Color in Practice

I've been corresponding with a student doing a master's dissertation who asked me about the use of color in Mom's Cancer. Honestly and immodestly, this isn't the first time an academic has asked about that. I liked my reply enough I thought it would make a good post about how I approach making comics.

The question was basically: why is so much of the story black-and-white, and how did I decide where and how to use color? I said: 

I have a lot of respect for black-and-white art as a medium, in the same way that critics respect black-and-white photography or movies. It’s a different medium with a long tradition, with its own rules of visual storytelling that are different than those of color.

Honestly, it was also faster and easier to not color all the pages. Back then, trying to document my Mom’s illness and treatment as it happened, I was in a hurry. 

Color has a very specific meaning and purpose in Mom’s Cancer. It is similar to the way color is used in the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy famously walks out of the black-and-white ordinary world of Kansas into the Technicolor fantasy world of Oz. In my book, color indicates that something out of the ordinary, subjective, or unreal is happening. It is first seen during Mom’s transient ischemic attack (TIA) as light blue spots that are meant to suggest the phenomenon is happening inside her head rather than actual blue bubbles floating through the room. Fantasy sequences, like the superhero fight, are likewise in full color. 

I also used golden-brown sepia color in the sequences that looked back at Mom’s past, to instantly signal to readers that this flashback was different from the regular storyline. My favorite use of color in the book is a very subtle example toward the end, when my grandmother’s casket is colored sepia, indicating that the past is being literally and metaphorically buried, and the flashbacks are done.

In general, color is an often ignored and underutilized tool in graphic storytelling. If you’re just coloring the sky blue and grass green, you’re missing half the fun! Different palettes can set a mood, establish character and place, convey emotion, and guide a reader’s attention and feelings in ways they don’t even realize. More cartoonists should think harder about color and do more with it!

Mamae esta com Cancer

I just replied to an extremely long and detailed e-mail interview for Folha de São Paulo, which I'm told is one of the leading newspapers in Brazil, about the forthcoming Portuguese edition of Mom's Cancer.

Also: there is a forthcoming Portuguese edition of Mom's Cancer! Talk about burying the lede . . .

This was one of the most exhaustive interview of any sort I've done: 24 questions that took me nearly seven pages to answer. I hope they use some of it.

That's the Portuguese cover above. I did not design it, and Editor Charlie was very dubious when he first saw it. But I kinda like it, and the pink color ties in with Brazil's nationwide anti-cancer campaigns. Bottom line: I trust the Brazilian publishers know their market better than I do, and if they think hot pink will sell the book, it's OK with me!

This will be the eighth language for Mom's Cancer. In addition to English we've got German, French, Italian and Japanese already out, with Spanish and Slovenian (!) in the works. 

Seriously, when I began all this, I had no idea.

Good News/Bad News

I have good and less-good publishing news today.

GOOD: A Spanish-language edition of "Mom's Cancer" is forthcoming! I've seen the pages and it looks like the translators and designers did a beautiful job, particularly with the graphic elements where text is integrated with the art. I'm honestly surprised there wasn't a Spanish version years ago, but am astonished and gratified that a book that's now about 15 years old still has a lot of life left in her. That's incredibly rare.

LESS-GOOD: My publisher, Abrams, and I have been working on a paperback version of "A Fire Story," with 32 new pages of art describing our rebuilding process and fleeing yet another wildfire, to be released in the fall. It now looks like Covid-19 has pushed that release into spring 2021.

Here's the deal: the publishing industry releases books in two seasons, spring and fall. Because bookstores are closed, authors can't tour, etc., many of the books that were supposed to be released this spring--right now--are being pushed into the fall. Editor Charlie felt that it would be better to delay my paperback's launch so it doesn't get drowned in the glut of books gushing from the pipeline after the clog is cleared. Besides, there's no guarantee that bookstores will be open by this fall, either!

Compared to everything else the pandemic has screwed up, my book launch is trivial. Abrams's strategy makes sense. But I'm still disappointed.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 19

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 19 (July 2).

Yeah, we really got that reaction from Mom's medical team. They couldn't believe her osteopath's incompetence. But we were making progress, zeroing in on a diagnosis and a plan.

