STITCHES BY DAVID SMALL

In the beginning of the spring semester of 2013 I had picked up about ten graphic novels from the Swirlbul Library, ranging from The Killing Joke to Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth to Maus. In addition to these incredibly influential pieces of comic history, I had picked up a quiet graphic novel, David Small’s memoir Stitches (2009). Small, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author, had a childhood that he felt he finally needed to confront head-on. And so Stitches was born. Nominated for Young People’s Literature in the 2009 National Book Awards, Stitches is a time capsule of a dysfunctional family in 1950s Detroit trying to maintain a conventional family exterior while remaining mute behind closed doors.

I WAS SIX

           
The memoir starts off with the scenery off with the scenery of Detroit – dark, desolate, doomed for what’s to come in the following decades. Small paints the scenery with dark undertones of black and gray, first capturing the gaseous factories near the docks, and then easing into the suburban neighborhood into the house of little David, whose lying in the living room drawing with crayons.

David’s family seems to be like every other family in the Detroit suburbs: a father who practices in the medical field, a mother who stays at home, and an older brother who is just entering puberty. Seems normal right? Wrong. David was born with slight sinus problems, so his father would give him small dosages of radiation (as that was considered safe in those days), enemas, and frequent x-ray sessions. His mother would dominate the house with silence. They knew she was angry when she’d slam cupboards or move her fork a little to the right at the dinner table. David’s dad expressed his emotions through a punching bag in the basement. His older brother would beat on a drum in his room. How did David get through his emotions? Getting sick.

As a child, David has to create his own world in order to get through the mysterious terrors of everyday life. Religion is not a source of escape, but fear and wonder. His grandmother is a crotchety, intimidating woman who has her own story that David’s mother tells. There’s something very frightening in one of the hallways at dad’s hospital building. And no one understands that he thinks having long hair is how Alice got to enter Wonderland. No one understands the anger and frustration and loneliness that builds up in little David. So he escapes through his imagination and drawings. Later on he’d realize that this is how he’d truly be able to escape his home.

I WAS ELEVEN

It’s interesting how once people are let into your home, you instantly change the way you interact inside your own home. When David’s mother hosts the Hospital Women’s Auxiliary Bridge Club, as David admires the details of Mrs. Dillon’s choice of drink and her taste in music, he also couldn’t help but notice the change in his mother amongst friends.

But this was also a time that he noticed a change in his self—a specific change, to be specific. Mrs. Dillon is the first to notice it. A growth begins to grow on the side of David’s neck. However, even when Mrs. Dillon—and later on, other friends of the family—tells the parents to take him to the doctor to get it checked, they use the excuse of financial problems to keep from taking David to the hospital. In between three years, as the growth began to take up more of his neck, his father found more things to spoil his mother with, in hopes to keep her happy.

I WAS FOURTEEN

After three and a half years after his first diagnosis, David is finally sent to the hospital for what seems to him to be a simple procedure to remove the growth. After two surgeries, he wakes up with a once “smooth young throat slashed and laced back up like a bloody boot” (191). 

He now knew what it was like to be permanently silenced. Before the surgery, he grew up in silence, yet finding his way to cope through with it. Now, he was without a voice both at home and at school. "My silence was no longer a matter of choice" (187). The tension between him and his mother had reached it height, as they seemed to have an equal understanding that she wasn't happy to have to pay for his surgery. But the moment when their tension loosened was when she visited him at his hospital bed before surgery, and she asked him if she could give him anything. David was shocked, as he didn't see any reason why she would ask him something so motherly. Little did he know at the time, that she half-expected him not to live through the surgery, so she got him what he wanted: a copy of Nabokov's Lolita, since she had originally burned it with the rest of his books.

But after the surgery, he finds a letter from his mom written to his grandmother, stating: "David has been home for two weeks now, of course the boy does not know it was cancer" (204). This is the moment when he truly felt alone, abandoned. What if he didn't survive the surgery? What if he went to sleep and never woke up? He would've never known. His mother gave him his book, his father acted so nice to him, all because they didn't expect him to make it. Or at least, just in case. 

He learned to survive on his own by this point. But it wouldn't be until a year later that he finally detached himself from the stitches that tied him to his family. 

