USA Today Today

I like Miriam Engelberg. Which is good, since we seem to be in an arranged marriage neither of us volunteered for.

Miriam wrote a book titled Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, released in April, which tells the story of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in comic form. Some journalists, including Liz Szabo of USA Today, have noted the coincidence of two cancer-themed graphic novels hitting the market around the same time. That makes it a trend, and journalists love to spot trends.

Miriam and me in USA Today, May 23.
Click on the picture to read the story.

Miriam and I made e-mail contact a while ago when one of the first such articles came out. We exchanged a couple of notes, commiserated over some shared frustrations, and basically said, "I guess we'll be seeing each other's names a lot in the next few months." She couldn't have been more friendly or personable. I liked her a lot.

I sometimes get comments from people expressing sympathy or frustration that I have to share my press with my competition. I don't see it like that. First, it's not "my" press in the first place. More likely, without Miriam's book many of the stories written about both of us wouldn't have been written at all. We get more attention together than either of us would alone.

Second, I don't consider her my competition. Her perspective, approach, writing voice, and drawing style are very different from mine (although it's interesting to see similarities where they occur as well). I suspect we attract different readers. Unfortunately, there's enough misery in the world for a multitude of takes on it. I'm not competing with Miriam; I'm competing with all the other ways people can spend $12.95.

So, while I probably wouldn't have chosen to have Miriam's book come out so soon after mine, I think it's working out fine. On balance, we're probably good for each other. I sincerely wish her and her book the best, and I look forward to treating her to lunch someday. We should have a lot to talk about.

USA Tomorrow

If you ever wanted to start reading USA Today, tomorrow might be a good day to begin.

WSJ Review

If you ever wanted to start reading the Wall Street Journal, today might be a good day to begin. I especially recommend Page W6.

Laura Landro wrote a nice review of Mom's Cancer for one of the world's great newspapers. An excerpt: "...Mom's Cancer works on several levels: The stark black-and-white drawings, with the occasional burst of color, convey the drama of a family battling the fear and uncertainty of cancer treatment, and the illustrations help explain technical matters--such as how chemotherapy and radiation work against a tumor--that might make readers' eyes glaze over in traditional text-only format."

I continue to be amazed by the press attention my book is getting, both reviews and features. The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Daily Telegraph (U.K.), Associated Press, others on the way that I'd rather not say. Hundreds of thousands of books are published every year, and most go unnoticed by big media outlets; most remain unreviewed by anyone at all. I'm grateful.

From my vantage point behind the wizard's curtain, I see three things happening: Some media discover the book on their own or receive review copies from my publisher, Abrams, and simply find Mom's Cancer worth writing about on its merits. Other media notice that my book is the first of a little cluster of cancer-themed graphic novels coming out this year and want to cover what they see as an interesting trend (the "Pow! Bam! Comics Aren't Just For Kids!" stories). And some media notice my book because people at Abrams work very hard and exercise their professional and social connections, sometimes for months, to get their attention. I'd guess that the press Mom's Cancer has gotten to date has derived about equally from those three sources.

I won't know for months whether that exposure translates to sales. Bookselling turns out to be a murky, mysterious business of orders, returns, discounts, forecasts, and unholy voodoo that makes it hard to reckon where you stand. I recently wrote that it feels very strange to put a book out into the world and realize it has a life completely independent of me; it must be like sending kids off to college (which I'll be doing in a few months) and not knowing if they're studying hard, flunking out, or staggering about in drunken debauchery. Almost all I know is that the reviews are good and people I talk to at Abrams seem happy. So I'm happy.

Back in the Saddle Again

I'm back home after a week working on The Big Island of Hawaii, about which more later. While I was gone, I missed a great review of Mom's Cancer by Laurel Maury in the Los Angeles Times. Fortunately, my sisters caught it. Two excerpts, the first and last passages of the review:

In Mom's Cancer, Eisner-Award winning artist Brian Fies does a simple reality face-off with his mother's illness. Fies' excellent graphic novel, which started as a weekly Web comic, describes his mother's cancer treatment with neither sentiment nor hysterics, and the effect is quietly devastating....