I mentioned this a few months ago but will repeat it here: I was watching TV recently when I saw a face in a commercial that brought me to an abrupt stop. "Hey, I know her!" Given the commercial's subject matter, it only took me a moment to remember how.



That's her younger version caricatured in the comic above. She was a terrific doc then and it's good to see her still working hard and getting it done.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 18

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 18 (June 29).

From time to time, people ask if pages from Mom's Cancer are available as prints or posters. (No, sorry.) This is almost always the page they're interested in. We used this image for the cloth bags given to participants of the 2011 Graphic Medicine Conference in Chicago (with, as I recall, a kind donation from my publisher Abrams to help pay for the bags).

It depicts a long day at the hospital. The different colored backgrounds suggest that these exams are happening in a variety of times and places. Different tests, repeated tests, different docs and nurses. They also make a visually interesting checkerboard pattern.

The day and the page begin with recognizably drawn features: hands, feet, arms, legs. As the day goes on, the features become less concrete. Everything becomes an exhausting abstract mush. By the time Mom's given the final command to "feel," it's impossible for her to feel anything.

I'm surprised how strongly some people respond to this page. I think maybe I captured something many folks have felt but didn't quite know how to express.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Pages 12 and 13

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Pages 12 and 13 (June 8 and 11).

This image of Mom as the character in the "Operation" board game often gets a strong reaction. It tends to be one of people's favorites or least favorites.

Occasionally people who haven't read a comic since "Little Dot" in 1966 accuse me of "making fun of my mother's illness," which couldn't be further from the truth--but I think this might be the sort of drawing that leads them to believe that. It does combine the deadly serious with the absurd, which was one of the points of Mom's Cancer. So much of the situation was absurd!

I don't remember how I thought of using this iconography. I think I wanted to take a breath and summarize what Mom's condition was at this point. How to do that in a comic? You can't just list symptoms and treatments with words, you need a way to show them. Diagrams, x-rays? Somewhere in that train of thought, the board game came to me.

One thing I like about splitting the image into two pages is it naturally divides Mom's tumors, and therefore the treatments she received for them, between her head and her chest. Which is basically what happened: she had head doctors and chest doctors, and rarely did the twain meet.

In the first draft I posted online, I just drew the "Operation" character in its original style as a stand-in for Mom:

I never liked that solution--not least because I didn't want to get sued by Milton Bradley--but my problem was a simple one: I didn't want to draw my mother fat and naked! I don't know how long it took me to solve it by putting a medical dressing gown on her, but it was an embarrassingly long time.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 11

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 11 (June 4). 

When I drew the picture of Mom modeling a swimsuit, I was relying on memories of photos I'd seen very briefly a long time before. Turns out my memory wasn't very good. Here are the actual pics of my Mom the model:

I could've sworn there was a beach ball.

What the heck, here are a couple more:

Beautiful! Classic Mid-Century Modern.

In case my asterisked footnote in the comic was too subtle, Mom worked as a model when she was 18 to 19. I was born shortly before she turned 20.

Having her papers and affairs in order was one of the best things Mom ever did for her family.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 10

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 10 (June 1). 

The panel of Mom drowning in a sea of medical jargon is one of the first and strongest (in my opinion) visual metaphors in Mom's Cancer. There'll be more later. A friend compared trying to absorb all the information rushing at you when you're suddenly seriously ill to drinking water from a fire hose. The ability to use this type of image is one of the reasons I decided comics was the right medium for telling my family's story.

I think this is a good example of how a picture conveys more meaning than a thousand words could. You look at that and you instantly get it. I don't need to use the words "drowning," "overwhelmed," or "terrified" at all. It's a type of communication comics do uniquely well.

Looking at this page today raises a couple of craft notes. First, I see I used the typeface "Comic Sans" for the words. Sorry about that. Back when I made this page I don't think it had acquired its infamous disrepute.

Second, I wasn't yet comfortable with digital art tools. Pasting those words into the background behind my hand-drawn figures would've been a 10-second cinch in Photoshop. Instead, I printed out the words on paper, cut out the shapes of the figures with an Xacto knife, and rubber-cemented them to the original art! It looks OK in print but the original is a gluey mess. What a maroon!

