By Benjamin Fraser, University of Arizona
Chiu, Monica. Show Me Where It Hurts: Manifesting Illness and Impairment in Graphic Pathography. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024. 224 pp.
Published in The Pennsylvania State University Press’s Graphic Medicine series with Susan Merrill Squier and Ian Williams as its General Editors, Monica Chiu’s Show Me Where It Hurts (2024) impresses with its deep understanding of the experiences of illness and impairment and dazzles with close analyses.
It should be no surprise for readers of ImageText that the subfield of graphic medicine has been charting a course to ever higher visibility, both as an interdisciplinary research area, and as a point of convergence for comics readers and creators, scholars from across the university, and health practitioners alike. Squier and Williams’s series has been at the forefront of innovations in these areas, with its published titles tending toward three broadly defined types of contributions. There are books offering theoretical interventions, such as the collective’s Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015), or Squier and Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff’s PathoGraphics (2020). There are thematically driven scholarly studies, such as Smith and José Alaniz’s edited volume Uncanny Bodies (2019). Finally there are comics anthologies and stand-alone comics texts: such as Jenell Johnson’s Reproduction: A Comics Anthology (2018), and Peter Dunlap-Shohl’s graphic novel My Degeneration (2015), which treats the creator’s experience of Parkinson’s disease. In fact, the series is increasingly home to more and more titles of this third variety, some of which are formally and imaginatively inventive and that will attract a broad readership. All of which makes Chiu’s book an important, if comparatively more traditional, contribution to the series. Traditional, because this monograph is directed toward researchers based in humanities departments. In its academic scope, Chiu’s monograph may speak more toward such a traditional scholarly readership than other entries in PSUP’s Graphic Medicine series. But it is not, for that reason, any less valuable to comics scholars. Though its potential readership may be traditional when compared with this broader landscape, in its specific context, Show Me Where It Hurts is anything but. As a work of comics scholarship, Chiu’s book is a provocation that illustrates her deep engagement with a genre, a theme, and a method that still prove elusive among faculty and researchers on the whole. On the heels of her previous book, Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives, this foray into graphic pathography is equally innovative.
Each of the book’s chapters examine one of many interrelated themes: for example, cancer (ch. 2), aging (ch. 3), hospital waiting rooms (ch. 4), “graphting” (ch. 5; a neologism that “combines notions of the graft in narrative theory, in medical suture, tissue engineering, and horticultural hybridization,” p. 103), and viruses (ch. 6). Using fewer example texts than, say, Elisabeth El Refaie’s Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives (2019)—an instructive comparison broached by the author herself in the introduction—results in an argument that is both coherent and yet loose enough to range far and wide through “affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism […] race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies and comics studies” (p. 5). This eclectic combination proves to be an asset in a book that takes on so many divergent experiences of illness and impairment: spina bifida (ch. 1), breast cancer (ch. 2), the vulnerability and (inter)dependence of aging (ch. 3), visual impairment in a culture of sightedness (ch. 5), and the herpes simplex virus (ch. 6).
It is natural in this kind of book that, at times, readers will want for more extensive treatments of certain themes or ideas. For example, while chapter 4’s discussion of waiting room space is both original and enlightening, in my reading it departs from the individualized or minoritized experiences at the center of other chapters. I wondered, first, about the selection of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan for this analysis, given that the book otherwise tends to privilege strictly autobiographical comics, and second, about what a more robust engagement of spatial theory might have brought to Chiu’s nonetheless astute interrogations of the medical industrial complex (despite some intriguing inclusion of Henri Lefebvre’s ideas, pp. 77-78). However, my own feeling is that this type of critique tends to ignore the burdens placed on innovative scholarship in the health humanities, which excels when it thinks in interdisciplinary terms, many times understandably aiming for broad coverage in an understudied and still underappreciated area of cultural production.
Chiu’s turns toward questions of racialized identities in chapters 5, 6, and in the book’s unnumbered coda (pp. 134-142), as well as a brief discussion of the racialization of care at the close of chapter 3, are a crucial part of the book’s originality. Here the author pushes her discussions of minoritized bodies from chapters 1 and 2 into racial terrain, bringing Show Me Where It Hurts full circle in a way and—in my opinion—leaving readers already desiring a subsequent monograph where these themes might be considered further in relation to the growing market for health comics. Chiu’s concluding words on this opportunity are worthy of citing in full: “Writing against absence affords people of color a capacious opportunity in the medium: there is more artistic and scholarly work to do. This coda is a call to artists of color to draw out their stories of illness and impairment. It is an invitation to scholars to read these manifestations into academic existence” (142). Related to this is the point she makes in the introduction: “In a study that critiques the lack of graphic pathography by and about people of color, I intentionally sought out as much scholarship as possible by scholars of color” (p. 20). For Chiu’s call for future artistic and scholarly contributions by people of color to be heard would mean a further diversification of the subfield of graphic pathographies.
