Interview: Arizona O’Neill’s Opioids & Organs Graphic Memoir

Arizona O'Neill measures other cities against Montreal, not the other way around. She grew up in the Mile End, walks through Mount Royal Cemetery on the way downtown, and spent years working at Drawn & Quarterly before publishing her debut graphic novel with the press. That book, Opioids & Organs (2026), is about her father's death from a fentanyl overdose in 2015 and the organ donation decision she made in its aftermath.

But it's also, in its bones, a Montreal book: macabre, literary, and completely unashamed of both.

We sat down with O'Neill following of her book’s launch at Drawn & Quarterly to talk about making art in this city, the film grammar underneath her illustration work, and what it means to finally put her mother and her father in the same book.

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