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← back to comics journalism the lily · 7 january 2019 · 10 panels

Weight, health, and appearance

Written and illustrated by Elizabeth Beier · Art direction by Rachel Orr

On the contradictory noise about women’s bodies that gets loudest every January, and on drawing a quiet circle inside it.

before you read

This piece is about diet culture and messages women receive about body size.

Title panel on black. Small white handwritten caption at the top gives way to huge hand-lettered words: WEIGHT in magenta, HEALTH in blue, and APPEARANCE reversed out of a magenta ribbon banner across the bottom. A woman in glasses with short hair, drawn in white outline only, stands with her arms folded in front of the lettering.
A large blue speech balloon fills most of the black panel, its hand-lettered white text sized up on the key words. At the right edge the woman in glasses stands on a bathroom scale in a sleeveless dress, one hand on her hip, scowling down, drawn in white outline.
A big magenta speech balloon with motion lines around it takes up the panel, its hand-lettered text mixing white and black words. At the lower left the woman in glasses, in white outline, holds a small apple in both hands and looks down at it with a flat expression.
The woman in glasses is drawn from the chest up in white outline, arms spread wide as if wading, surrounded and half-submerged by a dense crowd of overlapping blue and magenta speech balloons that run off all four edges of the black panel. The balloons carry contradictory diet and body messages, several cropped by the panel edge.
The woman lies in bed in profile, eyes closed, one arm raised so she can look at her smartwatch, all drawn in white outline on black. Dimmed, half-faded blue and magenta speech balloons float around and behind her head and body, their lettering grey and receding; a small bright magenta balloon points out of the watch face.
The woman walks inside a large chalky circle, reaching up to draw its white rim with a piece of chalk, in white outline on black. Outside the circle, solid blue and magenta teardrop shapes fall like rain on all sides but cannot get in. Caption text runs above and below the circle; the first letter of the top line is cut off by the panel edge.
A chalk-textured dark circle sits centred on black, its two questions hand-lettered in white curving around the inside of the rim. Within it the woman in glasses stands alone in a V-neck sweater, arms folded across her stomach, looking down.
Inside a chalky dark circle the woman sits cross-legged with eyes closed and hair floating outward, drawn in white outline. Short quoted phrases are lettered directly onto her body: across her chest, along her forearm, on her hand, and on her knee. A caption runs above the circle and a note in magenta and white runs along a torn white strip at the bottom.
The woman's head and shoulders are drawn in white outline low in the black panel, eyes rolled sideways and mouth tight, hemmed in on every side by five pointed blue and magenta speech balloons that crowd against her face.
The woman in glasses holds up an open umbrella, drawn in white outline on black, with a small closed-mouth smile. Solid blue and magenta teardrops fall at an angle from the upper left and are stopped by the canopy. A three-line caption sits above and a four-line caption at the lower left.

Originally published by The Lily. Republished here by the author, who holds the rights. Every panel carries a description for screen readers.

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