What may earn this book a spot in oncology offices, self-help groups and, probably, medical school curricula, is how carefully Fies tells the truth about what happens to people. Mom's Cancer doesn't soften any blows. It gives us a woman getting through the most horrible episode in her life. She could easily be one of us.

Wow. This is probably the most thoughtful, thorough review my book has received, and I'm tremendously appreciative that it appeared in one of the largest newspapers in the United States. I'm always a little uneasy posting news of good reviews in this blog--it veers toward self-congratulatory hucksterism--but if I don't mention them, who will? One of the reasons I started the blog was to share what it's like to get a first book published; at this stage, a couple of months after release, reviews are a big part of that. The best I can do is promise to report the bad with the good ... and when anything bad comes up I'll try to be honest about it. So far, it's all pretty good.

Aloha? Oy.
My week in Hawaii was less fun that you probably imagine. I'm not complaining, it was still pretty paradisical (look, I invented a word!), but most of my time was spent sitting in convention center meeting rooms that could have been anywhere.

I attended the 2006 IEEE Fourth World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, where my task was to gather the latest and greatest information on solar power for a government paper I'm helping write. These were a thousand of the brightest Ph.D. researchers from around the world pushing the boundaries of physics, chemistry and sophisticated manufacturing processes to eke every percentage point of efficiency possible from solar cells. They were some of the brightest people I've ever met, without a dippy hippy in sight (with all due respect to the dippy hippies, who are often the earliest adopters of the stuff these scientists and engineers invent).

It was a pretty heady experience. I met people who have Equations and Effects named after them--not only met them, but met their spouses and sat next to them at lunch and held up my end of intelligent conversations with them. Most seemed pretty low-key. After all, there's not a lot of glamour, prestige or money in solar power. Yet.

I'm an advocate of solar power and renewable energy resources in general. After several years of learning and writing about these technologies, and getting to know the people developing them, I'm firmly convinced that their proliferation is inevitable and probably coming sooner than most expect. At the same time, I'm not a True Believer Fanatic who thinks we'd all be living in harmony with nature already if only the Big Oil Conspiracy would lift its boot from our necks. In fact, most renewable technologies just aren't ready yet (one exception being wind power, which is genuinely affordable in many electricity markets). It's all about economics and priorities: if we all decided tomorrow that we wanted to power the country with pollution-free renewable energy and didn't mind paying five or ten times as much as we do today, it could happen in a decade. Right now, that's an unacceptable trade-off. But the price of renewables is only going down and the price of fossil fuels nowhere but up, and when those two curves cross each other I think we'll see an amazing transformation. So do the oil companies, which are already among the biggest investors in and developers of renewable power. They know.

In any case, I got what I needed for my paper, with only one unsolved scientific mystery lingering: What the heck is this?


A weasel? Ferret? Mongoose? I saw this thing from my hotel balcony and from a distance thought it was a squirrel. It's about that size and kind of moved like one, but as it scurried through the bushes almost directly beneath me I got a better look. I know very little about Hawaiian fauna, except that much of it has been displaced or wiped out by imported invaders, of which this must be one. Any insights are welcome. This creature haunts my dreams.

A Fiendish Q&A

As promised a couple of posts ago, The Cartoon Fiend has published his interview with me, done by e-mail about a week ago. The premise of The Fiend's blog is simple: he asks cartoonists with a wide variety of backgrounds and experience a similar list of questions, then publishes their answers. It's interesting to see how different people take the same questions in different directions. Fiendishly brilliant.

A cartoonist himself, The Fiend has only been blogging a short while and already amassed an impressive roster of interviews, mine notwithstanding: Chris Browne, Randy Glasbergen, Stephanie Piro, Peter Bagge, Rick Kirkman, my friend Patricia Storms, and many more. If those names mean anything to you or you're just curious about people who've figured out how to write and draw for a living, check it out.

I'm also expecting to see mentions of Mom's Cancer in at least two nationally distributed news outlets shortly. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't shown up yet. If anyone spots one, feel free to drop me a line. Thanks!

