Stitches.

Small, David (author).

Prolific, Caldecott Medal–winning Small makes the leap to the graphic novel with a spare and unflinching memoir. Set on a black page, the haunting words I was six preface a scene of 1950s, soot-stained Detroit. Successive panels dolly slowly in on a boy sprawled out on the floor, drawing. “Mama had her little cough” breaks the reverie, and we’re off into the nightmare of Small’s upbringing, dominated by his mother’s hateful silences and his physician father’s pipe-smoking impassivity. At 14, the boy goes in for minor throat surgery (which was secretly for the cancer his father gave him by subjecting him, as a baby, to X-rays) and wakes up maimed and effectively muted with a severed vocal cord—an outcome made all the more devastating because it is so potently metaphoric of his family life. The suffocating silences of the household swell in grays and blacks with more nuance than lesser artists achieve with full rainbows of color, and Small’s stark lines and intricacies of facial expression obliterate the divide between simplicity and sophistication. Like other “important” graphic works it seems destined to sit beside—think no less than Maus—this is a frequently disturbing, pitch-black funny, ultimately cathartic story whose full impact can only be delivered in the comics medium, which keeps it palatable as it reinforces its appalling aspects. If there’s any fight left in the argument that comics aren’t legitimate literature, this is just the thing to enlighten the naysayers.