Coping with a breast cancer diagnosis through comics: The Saga of Bob

“I'm not sure how else I could have dealt with my diagnosis,” said Ursula. “NOT talking about it didn't seem like an option.”

Ursula, an author and illustrator of more than 40 books, was inspired to create The Saga of Bob, in part, because comics were one of her first loves, going back two decades to an epic webcomic called DIGGER that she wrote and illustrated.

“I've always found that readers will engage with a comic more rapidly and intensely than they will with a wall of text (and believe me, as a novelist, I sometimes wish it was the other way around),” Ursula said. “But I also knew that there was no way I'd have the energy to keep up with drawing a comic while I was undergoing treatment. So, I started playing around with text layouts and word balloons and a program called Typorama and what came out had the feel of a comic without me having to sit down and painstakingly draw characters on every page.”

Whether you call it a comic or something else, Ursula hopes someone out there finds her story useful. And she wants readers to know: “It’s ok to laugh, by the way. Some of it is hilarious.”

Read The Saga of Bob: Part I below. Each Tuesday we'll post another installment of the comic here on the LBBC blog.