Postcard from the Edge

It's been a year of many "firsts" for me, but I don't think I'll soon forget this one: a student at an East Coast university wrote a few days ago saying that he/she (his/her sex isn't evident from his/her name) is taking an "International Graphic Novel" class and is writing a final paper on Mom's Cancer. The student plans to focus on "the art of your work and how your artistic decisions and the different styles you take up have allowed the reader to understand and sympathize with the characters."

The student asked a few questions about how and why I drew what I drew. Being a sucker for both flattery and academic legitimacy, I spilled my guts and told him/her about nearly every jot of style, symbolism, metaphor, foreshadowing, and any other literary or artistic device I remembered employing (although I kept a few secrets to myself). It was fun.

I hope I get to see the result. In any case, it provided my most recent jolting reminder of the impact my story has had among so many people I'll never know. It's a bit unsettling to realize my book's out there with a life of its own, and it's nice when it sends home a postcard from Germany, Australia, Brazil, or an East Coast university to let me know it's doing fine.

Interview at The Pulse

I forgot to mention this new interview by Jen Contino posted at comicon.com's "The Pulse" a few days ago. A follow-up to another interview Jen did with me last year, this one has some additional poignancy because Jen's grandmother died of cancer in the interim. It may not show in the interview itself, but I know from corresponding with Jen beforehand that her family's experience gave her a new perspective on my book.

I'm pointing out these two interviews in particular because Jen always asks thoughtful questions and dedicates plenty of space to the answers. Between them, I think just about anything anyone would want to know about me or Mom's Cancer gets addressed. We did these interviews by e-mail, by the way, which is a method I like; I'm a much better writer than speaker. Jen has been a real supporter of my work and I appreciate it.

APE, San Francisco

We had a nice time at the Alternative Press Expo held in San Francisco this weekend. I hadn't been to APE before but, as I expected, found it to be a nice, low-key, less-frantic version of the other conventions I've been to. Many small and independent creators displaying a wide range of abilities from seasoned professional to, frankly, stuff my high school kids could do (and I mean that partly as a compliment to my kids; they're pretty good). My wife and girls came along and I think we all had a fine time.

Program director Gary Sassaman, who also does the same job for the brobdingnagian Comic-Con International in San Diego, invited me to take part in a Saturday panel called "Hey, Kids! Graphic Novels!" The other panelists were Justin Green ("Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary"), Alex Robinson ("Tricked"), Raina Telgemeier ("Smile" and "The Baby-Sitters Club"), Rick Geary ("The Murder of Abraham Lincoln" and other historical horrors), and Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting"). I'd only ever met Raina (who attended with her fiance, Dave Roman) and was really looking forward to meeting some of the others whom I admired as well as others I'd never heard of. No, I won't embarrass myself by admitting which were which.

Left to right: Green, Robinson, Telgemeier, Medley, Geary
and me. About 75 people attended the panel (I remembered
to count this time!) and asked some good questions. Fun.

Justin Green in particular was a real trip. Almost literally. At one point he explained how in his next book he intends to take the same drugs his character takes and draw the story while under their influence. You've gotta admire that kind of dedication. Rick Geary stood out as one of the most easy-going, down-to-earth creators I've ever met. In response to a question about working digitally, I was surprised that we all replied we prefer the experience of putting ink on paper and wouldn't want to work any other way. I think that's an increasingly rare aesthetic. Linda Medley coined a new word, "meditativeness," to capture what she experiences sitting at the drawing board as opposed to the keyboard, and I think we all agreed with her.

APE also provided an opportunity for me to meet up with my Abrams editor Charlie Kochman, who flew out from New York for the event. Charlie took part in a Sunday panel on the topic of how to pitch a story to a publisher. My kids hadn't met him before and he was kind enough to bring me a copy of the soundtrack from the George Reeves "Adventures of Superman" series, which soaked into my DNA through repeated viewings decades ago. Just hearing some of those themes and musical stings conjured a host of happy childhood images.

Possibly the least flattering photo ever taken of either
Raina or me, but it's the only one I've got. I really like her work.
In the background, Linda Medley talks with Charlie Kochman.

I signed a few books, met a few people (including cartoonist Keith Knight), picked up some business cards, and thought APE was a great way to spend some time in my favorite big city in the world.

