Stitches by David Small

A disturbing but compelling comic book memoir (graphic novel seems wrong given that it's not fiction and therefore not a novel) about a boy whose doctor father, thinking he was treating his son's sinuses, gave him hundreds of radiation treatments that subsequently gave the son cancer. At least that's the hook that's been used to promote the book, but truthfully Small's father giving him cancer seems a much less significant element of the memoir than the fact that his parents treated him extremely coldly and everyone in the family seemed to be in their own silent misery...

But storyline aside, I was thinking about how comic books are particularly well-suited to childhood stories because they can so clearly depict the child's eye view through the pictures. Prose writers always have to cope with the problem of putting the child's perspective into language which often exceeds the child's actual capacity for language and so you get a lot of articulate child narrators... Interestingly like many prose stories about childhood the narrator of this memoir is an adult looking back...so the whole thing is actually in past tense. But while in a piece of prose writing this perspective is usually very noticeable (we never forget that it's an adult talking about his childhood), in this case I frequently forgot that it was an adult narrator. I think this is because a comic book can essentially have a present tense narrative and a past tense narrative running simultaneously. The pictures show things from a kid's eye view and feel like they are happening in the right now. And the dialogue is without tags so it never has to use said vs says. Thus the pictures are a present tense narrative. But the accompanying "voice over" is in past tense and adds that layer of adult reflection. So most of the time you feel like you're in the present tense (inside childhood), but when the past tense comes in, it's very easy to make the transition into adulthood. Prose writers could choose to write childhood in the present tense when in scene and past tense when doing more reflective adult narration, but I suspect it would never feel so seamless. And even in scene you'd most likely end up with non-childish language.

So in the end, it seems comic books are a particularly good form for looking back on childhood experiences...in this case, pretty dark and scary ones.