Cartoons are funny…. sometimes. But cartoons often deal with extremely serious subjects. One of my favourite comic books is called the Two Lives of Penelope and it tells the story of a Belgian doctor who works for Médecins sans frontières in war-torn Syria. She can’t settle back into to everyday life when she returns home to Belgium to see her daughter. Her daughter’s tribulations are so trite in comparison to the death and destruction she sees on assignment. Her emotional burden is easily illustrated by the cartoon. She carries a bleeding child in her breast pocket. It represents the suffering she has seen and cannot ignore, even while she is in her safe and familiar home.

I didn’t read comics much when I was a child. I was probably too serious. And, I associated them with superheroes and jokes that I didn’t always get. But, once I realised the power of the comic to tell serious stories, I found that they were just as good, if not better, than serious literature. Comics are at the same time more structured than a novel and more free. More structured because they show you the characters. You don’t get to imagine them. More free, because you have to connect the images and jump across the gap from picture to picture. To read the cartoon, you have to fill in the space between the images on your own. What an adventure!

Cartoons tell so many serious stories, from the death of a child (Rosalie Lightening) to the loss of a home to forest fires (A Fire Story), or the experience of a parent’s descent into dementia (Tangles). There is something unputdownable about a serious cartoon.