From David B.'s "Epileptic"

Comics provide an excellent tool for parsing our experiences, and each creator puts his or her own lens on the mysteries and mundanities of disease. Pekar is a slice-of-life writer as well as a social commentator, and he and Brabner set his cancer against their decision to buy a house and Brabner’s work collecting war stories from teenagers. Janet & Me reads as a love story, chronicling the final years of two people who could hardly bear to be apart from one another. David B. casts his brother’s epilepsy as a horde of fantastical monsters, the sort a mythical knight might slaughter. For Munroe, the lens with which he eyes cancer is naturally a scientific one.

From Stan Mack's "Janet & Me"

Munroe’s background is in physics and robotics, and xkcd has always championed the awesome power of science. Science helps us understand the beauty of our universe. It makes our world a more awesome place. And, as the t-shirt says, “It works, bitches.” It makes sense that, in the face of his fiancée’s diagnosis, Munroe would turn to science to understand both the enemy that is cancer and the tools on hand to beat it back. His decision to share what he’s learned through his comic could prove at once cathartic and empowering for Munroe – and for readers whose lives have been similarly touched by disease.

Cancer can seem at times inscrutable, and Munroe may be just the person to demystify the illness for the webcomics-consuming public. Reduced to its core biological components, cancer may seem less the monster lurking in our lymph nodes and more a physiological mechanism that can be controlled. By dropping such knowledge into the hands of his readers, Munroe could help them take back a sense of control as well. He might even let them occasionally laugh in cancer’s face.

We here at Gamma Squad wish Munroe’s fiancée a full and speedy recovery, and we’re looking forward to seeing what glorious weapons science has loaded in the battle against cancer.

[xkcd]