Sunday Comics: Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Cancer Vixen
(Click on the image for the clip!)
What do you look for in a comic book? Laughs? Suspense? Visual excitement? Emotion? Try Cancer Vixen (Knopf, hardcover $22*), a comic book by my friend and fellow New Yorker cartoonist, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, about her experience with breast cancer.
We all know someone who’s been touched by cancer. But not everyone deals with it in ways we find easy to face. The struggle for life isn’t always pretty. Cancer Vixen is pretty. Strip it of its glittering bright purple cover to see it’s just as vibrant and funny underneath. Inside, the color schemes all match my own favorite outfits: “It clashes, so I love it, ” she says in one frame, and that’s why I love it too. The style is Marisa’s recognizable own, with real people possessed of reassuringly human proportions and body shapes, a change from the elongated, thin fashionistas her New Yorker cartoons often portray (and poke light fun at). Her visual vocabulary engages you immediately. If the attractiveness of a book about cancer is a paradox, it’s a timely one. I can’t imagine what it would have been like without the happy ending, but Marisa doesn’t seem cut out for unhappy endings.
This is a comic book with a strong, seductive narrative, and images that keep you turning the pages. Marisa expresses honest, naked truths about fear, self-doubt, physical pain, and the disease itself in question in ways that are more than instructive: it’s enriching. It teeters on the edge of TMI only rarely, and does so rather charmingly (the truffle-scented farts in bed, not to mention the less than lovely “chemo farts”). You’ll also learn a thing or two about designer shoes and the world of the so-called “beautiful people.”
And I’m proud to say I make a two-frame guest appearance in it! Which is very touching, because it’s basically the scene where we first sealed our friendship, perhaps without even realizing it yet. It’s an honor, Marisa!
– Cancer Vixen: the clip – Cancer Vixen: the book – NYTimes interview of the Cancer Vixen herself – also interviewed by Cynthia Kling for the Huffington Post – see Marisa’s cartoons in The New Yorker.
- a percentage of which will be proceeding to the Comprehensive Cancer Center affiliated with St. Vincent’s Hospital, Manhattan, and to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
