When graphic designer James Burns was diagnosed with cancer, he reached for his sketchbook

James Burns’s Instagram post last December immediately upstaged all of the food porn, cat videos, and workout thirst traps on the app. Even the doomscrollers parked their thumbs for a minute. Through a series of four black-and-white comic panels, the Athens-based graphic designer told followers that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. In the third panel, a dialogue balloon over the artist’s head announced, “You know, the type of cancer that is 99% curable? It’s not that kind.”

Anyone familiar with Burns’s comic book work over the past 20 years knows that his art is often equal parts autobiography and therapy. His weekly “Grumbles” comic strip, which ran from 2004 to 2011 in the old Atlanta indie weekly The Sunday Paper, was about “shaking my fist metaphorically at things that piss me off.” In his 2006 comic Detached, the now-retired motion graphic designer and animator detailed his recovery from a detached retina that threatened his visual arts career.

Courtesy of James Burns

This spring, Burns, who is 65, underwent 28 radiation treatments—five days a week, over five and a half weeks—at Atlanta’s Emory Winship Cancer Institute. In between naps, the artist grabbed his iPad and created, in real time, his latest 60-page comic book, The Death of Me? (available online at burnscomics.com). The book is an unvarnished and often laugh-out-loud-funny “true story of one man’s experience with stage IV prostate cancer,” as the cover touts.

Male Care, a men’s cancer survivor support and advocacy nonprofit, turned Burns’s comic book into a free PDF, which has since been distributed to more than 4,200 other cancer patients. In June, following his first course of treatment, Burns posted a clear-eyed update on Instagram, in (what else?) the form of a comic: “The treatment did what it was supposed to . . . it’s still a waiting game.”

In an interview with Atlanta, Burns discussed the creation of and response to The Death of Me?

This is your most personal work yet. Was there any hesitancy about putting this out there?
I immediately thought about how this was going to affect my wife and my daughter. Once I got the okay from them, there was no hesitancy. I needed the creative outlet, and now, being able to distribute this through Male Care, it’s reaching people who have either gone through this or are about to. As an educational tool, I’m glad it’s out there.

This comic really underscores how we still don’t know how to talk about cancer to the people going through it. What inspired the pages on cancer “bugaboos”?
If you Google, you’ll find every cancer has a different color ribbon. This one is light blue. It reduces you to this weird identity. This is a terrible cancer to deal with. Everyone copes with this differently. But don’t ask me to wear a ribbon or go on a “fun run.” To me, there is nothing fun about cancer—or running.

In the book, the giant TrueBeam radiation machine you had to lie under at Emory looks like something Dr. Doom would have used on the Fantastic Four in an old Marvel comic. Is that what appealed to you?
Yeah, as soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to draw it. It was great to use that visual to explain the treatment process across a whole page.

The Death of Me? represents some of your most beautiful and powerful artwork. You told me, “It might be my last, so I’m trying to make it my best.” How heavily did that weigh on you as you created this?
I started doing comics at age 45, which was a late start. I’ve always joked that I’ll probably get really good at drawing and then die. It was important to do my best work on this. But I’m not dead yet. For now, we’ve beaten this thing back, and we’re waiting to see what the [irradiated] cells are going to do. My comics have always been a tough sell. My demographics are tiny. With this, there’s a chance to reach others who are going through this. I’m already thinking about the next one.

Illustration courtesy of James Burns

Illustration courtesy of James Burns

This article appears in our September 2024 issue.

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