Sign-In
Cart
The Ballad of Malady Nelson
Paperback
General Graphic NovelsGeneral Poetry
ISBN13: 9781918628210
Publisher: Broken Sleep Books
Published: Sep 30 2026
Pages: 44
Weight: 0.19
Height: 0.11 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
The Ballad of Malady Nelson by Nicky Arscott and Amy McCauley is a poetry comic that builds with momentum, each panel swallows the lines before it until a single sentence has grown into a catalogue of chronic illness, botched surgery, and care that never arrives. Its narrator is thirty-nine, living with her mother, and speaks in a nursery diction that makes abscesses, dressings, and discharge sound almost tender. Arscott and McCauley dress her in racecourse finery crowned with lungs and ribcages, then flatten her into decorative wallpaper before the book opens out onto rooftops and a burning globe. Against a backdrop of pandemic Britain, economic collapse, and neighbourly ritual, illness becomes both spectacle and domestic labour, and the ballad's mounting refrain starts to sound like an accusation.
Also in
General Graphic Novels
Fixing Flamingos: And Other Solutions to the World's Least Pressing Problems
Rea, Brian
Brown, Lucienne
Paperback
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Armageddon Game -- The Alliance
Burnham, Erik
Campbell, Sophie
Paperback