Arizona O’Neill talks about her debut graphic novel

Welcome to the True North Country Comics Podcast — originating in Canada and celebrating comic book and graphic novel creators and supporters.

On this episode, I chat with Arizona O’Neill about her debut graphic novel Opioids & Organs published by Drawn & Quarterly.

Based in Montreal, Quebec, Arizona O’Neill is an author and illustrator. Her illustration work has appeared in Nelly Arcan’s L’enfant dans le miroir and her mother Heather O’Neill’s Valentine in Montreal. Her comics have appeared in Hazlitt, Exclaim!, Canadian Geographic, and the Montreal Gazette. She has created animated videos for many outlets, including CBC. A regular contributor to Radio-Canada’s Il restera toujours la culture, she is one half of the Bookstagram page @ONeillReads. Opioids & Organs is her first graphic novel.

Opioids & Organs is “a heartwrenching memoir of a daughter losing her father and a scathing indictment of the medical industry. Arizona grieves at the hospital bed of her father, a man she hardly knew, brain dead after a fentanyl overdose. Doctors encourage her to act quickly to recast him as a hero by way of organ donations. Distraught, Arizona makes a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life. As she struggles to come to terms with her father’s death and her role as next of kin in making his life’s last decision, she uncovers inconvenient truths about the organ industry’s own codependence on the opioid crisis.”

You can discover more about Arizona O’Neill online at ArizonaOneill.com and on Instagram at @arizonaoneill

Discover more about Opioids & Organs at Drawn & Quarterly

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