Graphic artist Matthew Kelly will never forget a visit, at the age of 12, to his father in a Dublin hospice, the day before he died.
“He was asleep for the whole meeting. My mam, before we left, said ‘don’t forget to give him a hug’. I gave him a hug and I whispered ‘I love you Dad’ and he opened his eyes,” Kelly says.
“He looked at me – and you know when you can just see someone’s saying ‘I love you’ back. He had tubes and everything, but that’s always stuck with me. The look of love.”
The diagnosis of a brain tumour had come out of the blue for his father, Mick Kelly. “He was a karate instructor, so he was a very fit man. Black belt.” He and his wife, Mary O’Byrne-Kelly, ran a karate school in Raheny, and he also worked night shifts at Dublin Bus.
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Kelly recalls being in the car park of Beaumont Hospital when his mother gently explained his father was dying. Her husband had been told on diagnosis that he might only have two or three weeks, so “she had to get me in the loop quite quickly”.
In fact, he lived for another 13 months. During that time, Mary had discussed with Kelly how he wanted to be told when the inevitable happened. “I said to Mam, I wanted her to say, ‘he’s gone to spirit’ because that’s a nice way to say it.”
The afternoon in 2013 that she had to deliver that message, he had just rushed off the trampoline in the back garden of their Balbriggan home, bursting to tell her about the thousands of bounces in a row he had just done. Hearing those previously agreed words, he laughed initially thinking it was some kind of joke.
“It obviously wasn’t; it would be a weird joke to play,” he says. “Then I cried.”
In that instant, he sensed the whole world had “shifted slightly”, but he was too young to understand the ramifications of such a profound bereavement. He was about to start sixth class at primary school and was on the cusp of his teenage years.
Twelve years later, Kelly, now aged 24, is sitting in a city-centre hotel, holding a proof copy of a beautiful A4-size comic book that he has crafted, infused it with his experiences of love and loss. He talks with premature insight into what really matters in life, yet radiates a refreshingly youthful outlook, full of optimism and compassion.
After the death of his father came more losses, such as the death of a beloved grandfather and a romantic break-up. The narrative of the book, Porter Loves Cleo, is also informed by a chorus of voices that he distilled from on-street and online canvassing of other people’s perspectives on grief and, crucially, the love that fuels it.
The work is to be launched in September at the Royal Irish Academy as one of the first Irish-published graphic medicine books. The event will coincide with the announcement of the setting up of a new organisation, Graphic Medicine Ireland.
Graphic medicine “is the intersection of comics and anything to do with healthcare”, says Jane Burns, who works at the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS). She headed the organising committee when Ireland hosted the annual international graphic medicine conference for the first time, at TUS in Athlone, Co Westmeath, last year.
Interest in this emerging field of medical literature has been growing here since. It attracts people from different disciplines, including healthcare staff, health librarians, historians, and arts and humanities researchers, says Burns, who is director of public education and engagement in the TUS faculty of engineering and informatics.
Graphic medicine is a term that was devised by a Welsh doctor, Ian Williams, when he set up the graphicmedicine.org website in 2007. He could see the potential of the visual storytelling format of comics for health professionals and patients alike as a gateway to better understanding. Sharing information and experiences in this way can have a therapeutic effect – for the creator and the reader.
Porter Loves Cleo is a perfect example, even though Kelly had never heard of graphic medicine when he conceived the idea as a final-year project at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). He channelled all he had learned about love and loss around one boy’s quest, in an evocative adventure story that works on different levels for readers of all ages.
In his first year at NCAD studying illustration, Kelly had done some other pieces of work on grief. “Just on my dad, to kind of get it out of my system because that’s the point of art, isn’t it? To express it and get it out.”
But, two years later, the idea of Porter came to him in a dream. “I know how it sounds,” Kelly adds hastily, not wanting to seem pretentious. “I hate the fact that it did. But it did.”
It is a character who means a lot to him, not least because a romantic relationship had ended the previous summer. Reflecting on the typical, melodramatic, “my world is over” response when young love fractures, Kelly wanted his character to represent the importance of moving on.
