"Last year, he got our attention for his disturbingly brilliant graphic novel Monsters. . . . Gabby Schulz has gone on to create a similarly unnerving web comic series titled Sick."—Flavorwire
The author of the perennial classic, Monsters (written as Ken Dahl), Gabby Schulz returns with a new graphic novel, Sick, which Hicksville author Dylan Horrocks calls "a punch in the face and well worth reading." Like Monsters, Sick focuses on health and social policy, this time expanding from the subject of STDs and their stigma to the larger, hot-button issue of national healthcare.
Severely ill, uninsured, alone, and confined to his bed for weeks, Schulz was left searching—only to find himself. Sick documents his discovery in gory, glorious, water-colored detail, finally completed and collected here for the first time in a beautiful, album-sized hardcover edition.
Since Monsters, Schulz has produced a host of online comics including SEXISM, a viral sensation written up everywhere from the Stranger to Scientific American. The web-serialized Sick was an Ignatz Award nominee for Outstanding Online Comic. His work has appeared on narrative.ly and BuzzFeed and in Arthur magazine.
Gabby Schulz, sometimes known as Ken Dahl, grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. His graphic novel, Monsters won two Ignatz Awards, was an Eisner Award nominee, and was a Best American Comics selection. His other works include the collection Welcome to the Dahl House and the web comic Sick, an Ignatz Award nominee for Outstanding Online Comic. Schulz currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.
Industry Reviews
THE BEST COMICS OF 2016
"Gabby Schulz's unfairly overlooked and singularly upsetting Sick (Secret Acres) deserves mention, a painful and highly intimate look at depression from the inside out." - A.V. Club
BEST GRAPHIC NOVELS OF FALL 2016
"Schulz's art is as good as any independent cartoonist working today--grim and graphic, but also frank and penetrating. With plenty of anatomical details and ailments shown and described, Sick isn't for the easily grossed-out or offended. But those looking for a vital, independent voice to follow in the footsteps of Robert Crumb and others should give it a try--some of Schulz's images and ideas will linger, like a stubborn infection, long after the book's cover has been closed." - Foreword Reviews
"Schulz uses the book to explore topics as broad as class inequity in the United States and as specific and personal as his own psyche. You may have seen Sick online when it was first serialized a couple of years ago, but in this new edition, Schulz seems to have repainted the artwork to give it a more rich and visceral feel. He is probably the most inventive cartoonist working in comics that many readers still have never heard of, and this is his most masterful piece of cartooning to date. Gabby Schulz's unfairly overlooked and singularly upsetting Sick (Secret Acres) deserves mention, a painful and highly intimate look at depression from the inside out." - mental_floss
"Schulz captures the experience of sickness with uncomfortable accuracy: the woozy slipping in and out of consciousness, the sense of health and wellness becoming but a distant memory-and of pain and illness defining all of one's existence. Sick joins other books in the growing genre of graphic memoirs dealing with health issues, among them Ellen Forney's Marbles, John Porcellino's The Hospital Suite, and Jennifer Haydn's The Story of My Tits. While those books offer stories of people who navigated through their physical and mental problems to the point of reaching new possibilities for their lives, in Sick, Schulz's illness is the avenue that leads him to simply confirm all of his worst fears about himself and the world surrounding him: 'The sickness had become me.' This is uncompromising work by a brave and powerful artist." - The Comics Journal
