Brian Fies

From the first pages I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Sure, Fies’ work is an Eisner Award winner, a book form graphic novel born out of an anonymous, online comic strip the author wrote as a kind of self-therapy while dealing with his own mother’s cancer. That alone is quite a bit to recommend the work. But there was something about the simplicity of Fies’ lines that gave me pause. It’s a little cartoony with very little depth of image (a complex panels is the narrator show more sitting in a chair watching TV, drapes behind him over his shoulder), so I worried I’d be getting a Hallmark card journey through illness and health.But there is something to Scott McCloud’s assertion made in Understanding Comics that the simpler the image the closer it approaches universality, which is to some degree an unintended point in Fies’ work. Written for himself to say all the things he couldn’t say to his family, to better understand all the things happening around him and to him, Fies’ work touched a chord all across the world. Word-of-mouth spread and increased the work’s popularity. The story, begun without intentional shape or structure, manages to jell nicely as a piece with the satisfying wholeness of a tale told without undue elaboration or dramatics.To keep things simple, Fies limits the story almost entirely to the narrator and his two sisters, known throughout the work as Kid Sis and Nurse Sis, and the eponymous Mom. Doctors and nurses of various types float in and out through the story, as does a kind of spectral figure of the long-absent Dad. We watch in a kind of helpless fascination as Mom submits to treatment, first six weeks of radiation coupled with chemo (the radiation designed to get the metastasized node in her brain), then chemo alone to treat the cancer in her lungs. Technical aspects are not glossed over, but they are reduced to their most easily understood hearts, aided by Fies clarity of pen.Mom’s Cancer is unsparing in its finger pointing. In one scene, in reply to Mom’s question: “Can you tell what caused it?” her doctor replies tartly: “In my experience, one of five things: smoking, smoking, smoking, smoking, or smoking.” In other places, as we watch a headshot of Mom as she undergoes treatment, losing hair and becoming more gaunt from panel to panel, we watch the stages of grief play themselves out including the confessional final shot. “But you know, I still want it,” Mom tells us here. “I’d smoke a pack now if I could.”Unsurprisingly, the narrator’s observation after having nagged his mother to quit through the decades, “Somehow saying ‘I told you so’ turned out to be a lot less satisfying than I imagined” has the chest clenching ring of a true experience. For such a short volume with such simply drawn characters, Fies has managed to pour the essence of grief, the nub of experience into his pen and devastatingly out onto the page.There were more than a few instances I found myself, hand to my throat as I read, blinking back tears. A panel late in the story, in the depth of her treatment, hairless, Mom turning to her daughter with a desperate panic in her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks — she’s just found out after all these months that only five percent of patients in her condition live — made me set the book down until I felt I could continue. To look at it now, two weeks after I first read it, to see the stark beauty of Fies’ art in that one look is to catch just the faintest whisper of the despair of chronic illness of any kind.It is also to see art, pure and simple. show less

Often when someone becomes ill, their identity is supplanted by their illness. The people around them no longer see a life in progress just the diagnosis. This bothers me about this sometimes compelling, often not graphic novel. We have lost the MOM to her CANCER while she is still alive. This is even reflected in the title where the key word is CANCER and not MOM. I can’t think that this was the intention of the author, this feeling of detachment—where instead of being the earth, MOM show more was relegated to the moon.

This book, however, does have some strengths. It might have been titled CANCER FAMILY instead of MOM’S CANCER to better reflect what it does best. There are three adult children. Seeing how each goes through their own stages in different ways and how they come together or don’t come together over the illness is to finally be invited into the story. The siblings are rendered with an honesty that makes them feel real. I wish that had been extended to the MOM.

I have been part of a cancer family several times, including my own mom, and expected this to hit me harder than it did. I actually hoped it would hit me hard as a means of remembering and grieving. Instead, I felt like I was reading about a plane crash from the point of view of the land that was hit rather than the people on board.

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Public Domain Superman!

Well, actually, Superman only appears once and only as a name in a microfilm image of a Daily Planet newspaper headline halfway through the story. That's the moment when I stopped reading and started researching. And indeed, I found that this book is a sequel to "The Mechanical Monsters" cartoon produced by Max Fleischer back in the 1940s as part of a series of Superman animated shorts that were later allowed to fall into the public domain when their copyrights were show more not renewed. I must have watched this decades ago, but it had slipped from my mind, so I refreshed my memory by finding a version on YouTube. This connection is not mentioned anywhere on the cover, but it was mentioned on the blurb page that I had skipped, and it also turned up in the acknowledgments at the end.

Doing my homework gave the book an extra layer, but it didn't add as much depth as I expected since the cartoon is just a jumping off point for Brian Fies examination of aging and legacy. The villainous inventor who made the Mechanical Monsters in 1941 has spent six decades in prison, and upon his release he returns to his secret lair and resumes his evil plans with the single robot he is able to cobble together from the parts Superman left scattered about when he took down the whole robotic army.

Gathering the resources needed for his evil plans and day-to-day needs forces the aged inventor to interact with various members of the community near his lair as they help him play catch-up with the changes that have happened in the world during his absence. And like the Grinch coming down from the mountain, he finds the the size of his heart changing size.

I liked the fable aspects of the story, but I did get distracted by some bits that just didn't make much sense, like the length of his jail sentence, the fact that prison is treated like it exists in a vacuum with no access to outside news, and that the U.S. government while militarizing for World War II ignored the weaponry potential of the Mechanical Monsters. The officials who scooped up Nazi scientists with Operation Paperclip at the end of the war would have certainly implemented a work-release program for prisoners who could contribute automated fighting machines to the war effort.

And then the big finale just fell flat for me as the inventor's support network inevitably comes together to help in the moment of crisis as fire fighters and policemen just stand around twiddling their thumbs. Events unfold in increasingly unlikely ways to the point of being ridiculous.

It's a pretty decent book, but I just couldn't let myself go with the flow of it. show less

In graphic novel format,Brian Fies tells his own personal story as well as those of others who lost everything in the devastating Northern California fires of 2017. Their stories highlight the more mundane aspects of a living through a natural disaster—the bureaucratic red tape, the small things that trigger immense emotion, the weird sense of living as a displaced person in your own environs. Having experienced two devastating hurricanes myself, I can attest that Fies has accurately show more captured the moods and experiences of survivors of catastrophe. Some photos are also incorporated into the dramatic illustrations. This affecting book will stay with you much longer that the short time it will take to read it.

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