ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how people represent their experiences of illness in graphic novels; the broader issue is how representations of suffering affect living with disease and finding forms of healing. Humanity's earliest known work of sustained storytelling, the Gilgamesh epic, is a kind of guide to the suffering of mortality. People tell stories not only to represent their sufferings and break out of the isolation that Philoctetes's abandonment epitomizes. Although people have always told stories about their illnesses in one medium or another,6 the contemporary illness narrative emerges in the 1970s, when people with considerable public profile began to write about their illness. The problems of narrating illness derive from problems of being ill, or more exactly, problems of what serious illness does to the self. Graphic-novel illness memoirs are written in three formats, which are not discrete types but form a continuum. The specifics of their utterly mundane lives argue against the impersonality of the larger world.
