Three Things I Have in Common with David Hasselhoff

1. I am mysteriously beloved in Germany, just like David Hasselhoff. Well, "beloved" is too strong a word, but the very popular magazine Die Zeit Wissen recently published a story about Mom's Cancer, for which I was interviewed by Anne Kunze several weeks ago. My high school Deutsch is rusty but I think she said some good things about me. The book is available in German as Mutter Hat Krebs, perhaps the most lyrical title I've ever heard.

2. I have a car that is smarter than I am, just like David Hasselhoff. (Mine doesn't talk to me, but it does have a computer onboard and definitely ... knows things.)

3. I wept like a little baby girl when Taylor Hicks won American Idol. Just like David Hasselhoff.

Character Design

Yesterday a friend on an Internet newsgroup I frequent jokingly (?) accused me of making my cartoon counterpart in Mom's Cancer look 20 years younger than I actually appear to be in photographs. Ouch. That, along with an interview I recently did with an author writing a book about designing characters for comics, gave me the inspiration and material for today's post. If you don't like it, blame my friend Peter B. Steiger of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

As I prepared to do Mom's Cancer, I put a lot of thought into what the characters would look like. Making them exact likenesses of my family was not my top priority, which is one reason Editor Charlie and I decided not to publish a photo in the book: as cartoon characters, we're abstract stand-ins for the reader rather than concrete, specific people. Also, we didn't want to pull readers out of the story by giving them a reason to flip back and forth comparing the drawings with reality. But for today's purposes, here's a side-by-side:


Mom’s Cancer took more than a year to draw and I wanted my characters to be recognizable and consistent from the beginning of the story to the end. I sat down beforehand to make sure I understood the fundamental shapes underlying my characters, could move them around in space and make them work from every angle, etc. I didn't spend a lot of time on it and wasn’t trying to accomplish anything more profound than come up with characters who could do everything I wanted and express every emotion I needed, and that I could stand to draw over and over again.

Mostly, I tried to apply some basic cartooning principles to help the reader subconsciously know my characters before they opened their mouths. In Mom’s Cancer, the characters of Nurse Sis and I are in our forties while Kid Sis is about thirty. Nurse Sis and I therefore have stockier necks, rounder faces, thicker body shapes, and more often than not a bag under an eye. Nurse Sis is a take-charge person who leans forward and leads. My character is more passive and reflective, leaning back. In contrast, Kid Sis is more angular and attractive, with a thinner neck, smaller nose, bigger smile, and better posture.

Of all my characters, Mom is the one that looks least like her real-world counterpart. The Mom character is in her sixties, sick, and tired. Both her head and body are pear-shaped, her posture is poor. Gravity is dragging her down. She has no neck, her eyes are baggy. When she had hair, I drew it with a lot of waves and points that would contrast with her smooth bald head later. Her striped shirt gave me something graphically interesting to play with that stood out against both white and black backgrounds, while her black pants were a negative space I knew I could use effectively once in a while. I was much less interested in creating a character who looked like my mother than one who could help me tell the story.

Despite my initial groundwork, I found that the look of my characters gradually evolved over the course of drawing them dozens of times over several months. That's pretty common for comics characters: Snoopy changed a lot between 1955 and 1995. I actually had to go back and redraw Mom in particular as she became quite unrecognizable. The “Moms” in about the first 20 pages of my book are all paste-up corrections inserted much later because the way I drew her character changed as I grew more comfortable with it and demanded more of it.

Mom's evolution, pre- and post-paste-up.

I consider that design evolution an interesting failure on my part. If I had put a little more thought into what I expected of the character at the start, I might have been able to design her to hold up better in the long run.

And though I wasn't necessarily aiming for photorealistic accuracy, at least I was honest about my gray hair.

Amber

I own a stupid cat. That's not a slander against the cat, whose name is Amber. It is a medical fact.