I WAS FIFTEEN

Unfortunately, I think the last chapter is perhaps the weakest, for though it does show the moment that David had realized none of his parents’ anger was his fault, and that they were terrible parents, it lacks the strength his other chapters had. I believe the reason why is that his skill was utilizing the domination of images over words in his first couple of chapters, thus making the reader appreciate the untold moments, while this last chapter provides words at the moment David begins to truly “speak his mind”.
David sees a therapist, and for the first time he realizes that his home isn’t normal, and he needs to get away from it all. There are moments of speechlessness still found in this chapter, such as when his therapist tells him: “Your mother doesn’t love you” (255). He finds his own place to stay in, and pursues his dream as an artist. 
In the following years, he cleaned his self up. He made a name for his self. And he got his voice back over time. By the time his mother is at her deathbed, he's a grown man who yells while he's alone, not out of anger, but to strengthen his vocal cords. He became the artist he dreamed of becoming. It became his new home, and he met a lot of great people through it. In the end, he realizes that he'll never follow the path of his mother, a path filled with intense hatred built up inside. 

ANALYSIS

The lack of color that is carried on throughout the novel, and the way the watery ink overflows past the panel lines is reminiscent of both the noire films of the 50s and the way children never color inside the edges. The different shades of black and white prevent the viewer from getting lost in the materialism of the 1950s, and to see Small’s world for what it truly is: a family of suppressed self-loathing, projected anger, confusion, and sadness.
Another interesting method that Small took with his illustration was the high amount of moment-to-moment and subject-to-subject panels that dominated the pages. It blended the autobiographical graphic memoir with the angle techniques of film-making. There was great focus on the environment itself, oftentimes making the characters smaller than the world around them. 

The cinematic touch of the graphic novel overall provides a unique story to a familiar setting, allowing the reader to ease their way into David's life with as little difficulty as possible. It's also got to do with how we naturally allow ourselves to enter a movie theater with all past experiences placed aside, and thus allowing ourselves to immerse fully into David's world, the way he wants us to see it. 

There's also spurts of intense, graphic imagination, oftentimes concerning dreams that David has at significant moments of his life. There's also a recurring character, a small fetus that David found in one of the shelves at his father's hospital. There's no real meaning to these dreams or the little fetus that is sometimes imagined to be looking right at little David. But the inability to give meaning to everything in life is what I think David is trying to convey. Again, nothing is black and white. 

Finally, one of the most heartfelt, truly terrifying things that I got out of this graphic memoir was how little David's parents knew what they were doing. As a child, I always thought the parents were the true authorities who were given the rules of how to be a parent. But in actuality, the parent knows as much about what they're doing as we do with our own lives. David's father is trying to help his son get better, but he's doing it all scientifically, thinking that the things wrong with David can be fixed with radioactive dosages, or found by an x-ray machine. His mother probably never wanted children, but she was forced to because that was the norm during the 50s. The family structure is a difficult part of society that no one knows how to do right, and that's where the feeling of loneliness begins with most families. This story is only one of millions of families who have failed in satisfying the societal standards of a "family".

Although this is a very touching graphic memoir, it is not the first memoir to have come out from the sequential arts. Many works over the decades have won awards for their biographical content, as graphic novels have become a new way to tell one's story. Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Craig Thompson and and Alison Bechdel have all done it before. But it's still an important part of story-telling, as it uniquely makes the images more powerful than the words that support it. The image-text ratio highly leans to the image, where there won't be words exchanged for several panels. The images in sequential art are revitalized in Stitches, and it's a refreshing sight to read the lines rather than the text. 

I highly recommend this graphic novel, as it's both a personal artifact and a great way to start looking at comics and sequential art in a way that doesn't concern men in tights and capes, or little animals throwing bricks at each other. David Small is a true artist, telling his story better than his voice ever could. 

Works Cited

Konisberg, Eric. “Finding a Voice in a Graphic Novel”. New York Times. New York Times, Sept. 6, 2009. Web. April 27, 2013.

Weldon, Glen. “The Curious Case of David Small’s ‘Stiches’”. Monkey See. National Public Radio, Oct. 21, 2009. Web. April 27, 2013.

Small, David. Stiches by David Small. N.d. Web. April 27, 2013.