God in the format, and maybe a little bit in the tone as well.
You see, Mom's Cancer is about a dire topic, but it is not a dire book. Fies has a light touch, so that you can feel the impact of the moments when the cancer is diagnosed, when the darker threat of the disease rears its head again and again, as counterbalanced against the day-to-day life goes on story that is being told. We don't learn of Fies's mother as an example of going through cancer or as a cautionary tale about the dangers of smoking. Instead, these are elements of the story being told about mom as a person. Fies shows us her past, in the form of insights into her job before becoming a mother, the man her ex-husband had become and how that shaped her life and a very moving story of her youth and her grandfather, and he shows us her present, as she shows a sense of humor even as the realities of the cancer begins to set in. When Fie's sister, a nurse, is filling out forms, and asks what she should put under hobbies, mom suggests "Put 'pole dancing,' see what they say" even as she's being wheeled in to draw up a treatment plan for her cancer. Little bits of personality like this show through for each character in the telling, and the result is that Fies draws us into his family and where their heads and hearts are at during this time, even though we don't learn any of their names, just their roles, like "Nurse Sister" and "Kid Sister" and "Mom."
This is not to say that Mom's Cancer offers up a light or meaningless take on cancer. Fies offers up an easy-to-digest but seemingly comprehensive take on the treatment options, symptoms and development of the disease, both through specific things his mother went through and things he learned from studying while she was going through it. There's a throughline in the story about mom's smoking, and how it was the main contributing factor to her cancer, if not the only one. Mom's Cancer doesn't preach, but the connection between smoking and cancer, in this specific case at least, is laid out without a doubt in this story. The focus of the story, however, is not on a mesage linking smoking to cancer, or on education about the disease; but on the story of one family and how they dealt with the disease, and these messages and educational information are side effects of the main thrust of the story.
Fies has a clear and open comic book storytelling style. Most of his pages are one or two panels, and he uses a fair amount of narrative caption, giving the whole thing a sort of "Wonder Years" talking to the audience feel. Given how personal the story is, this is a style that works, that brings the reader in and invites them not to feel awkward about the personal stuff they're reading, but instead gets them almost instantly on the side of the narrator, his mother and his sisters. For the duration of Mom's Cancer, the reader is a family friend, listening to tales of how someone they care about is doing. There are several pages that are visually inventive and clever, such as a two-page color spread that shows symptoms and treatments in an homage to the style of the board game Operation, a couple other pages that use a maze or board game motif to show histories for characters and several fantasy sequences that put the story material in the context of a circus, a mad scientist's laboratory or a superhero comic. The superhero analogy is a bit labored, feeling somewhat unnecessary and even maybe too goofy in the context of the rest of the book, but this could be due to the proliferation of superhero motifs in comics. Whereas most of the book feels fresh and original, putting events in a superhero context is cliche for this medium. It's a rare misstep, though, and certainly forgivable in the context of how much of the book just plain works.
Given that this is an autobiographical, personal story, it may seem weird for me to say that I don't want to spoil the ending. But I don't. Part of the journey of Mom's Cancer is wondering if mom will be alright, if she'll beat the cancer or not, and that answer is more complex than one might expect, playing out not just in the comic bits of the story but in the afterword and final text piece. In the end, though, while the resolution of the story has great meaning for those who lived it, for the readers it's almost immaterial. Instead, it is the story of Mom's cancer, the courage and the heartbreak and all the hopes and fears throughout, that make it an engaging read, one that this reader found hard to put down. I know I stopped doing official ratings a while ago, but take my word for it: Mom's Cancer is Highly Recommended.
For more information about Mom's Cancer, check out the website.
