Reading Through 2021 65: Sick, by Gabby Schulz

Sick, by Gabby Schulz

2016

Just last month, I read Monsters, by Gabby Schulz, aka Ken Dahl, and was quite impressed.  I've subscribed to his Instagram and picked up another of his books, Sick. Now, Monsters was about life with herpes and festering genitals. Sick couldn't possibly be more troubling to read, could it?

The cover and the insides as well are lushly grotesque

Yes, it could. And it is. Sick has two parts to it. The first part is an autobiographical tale of a two week long sickness Schulz persevered through all on his own because he was too poor to afford healthcare, and too cut off from friends and family to get support. I was on board for this experience, as bleak as it was. I wondered if it was a spiritual successor to Glenn Ganges in: The River at Night. Taking a small intimate experience and blowing it up to the length of a book.

Then the second half was about humanity and what a blight on existence we all are. The thing is, it was told from a distinctly American perspective, one wrapped up in race, religion and economic inequalities, and I wasn't on board with that because it just isn't the world I live in, as a Canadian living in Japan for the past twenty years.

There are dozens of pages of shredded flesh

The book looks great. It's an oversized hardcover, loaded with lush watercolor illustrations of sickness. It's beautiful in its grossness. He draws scenes and images over and over again, and gets into rhythms with them which are compelling to look at. He shifts from neutral side views to worms-eye views, and with some sequences in the bathtub, the view from down the drain. It's powerful stuff.

There's a lot of suffering

More and more I hear about Americans who can't go to the hospital for the simplest things because it is just unreasonably expensive. It's tragic, and that's the way the country has chosen to go. I prefer Canada's free hospitals (paid through taxes of course), or even Japan's heavily subsidized insurance system to America's "better be rich or else" one. The notion of spending two weeks in bed, immobile and losing blood every time you use the washroom, yet not being able to go to the hospital is insane. It's not normal in the developed world, it's normal in America. 

He tackles his own difficulties in trying to be a person

Schulz weighs his life, the ups and downs, the value of existence, and tries to find out if it's even worth living. At first, it's personal and compelling. He gets into his "complicity" as a white, able, sane, middle-class, cisgendered male, and despite being in the identical demographic, I started to look at him as opposed to relate to him.

He goes into talk about humanity, but it is so much about America, or at least Euro-centric. What he's writing is interesting, but he describes it in some universal way, when it isn't. Every country has its problems, but, as an outsider looking at America, America has more than average.

History is most definitely a dark thing, with countless stories of societies being horrible to other societies, Europeans often being the most horrible  

So as I read, I saw Schulz writing what he seemed to think was some grand truth. The world has problems, every place has problems, but what he's getting at is really a personal view of the world. Toward the end, he writes, "Maybe there are no words to describe what no one wants to hear." On the back cover, he writes, "Not recommended for the self-satisfied." I felt bad for him, because I've done the soul-searching and analysis of life, and my results weren't the same as his. 

Our history, he states, is "primarily one of destruction, consumption and greed." History is most definitely full of destruction, consumption, and greed, but it's hard to say it's primarily so. I love the art of the world, I love the culture of the world. The negativity is part of it, but it's a miserable practice to focus on the negative and make it the foreground. It's simply part of the animal that is humanity. 

A beautiful page. The one after this is bleak

It's a good work, he's a talented creator taking himself to an honest place. The ideas in this at the very least force readers to confront their opinions on the world, whether in agreement or disagreement. If I had to compare it to another comic creator, the closest one would be Ivan Brunetti and the self-flagellating work he did in Schizo. But in that, Brunetti knew he was being over the top. Here, Schulz seems quite serious. The reality of their point of view could be very different. Perhaps Brunetti was serious, and his humor was a reflexive defense. Maybe Schulz is offering this up as food for thought and not a treatise to be taken so literally. I can't say. But the book portrays human life as a disease. 

It is food for thought though. To read through this is to confront a lot of harsh ideas about humanity. Ultimately, I don't share Schulz's views and by the end, I was interacting with it as I might a book espousing Christianity or Islam or any other view of the world I have already investigated and rejected. I wasn't able to embrace his ideology, and that affected my ability to purely enjoy an ideological work like this.

One Coin Reads 7: Monsters, by Ken Dahl

Monsters, by Ken Dahl

2009

I've never heard of Ken Dahl, I didn't particularly like the cover, but something in the Amazon listing made me pick it up. It was cheap, and he's Ignatz award winning and Eisner nominated. It's great!

The title and cover reflect the content of the book well, but it didn't reflect the cartooning style inside. I saw this marked down multiple times before making the plunge and buying it, but upon reading, this was right up my alley.

Monsters is an autobiographical comic about Dahl (a pseudonym for Gabby Schultz) and his own experience with herpes. Admittedly, it's not an appealing topic, but that's why it's called Monsters. What I found with it though was that it was as brave and honest an autobio comic as I've ever read. The major theme of the book is the shame and self-destructive emotion the stigma of this very common STD causes. The direct effects of the disease itself isn't what causes Dahl's troubles.

Dahl works in four modes in this book:

-straight autobiographical recapping of herpes' effect on his life and relationships

-reflective self-analysis on his thinking during that time

-more metaphoric autobiographical work, where he illustrates his experiences, but lets himself play as a cartoonist to illustrate his own emotional state

-occasional fact bombs about what herpes is, what its physical effects are, and what the statistics are, but done using cartooning skills

Throughout, he uses a lot of techniques to tell his story. Sometimes it's a very light, loose line, sometimes it's a heavily rendered image. My preference is the zone in between those poles, where he very clearly cartoons, but he has a strong texture to give the cartoons weight. The cartooning quality ranges from good to great.

Dahl shifts his cartooning styles throughout the book, this self-representation is more realistically proportioned despite the not-actual-size herpes virus

This isn't a book for kids. Dahl "goes there", he draws the effects of herpes as he researched on the Internet. The worst case scenarios become his own nightmares, which he fully illustrates even though his own case is mild. That is to say, he sometimes draws scabby genitals. It's not something anyone wants to look at or consider, but it is something a lot of people might confront at some point in their own life even if only the fear of it, so I appreciate Dahl's commitment to honesty and mature presentation.

Some people might have an experience with herpes and just ignore it and pass it along. I don't  think most people are like that. Most would be shell shocked by the news and use it as a starting point for self-reflection, if not the seven stages of grief. That's Dahl, whose social life seems knocked off course for years due to the disease.

Living with shame

Reading this, I was taken back to the indie comics that really excited me when I was 20, when I was trying to figure out just who I was and who I wanted to be. I read the 80's autobio of Robert Crumb, and the work of Chester Brown and Joe Matt. I saw myself in them a lot, and received some relief that my emotions were "normal" but not necessarily excusable or acceptable. It's a challenging territory, which mainstream works don't usually venture into. Dahl's book shares some characteristics with those artists, in its frankness and emotional honesty. It's very personal work, but work that most readers should be able to see themselves in.

Ultimately, Monsters is a book about living with herpes, not becoming a hermit, so it has some resolution, and is not bleak in its final outlook. It's not for everyone, but it's a book, to quote Jeffery Brown on the back cover, "for anyone who has had sex, is going to have sex, or wants to have sex."