Boum (Prune Paycha)

“Graphic medicine” – graphic novels that give a window into various medical conditions, usually from the patient’s point of view – has become a significant publishing trend in recent years, producing notable works such as Georgia Webber’s Dumb and Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles. In The Jellyfish, Boum provides a striking addition to this burgeoning literature, leveraging the visual medium of comics to evoke the encroaching vision impairment that is the subject of this work.

The Jellyfish is based largely on Quebec cartoonist Boum’s real-life experience with vision loss that has left her blind in one eye. Now published in English, translated by Robin Lang and Helge Dascher, the work originally appeared in French in 2022, also published by the bilingual Montreal house Pow Pow Press.

Odette has a jellyfish in her eye – a floater that is always present, and comes between her and the world. Her optometrist is dismissive of her condition; Odette just has to carry on with her life as a twentysomething bookseller in Montreal, the jellyfish a persistent, mildly annoying new companion.

As the book begins, we are immersed in the ordinary events of Odette’s days: working at the bookstore, at the cafe with friends, spending chill evenings in with her rabbit Napoleon, or on a date with dashing manga fan Naina. Boum creates an immersive, realistic Montreal cityscape and her characters exhibit a masterfully deployed expressive range. The Jellyfish captures the textures of contemporary city life, and the lives of its young cast, with gently wry humour.

But the title is not “Odette,” and the titular optical jellyfish steals the focus soon enough. It’s depicted as a small, impish black blob with legs, always floating somewhere on the page. Boum is playful with its placement, and the floater seems to take on a personality, similar to that of a mischievous, underfoot cat. At the start, it’s almost charming.

Increasingly, the blob gets in the way of Odette’s vision – and also the reader’s. It obscures the corner of a product label here, a bit of a cellphone screen there. It gets a little bigger. Odette forges on, telling almost no one – not her mom, not her boss, not her new sweetheart – about her jellyfish. Until one day, there are two. And then several. More medical visits intrude on an increasingly difficult daily life as Odette conceals her vision impairment from those around her. Boum brings the reader along on this journey toward vision loss as more and more of each panel is obscured.

Boum’s sensitive but frank storytelling makes for an involving and moving narrative as the jellyfish morphs from a minor annoyance into an existential health crisis. There is no remedy for her vision loss, but the book offers a glimpse of Odette finally reclaiming the focus of her own story. Although it is specifically grounded in the author’s own experiences, the story feels universal. Deeply human and ultimately optimistic, The Jellyfish is an important entry in the world of graphic medicine, and a remarkable graphic novel by any standard.