The body is a fascinating work of science, nature, and art . . . when it works. In this anthology, various creators explore their relationships with their own bodies, illness, and the healthcare system.
Cover by Mark WangWritten and Illustrated by Various
Edited by Nadia ShammasA diverse and eclectic anthology providing space for comics creators to tell their experiences with medical ailments, CORPUS is a vital and necessary work full of hope, understanding, and reflection. Split between sections on physical, mental, and financial experiences, CORPUS is raw but humorous, shocking but poignant, tragic but uplifting. But most of all it is honest and heartfelt, revealing what it’s really like to live in the center of what has become a massive health crisis.
If you are of a certain age like me, you remember your Saturday morning cartoons interspersed with Schoolhouse Rock!, the series of interstitial educational shorts from the 1970s and 1980s. (You may remember them most for their catchy explanation of how the United States government passes legislation, “I’m Just a Bill.”) One of my favorites from their science series was “The Body Machine,” equating how our digestive system works to keep the body running smoothly through the lens of a machine. And indeed, the body itself is a fascinating machine. But like all machines, sometimes the body doesn’t work the way it should. And unlike non-organic machines, the same problem in two different body machines can look very different. This idea of illness as both a shared and an individual experience is the heart of Nadia Shammas’s anthology “CORPUS” – – to break down the barriers of the very personal and individual nature of illness so that we all find a shared thread of life experience within our own sufferings.
Shammas segments her anthology into three sections: “Physical,” “Mental,” and “Medical,” the latter focusing on the American healthcare system. Within each of these, creators open up about what makes their bodies not work as they should, everything from allergies to colitis to chronic pain to anxiety to depression. I imagine for even the strongest of souls, writing and drawing about what ails them was incredibly cathartic; they can personify their disease in a way that they and anyone can understand. David Stoll and Vita Ayala use a “Venom” like spider to explain Ayala’s experiences with finding treatment for chronic pain in “With a Bang not a Whimper.” Venom himself makes his appearance in Shammas’s own retelling of growing up a diabetic child in “Low.” Throughout the section on mental illness, the illness at the heart of the story becomes a ghost, a reaper, a never-ending spiral of obsession . . . whatever form the author and artist deem fit to best explain their relationship to this illness in a way that the layperson will recognize, empathize, and understand.
Other times, the manifestation remains less corporeal, such as Brian Level’s “A Recurring Interruption,” Shing Yin Khor’s “Double Double,” and “Choking Hazard,” by Ryan King and Alabaster Pizzo The focus in stories such as these is the effect of the illness on the person, rather than what the illness is itself. In these stories, the art that is front and center. In the case of Level’s work, creative paneling with a 5×6 grid shows his protagonist’s descent into an unnamed illness (perhaps respiratory as a set of lungs comprises this background), the grid breaking the scene apart to make plain the man’s broken body. “Choking Hazard,” puts a pop-Art color palette on King’s family’s hoarding disorder, emphasizing how innocent the desire to have it all broke his mother and sister but it wouldn’t break him. “Double Double” uses a sketchbook style and uneven tracing to show just what having double visit made the world look like to them.
As someone who has suffered from varying mental illnesses all her life only diagnosed formally in the last decade, the “Mental” section of the work was of most interest, and what left me the most moved. Anyone with mental illness can sometime tell you what a struggle it is to put what they are feeling into tangible thought when physical symptoms aren’t present or unique to that illness, and I was not alone in having this difficulty (which is most likely why I didn’t get those formal diagnoses until I was into my 30s). The tears that rolled down my face as I read these tales were tears of sadness and pain, reliving my own traumas of putting into words why I was the way I was in the hopes that family and friends would understand – – which of course, they didn’t. (It goes without saying that one should read this book with their own emotional capacities in mind, stepping away when the subject matter is too much for their psyche to handle.) But those tears were also those of gratitude and relief, for every single story in this section is one step closer to wider acceptance and understanding of the most misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and stigmatized of maladies.
If there is any weak section to this work, it is in “Medical.” My impression from the solicit and from Shammas’s foreword was that this section would focus on illnesses of, and within, the healthcare system, particularly the American healthcare system. A few of the selections, such as “Straight to Voicemail” by Mark Bouchard and Stellaida and “Out of Pocket” by Alison and Libby Van Bunte, take on the financial tolls of healthcare in America. What is left after that is a hodgepodge of stories that seem to have been shoehorned into this final section because they didn’t seem to fit in the previous two. The debate over American healthcare as an industry continues at fever pitch, whether it’s the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the disparity in healthcare opportunities based on race and/or income, or the fight that some (particularly women) face to find doctors willing and able to understand and act on their concerns. There’s much to probe when it comes to a sector that turns the basic need of good health into a monetized commodity, and to not tackle this on a larger scale is this anthology’s greatest disservice.
With “CORPUS,” Shammas hopes that readers see themselves reflected in a new way, perhaps finding love and hope in the throes of pain. It’s a corpus of the body physical, but more importantly, it’s a corpus of the body of hope that moves us from survival to true life.
