Highs and Lows With Mister V

The cartoonist Mister V is often at his best when writing his profane, revealing and detailed memoir comics that always have a specific focus. His DNR series concentrated on his work life as a patient transporter and later a patient processor at a medical center. His more recent autobio comics have been more focused and more potent as a result. Poser, his account of being bullied during eighth grade, is terrifying in its description of just how random a bully's victim can be. It's a brutal story about popularity, hierarchy and sheer social Darwinism. Unlike the more straightforward DNR, there's a more interesting framing device in this story, one that wraps the story of eight grade inside his thirtieth birthday party. Ultimately, Mister V has the young Matt (his real first name) meet adult Matt in a magical realist sequence that's remarkably cathartic, both for the reader and Matt himself.

Many of Mister V's comics are about traumatic events. Poser is the ur-story about his trauma, and how being bullied caused him to distrust authority and strangers for the rest of his life and helped him to become irritable, paranoid and defensive. When he asks his younger self why he never went to his parents, a teacher or anyone else about being bullied, the simple defense was "I ain't no fuckin' narc." The need to conform, to adhere to an ethical system that no one else took seriously, all in an effort to gain popularity, shows just how powerful that kind of peer pressure can be. The most insidious thing about it is that much of this pressure comes from within. Mister V has a remarkable way of relating his memories with a great deal of verisimilitude, perfectly echoing the sheer foulness of teenagers and their interactions in a manner that was at once funny, cruel and entirely credible. When he simply drops out of the race to be popular toward the end of the year (signified by cutting his hair short) and finds that his drawing ability gave him the attention he had been seeking all along, the modern day Mister V muses about how just being yourself in order to be popular sounds like the sappiest of afterschool specials.

Despite Mister V's highly sarcastic, detached persona, his comics actually explore the complexity and pain of emotions on a regular basis. There are any number of panels involving Mister V crying in Poser, for example. The same is true in the first volume of his new trilogy, Mile High: Adventures In Colorado Medical Marijuana. Once again, he wraps the narrative around a potential future where he catches his niece smoking pot from an electronic device, but she catches him smoking from a bong. From there, Mister V goes into a focused, hilarious and frequently insane rant about the hoops he had to jump through in order to obtain medicinal marijuana. Suffering from constant irritable bowel syndrome accompanied by pain and anxiety, pot was one of the few things that ever gave him relief. Mister V takes the reader into the sketchiest of neighborhoods, the sleaziest of scam artists and the fear of being busted by agenda-serving federal agents. The scene where he breaks the news that he's using medicinal marijuana to his generally-disapproving parents is the funniest in the book, as he's soon disabused of the notion that he was going to shock his pot-smoking dad by making this revelation. What I loved most about this book is not that Mister V was extolling the virtues of pot because he loved getting high, but because it genuinely had a positive impact on his life. On his wedding day, for example, he had a huge IBS flare-up that was quieted down by just a few puffs, creating a magical environment that allowed him to live his life in health rather than see him in agony. This book isn't necessarily an argument for marijuana's legalization per se, but rather it's a personal account of the way it's improved his life and the ridiculous bureaucracy he had to wade through in order to get there.

Mister V's art is highly cartoony and stylized (indeed, it's as though Jim Davis drew comics about a foul-mouthed teenager), but he adds a number of effects to give his work more weight and solidity. His use of facial exaggerations and contortions is his go-to signature as an artist, but his increased use of greyscale tones and thick panel borders gives each individual image a greater overall impact. As an artist, Mister V is a plugger, relentlessly drawing page after page until he's gotten better by way of sheer effort. He's developed his own style and voice, and most importantly has begun to learn how to edit himself properly. He could strip things down even further and be even more effective, but there's something to be said for his "more is more" approach as well. His narrative voice is abrasive but amiable, self-deprecating but proud, and harsh but full of unexpected warmth.