Signing books after the panel. You can tell I'm at the
Alternative Press Expo because I'm wearing jeans.
That makes me hip and edgy.

New Mentions Online

In the past few days, Mom's Cancer got a few new cites I wanted to mention and thank their authors for:

Comics writer Brian K. Vaughan named the book one of his Top Five new comics for the week on his message board, saying he thought it was "pretty great." It's also pretty great to get a nod from Mr. Vaughan.

Graphic artist Bill Dawson mentioned Mom's Cancer on his blog "Woof!" "So much in this book rings true in a way only someone who has experienced this would know," he wrote. "This is a beautiful little book. Go buy it." Thanks, Bill.

Cartoonist Bill LaRocque wrote a lovely little entry on Mom's Cancer in his blog, "Am I There Yet?" My path has not yet crossed "Boomer Bill's" but I hope we get a chance to meet someday.

Last but far from least, Lance Eaton wrote a full-on review of Mom's Cancer for the site Bookloons, an impressive online resource of more than 6,000 book reviews. Lance called the story "touching and endearing," and wrote, "the book can prove therapeutic on many levels for people who have had to deal with cancer, either directly or indirectly." He also had some interesting thoughts on the symbolism of the pawn-and-die image we used for the endpapers. Good catch.

I truly appreciate them all, thanks.

London Calling

I awoke this morning to find quite a surge of hits from the U.K. thanks to this article in The Daily Telegraph. If you're new here, welcome and thanks. I hope you find something worthwhile.

The Telegraph article, titled "Ease Your Pain and Share Your Worries on the Web," looks at the therapeutic value of sharing stories such as my family's on the Internet. I did this interview with Barbara Lantin a couple of weeks ago and I think the story turned out great. Of course, like most Americans, I'm a sucker for a British accent. If you have one, I promise to find you twice as attractive, charming, and intelligent as you actually are.

Entertainment Weekly

I picked up this week's Entertainment Weekly (the April 7 issue with Howard Stern on the cover; on my first try, I bought the wrong one) and on Page 66 found this:


This is a very good review by Hannah Tucker. It did not escape my notice that three other graphic novels reviewed in the same issue received better grades of "A" or "A-minus." However, since those books' creators are Harvey Pekar, Julie Doucet and Jessica Abel, I'm satisfied with a "B-plus." That's a fine grade by EW standards. And I have a feeling that no one's going to base a purchase decision on my book's cumulative GPA (grade point average).

A Few New Reviews and a Comment

Louie pointed me to this March 28 review on The Onion's A.V. Club, which reads in part: "Creator Brian Fies began it as an online comic addressing his mother's lung cancer, and he writes and draws in a newspaper-comics-friendly style that's inviting to look at and easy to read, but does nothing to soft-sell his family's difficulties." The A.V. Club graded Mom's Cancer an "A-minus."

Back on March 12, Florida's St. Petersburg Times ran a brief review by staff writer Margo Hammond that began, "This unflinchingly honest graphic novel is a welcome departure from the excess sentimentality that followed the death of Dana Reeve...." Though I didn't find the coverage of Ms. Reeve's passing as excessive as Ms. Hammond did, I appreciate her recommendation and am happy she picked up on my story's lack of pathos. I did that on purpose.

Watermark Books posted a March 22 review by Mark Bradshaw on its website, which reads in part: "The pairing of light-hearted medium and troubling subject matter works surprisingly well: Fies's sweet-faced characters are brave but a bit bewildered by their medical adventure, and they find that cancer treatment, like cartooning, can contain heroic efforts and absurd comedy." I'm grateful both for the review and for Mr. Bradshaw knowing that the possessive of "Fies" is "Fies's." A lot of Fieses don't even know that.

I also understand that Entertainment Weekly magazine reviewed Mom's Cancer in its new issue out today. I haven't seen it yet, but hear that I earned a "B-plus."

What is it with reviewers and grades? Are they all frustrated grammar school teachers?

I have a hard time with reviews. Even when they're good--and I haven't seen a negative or hostile review yet--I wonder why they weren't better (what would have gotten that B-plus up to an A?). A writer friend reminds me that I'm lucky to be reviewed at all, and he's absolutely right. The enormous majority of books come and go without raising a ripple. Most writers would kill for the press I've received and I'm genuinely appreciative.