One nice surprise of reprinting Mom's Cancer on GoComics.com has been watching a little community of readers and commenters build. Some have been or are going through similar ordeals themselves. An unexpected hitch is that some readers who (very reasonably) don't know the history of Mom's Cancer seem to be under the impression the story is happening now. They offer me and my family advice. I don't want to ruin the story's immediacy by telling them "No need, it happened 10 years ago," nor interrupt the conversations to constantly correct people, but I don't want to give the wrong impression either. There's a fine line there I haven't figured out how to walk yet.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 5

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 5 (May 14). 

From a storytelling point of view, the game board metaphor does a couple of things.

It compresses time and delivers a lot of exposition. If I'd wanted to, I could have expanded any one of these "game squares" into a page or more of comic, but because a lot of the activity didn't directly involve Mom I wanted to get through it quickly.

It also stresses the role that random chance played in the quality of treatment Mom received. She ended up with very good care but could very easily not have. Remember, the osteopath at upper left was a quack . . . I mean, a giant duck. If Mom made any missteps at all, it was relying too much and too long on an incompetent primary care physician who (in my opinion) didn't know the first thing about cancer. I don't know if it made any difference.

This element of chance comes up again in the story. I thought it was a strong enough theme or motif that when it came time to design end papers for the print version of Mom's Cancer, I drew a token and a die (double meaning intended) pattern. Life is  a crapshoot.

The end paper pattern for the Mom's Cancer book, inspired by Page 5.

Starting today, Mom's Cancer will appear on GoComics.com twice a week instead of once. A week between pages was just too long, I thought (and some readers agreed with me). I'll see if  twice per week helps the pacing. I could post a new page every day, but would be done with the entire story in a few months! Happily, GoComics seems to be up for any way I want to do it, so we'll give it a try. Let me know what you think.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 4

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they are posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 4 (May 11). 

Now I have to tell you about the Duck.

My original conceit for Mom's Cancer was that my family would look like people but everyone else would be depicted as animals or objects that somehow symbolized their personalities, as in Alice in Wonderland or Animal Farm. I first drew Mom's osteopath as a duck because she was . . . a quack. (Necessary disclaimer: I'm not insulting osteopathy in general; I'm sure there are some good osteopaths doing good work. Mom's was not one of them.)

Original on the left, published version on the right.
This was also one of the early pages where I had to
redraw Mom, as I described in my notes on Page 1.

The problem was that there weren't many other characters in the story, and my high-concept symbolism didn't seem appropriate for the next one. Or the next. After a while, the osteopath was the only non-human character in the whole thing, and people reading it for the first time online began to ask, "Uh, what's up with the giant duck?"

Later, when we began thinking about editing for print, I hinted online that I might change her into a human. Fans of the Duck who'd understood my intent in the first place erupted in outrage (i.e., politely voiced mild disagreement). I think I made the right decision, but I gave Mom's duck--er, doc--a little lapel pin as a nod to her history and her champions.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 3

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they are posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 3 (May 4). 

There's a convention that comics characters wear the same clothes all the time--Charlie Brown's striped shirt, Clark Kent's blue suit. The "pro" of this convention is that it keeps the characters recognizable: once the reader gets used to seeing the characters dressed in a particular way, they don't have to stop and figure out who they are when they show up later. A uniform helps identify them. The "con" is that it's unrealistic. Cartoonists beginning a long project need to think about which way they want to go. In Mom's Cancer the characters wear the same clothes most of the time; when they change clothes late in the story, it helps signal the reader that time has passed.

I admit I didn't put a lot of thought into my own pants and polo shirt ensemble when I began Mom's Cancer. I don't even wear polo shirts that often! However, I dressed Mom in a striped long-sleeve shirt because I knew the stripes would be graphically interesting and draw the eye to her, the story's protagonist. I wanted Mom to be the center of attention whenever she appeared.

Similarly, I gave Kid Sis a sweater with a big floppy collar to emphasize the slenderness of her neck. In cartooning shorthand, skinny necks = youth, and thick necks = age. Nurse Sis and I are older than Kid Sis, so we have thicker necks and rounder curves (and Mom, even older, has hardly any neck at all!).

