Cancer kills acne!
We wrote (and illustrated) the story of a teenager’s year with cancer like it was a screenplay.
Increasingly, news organisations like Fairfax Media are looking to engage readers with longform pieces that sit outside the regular news cycle. Year 12 with Cancer: Gabbie’s Story came about from a desire to experiment with the way we tell these stories.
I have a background in screenwriting, and thought the techniques of writing for film would translate well into a graphic novel-style format. The beauty of a graphic novel is that it can convey emotional truth and a person’s interior world in a succinct yet compelling way — after all, “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
Through a contact at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse we heard about Gabbie Wehbe, a “remarkable young woman” who just been through a year of chemo and radiotherapy after being diagnosed with sarcoma cancer — all while doing her HSC. When it was first suggested that Gabbie would make an ideal subject, I must admit I had concerns. Would there be a narrative arc to propel the story? What if Gabbie wasn’t that remarkable?
In late October 2016, illustrator Simon Letch and I met Gabbie at her home. Over an hour or two, we talked to Gabbie, her mum Loretta and her sister Mel about the previous year and the effect it had had on their lives.
Gabbie was in the midst of her HSC exams at the time, and her attitude was so positive it really was quite remarkable. In fact, everything seemed so relentlessly upbeat it almost felt as if she had merely been diagnosed with a bad case of flu, rather than a form of cancer with a 20 per cent survival rate.
I had a sense that Gabbie was keeping a brave face for her family, and was perhaps hiding her true feelings about the diagnosis. So as our meeting wound up, I quietly asked her if she had ever felt scared. Her response was illuminating, and it was then I felt confident we had found an emotional truth worth telling.
As I suspected, writing the script proved to be much like writing a screenplay. I felt that we needed a hook to get the readers’ interest from the get-go, which is why we started with the “Chemo kills acne” panel. This was an important decision, as it set the tone for the rest of the story. We needed to tread the fine line between light and dark, playful and honest, and tell the story of a cancer patient with a fresh twist.
We knew Gabbie would be making a fundraising speech a few weeks after our interview, so that seemed like a good place to wrap up the story. Video footage would be available, which is where the idea of transitioning the final panel from a cartoon representation of Gabbie to the “real thing” came about.
With a beginning and end in mind, it was then a matter of fleshing out the year that followed the diagnosis, and providing an insight into what it’s like to go through chemotherapy. I identified the key moments (or “beats”, in screenwriting parlance) of the story and strung them together in a narrative I hoped would flow from one scene to another.
It was of utmost importance to get our facts straight, so I also interviewed Gabbie’s oncologist, Dr Vivek Bhadri. He provided in-depth medical background and clarified some things that had Gabbie and her family had mentioned during our meeting.
I then handed over the draft script to illustrator Simon Letch, and was delighted when I saw his first rough sketches a few weeks later.
Lines in the script with a purely expositional function were brought to life by his pencil, and his unique drawing style gave a fresh spin to the story. I had tried to incorporate humour into the script, but Simon found extra moments of levity in a way that was always respectful to the story and in keeping with Gabbie’s personality, which shone through in his illustrations.
Because Simon had attended the interview with Gabbie, he remembered moments I had edited from the script, and reminded me of important plot points that should remain.
With the rough first draft completed, 90 per cent of the finished story was in place. We tweaked the flow of some scenes; because everything was hand-drawn, any change to the text (a spelling correction, the deletion of a comma) required Simon to redraw the affected panel.
As a courtesy, we sent the finished story to Gabbie. While we retained our editorial right to tell her tale they way we best saw fit, we were highly cognisant it was a very personal story, and were keen to get her blessing. Thankfully, she was “really happy” with it.
Year 12 with Cancer was always conceived as a “digital first” project, and Simon took great care to ensure the panels would work across all online platform — desktop, tablet and mobile. When it was decided to also run the story in Good Weekend magazine, we needed to revisit the layout of the story once more, to make sure it worked in the print format. We rearranged the size and placement of some of the panels, much like a jigsaw puzzle, to get the story to fit into the three pages allotted to it.
Year 12 with Cancer proved to be a huge hit with both regular readers and first-time visitors to Fairfax sites — I’ve never received so much unsolicited positive feedback for a multimedia project. A highlight was when Dr Bhadri said it was the best thing he had ever read on the subject.
Part of the success of the piece can be put down to its protagonist. Despite my initial reservations, Gabbie did indeed turn out to be a “remarkable young woman”, providing the raw material for an inspiring story.
Matt Teffer is multimedia editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. He co-wrote a screenplay that “Orlando Bloom is reading right now!” (He passed on it). Follow him on Twitter @teffraff.
Simon Letch is an illustrator at Fairfax Media. He’s drawn for many publications over the past 30 years, but is not as mature as he looks. Follow him on Instagram @simon_letch.