I thought I learned long ago to separate myself from my work and take criticism like a pro. As a writer, I've worked with a lot of editors to dispassionately hack up my prose and make it better. It's part of the job. I don't take it personally. But Mom's Cancer is different. It is personal.

There's also the fact that, for better or worse, Mom's Cancer is cast. Even if a reviewer were to pinpoint one change that would improve the story 300 percent, there's nothing I could do about it now except say, "You know, you're right. That would have been a lot better."

Where's My Book?

Mom's Cancer is showing up in more places than I expected. Oh, I knew it'd be in bookstores, and indeed friends and readers have written to tell me they've seen it in Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, New York, and points elsewhere.

What I mean is that it seems to be showing up in a variety of locations within bookstores. I personally have found it on the "Graphic Novel" and "Biography" shelves. Others have seen it in "Health," "Disease," or "Memoir." In rare instances I appreciate enormously, a couple of independent bookstores have simply stacked it on the front counter.

On display just inside the front door of a bookstore in Santa
Monica, Calif. You'll have to take my word that Nurse Sis
is standing right beside the table but is cropped out because
she made me promise not to show the picture to anyone.

Where a bookstore decides to put your book can be very important. Good placement has made many a bestseller, while poor or thoughtless placement has buried many a deserving work. This can be a real problem for graphic novels, which more often than not end up on the same shelf as "Dilbert." There's nothing wrong with "Dilbert"; we just don't have that much in common.

Rob Wynne found Mom's Cancer in good company
at a Borders near Atlanta, Georgia and took this
photo with his camera-phone, which made my day.

That's frustrating. Comics are a medium, not a genre. Graphic novels can be biographies, mysteries, histories, romances, horror stories, science fiction stories, coming-of-age stories, or anything else prose books can be, but somehow--just because they all have drawings in them--they often end up on the same shelf.

I understand why that happens and, frankly, if you're a graphic novel fan and know what you're looking for, it makes them easy to locate. The readers who lose out are history buffs who'll never find Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze, political or travel buffs who'll never find Guy Delisle's Pyongyang, or whoever my potential readers are who'll never find Mom's Cancer.

Which is why I'm happily surprised to see so much variety in my book's placement. It would be interesting to track which spots yield the best sales, but I don't suppose there's any way to do that. Pity; it sounds like a fun experiment.

Lynda found it at a Barnes & Noble shelved
with other cancer-themed books. She bought
the second one from the left. (Thank you!)

Cody's Fourth Street, Berkeley

Last night's talk and signing at Cody's Books in Berkeley went very well, I think. My wife and I went early to meet our friend Christina for dinner, then walked to the bookstore for the event. Although I've spent a little time around the U.C. Berkeley campus over the years, I'd never been to this part of the city and enjoyed it a lot.

The staff at Cody's was extremely welcoming and helpful. A few surprises awaited me: my wife's boss and his family came, as did my wife's aunt and uncle. Walking to the podium to unexpectedly find familiar, friendly faces was great albeit a little disorienting. "What are they doing here?" Weird, but in a good way.

I've done a couple of signings before but this was my first real talk before a book crowd. I told my story: how my mother was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, its impact on our family, how and why I decided to write the book, reaction to it both from readers and my family, its publication, Mom's passing, etc. I don't really know what people want or expect to hear: do they want me to talk about cancer? Family dynamics? Comics? Book publishing? A couple of months ago I had coffee with a syndicated cartoonist who said that people who come to book signings only want to know one thing: How to get published themselves and take my place. That might be very true for a cartoonist in his position, but I think the nature of my book draws a different crowd. I tried to strike a balance among all of those topics and left time for audience questions to fill in any gaps.

While I very much appreciated everyone who came, two people I met last night really stood out:

Margo Mercedes Rivera-Weiss is the librarian and art gallery coordinator for the Women's Cancer Resource Center (www.wcrc.org) of Oakland. The WCRC co-sponsored the event and is very active in community outreach, advocacy, and services. We talked for about 10 minutes before the event and I appreciated the opportunity to meet her and find out more about the center.

