Warning: This article contains discussion of mental health, depression and suicide. Spoilers – I’ve tried to avoid specific details around the comic, but there are elements that might impact some people’s reading experience.
With suicide the leading cause of death for males under fifty in the UK, the need to reduce the stigma around mental health couldn’t be greater. It is imperative that more men open up about their experiences with depression and anxiety, and help normalise these types of conversations. It needs to happen now and right across society: all communities, all demographics, all of us.
Joe Stone’s autobiographical comic Five Months on Earth feels like an important step on the journey. Over the course of just 24-pages, Stone employs sophisticated visual and written language to articulate his experience of depression and anxiety with remarkable clarity.
With sparse prose, emotive sketches and a mastery of form, Stone immerses you in his mental health crisis. Reading it is a visceral, deeply affecting and, at times, challenging undertaking. This is brave, gut-wrenching art at its most essential.
Every element of Five Months on Earth is so skillfully executed: the visual aesthetic, the drawings, the layout, the prose, the narrative.
When telling a story, even one rooted firmly in reality, you make decisions on what to include, what to exclude, which perspective to take, when to dwell, and when to progress the action. Stone has created a narrative that is perfectly paced, compelling and unflinching, a symbiosis of image and prose. Five Months on Earth is split into three distinct sections – the onset of depression, the search for help, and, the introduction of Earthling, the kitten.
An expressive realism dominates the sketches, pain and anguish coming across in each pencil mark, intensifying with scribbles and dark tones. Stone relives his illness through thick, agitated lines, leaving the reader with a very real sense of turmoil.
The accompanying prose, sparse and to the point, is presented in small, unfussy typography, without fat, frills or artifice. Like the images, the text exists to get to the reality of the situation without distraction – it’s not written for effect, only to convey truth. It’s the kind of writing that is hard to achieve in any form but Stone is more than capable.
The comic opens with a series of pencil-drawn self-portraits, where the initial more confident lines quickly erode, getting scratchier and more frayed. Stone’s eyes are unmistakably and consistently sad, the mouth omitted altogether – no means to speak out nor smile. Darkness soon gathers, thickening and deepening around the panels until it finally breaks through to engulf Stone. On the next page, we’re confronted with only blackness and small white text that reads: ‘until it became overwhelming’. At this point, you too as a reader, feel overwhelmed.
Throughout this first section, there are square and oblong panels laid out on the page as you might expect from a comic. However, the action is not contained within them neatly. Pencil marks frequently ignore the framing lines, breaking out onto the page. Depression is not so easily confined or defined, you cannot box up the complexity of mental health or its impact on your life into a uniform grid. Stone makes this point with subtle force.
In the final third, with the introduction of Earthling, the kitten, the drawings become simpler. In contrast to what has preceded, the sketches are rendered in clean confident lines, balanced with delicate shading. As Joe and the kitten bond, the depression starts to lift. Earthling is now presented fully within the square panels, the composition well-balanced, allowing a comparative calm to radiate from the pages. In turn, we see Stone’s own portrait grow stronger, more defined, and whole as his depression starts to lift.
It doesn’t last. The pencil once again breaks out from the panels, but that is life. Something more profound has happened though, and it is the final panel that we should pay attention to: Stone is there alone, head and shoulders rendered in a reassuringly robust outline. He is framed inside a rectangle, looking with knowing eyes off to the left and towards the future, the faintest hint of lips, a means to speak, to smile, defiant, having lived to tell his story.
You can buy Five Months on Earth and Joe’s other comics here or find out more about Joe Stone on his professional website
