“Immortal Lightheartedness,” Councilor

Access this comic as a PDF or read below.

Comic Takeaways

  • Rhetorically focused autobiographical comics can provide a lens that re-humanizes seemingly sterile clinical healthcare experiences, such as those around fertility care.
  • Humor, and the lightheartedness it can manifest, can be a useful form of self-care for queering fraught healthcare experiences and normalizing meanings associated with them.
  • Comics also have the potential to create agentive, intergenerational, and non-normative stories around family formation, identity, and values.
  • Comic creation can offer a way to inventively process and share challenging healthcare decisions that have shaped our and others’ existence, and it can also bring attention to the rhetorical dynamics of communicating such experiences.

Artist Statement

I am equal parts cartoonist and rhetorical scholar—any comic I draw is informed by my training as a rhetorician, and any scholarship I write comes through my visual storytelling lens as a cartoonist. My comics are nonfiction and occasionally academic, but more often they are about the experience of being a transgender and transitioning person in the world. My most recent transition has been becoming a parent—a dad to our baby Robin, who turns one year old the week I’m drafting this statement. Throughout our IVF journey, my partner’s pregnancy, Robin’s birth, and sporadically during the tumult of this first year, I’ve drawn comics documenting the experience. My most important audience is Robin. I want her to have a strong sense of who she is, where she comes from, to whom she belongs and who belongs to her. I also hope to eventually publish a book of these comics that speaks particularly to queer parents, to dads, and to the many people who don’t feel seen or heard in the slew of mommy blogs, podcasts, and parent lit. How do we make meaning around families, especially when they fall outside the norm? How can we humanize the often-sterile world of fertility care? What effect might sharing stories of queer parenting have in the public sphere writ large?

Going to the doctor had always been a fraught experience for me—a mix of anxiety, shame, and fear; it was also a source of comic creation that I overlooked. MK Czerwiec, aka “Comic Nurse,” is the first person who taught me that you can make comics about healthcare experiences. Discovering MK’s work opened up a world of empowerment and curiosity around these experiences, and I started to make comics about the medical aspects of gender transition. I went into doctors’ offices with more confidence, knowing that if I had a bad or awkward encounter, I’d have great material for a comic. Throughout the process of fertility treatment, pregnancy, and birth, those same tools for storytelling and meaningmaking through comics helped me process complex experiences and share them with others.

Choosing a sperm donor—the genetic other half of your (hopeful) future child(ren)—is an impossible task, almost laughably so. At reputable sperm banks, all donors have been thoroughly screened. Everyone looks good on paper. Having a baby is perhaps one of the most fundamental human experiences, and yet my partner and I were choosing sperm identified by a five-digit number, the process being a strange combination of online dating, online shopping, and electronic medical records. I don’t know how other people go about making this decision, but we needed a story for ourselves to help us make sense of this impossible choice, and I wanted to share that story with our future child as a comic, as well as other people who will be in that spot.

There is a lot of stigma and shame related to infertility, including not being woman enough to be a mother or virile enough of a man to get a woman pregnant. I know people whose parents never told them they were the product of donor sperm, that their biological father was not the one who raised them. Since we first conceived of having a family through our word, I knew that I did not want my trans identity to be some weird secret to our kids, something they “find out” or that we have an awkward talk about when they are teenagers. Being trans is part of the story of who I am, and it’s part of the story of who they are, too—I want them to claim this as a point of pride, or at least give them a powerful framing of their origin story. All of this is rhetorical negotiation at its core—making meaning through language for very complex experiences without singular fixed meanings.

I painted “Immortal Lightheartedness” on Bristol paper with Sumi ink and inexpensive brushes, and I shaded it with gray washes using the ink. I often sketch out a rougher version in a notebook or write down key phrases or images before I commit to the final paper. I learned to make comics from my teacher Lynda Barry, which means I work by hand with ink on paper and don’t do anything digital besides scan the pages. Among her books and YouTube videos, Lynda’s Making Comics is especially helpful, as is Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Theory and Practice; both of these books can take you through a self-guided comics-making experience.

References

Brunetti, Ivan. (2011). Cartooning: Theory and practice. Yale University Press.

Barry, Lynda. (2019). Making comics. Drawn and Quarterly.

Click on an image below to open a larger version.

