CADAVER CHRONICLES MEMOIR SERIES

WHY WRITE A MEMOIR ABOUT MY RELATIONSHIP TO DEAD BODIES?

Excerpt from Cadaver Chronicles Episode #2 by K. Willberg. 

I'm remembering my love of anatomy related to dancing.

I teach a drawing class in a cadaver lab. This dream job inspired me to make Cadaver Chronicles, a philosophical, occasionally explicit, and sometimes poignant and funny graphic memoir about childhood, anatomy, death, dying, healthcare, art, food, and relationships.
 
For artists, healthcare workers, scientists, and scholars, the study of actual human bodies affects how we perceive the dead and gives us context for reflection on the deaths of others and ourselves. For me, every living creature has an anatomical identity. For many, anatomy is not only an area of scientific knowledge and technical specificity, it’s a lifestyle!

I've already written and drafted roughly 200 pages illustrated with comics as well as 20 years of drawings from my sketchbooks. What kind of sketchbook drawing? My sketches from the cadaver lab where I teach, figure drawings where I anatomized the live models (just for fun!), animal sketches including an anatomized kitten, comparative anatomy sketches where I turn animal skeletons into people, general sketches of bodies, some bones, and even some dancers. 

EPISODE #1

 Here's the cover of this 24 page episode. I drew it from a selfie and anatomized my face. That's my spouse, cartoonist R. Sikoryak in the background. He's been tolerating my fascination with bodies for 30 years!

This first episode starts with the book's prologue about how I was terrified of death as a child. So much so that driving by a cemetery with a friend when I was 10 terrified me. 

How could I remember that? By gazing at my sketches and following a chain of flashbacks from my trip to the Paris Catacombs at 50, through a series of events taking me back to the cemetery. 

Then Episode #1 gets into Chapter 1 of the book.

Highlights include my father getting me very interested in animals and anatomy. So much so that one day, he brought me a bullfrog from the biology department on the campus where he was a professor. We dissected it in the basement together.

Dad was so encouraging that he was totally supportive when a friend and I started hanging out a a local veterinary clinic. 

Obviously, a childhood of catching wildlife, dissecting frogs, and assisting in the medical and surgical treatment of animals began to soften and moderate my fear of death.

Here are a few pages and excerpted panels.

Interested in browsing a copy? If you live in New York or New Jersey, I'll be selling them this Saturday and Sunday, March 16-17th at MoCCA Fest  in Manhattan, sponsored by the Society of Illustrators.

A description and samples of Episode #2 will be posted next!