Sarah Trejo is the patient services program coordinator for the National Brain Tumor Foundation (www.braintumor.org) headquartered in San Francisco. Sarah and I had corresponded by e-mail before and discovered we had a link through my publicist at Abrams, whose boyfriend is currently biking from Alaska to Argentina to raise funds for the organization. Sarah is a triathlete who was kind enough to mention my book in her blog and bring her entire family to last night's signing, and I really enjoyed meeting her in person.

Characteristically, I now have a mental list of 20 things I plan to improve next time, but I think my approach worked and I did well. I didn't count but would guess that about 30 people attended, and we probably sold slightly fewer than that many books for the fine folks at Cody's. They said turnout was good and seemed pleased. So was I.

Mornings on 2

I just got home from the studio and will write more soon. The short version: Nice people. Good interview. No barf. I'm happy.

LATER....

KTVU is one of the bigger, better television stations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now a Fox station, they were independent for decades and at one point tried to become a national Superstation like WGN or TBS. I believe they have the largest news organization in northern California and the highest-rated 10 o'clock newscast in the country. So it was pretty exciting to be invited to appear on their morning show.

Everyone I met there was great. I arrived about 40 minutes before my interview and was ushered into a green room with six professional automobile drivers and a guy from Consumer Reports who were there to talk about new cars for 2007. Nice guys, and chatting with them gave me something to focus on other than the small monitor showing what was happening live through the big double doors right around the corner.

My "handler" was Michele, whom I took to be a producer though I don't know her real job title. She'd asked me to bring some family photos to show during my segment; I included some images from the book as well. She gave me a five-minute warning, guided me into the studio, stood by my side until the commercial break before my segment, and sat me on my chair. As we walked into the studio, Michele asked me how many television interviews I'd done and did not seem comforted by my answer: "Counting this one? One."


But I've actually spent a fair amount of time in television studios (different story, different time) so I was pretty comfortable in the environment. However, I'm still always struck by how business-like and unglamorous they are in life. Besides the three newsreaders and weatherman, there were no more than five other people in the enormous room outfitted with four different sets (anchor desk, weather station, a couch set, and the chair-and-table set we used). It was a surprisingly low-key affair.

I met the host, Ross McGowan, and we had just a few seconds to chat before we returned to the air. I was very impressed with Ross. He's been doing his job a long time and would have every reason to coast, but it was obvious he (or someone working for him) had really done some homework. When I go into an interview, I have a mental checklist of key points I plan to make. Before I even opened my mouth, Ross's introduction made two of them for me. He asked apt questions and it felt like a nice conversation. He made it easy. After we went to commercial I shook Ross's hand, signed his book, spread thanks all around, gave high fives to the car guys, picked up a videotape of my appearance, and was escorted to the door. Start to finish, less than an hour.

I just watched the tape and was only slightly mortified. I spotted things I need to work on if there's ever a next time. Sideways glances at the monitors and teleprompters made me look nervous and shifty. I seem to have a couple of new wrinkles I never noticed before. Alas, I fear little can be done about my hideous face and voice. But overall I am very happy with the result and grateful to KTVU for the invitation.

One fun post-script: as I was driving home I got a call from Nurse Sis, who told me she'd heard the broadcast in L.A. and congratulated me for doing a nice job. I was mystified. Did she somehow find it online? A podcast? No... her local friend Lorna (who left a comment in the previous post) called her and held a phone to her television for the entire segment! I thought that was fantastic. Thanks, Lorna!

Bay Area Media Alert

I just found out I'll be on the KTVU (Channel 2 in Oakland, Calif.) television program "Mornings on 2" this Thursday, March 23. I'm scheduled to be interviewed for about five minutes at 8:15 a.m. This is in advance of my appearance at Cody's Fourth Street in Berkeley at 7 p.m. Saturday.

For those beyond the San Francisco Bay Area who won't be able to see the show, I expect the first 4½ minutes to look a little something like this:

The last half minute may involve either speaking or barfing. I haven't decided which way to go yet. Tune in to find out!