Hospital Week: DNR, Books 2 and 3

Mister V's comics are almost relentlessly crude and tangential but in a way that adds to their charm and that reflects the chaos of his life in the medical industry. By slicing up his narrative into bite-size vignettes (a function, in part, of his originally publishing these as webcomics), the pseudonomous Mister V is able to retain some sense of order in the larger narratives while pleasing himself and the reader with whatever interests him in a particular vignette. The second and third volumes of his series DNR detail a significant administrative transition in his job as a medical transporter on the night shift of a busy hospital and then his shift to a patient registration job in the same hospital, respectively. While V is the hero of his own story, he happily depicts himself as less-than-heroic at times, detailing mistakes, failures of his own courage, moments of pettiness and the fact that his brutal bluntness sometimes hurt others. Grounding the narrative in his own weaknesses as a person allows him a platform to address the injustices he sees all around him. One of the overarching themes of the book is the transformation of the hospital from a caring place designed to help its patients to a cynical money-making enterprise built on corporate double-talk, bureaucracy and out-and-out deception. Another theme is his desire for self-improvement and getting a better job, as well as developing as an artist. That ties into the book's end, when his job devolves into finding ways to soak as much money from the patients he encounters as possible, leaving him burned out and incapable of showing compassion.

The second volume, Best In The Nation, is at its best when V brutally takes down the CEO of "Sampla Medical Center", Bob Shakey. (Understandably, all identities in the book have been changed to protect patient and worker confidentiality, including his own.) V is a savage and profane critic who gets at the heart of Shakey's five bullet points that have little to do with medicine and much to do with feel-good doublespeak. He's also kind of an asshole who won't keep his mouth shut, even (and especially) when doing so gets him in trouble--but that's a large part of the entertainment. Immediately, a new axeman is hired to clean house in V's department, and V is told to take a paycut or seek employment elsewhere. This introduces a bizarre element to the story: it's quickly discovered that his new boss has a "leather daddy" profile and that he not only hires a bunch of his dubiously credentialed friends, but that evidence emerges that those who play along with him sexually get promotions. V makes it clear in other portions of the book that he's against homophobia, but the profane nature of his sense of humor and the position he's put  blurs that border in an almost casual manner. Of course, V himself realizes this in the course of the story (like when he says "This is so fucking gay!" about a dumb assignment to a gay co-worker, then slinking off in embarrassment) and offers some self-admonishment. (There's also a long bit in the third book where V goes out of his way to assist a trans person.) The climax of the book, when the tyrannical boss slinks away after an employee he fired at the drop of a hat slapped a harassment lawsuit on him, showed how even the pettiest of tyrants can be laid low when drunk on their own hubris.

This volume balances V's own growing disgruntlement, the frequently disgusting and sometimes hilarious nature of dealing with patients in a hospital setting, the ways in which even the tiniest amounts of power can go to someone's head, how arrogance and simple incompetence can lead to mistakes, and how sometimes the most powerful members of a hospital can be the pettiest. He also mixes in intraoffice intrigue and romance in a way that was certainly interesting but of questionable taste and even relevance, a decision that V admitted in a later strip was something he felt bad about. All told, the second volume is a tight and brisk read, one that reflects his improvement as a cartoonist. His style is best described as kind of a grungy, deranged Jim Davis: huge eyes, exaggerated poses, lots of cocked eyebrows, etc. It works, however, as every character has their own personality and a slightly larger-than-life quality. It also helps make the assorted bodily fluids that pop up throughout the book a bit easier to take as a reader, making them a bit funnier while still losing none of their visceral impact.