“Then I went on a walk and Cleo came after him, like the idea of a foil: of someone for Porter to talk to and to confide in and to love,” he says
After graduation, Kelly worked as a graphic designer in the beauty industry. “Ads and that kind of stuff.” But he quickly became disillusioned with “churning these things out”.
“It’s a career and it’s respectable, but I wasn’t helping the world in any kind of sense,” he says.
In pursuit of a more meaningful life path, he returned to NCAD last autumn to start a two-year Masters in Education.
In the meantime he had been trying to bring Porter to a wider audience, but no publisher he approached would take it on. The issue with comic books, he says, is that they live in a “limbo world”. But, in the manner of Porter’s determined pursuit of love, Kelly didn’t give up. Tribes Press in Galway helped him with small edits and then, he says, very honestly suggested that since he had done all the work of writing and illustrating himself, he should do the final step of publishing it too, through crowdfunding.
Kelly hesitated, feeling he had just one shot. If he didn’t get the pitch right, that would be the end – not only of the book but also “these characters that I love so dearly”. When he finally launched the project on Kickstarter last June, it took less than 24 hours to reach his modest target of €400 to cover the cost of getting it into print; the excess would enable him to produce many more.
Last December, he showed the work to his masters philosophy tutor, Dr Andy Wall, thinking he might like it but unaware he was involved in the fledgling graphic medicine community here. Wall brought it to Burns; both recognised the book’s powerful quality and its potential as a trailblazer for the genre.
I relearned how to love myself and then I learned that balance of it’s okay to be sad sometimes, it’s okay to be happy sometimes, and it’s 100 per cent okay to just be ‘normal’
Kelly writes at the beginning of the book that his mother “taught me what it meant to love” and his father “taught me loss”. On the latter, he reflects: “I’d love to say I was very close to him, but I don’t think I was old enough to grasp how I could have been. My sister and him, they were so close.”
On his own admission, Kelly became a very angry teenager. Grief and adolescence is a volatile mix. He recalls, for instance, that he was annoyed at how people had been constantly calling to the house when his father was dying.
As an adult he understands they just wanted to say their goodbyes. “But as a child, you’re just seeing, ‘they’re taking my time away from him’. The house was always busy. There was never a moment where it was just me and him,” Kelly says.
Then, after the funeral, most of these people disappeared.
He also resented how his sister Sarah, who is nine years older, had had more time with their father than he had. “Obviously, as you grow older, you realise that’s silly. If anything, I am delighted she had that time with him.”
Kelly’s prevailing memory of limited father-and-son time was that “he would always take me to the cinema because he loved film”. Mick had never been obviously “arty”, but began painting after starting to attend St Francis Hospice part-time before entering full-time care. Whereas from an early age Matthew loved to fill copious notebooks with drawings, and began art classes when he was six.
An avid fan of Tintin, he also acknowledges the influence of Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts and Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse on creating Porter Loves Cleo. But he has brought his own authenticity and artistic talent to an engaging exploration of how love endures, even when you have to say goodbye.
He is very open about the intense turmoil with suicidal thoughts he endured around the age of 17, at a time the Leaving Certificate was looming. Pieta House, school support, a very good psychotherapist “and my mam more than anyone” all helped him cope with the emotional seesawing.
“If I wasn’t ecstatic then I was depressed, I couldn’t be just neutral, that balance wasn’t there for me. In time, I relearned how to love myself and then I learned that balance of it’s okay to be sad sometimes, it’s okay to be happy sometimes, and it’s 100 per cent okay to just be ‘normal’, because most of us are just in a neutral state most of the time.”
Acknowledging how circumstances fast-forwarded his maturity, Kelly would be pleased if even one other young person going through similar, difficult feelings were to take hope from what he has to say. “I have had to deal with the shutting in of emotions quite early and then explode it and then be where I am now. It is what it is. It’s my story, it’s my life.”
A story that’s only starting. Not for nothing, the strapline on the book cover reads: “One of Porter’s Peculiar Problems ...”
There will be more.