Me: thick neck, round chin, high hairline, and a wrinkle or bag under one eye.
That all helps make me look older than....

Kid Sis, who has a thin neck, sharp chin, perky nose, unlined face, and alert eyes.

These are some of the things I think about when designing characters.

By the way, my college friend Tina recently told me that she remembers me sitting slouched exactly as I've drawn myself in today's page of Mom's Cancer (Page 3). So I got that right.

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 2

I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they are posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 2 (April 27). 

In answer to a question already posted on the GoComics.com page, Nurse Sis is my sister, and she's a registered nurse. You'll get to know the characters pretty well.

I think this page is a fair representation of the conversation Nurse Sis and I had that night. It was about this one-sided. I didn't quite know what to make of Mom's episode or how seriously to take it. We didn't realize it was just the start.

I was watching TV when my sister called, though I didn't remember exactly what. When it came time to portray it the comic, I wanted to draw myself watching some program I'd actually watch that would also say something about the "Brian" character.

I settled on the "Powerpuff Girls," which a clever cartoon series my daughters and I enjoyed together, and wouldn't have been out of character for me to enjoy by myself, either. I chose that particular image because I own it--that is to say, I bought the transparent layered cels the animators drew and painted to make that particular scene. They're framed and hanging on my wall. 

I'll let you conclude what that says about me.

By the way, owning the animation cels doesn't convey any particular right to reproduce them. The Powerpuff Girls are copyrighted and I respect other people's intellectual property as I'd hope they'd respect mine. But Fair Use allows the use of copyrighted material in transformative works of art (Warhol, Lichtenstein, etc.) and I was pretty sure that reproducing one frame of a cartoon in tiny black and white to reveal something about a character in a graphic novel about cancer was transformative enough to pass.

Just wanted you to know I gave that some thought . . .

Mom's Cancer Notes: Page 1

As I celebrated in my previous post, the first page of Mom's Cancer was posted to GoComics.com today (actually tomorrow, but I got a jump on it from the Pacific Time Zone). Let me introduce it to new readers:

Mom's Cancer is a true story about my mother's diagnosis and treatment for metastatic lung cancer, and how that affected our family. I first serialized it as a webcomic, posting a few pages at a time online. At first I posted anonymously; my family didn't even know. After a few months the comic went viral, I told my family, and they took the news pretty well. Fortunately, Mom loved it. If she hadn't, I would've killed the whole thing. The webcomic went on to win the first Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic and be acquired for print by Abrams Books. It's gotten some very gratifying recognition, brought me many new opportunities and good friends, and is remarkably still in print. Now, about a decade after I created it, Mom's Cancer returns to the Web.

Annotated!
When Universal's John Glynn and I first talked about putting Mom's Cancer online, one of his ideas was to annotate the story with sketches, drafts, and my reflections on its creation. Terrific! But given how the GoComics.com site is set up, it'd be difficult to add such material without interrupting the flow of the story.

So I'll try to do that here. My plan is to add a comment to each week's comic linking readers to these posts (although I don't expect to have something to say about every page). Anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes process stuff can find it here, those uninterested won't be bothered. We'll see how that works.

I briefly considered setting up a separate blog for the purpose, but already have more balls online than I can juggle. These posts will all be labeled "Mom's Cancer Notes" in the right-column index so that, as they accumulate, they'll be easy to corral with a click.

Page 1
The story begins with Mom and Kid Sis watching a bad movie. I always felt a little guilty naming the culprit (the 2002 "Time Machine" film) but that's what it was and it truly was a bad movie.

This page establishes one of Mom's Cancer's conceits from the start: the story's mostly black and white, but anything that is extraordinary, fantastic, subjective or unreal--in this case the little blue spots floating around Mom's head--appears in color.

It took about a year and a half to complete Mom's Cancer. In that time, the way I drew the characters drifted and evolved, Mom most of all. That's pretty common in comic strips: Snoopy and Garfield changed a lot over the years. In Mom's case, the change was so noticeable that when it came time to turn my webcomic into a book, I had to go back and redraw her to match how she'd look later:

Original Mom at left, redrawn Mom at right.

Thank you for reading Mom's Cancer. Please feel free to leave any questions or comments here or at GoComics.com and I'll respond as best I can.