The third book, Too Long In The Wasteland, isn't nearly as strong a work. Part of this is that the setting simply isn't as interesting. Working in the patient registration area turned the series from an interesting exploration of the health industry into more of an office conflict story. Indeed, what was supposed to be sweet salvation after years of being puked on turned out to be more of the same: petty infighting, squabbles over the tiniest amounts of power, V's unwillingness to bend to corporate dictates regarding uses scripts in patient encounters, etc. It also meanders quite a bit more and veers off into some pointless bits of scatological humor. Some of the episodes, like one where V goes out on a disastrous date with a co-worker, are quite amusing but overall this collection had a lot of fat to trim. Fortunately, the book ends on a strong note. V essentially ends the story because there is no more story--just him at this same job. Of course, he provides a couple of amusing psych-out endings as well, along with giving as many "where are they now?" updates for other characters as possible. In the end, while V continues to wallop the increasingly-corporate nature of big medicine, he also places the blame on people like himself--cogs in a wheel, unwilling or unable to get off because they need a regular paycheck. At the same time, V also notes that he engaged in a lot of negative cherry picking; even the dumbest and laziest employees still managed to help patients and showed moments of compassion. In the end, what working at the hospital most instilled in him was a desire to create and to get better at it; indeed, there was even one grim strip that showed a suicide fantasy sequence where the only thing that kept him clinging to life was that he had so many ideas he wanted to commit to paper. That was a brutally honest strip, one that was done in the obvious throes of depression. The isolation and alienation that a workplace can create had gotten to him, but art was his only way out.

Mister V's other work tends to be funny and raunchy, blending in genre tropes and extreme, visceral gags. The House of Whorror is a good example of this, as it depicts a Nevada brothel featuring a line-up of women who fall into horror-movie tropes: a prostitute possessed by a demon, a half-fish working girl, a vampire who loves sucking all sorts of bodily fluids, etc. Into this mix comes "Fran", a putative Sex Doll of Frankenstein who escaped her maker's clutches and found herself working at The House and the witch who runs it as part of a very special auction: a virgin. There's actually very little nudity or sex in this comic; instead, Mister V prefers to lean on the horror side of things for laughs. At the same time, he doesn't glorify or play down the negative aspects of sex work in this book, noting that while the brothel's madam helped them when they were down and out, she still exploits them. The men (mostly government and religious types) who use their services are depicted as creeps or worse, often as a means of giving them their comeuppance. There's almost a sweetness at work in this story that involves a Candide-like innocent in Fran making her way in the world without totally losing her ability to care for others and see the other working women as friends of a sort, as fellow freaks that are all in it together. That genuine love of the individual characters gives them a bit of depth and context, even as it's all a background for sexual abasement on the part of both john and working girls. Hitting that sweet spot between warmth and nastiness is Mister V's specialty, as the best moments in DNR were cynical precisely because of how much V cared about what was going on.

The same isn't quite as true in Mister V's shorter comics, collected in his Arborcides minicomics. For every funny concept, like the Purple People Greeter (a monster who works as a Wal-Mart greeter), there's a misfire like the over-the-top parodies of communism in the strips featuring Mao and Karl Marx. What's missing here is the humanity that informs his other work. The gags here for the most part aren't even necessarily all that inspired; instead, they're simply visceral, angry and over-the-top. I get that Mister V wants to make fun of communist-chic, but he beats it into the ground instead of letting the gag go after a couple of pages. The problem with a cartoonist whose only mode is over-the-top, all of the time is that there's no modulation between page to page and story to story. There's no subtlety possible, no room for reader interpretation. Mister V strikes me as a humorist with a brain, not just a gag writer who wants to gross out his readers. The reason why his other comics are so much more effective is because of his ability to modulate between extreme scenes and scenes that actually treat the characters as characters, instead of joke delivery systems.

Graphic Medicine: Disrepute and DNR

The Welsh physician who uses the nom de plume of Thom Ferrier created the term "graphic medicine" to refer to comics about the practice of and participation in the field of medicine. The equivalent of a general practitioner in the US, his comics detail the daily life of a family doctor who has to see every kind of ailment imaginable, as well as his own mental state in performing these sorts of duties. The cartoonist "Mister V" is a former medical transporter (ie, a gurney and wheelchair pusher) at a hospital in Denver who's at the lowest end of the totem pole in patient care, yet his keen eye allowed him to document what it was like to live in a perpetual state of crisis in a health care setting. Both artists emphasize the raw, naked truth of stress on the job, dealing with difficult and flat-out insane patients, and living with life and death. Both artists create a narrative of sorts through a series of short vignettes. Neither artist is a remarkable draftsman, yet they both get their point across.  Let's take a closer look at Ferrier's book Disrepute first.

