The Hospital Suite

Starred review from August 18, 2014
Best-known for his long-running King-Cat mini-comics, Porcellino’s memoir is sometimes brutal but exceptionally honest. The illnesses that plague Porcellino—chronic pain from an unknown cause and OCD—are exhausting and endless. The toll these various health challenges ultimately take on Porcellino’s life range from minor irritations—the avoidance of certain foods, worries about “contamination”—to major disruptions, including stress on his marriage. Porcellino is well aware of his quirks, but like many OCD sufferers, unable to resist them; he’s already a victim of anxiety and a rare disorder called hyperacusis before the afflictions detailed here begin. The ups and downs of his largely undiagnosed ailments and the endless parade of doctors, specialists, and hospitals only heighten his paralyzing anxiety. In King Cat, Porcellino excels at peaceful Zen moments of observation. Here, his simple, black lines and bare-bones drawings have a powerful economy that present the story cleanly, without flourish, detailing a frightening and inescapable spiral into dysfunction without hyperbole. The result is a clear-eyed, penetrating book about the helplessness of illness which should bring Porcellino a wider audience beyond his cult following.

November 1, 2014

Minicomics veteran Porcellino has published his mostly autobiographical King-Cat Comics for 30-plus years, spinning off collections (Map of My Heart) as well as illustrating other stories (The Next Day, LJ 3/15/12; Thoreau at Walden). This work brings together three overlapping accounts of his roller-coaster health condition, intercut with his appreciation for Zen writings as anodyne. Stomach pain triggers a misdiagnosis of Crohn's disease, then major surgery. Other problems include allergies, pesticide poisoning, and pyroluria, all complicated by anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and leading to family and work difficulties. Porcellino uses a very simple line style of drawing, which does not lessen the impact of his content and indeed makes it more accessible. His evocative lines show an economy of message, as when being "partially crazy" appears as a brain-space divided into plus and minus symbols while repeated small drawings show his compulsion to check and recheck if the refrigerator door is closed. VERDICT Porcellino's art has a Zenlike sparseness, and his highly personal, detailed account of unfortunately common-life roadblocks can help alleviate the loneliness of the rest of us with analogous problems. For high school age through adults.--M.C.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2014
Porcellino has been self-publishing his autobiographical minicomic King-Cat since 1989, and for nearly as long, he's been suffering from serious health problems. After experiencing debilitating stomach pain, he underwent surgery at age 28 to remove a noncancerous tumor from his small intestine. The effect on his mental health was devastating: the chronic anxiety he'd long endured turned into full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. As he struggled with his illness, he moved back in with his parents, his marriage collapsed, and even his ability to draw comics was hindered. The Hospital Suite chronicles these travails as well as his efforts to deal with them through conventional medicine, therapy, nutritional treatment, and Zen practice, leading to his hard-won, if tentative, recovery. Porcellino's unstinting depiction of his harrowing ordeal is offset by his gentle graphic approach; with its childlike minimalism and unvarying, unshaded lines, Porcellino's might be the simplest and most straightforward drawing style in all of comics, which only adds to the relatability and honesty of this poignant memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)