Two New Reviews

Arnold Wagner is an old-school cartoonist, and I say that with great respect. He wrote "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cartooning" a few years back and is a historian of the art and craft of comics. He also knows more about nibs than anyone I've ever met.

I got to know Arnold the same way I've gotten to know a lot of people in the past couple of years, via the Internet, and he's been kind and encouraging to me. If he weren't, I wouldn't have mentioned him in my book's acknowledgements. Arnold recently posted a review of Mom's Cancer on his blog, saying it is "honest about the difficulties, including those most of us don't think about, about the dark moments, but there's warmth, humor, and hope along with the kind of reality most of us know." Aside from this review, I think a few minutes touring Arnold's website is time well spent.

David LeBlanc is the editor of the Comic Book Network Electronic Magazine, a text e-zine sent to more than 1,400 subscribers. David reviewed Mom's Cancer in his March 10, 2006 issue. Since his archives are a bit difficult to dig into and he gave permission to reprint his work, I've pasted the review below.

Many thanks to both Arnold and David.

MY VIEW
By David LeBlanc
There are a few graphic novels, or long story arcs of series that stand out by how they affect your thinking or just your enjoyment of the reading. For me some of those are MAGE:THE HERO DISCOVERD, PEDRO AND ME, FAITH A FABLE, INNOCENT BYSTANDER and a few more perhaps. I now add to that list MOM'S CANCER. The aforementioned titles are ones I purposely bought extra copies to give to those I felt should read them. MOM'S CANCER will be shared with others I love as well.

When the Eisner committee decided to recognize comics created for the web with their own award, Best Digital Comic, MOM'S CANCER won the first ever Eisner for the web version of this story. It is a non-fiction account of his mother's battle with lung cancer and the interaction of her three children as that struggle progressed. It covers the two years from 2004 through 2005 in the lives of Brian, his two sisters, his mom and his stepfather. As often is the case with serious subject matter, the author looks back to earlier times to examine the basis of beliefs, feelings and motivation of some of the characters.

I too lived through the diagnosis and battle against cancer of my own mother, though not as intimately as Brian and his sisters had to. This is not so much about the disease but about the effects on those involved with the patient. It is not a how-to cope book either. Rather it is a frank telling of one story. He shows how each sibling played a part - nurse sister was the guiding figure cutting through the red tape and making sure things happened, younger sister lived with mom and bore the day to day care-giving duties while Brian offered what help that he could and learned as much as he could about what was going on to be informed on what to expect.

It is remarkable that so much information is passed along during the course of this journey. No two cancers are alike and some may be shocked to learn that treatments are often altered as you go
with changing circumstances rather than some fixed regimen that is followed explicitly. At the later stage in the cancer Mom had, only 5% survive so it is easy to see the choice not to go through extensive chemotherapy, which is seriously debilitating, is made by many. There is really one thing that stands out - the support of family in caring and understanding is most important if the patient is to fight the fight.

Brian has a delightful cartoon style you will warm up to instantly. His scripting and sense of humor makes it readable from first to last. Regardless of how the story may end, it is a story of hope. Another person may have been resigned to her fate and that would have been a different journey. This one is about a choice to fight and not give up. It is uplifting to see these people not give in to despair. I hesitate to say how it ends, though there are really two endings. I will say I teared up reading the afterword. Anything that affects you emotionally like that is well worth your time and money. This one's a keeper.

Good Press

My Internet friend Mike Peterson is a journalist in Glens Falls, N.Y. and one of Mom's Cancer's earliest readers and champions. Mike runs the "Newspapers in Education" program for the Glens Falls Post-Star and does a wonderful job of incorporating comics into his projects aimed at young readers. In a recent "Honor Roll" supplement of his newspaper, Mike dedicated a page to Mom's Cancer that I think provides one of the most insightful analyses of my story I've read.

What I like about Mike's piece is that it introduces comics as a medium that can address serious, complex, mature topics. That's news to a lot of people. In addition, he focused on individual pages or panels and dug down to examine what's really going on in them--something Mike regularly does in his analysis of political cartoons for a feature called "Drawing Conclusions" (available at www.nelliebly.org, which seems to be offline today). His article is a nice piece of work that I really appreciate.