A Good Samaritan found Amber when she was just a couple of weeks old, comatose in a field, almost dead, and took her to a veterinarian friend of ours. He saved her, barely, but whatever happened to her in that field took its toll. He started asking around: Anybody want a brain-damaged cat?

He played us like fools.

Amber isn't cool and graceful like our other two cats. When she jumps, she's as likely to overshoot her landing as stick it. Gravity is always a delightful new discovery. She knows her name--about half the time--but never seems able to figure out where it's coming from. She's kind of an oaf and about half a beat slow, a trait often undetectable in a human but hilariously evident in a cat.

She's also not very good at grooming herself, which is unfortunate since she turned out to be a very long-haired tabby who hates being brushed. So once a year, in the spring when the weather turns warm, we take Amber back to our vet friend and he shaves her tangled, matted coat into a "lion cut." For a few weeks afterward she's the most pathetic, trembling, sorry, ridiculous creature ever born. Her bobble head is five sizes too big for her body and she's got a pom-pom stuck at the end of every extremity. The other cats tease her mercilessly--I hear them snicker.

Or perhaps that's me.

New Reviews: Villalon and Nonanon

That title kinda rhymes....

I just learned of a terrific audio review of Mom's Cancer by San Francisco Chronicle book editor Oscar Villalon. The review was done a week ago for "The California Report" magazine, a weekly radio news program produced by KQED in San Francisco. I appreciate it very much.

Y'know, I put a lot of thought into how I structured my story, its tone and style, how I portrayed the characters, which parts I included and which I left out. The story is all true, but within the boundaries of telling the truth (as I saw it) I still had a lot of choices to make. So I'm happy when someone who really knows books and understands how a story works says I chose well. It means a lot to my insecure inner writer.

Mom's Cancer also got a nice review yesterday on the "Nonfiction (Readers) Anonymous" blog. "Nonanon" is an opinionated, sardonic online critic who, I gather, doesn't shy away from scorching earth when necessary. That makes her "Wows" (I count five of them) that much sweeter. Thank you.

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.

LiveSTRONG Day

Today, Wednesday May 17, was designated LiveSTRONG Day by the Lance Armstrong Foundation. As part of that effort, a representative of the foundation wrote and asked if I would blog today "about (my) experience with cancer or on a specific issue (I) feel most passionately about.... What would have made Mom's cancer experience a better one?" I'm happy to participate but fear I won't be very inspirational. However, I'll be honest.

I once thought the phrase "They're inventing new and better treatments every day" was an empty platitude employed to inject false hope into a hopeless situation. I don't believe that anymore. Ten years ago, my mother wouldn't have gotten the brief remission and approximately two extra years of life she worked so hard to win. Today, medical science has treatment options that weren't available to my mother even a couple of years ago. Cancer treatment is improving incrementally, with revolutionary therapies--gene therapies, nanotechnologies, custom chemotherapy that targets only cancer cells, other stuff I don't understand--on the realistic horizon.

At the same time, cancer patients are more than meat and bones to be repaired and sent on their way. What would have made Mom's cancer experience better? Continuity of care: one physician who understood the entire picture, pointed Mom to the right resources, smoothed the path for her. As it was, Mom faced too many specialists concerned only with their little piece of brain or foot, and no one who seemed aware that cancer can affect the whole body no matter what particular organ it attacks. When Mom had one physician championing her cause, she got good care; when she didn't, she didn't. Family can fill some of that role but not all. I think it's important to build a history with a pro who knows who you are, not just what's wrong with your parts. If you're not satisified with the care you're getting, complain or shop around until you do. No one else will care more about your welfare than you do.

I get e-mails from people going through terrible ordeals, cancer and otherwise. I'm always quick to say I'm not a healthcare professional and can't give medical advice, but most already seem to know that. They're just looking for someone who understands... who's maybe been down the path they're standing at the trailhead of and can draw them a rough map of the hard climbs and switchbacks ahead. That's the main reason I wrote Mom's Cancer, and I think that's part of what the Lance Armstrong Foundation and similar organization are about.