Panel 1: Narration at the top reads, how do you go about choosing a sperm donor? KC and Cate are sitting and looking at a computer screen that reads, California Cryobank, 243 donors, then a list of attributes like height, eye color, hair texture, blood type, education, ancestry. KC says, Ok, wow, and Cate responds, yeah. Panel 2: Narration reads, it’s a little like online dating for the genetic other half of your child. Only the computer screen is visible here, with cheeky profile names for donors like trilingual cutie, rockin’ computer guy, tall and talented, fit and focused. Panel 3: Narration reads, logistical factors help narrow down the search. There are two checkboxes on the screen, both checked: CMV negative and Open aka willing to be known. An asterisk clarifies that open means agrees to at least one meeting after child turns 18. Panel 4: Narration reads, we’re both white, so we’re saving the POC and Jewish donors—who are fewer—for those families. KC and Katie are side by side facing the reader, and KC says, okay, that gives us … 18. Panel 5: Narration reads, then we start listening to interviews. KC and Katie have flat, annoyed expressions while the audio from the computer plays a donor’s voice saying, like I just want to own buildings and buy a lot of property and have a yacht like my dad. Panel 6: KC and Katie look at each other and say loudly and in unison, nope.
Panel 1: KC and Katie are in front of the computer again. Katie, who is now wearing a white shirt to connote a different day, says okay, next. Audio from the computer says, I’m here with donor number … Panel 2: Audio from a donor interview coming from the computer says, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Katie, drinking some water, says, sure. KC says, seems fine. Panel 3: Narration reads, we are evaluating candidates for a position. Just KC is in the frame, and he says, Huh. This one’s a champion ballroom dancer… oh, and this one’s a vegetarian skateboarder. Katie, from off panel, says, add ‘em to the list. Panel 4: Narration at the top reads, not unlike a hiring committee I was on recently at work. KC is in a collared shirt at a conference table, with papers in front of him. To his right, a female colleague with curly hair and a botanical print shirt says, let’s bring in the next candidate. Narration at the bottom reads, but this is a lifetime appointment. Panel 5: Narration reads, we looked for folks who looked similar to me, maybe had some similar traits. KC is wearing a collared shirt now, as this process has gone on many days. KC says, this guy loves to cook. That’s nice. 03666 loves the beach, athletic, clean cut. Katie says, let’s see what they sound like. Panel 6: Narration reads, or some things we didn’t have. KC says, well, this guy is 6 foot 3. And a scientist. Okay… Katie replies, wow, this dude speaks 6 languages and looks like Kurt Russell.
Panel 1: Narration reads, the interviews, the human voice, gave us most everything we needed. Are we drawn in or pushed away? A male shaped head, neck and shoulders with a big question mark instead of facial features says, being a window washer would be cool. I’m afraid of heights so I’d get over it, be a bird, make faces at people. Panel 2: Narration reads, it’s a nearly immediate visceral response. Sitting at a round table with an open chair in between them in yet different outfits, Katie says, are you someone we’d want to know? KC says, would we want to hang out? Panel 3: Narration reads, we chose a few different donors over the years. KC and Katie are each looking at their own computers, KC in a v-neck shirt and Katie in a white long-sleeved one. KC says, this guy is a musician and a painter! Katie says, this guy swims and loves his mom. Aw. Panel 4: Narration reads, but the one we picked this time is the best of them all. KC and Katie are back to the present now, in different outfits again. Katie says, his voice is kind and sweet. KC says, he’s not precious, nervous, or arrogant. He sounds clear, grounded. In unison, they say, perfect. Panel 5: Narration reads, the clincher, though, is what he hopes to contribute to the world via his donation. KC and Katie look at each other while listening to the donor’s audio interview, which says, an open mind and… Panel 6: The audio interview sentence concludes, immortal lightheartedness, which is written in large, all capital letters. KC and Katie both have individual thought bubbles with multiple exclamation marks. KC’s eyes are wide, as is his smile. Katie smiles with an assuredness.
Panel 1: Narration reads, this is something we do not have. KC and Katie are walking a small dog on a leash. KC says to Katie, man, did you hear the news today? Katie says ugh, no. In the air around them are the words covid, general despair, humanity, climate change, politics. Panel 2: Narration reads, we can be perpetually heavy-hearted—and always resisting that. KC is carrying two dinner plates, bags under his eyes, and says to Katie, can we watch something uplifting on TV? Katie suggests, the voice? Panel 3: Narration reads, we chose you—you who are growing now in your mother’s belly—to bring openness and lightheartedness into the world. Katie is in bed, one hand on her noticeably pregnant belly. She says, I think we’re playing a game. I press my belly and they kick back. KC, standing by the bed, says, wow! Panel 4: Narration reads, along with empathy, kindness, critical thinking, art, community, and justice. A baby in a polka-dotted onesie and a striped bib reads the book, A is for Activist. Panel 5: Narration reads, we conceived of you, created you, and soon will welcome you into the world. KC and Katie are on a deck. Standing and holding her pregnant belly, Katie says, this is so surreal. KC, sitting with a notebook and pen, responds, totally wild. Panel 6: The narration completes the sentence in the previous panel: We conceived of you, created you, and soon will welcome you into the world, you immortally lighthearted being. In the center of the panel is a baby, perhaps still a fetus, surrounded by rings of color that fill the space, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. This last panel is the only one in full color.

Artist Bio

KC Councilor (he/him) is a cartoonist and communication professor at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT. He earned his PhD in Communication Arts/Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also learned how to make comics with Lynda Barry. His first book, Between You and Me: Transitional Comics, came out in 2019. He has published comics in Mutha Magazine, the Rumpus, Women’s Studies in Communication, Social Science & Medicine, QED, Annals of Internal Medicine, Literature & Medicine, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. He is currently working on a new book of comics about parenting, masculinity, and queer worldmaking.

To Cite

Councilor, KC. (2023). Immortal lightheartedness [comics and artist statement]. Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 6(4), http://medicalrhetoric.com/graphicRHM/home/archive/column-1/councilor/