With Mike's permission, I've put a 2.3-MB PDF of the page on my momscancer.com website. It can be downloaded HERE or by clicking the picture below. Thanks again, Mike.

"No Experience in Cartooning..."?

The Associated Press article about Mom's Cancer has been released. I found it online here (thanks to D.D. Degg!) and I suspect it'll show up in other places before long. That's what the AP does.

I've been a writer and journalist for a long time, and interviewed a lot of people. I think I've done a good job of accurately quoting subjects in context, but now that the roles are reversed I have to wonder. Some of my quotes don't sound like me, and if I said those words they didn't come out quite like I intended. It's a truism of journalism that most people believe reporters get it right except when writing about anything involving them, and I'll vouch for that. Maybe it's like hearing your own voice on a tape recorder.

I am nevertheless pretty satisfied with the story. It also features cartoonist Miriam Engelberg, and I was grateful to learn things about her and her forthcoming book, Cancer Made a Shallower Person, that I didn't know. The only passage that raised my hackles was one that began, "Fies had no experience in cartooning." I don't see it that way.

As far as I'm concerned, I have more than 30 years of experience in cartooning. I just seldom managed to get paid for it.

In my teens and twenties I worked very hard at it, and was serious about trying to start a career as a cartoonist or illustrator. I studied the work of masters. I practiced with all the tools I could find: brushes, pens, nibs, inks, washes, watercolors, gouache, charcoals, papers, duotone. When I was a reporter at a small newspaper I published scores of cartoons, spot drawings, and illustrations. I learned how to shoot my own photostats and cut my own color separations by hand.

I also submitted all types of work to all kinds of publications. Mostly, I failed. (Although as I've mentioned before, I did once get a nice gig illustrating a light bulb catalog. They come in an amazing variety of shapes and sizes.) There's little shame in that; most people trying to pursue creative vocations fail. Unlike some, I've been good at other things at that people would pay me to do. But I never stopped working on my drawing skills, learning and applying as much as I could while whittling away the unnecessary. I think that's what both good writing and cartooning are about: trying to master the tools needed to capture the essence of something and evoke precisely the effect you're aiming for in your reader.

Editor Charlie has been on the receiving end of this screed before, and I think it took him aback--I'm usually a pretty easy-going guy. I'm not sure why I feel quite as passionately about it as I do. The Mom's Cancer mythology is essentially right: I did appear out of nowhere to win an Eisner Award and land a book deal my first time batting in the big leagues. It's a good story. I understand that. So what's my problem?

I hate stories that makes cartooning sound easy. It's too disrespectful to an artform I love and the professionals who work hard to make a living at it. Everybody already thinks it's easy, and a few famous examples of everyday folks who sent their doodles to a publisher or newspaper syndicate and hit the million-dollar jackpot only reinforce that idea. I would hate to contribute to that misperception.

I've spent a long time learning how to cartoon, and it's only in the past couple of years that I think I might have begun to get a handle on it. It is very hard to do right. It is very hard to make something look so easy that everybody thinks they can do it. If it were easy I would have been published decades ago instead of accumulating shoeboxes of rejection slips.

I didn't just dash off Mom's Cancer. It distills years of study and hard work, and more thousands of hours of practice with pencils and brushes and pens than I could calculate. Just as important were the 20-plus years I worked as a professional writer. If that experience gave me the skills to make it look easy, then I succeeded.

Going APE

I just accepted an invitation to take part in a panel at the Alternative Press Expo (APE) to be held in San Francisco April 8 and 9. My panel, "Hey, Kids! Graphic Novels!" will be sometime on Saturday, April 8; I don't know the time yet and I'm not sure I'm at liberty to say who else might be on the panel. A couple of people I'd like to meet, for certain.

I haven't been to an APE, but by reputation it's a nice, smallish, affordable, low-key event focusing on alternative and self-published works. It's organized by the same people who do the Comic-Con International in San Diego, and they seem to know what they're doing. I'm honored to be asked.

Click the logo for more information.
Don't stare at the spiral...it's hypnotic.

UPDATE: The graphic novel panel will begin at 2:30 and the organizers are kindly making arrangements for me to sign books for an hour afterward.