Graphic Resilience: Illness, Identity, and Empowerment in Neelam Kumar’s To Cancer, with Love: A Graphic Novel

The depiction of illness in comics has garnered increasing scholarly attention since the formalization of graphic medicine. This interdisciplinary field reimagines the affective and sociocultural dimensions of illness, disability, and healthcare through the unique affordances of the comics medium. Unlike typical prose-based illness narratives, graphic narratives utilize a multimodal language that enables a layered depiction of medical experiences, allowing readers to engage with illness not just as a clinical condition but as a deeply personal and socially embedded phenomenon. The visual grammar of comics further enables the representation of affective states such as pain, fear, and hope through metaphor, panel transitions, and spatial arrangements, often surpassing the expressive limitations of prose. Despite its growing prominence, graphic medicine remains predominantly Eurocentric, with scholarly discourse largely centered on works produced in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Graphic narratives emerging from non-Western contexts, particularly India, remain significantly underexplored. Addressing this critical gap, the present interview article focuses on To Cancer, with Love: A Graphic Novel (2017) by Neelam Kumar—India’s first graphic pathography—and reads it in conjunction with its prose counterpart, To Cancer, with Love: My Journey of Joy (2015). Through an email interview, Kumar reflects on the artistic and narrative strategies she employs to disrupt stereotypes, cultivate resilience, and depict self-care in the context of illness. The article further explores how the intersection of graphic medicine and Indian cancer culture foregrounds the need to address not only medical treatment but also the psychosocial dimensions of survivorship, gendered experiences of care, and the culturally specific framing of illness and recovery.