I tell people who write me that Hope is never in vain. It has to be tempered with realism--I never advocate false hope--but I sincerely believe that it's reasonable to be optimistic. Reasonable to anticipate a better treatment or alternative therapy or acceptable quality of life. Sometimes the best you can hope for is a graceful, painless end--which after all is the best any of us mortals can hope for--and medical science can help that happen, too.

I'm no spokesman for any particular organization or cause. But in general, I think the road to surviving cancer has two parallel lanes: scientific progress and advocacy for those afflicted. Any person or group engaged in either or both is doing right.

Anyone Speak Italian?

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.

The Drinking Horn of Thor

We have two good-sized trees in our small backyard. Under one of those trees, two bird feeders hang from a hooked metal pole. One feeder is stocked with the usual mix of small wild bird seed and the other with sunflower seed. We host finches, nut-hatches, robins, an occasional bullying jay. In branches overhead, a pair of gray squirrels has built a nest and taken up residence.

It's a good suburban life for a squirrel. Oh, there are a few neighborhood cats but they're fat and stupid, and if you've got eyes on both sides of your head and are paying the slightest attention, they're not much of a threat. We awaken to the sounds of squirrels scampering across our roof, making heedless leaps from roof to tree, and spiralling down one trunk and up the other with abandon.

And there ... not quite close enough to tree or fence to chance the leap, not quite low enough to reach from the ground, hanging from a slippery metal pole that takes all your finger and toe strength merely to climb ... juuuuussst within touching distance of one tiny claw if you stretch as far as you can ... is the bottomless buffet. Nirvana.


I'll be traveling on business for a week and doubt I'll have a chance to post. Take care, and don't forget to check back.

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!

University Researcher Wants Your Help

Speaking of academic legitimacy....

University of Kentucky communications professor Deborah Chung left a comment in my previous post about a survey she and a colleague are doing to figure out who's using cancer-related blogs, how they're using them, and why. I'm posting a note here because I wouldn't expect a casual visitor to find her comment, plus I owe her one because she wrote me a long time ago and I put off following up until I forgot about it. My apologies to her.

I checked out Dr. Chung and her survey, and both appear entirely legitimate to me. If you're a cancer patient or a relative of one, are over 18, and want to contribute to a such a study, take a look at her comment in the previous post or go to https://wintis.mowsey.org/survey/.

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.

Artistic Influences?

Two threads today that I'm going to try to braid into one....

Thread One: I'm back from a week's vacation, and my family and I had a good and productive time. What I didn't reveal in my last post is that some of that time was spent in Hollywood with my sisters wrapping up the last of Mom's life. Deciding, dividing, disposing. Of course as you dig through your parent's life you inevitably excavate your own, and I was surprised by some of the treasures that turned up. We found the beaded blue hospital bracelet tied round my wrist when I was born; I had no idea it still existed. Mom also saved a lot of my art--even had some of it framed--and I retook possession of doodles and school projects I last saw years ago.

Thread Two: Cartoonist Rod McKie recently started a blog titled
The Cartoon Fiend, in which he asks several cartoonists a series of similar questions and posts their replies. Rod has invited me to participate, and one of his questions asks me to name my major artistic influences. On the list of Questions I Find Impossible To Answer, that is very near the top. All I can say is "no one and everyone." I understand how unsatisfying an answer that is, but it's the only honest one I've got.

I've never consciously mimicked or borrowed anyone's writing or drawing style. I never tried to develop a style per se at all; I just try to convey information as accurately as I can while at the same time simplifying it to its essence. To me that's cartooning. I've read a few analyses of my work that tried to pin me down: "He's clearly derivative of Smith mixed with a little bit of Jones." Almost always, the creators whose work so obviously shaped mine are people I've never heard of who were babies when I started writing and drawing the way I do. It's pretty funny.

