Some time back, I got an e-mail alerting me to the existence of a graphic novel called CANCER VIXEN. I say "graphic novel" but that's a slip, because it's actually a memoir rather than a novel. A memoir in comic book form.

Think of MAUS, the Holocaust cartoon featuring the genocidal Germans as cats and the victim Jews as mice, and you get an idea of the quality.

What soon struck me, as I began leafing through the pages, was the strong sense of girl which came through to me. It's a cartoon book which is very much about a woman's situation, facing breast cancer, a potentially fatal disease, when she's 43 years old and is scheduled to get married, and to get married for the very first time, real soon now.

I can't draw at all, so I was really mind-boggled as I thought of how much work must have gone into all this, page after page after page of stuff.

I personally do not expect to find myself ever facing breast cancer, though it is a fact that men sometimes do, since the breasts of a male replicate, in large measure, the physiology of the female.

What is really interesting is the peek it gives me into the world of a woman. This, after all, is a woman who is very much focused on self-assessment, wargaming her situation and, constantly, assessing the people around her.

The book opens like this, putting you in the picture (no pun intended):

"What happens when a shoe-crazy, lipstick-obsessed, wine-swilling, pasta-slurping, fashion-fanatic, single-forever, about-to-get-married big-city girl cartoonist (me, Marisa Acocella) with a fabulous life finds A LUMP IN HER BREAST?"

After that text, we see a picture of her swimming. This is how the cancer showed up: she was swimming and started to wonder why her arm was hurting as she swam.

Already we're into a different world, wildly remote from mine. My one and only lipstick experience involves accompanying my sister and one of her friends to a lipstick shop near the Devonport cafe where we had been having a coffee break. I was staggered by the price these women thought reasonable to pay for a tube of lipstick. I mean, we're just talking about crayons for the lips, right? And how does someone get away with charging that much for what's really just a skin crayon?

Hence, right at the start, there's a strong sense of girl.

Marisa is an intense observer, really cued in to the social dynamics of her situation, much more than I am in situations where I'm the patient. She comes up with stuff like this:

"100,000-watt smiles #2 and #3, now I KNOW I'm in deep ..."

A little later on she comes out with this:

"When a doctor turns his back to you, it's never a good sign."

She's been watching, mapping, picking up on the secret signals. By contrast, I went through my own cancer experience as a sleepwalker.

The laconic wit of this exchange appeals to me:

Very loud friend: "You've NEVER had a mammogram? I'm going to kill you!"

Embattled cartoonist: "Thanks, but I'm doing quite well in that department."

And now, quite early into her graphic memoir, she's into a dialog with her disease, a hooded figure holding what looks like a sickle, hooded but showing enough of the face so that we can see that there is no face.

And she says:

"Listen, Cancer, ya sick bastard ..."

The capital C for "Cancer" is my choice, since the cartoon text at this particular point is hand-lettered in capitals.

In the next frame we see her marriage thoughts:

"I want a dress that's simple and white and kinda tight."

That's something I've never thought about, not once, in the whole fifty years of my life. What kind of wedding dress do I want? Thought never crossed my mind. Not even once. Even though I did end up getting married, twice.

Now she's facing up to the fact that she has to tell the guy she's going to marry that she has this problem. It's very much a girl moment, a behavioral pattern beyond the imagination of the average man:

"I put on 'brave' lipstick by M.A.C. I needed something, anything, that would help me face God willing my future husband ..."

The lipstick, hugely pink, dominates the left side of the frame.

When I began reading CANCER VIXEN, I had one brain-damaged moment when I hit the problem of what an s-mother might be (written "S-MOTHER"). Then I realized that this is her mother who smothers her, so it's a pun, mother/smother.

In one of the early frames, the smother says to her daughter "And you'd better not draw me on the throne." The smother is phoning from the toilet, as we see in the frame a decorative sign saying "LA TOILETTE," so the daughter is flirting with the attractions of insolence, though we don't see her seated on the throne, but, rather, just see the extreme edge of one side of the toilet.

This cartoonist, it emerges, sometimes draws real people into the cartoons that she has published in (I think I have this right) THE NEW YORKER.

She includes what I think is one of her New Yorker cartoons in CANCER VIXEN, and it's drawn a lot smoother. Her own CANCER VIXEN frames have a lot more jerky energy, and she's an energetic innovator when it comes to the business of finding different things to do with the frames.

All in all, quite a good read, and, as indicated above, there were some parts that I found fascinating.