An Interview with Brian Fies

Two tools almost unique to comics are their use of metaphor and their ability to manipulate time and space. That’s their superpower.

Last month, Amaris talked about reading Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies while in the waiting at the UNM Cancer Research and Treatment Center. This Eisner award-winning graphic memoir is being re-released in March to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. Fies has also expanded the memoir, adding details about what happened after the original ending.

Describe your comics journey—how did you get into making comics?

I’ve loved comics as long as I can remember, and was always a good artist for my age. I read both comic books and newspaper comic strips, and didn’t really differentiate between the two. They were all telling stories with words and drawings.

I began submitting strips to newspaper syndicates when I was fourteen or fifteen, certain I was going to become the youngest syndicated cartoonist in history. I didn’t. But even then, an editor would occasionally scribble a word of feedback or encouragement on the rejection slip that provided enough oxygen to keep me going. I also submitted superhero samples to DC and Marvel, and in my early twenties got a little try-out from DC that, again, led to nothing.

So like a lot of people trying to break into creative fields, I failed. I continued to submit comic strips to syndicates and occasionally did some illustration or cartoon work, but through my twenties and thirties I paid the bills with completely different, good, interesting careers. Meanwhile I kept drawing—couldn’t stop drawing!—so my skills stayed sharp.

In my early forties, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to tell my family’s story somehow, because cancer diagnosis and treatment is a treacherous path with too many unexpected twists, but I wasn’t sure how. I’d been a journalist and freelance writer, so I thought maybe I’d write something.

Then one day I took my mother to chemotherapy and did a little sketch of her sitting in the chair getting an I.V., and realized that in that one cartoon I’d captured more about the experience than I could have written in a thousand words.

I decided to tell our story as a comic, began serializing it online, and that became Mom’s Cancer, which led to the comics career I’ve enjoyed ever since.

How did you develop your voice?

I’ve always been a decent writer with, I think, a distinctive voice I’ve developed since high school. After college I was a newspaper reporter for a few years, and there was nothing like having to write several hundred words per day on an enormous variety of topics to make you fast and facile. You can’t sit around waiting for the muse to strike when deadline is an hour away and your paycheck is on the line. I learned the power of using exactly the right words to tell a tight, well-structured story.

I think my development as an artist was unusual because, until I was about twenty, I thought I was going to draw like Neal Adams or Alex Raymond. Not exactly a “realistic” style, but a sort of heightened representational reality, with lots of cross-hatching and anatomical fastidiousness. Then I realized a couple of things.

One, I was not going to be the next Adams or Raymond. Two, nobody wanted to buy art that looked like a bad knock-off of them. So I sat down one summer to deliberately develop an entirely different style, a less fussy, more cartoony, “ligne claire” style of cartooning that evolved into how my art looks today.

My standard advice is that everybody begins by copying and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the best way to find your own voice is to draw from life yourself. Don’t draw a hand like Jack Kirby or Burne Hogarth or Charles Schulz did. Look at the hand on the end of your own wrist and draw that. Draw everyday stuff: people, cars, houses, trees. Simplify those drawings by seeing how much detail you can remove and still have them look like what they are. Congratulations: you’re a cartoonist interpreting the world in your own style.

What are some of the joys and challenges of making nonfiction comics?

Probably because I was once a journalist, I approach all my comics work, both fiction and nonfiction, as journalism. I try to tell the story as directly and honestly as I can. The joy is getting it right. Knowing that I put the right words together with the right drawings to make exactly the point I intended to make is tremendously satisfying.

One challenge of nonfiction work is research. You have to get it right, and the challenge is doubled because you need to get both your facts and your images straight. You want to draw the right clothes, the right buildings, the right landscapes, the right people. It’s all simplified and pared down to as near its essence as you can draw it, but that just increases the need to get the details right.

And then, after you’ve done all the research, you need to let it go. Some nonfiction graphic novelists make the mistake of wanting to show all their work. Nobody wants to read that. You have to do the research, absorb it, and let it inform the story so that when you draw a street light or a business suit you know it’s right but the reader never even notices it. It’s just part of the book’s world.

If you’re watching a movie and say, “Wow, what a great special effect!” the filmmakers made the mistake of pulling you out of the story. Likewise, if you’re reading a book and say, “Wow, this author sure did a lot of research!” I think that author failed.

What could comics do for your family’s cancer story that prose couldn’t?

I mentioned my epiphany the day I took Mom to chemo. Two tools almost unique to comics are their use of metaphor and their ability to manipulate time and space. That’s their superpower.

In Mom’s Cancer, at one point early in the book I had to explain to readers what exactly was wrong with my mother and what doctors planned to do about it. If I were writing in prose, it would have been several dull paragraphs of exposition. But as a comic, I could draw my mother as the character in the “Operation” board game, illustrating her disease and describing her treatment.

Anyone who’s played that game got my point: this was going to be a delicate process that demanded careful handling or my mother was going to die. That metaphor delivered the information much more clearly and economically than I could have in prose.

There are several instances in Mom’s Cancer where I play with time and space—where eight near-identical panels span several weeks or one panel shows the changing of the seasons. Comics panels, as well as the spaces between them, can depict an infinitude of space and time, from moments to millennia. Movies can do some of that, too, but I think not as well as comics.

The twentieth anniversary edition of Mom’s Cancer comes out in March, with several new pages. Can you tell us a little bit about how you expanded it?

The original Mom’s Cancer, both the webcomic and the 2006 book published by Abrams ComicArts, ended where I thought our family’s cancer story ended. It turns out I was premature. More happened after the book was published, and this twentieth anniversary edition gives me a chance to give the story the ending it deserves. We didn’t touch the original, but the new edition adds twenty-two pages of comics that tell the rest of the story, plus some forewords and an afterword that offers some other insight.

One of the new pages in the anniversary edition.

Mom’s Cancer has had a remarkable life I never could have foreseen. I thought I was writing a roadmap for others following a similar path behind us, and it has been that. But it also became much more.

It has been in print all these years, which is unusual for any book. It’s taught in medical schools. Two or three times a year, I talk to groups of medical students who read Mom’s Cancer because it gives them insight into what medicine looks like from their future patients’ perspective. It was also one of the books that inspired a new and growing field of medical humanities called graphic medicine, which gets written up in medical journals and holds international conferences every year.

I never could have predicted that, but it turned out to be one of the most gratifying outcomes of writing Mom’s Cancer.

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Brian Fies is a writer and cartoonist whose other graphic novels are Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, A Fire Story, and The Last Mechanical Monster. He has also done many short-form comics and been published in magazines and anthologies. Brian lives in northern California with his wife, Karen, and dislikes writing about himself in the third person.

He keeps a lively blog at brianfies.blogspot.com.

You can follow Brian on Facebook as well.