There are many creators whose work I've admired and studied, mostly old-school: Walt Kelly, Hal Foster, Charles Schulz, Winsor McCay, Cliff Sterrett, Milt Caniff, Will Eisner, James Thurber, Bud Blake, Stan Drake, Neal Adams, Gus Arriola, everyone who worked at DC Comics in the 1960s and Marvel in the '70s. I suppose they all influenced me, but when I really ponder the question I come up with names that have nothing to do with cartoons or comics.

Exhibit A: In college I devoured everything I could find by E.B. White. Many of his old New Yorker essays in particular are brilliant little gems. For months afterward, everything I wrote sounded like him and it took me a long time to shake his voice. In fact, I'm not sure I ever really did. Fortunately, I could have absorbed much worse. White was an economical writer who believed in getting to the point with speed, clarity, and grace. That is a good trait for a cartoonist to develop.

Exhibit B, recovered from Mom's closet last week:


I was about 14 when I did this pointilism exercise in art class. It is 100 percent pure Chesley Bonestell, or as near as I could get as a kid. (It's also very bad, but I'm learning to cut the younger me some slack.) For decades through the middle of the 20th century, Bonestell was the leading illustrator of outer space: the man who showed us what it would be like out there before any robots had actually made the trip. Mom had a couple of old Bonestell books I read repeatedly, my imagination alighted by the wonders I'd surely see myself in the 21st century, when spaceships would be as common as flying cars. I lived for years on worlds he created.

So who were my major artistic influences?

E.B. White and Chesley Bonestell. Plus many others. No one and everyone. That's the best I can do.

Down Time

My blogging will be sparse for the next week or so, as my family and I take some time off, visit relatives, and tour potential universities for my kids. They got accepted to some good ones; now all they need to do is make one of the most important decisions of their lives by May 1. I hear book sales are going well and I anticipate that Mom's Cancer will be showing up in some interesting reviews and articles soon. If you see one, please let me know!

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.

Meme Me

I viscerally dislike those e-mail chain-letter Internet meme things: "answer these questions and forward to ten friends to show you care." Ugh. But this one caught my eye and, since my sister sent it to me, I thought I'd unclench long enough to play along.

Four jobs I have had in my life:
1. TV cameraman and director.
2. Double-decker bus driver.
3. Newspaper reporter.
4. Environmental chemist.

.

I drove these. Weird clutches.

Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the whale movie)
2. The Pink Panther Strikes Again
3. The Shawshank Redemption (I don't own it, but it's on TV a lot and everytime I flip past it I get hooked. Not sure I've ever seen the whole thing in one sitting.)
4. The General (Buster Keaton; I admit I listed this mostly to score obscurity cred, but it truly is an irresistible charmer.)

Buster Keaton in "The General"

Four places I have lived:
1. Rapid City, South Dakota
2. San Jose, California
3. Davis, California
4. None of your business

Four TV shows I love to watch:
1. Monk
2. House
3. Most Star Treks
4. Iron Chef (original Japanese is best, but American is O.K.)
4.1. Mythbusters
4.2. American Chopper (I'm not proud, just honest)
4.3. The episode of Fairly Odd-Parents where Timmy, Cosmo and Wanda are cornered by an angry mob in a dead-end alley and Cosmo says to Timmy: "Well, you lived a good life." Timmy: "I'm only ten!" Cosmo: I said good, not long!"
4.4. None of those Trading Spaces people is ever getting anywhere near my house.

Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Kauai and Maui
2. Puerto Vallarta
3. The Mediterranean
4. Fresno

Four websites I visit daily:
1. Mark Evanier
2. Bad Astronomy
3. The Straight Dope
4. The Comics Curmudgeon

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Poached eggs on buttered English muffins
2. Baby back ribs
3. Reuben sandwich
4. The perfect peach

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Piazza San Marco, Venice
2. Disneyland
3. The International Space Station
4. Columbia River, autumn of 1805, canoeing toward the Pacific with Lewis and Clark.

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."