Shelley Wall, "Grief Changes"
Color and shape dominate Shelley Wall’s comic, “Grief Changes.” A medical illustrator, Keats scholar, and active member of the graphic medicine community, Wall’s meditation on loss emphasizes the added value of text and image collaboration. Throughout, Wall foregrounds vertical space to emphasize the destabilizing effects of grief.
On the comic’s first page, three wavy-lined panels enclose watercolor drawings that carry the weight of the scene. The frayed edges of the lines of the panels suggest fissure and cracking. The realism of the first panel, a close-up of a phone – offering connection – gives way to the scene in the second below it. The perspective is skewed; we are looking at the corner of a room from a vantage point that feels unsteady. The room is empty, apart from a slim cane that leans precariously against the wall. Wall’s narrative has progressed and we are already lower, and on less stable ground. We learn from the text, too, that a loved one is “already gone.”
In the third panel of this introductory page, we’re in freefall. Inside a long, rectangular panel that resembles a test tube, a woman plunges in a wash of greens and blues. She’s caught in an undertow that forces her down further as she falls into “a new grief.”