Review: Seeds
February 5, 2012
Seeds by Ross Mackintosh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As the foreword of the book reads, "cartooning is the art of distilling reality to its essence" and "Seeds" perfectly strips down the painful process that a person and his/her close family undergoes when he/she is diagnosed terminal cancer.
By using endearing drawings, Mackinthosh is able to capture the impotence and despair yet intense humanism of the situation: from the beginning when you try to convince yourself it might not be that severe as you are informed, to the final stages when the body of the person deteriorates by the day, to the first months after the death, when you unsuccessfully try to deal with the absence and understand what it means.
For anyone who unfortunately has had to live an experience like this, the read of Seeds is both unresting because it inevitably brings back memories that might have been put aside but also comforting because it reveals the most human aspect of our inner self, the one that only comes out in extreme situations and makes everything else in life look irrelevant. Very powerful stuff.