One of the most striking images in Disrepute is a photo of Ferrier with the phrase "I am a shit doctor" scrawled on top of it. It gets at the heart of Ferrier's overall project: humanizing the medical profession and getting the kind of mental illness that can haunt healthcare providers out in the open. Ferrier goes on to discuss his being a "sensitive" child who fainted at the sight of blood and how he overcame it as a surgeon. A recurring feature throughout the book are profiles of his "regular attenders": the patients who see him the most. He admits, for example, that he holds antipathy toward one patient because he reminds him of a man who stole one of his girlfriends, while at the same time admitting that patients who are extra nice to him certainly doesn't hurt in how he interacts with them. Another strip finds Ferrier about to give an apparently drug-seeking patient what for when he finds him on his schedule, when the patient just came by to give him a bottle of liquor as a thank-you for helping him feel better. Ferrier is candid and every bit as hard on himself as he is on others.

Ferrier also spends a lot of time talking about mental health. In a fictional story, his stand-in was obviously shattered to hear that one of his patients had committed suicide after the doctor disclosed his own battles with depression and finding life meaningless.  Ferrier was also saddened in real life when another patient never returned after Ferrier declined to talk about his own experiences with depression. A GP having to deal with mental illness on a regular basis must be astonishingly difficult, especially when there's often so little that they can do about it. In terms of the art, Ferrier is at his best when he's cartoony and lets his pages breathe a bit. His more realistic strips feel cluttered and choppy as he frantically tries to cram as many panels and as much information on the page as possible. On the other hand, his looser, scribbly and airier pieces have a much better flow as comics without losing any of their impact. Ferrier's work is important because so little has been written in comics from a provider's perspective, years after a wave of illness-specific comics done from the point of view of the patient. Ferrier is still getting his legs under him as a cartoonist, but both his draftsmanship and his storytelling chops have evolved as he's continued to write his stories.

From the opposite end of the medical world's pecking order comes "Mister V" and DNR. This is a funny, profane, gross and cynical look at the experience of being a patient transporter in a busy hospital. The job is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: taking patients via gurney or wheelchair from their hospital room or spot in the ER to someplace else (usually for a radiological study like a CT scan). Of course, this doesn't account for mentally unstable patients, patients who are too big to push easily or lift, puking patients, patients soiling themselves (sometimes intentionally), weird patients hitting on him, etc. Though the book is broken up into vignettes and jumps back and forth in time a bit, Mister V creates a narrative centered around the unrequited crush he has on a CT tech named Kim. Being around her is about the only thing he likes about his job and is one of the reasons he elects to keep it, even as it starts to interfere with college.

The potential romantic narrative is probably the least interesting thing about the book, even if it gives all of this craziness structure. That said, the bitterly unhappy ending to that story was interesting and certainly informed the tone of the rest of the book. Where Mister V does his best work is when he does an incendiary profile on one of his co-workers. The story of one CT tech he calls the "Enemaster" for her proclivity for giving unnecessary barium enemas was funny enough, but pairing her with her arch-enemy, an abusive nurse, was even funnier when the nurse was forced to get an emergency CT. Mister V's stories about his own nemesis, a fellow transporter named Rodney, were also some of the funniest stuff in the book, in part because Rodney's laziness always got the best of "Matt's" (his stand-in's name) conscientiousness. Mister V's art is all manic scrawl, with every character possessing huge, cartoony eyes. It's a perfect match for the subject matter even if it is a little wearying to look at for nearly 300 pages. What's interesting is that despite the cynicism of the author, it's clear that moments when his actions might have saved a patient's life or possibly contributed to the death of a patient clearly shook him up. It's the adrenaline rush of a life-or-death situation without the training or hands-on approach with which the adrenaline can dissipate; instead, there was just the body-shaking experience of being so close to a tough situation. The same thing went for patients in the hospital whom he struck up friendships with who either died or managed to bounce back. Mister V was in a very interesting experience because many patients strike up such friendships because transporters are the most approachable of all health care professionals, providing a service that goes far beyond their job description. I'll be curious to see the next two volumes of this series, as Mister V movies into other jobs at the hospital.