The author’s expertise in comics studies is evident throughout, and Chiu touches on many sophisticated aspects of the medium without bogging the text down in metacommentary. For example, chapter 1 starts off with a bang in its swift introduction to the varied aesthetic and formal offerings of Al Davison’s comics text The Spiral Cage: from the challenges he poses to “prescribed reading modes,” to the rhythmic propulsion of his comics “syncopation” to the way in which readers experience the creator’s “defiant somaticism aesthetically” (this masterful paragraph appears on p. 24). The latter is a nod to how the material experience of illness, the specific nature of this embodiment, influences the comics in question’s form. Chiu is at her best when noting the content of the form, to put things in literary terms, something that not all who write about comics are able to do.
That each chapter centers on only one or two carefully selected comics texts is a plus for those readers who want to see what actually happens on the page, rather than read about the comics images merely as vehicles toward some thematic goal. Throughout the volume, Chiu gives appropriate attention to graphic style and the notion of the artist’s unique ‘hand’ or line as being (here drawing on Hillary Chute) an “index” of the artist’s body: “In graphic pathography, the illustrating hand is an embodied, interpretive tool crafting somatic representations of the state of being unwell, incapacitated, or otherwise enabled” (p. 6). This insight forms one of the throughlines of the book, where the author draws now on Lynda Barry (p. 33), now Estzer Szép (p. 65), and now Barbara Bernstein (p. 104), to pursue this material connection between experience and artistic creation. In one place, Chiu remarks that artist Roz Chast has a “distinctive thready hand” (p. 59). Discussing Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber’s artwork as collaborators on the volume Dancing After TEN (toxic epidermal necrolysis syndrome), the author contrasts the former’s “short, broken strokes” with the latter’s “dark, bold lines,” each in light of their embodied experiences: “Chong’s line embodies that liminality, removed from the surety, boldness, and confidence of Webber’s” (p. 105). In the scholar’s vision of comics, the medium is the message.
As Chiu’s title captures, the visual materiality of the comics text is itself a manifestation of a life lived. If these comics indeed “Show [Us] Where It Hurts,” anyone interested in investigating further this “where” is referred at once to both the creator’s narrated body and the comics body—by comics body, I mean the material weight and visual presence that define a reader’s engagement with print comics. Still, in graphic pathographies, these two bodies are not yet sufficient to account for what the “where” of Chiu’s title achieves. As comics scholars Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and Barbara Postema have theorized, the participatory and interactive elements of comics are a fundamental part of the medium. In this sense, we, as the readers of comics, are a third bodily subject implied in this notional “where.” Part of the value to be found in autobio comics generally and graphic pathographies specifically has to do with the way comics invite readers to share in an experience that is not our own. This sharing is only possible to the degree that in reading comics the material becomes real; the subjective, collective.
It seems to me that the human senses are one of the main pathways through which this sharing occurs in comics, and as an interpreter of the health humanities, Monica Chiu is a gifted analyst of the medium’s multi-sensory properties. Though Ian Hague’s Comics and the Senses (2014) is not cited in Show Me Where It Hurts, some of Chiu’s insights that most impacted me involve the way that visuality in specific comics texts can convey touch, sound and even smell. For example, in chapter 3’s discussion of Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits: “Farmer adores texture, from ribbed turtlenecks to striped flannel pajamas, from fringed silk scarves to brittle, drying hair. Her modus operandi is an invocation of the senses through the material”; or “Farmer’s detailed ink drawings permit us to ‘see’ how a checked flannel nightgown, after a warm sponge bath, might feel soft and comforting against Rachel’s sensitive skin” (p. 66). It is too simplistic for readers to think that these sorts of sentences are merely descriptive. In Chiu’s hands, such rich descriptions of what happens on the comics page are replete with implications for how the best graphic pathographies are intent on “manifesting illness and impairment” in a particular way—through sensory experience, as a marker of embodiment. “The artists of graphic pathography necessarily depend on the body to reimagine it on the page. Likewise, the subjects of graphic pathography refuse to concede to the management of their corporeality under clinical, visual organization. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, animating vital images of the self against clinical medicine’s static visual culture” (p. 1). Later in the book, Chiu arrives at the concluding phrasing that “hand-drawn self-depictions […] are resistant drawing” (p. 125, my emphasis). At the same time, she emphasizes, these graphic projects are “restorative” and together “create a generative archive” (p. 126). The author’s consistently superb writing captures well the dualistic nature of images, as both critiques and affirmations that push onward from the immediacy and metaphorical qualities of the senses toward a contemplation of larger social relationships—here, those implicated in experiences of illness and impairment.
Show Me Where It Hurts splendidly captures Monica Chiu in the process of considering complex questions regarding a medium whose cultural fandom still far outweighs its status as a social intervention, whose seemingly self-evident simplicity hides a much more sophisticated potentiality. This book will appeal to scholarly readers from many different research areas. For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Chiu is at home not only with comics studies and the health humanities broadly considered, but also with disability studies as an interdisciplinary formation. Yes, she cites from El Refaie, Groensteen, and other comics theorists (distancing herself a bit from McCloud, see p. 19, cf. p. 75), but also references some of the most prominent names in disability studies research (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder, Tobin Siebers, G. Thomas Couser, etc.). All things considered, my enthusiastic review of this scholarly monograph is due to the fact that its author never moves too far away from the comics texts at hand, nor from the experiences of their creators. If comics readers, health humanities scholars, and healthcare practitioners are to appreciate, understand, and ultimately change the social relations implicated in experiences of illness and impairment, then we are going to need many more monographs like this one.