Homebrewed Remedy

A review of the comic book memoir Fights: One Boy’s Triumph Over Violence

I work in healthcare. With recent events, it can’t be coincidence that while reading Joel Christian Gill’s Fights: One Boy’s Triumph Over Violence (available through Oni Press), I started thinking about violence being like a virus, a unique strain in each human being. It’s infectious, easily able to be transferred from bully to victim, yet the symptoms and outcome for each new “patient” can be almost impossible to predict. The idea still holds up at least from an artistic standpoint, and Gill’s book makes the case for it very well.

In Boston, thanks in part to cartoonists like Cathy Leamy, there are efforts in some medical libraries to dedicate sections to comics related to medicine, however tangential. The selections can be vast, ranging from Pedro and Me to From Hell. From an objective standpoint, Fights deserves to be in such a selection as a psychological study, impressive and even painful in its thoroughness. From a metaphorical point of view, Gill’s autobiographical book dissects his own history, including the people he grew up fighting against and those who stood with him. In the end, he can only come out with the conclusion that he survived. In the end,that’s all the author needs to know and all the reader wants.