WHO I AM: Shelley Wall

WHAT I DO: I’m a medical illustrator and an assistant professor in the Biomedical Communications graduate program at the University of Toronto (UofT). I teach aspects of medical illustration and writing for healthcare, with a focus on patient education, visual narrative, and gender & health. This year I was inaugural illustrator-in-residence in UofT’s Faculty of Medicine.

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE: My first foray into comics was a few years ago, when I began work on some panels about living with someone who is living with Parkinson’s disease.

As I worked, I discovered that a form of reflective research was embedded in the work itself: the creative work of illustration and storytelling alternated with reflection on the visual grammar of comics and the analysis of how our individual story of illness and caregiving might be represented in such a way that it would reflect larger ideas about the roles of caregiver and patient. I was lucky enough to present that work-in-progress at the Chicago Comics & Medicine conference in 2011, and was bowled over by the eclectic, stimulating, friendly mix of people I met there. Since then, I’ve also collaborated with Mike Sappol of the National Library of Medicine on a medical memoir in comic form, to be published in Health and Humanities Reader: A Textbook for the Medical/Health Humanities, edited by Therese Jones.

The Chicago conference was my road-to-Damascus moment. I ended up joining the organizing committee, and was local point-person for last year’s Comics & Medicine conference in Toronto.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: For the past two years I’ve offered an elective course in graphic medicine for graduate students in the Biomedical Communications program. A couple of our students have also chosen to do their Master’s research projects in comic form (one about vaccination and immunology–told from the perspective of a virus and a bacterium who meet on a subway pole–and one about sexuality and teens with disabilities–still in early development), and I’ve been involved in supervising them.

During this past academic year, I led two experimental iterations of a graphic medicine seminar for undergraduate medical students; the seminar was a success, and will run again next year.

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON NOW: The personal Parkinson’s comic continues, though slowly. Professionally, I’m in the early stages of a collaborative project that will use comics to tell the stories of children with disabilities and the families and healthcare providers who care for them.

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW: Last weekend I attended the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, a real feast. Among other things I found myself drawn to the many beautiful, wordless comics presented there. I’m reading Carol Tyler’s trilogy, You’ll Never Know, and am looking forward to the publication of graphic memoirs by Paula Knight and Ian Williams.

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: I’ll be looking at moments when the visual discourse of medical illustration and diagnostic imaging erupts within comics about the experience of illness. I’ll also be chairing a panel on “Research in Health Education”, and taking part in a discussion panel with some of my fellow organizers.

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE:  Where to begin? Above all, I’m looking forward to the people–to seeing old friends, and meeting new ones. And to coming away reeling with inspiration.

The second keynote address in this brief podcast series is by Mom’s Cancer creator Brian Fies. He gave this talk at the recent  “Medical Examinations: Art, Story, Theory” conference at the University of California, Riverside.  You can read Brian’s blog write up of the conference as well as enjoy his keynote address here. Brian is introduced by conference organizer Juliette McMullin.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

David Small is giving a keynote address at the conference A Narrative Future for Healthcare in Kings College, London, which is likely to be a landmark event in narrative medicine, being a collaborative venture between Kings and Columbia University. The organisers have made extra tickets available for non-delegates who would like to attend David’s talks. These are limited to 60 so early booking is essential. You can book by clicking on the image below.

WHO I AM: Bobbie Farsides (female – people often expect a man to turn up)

WHAT I DO: My day job is Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS).

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE: I am a member of the Brighton based team which will be hosting the 4^th International Comics and Medicine Conference in June. I have ‘lurked’ around the Graphic Medicine site for some time now, so it was wonderful to be invited to be part of this great event.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: As an ethicist with an interest in narrative and first person accounts of illness experience I am always looking for new resources with which to engage my students and enliven my own work. Some years ago I attended a conference in the US and was introduced to the genre of Cancer comics. My interest started there, and now my bookshelves are enriched by a growing collection of works and my interest in graphic novels has strayed beyond the medical. I am also Director of Student Support in the Medical School and I have used some works on depression and other mental health problems as a successful trigger to discussion with colleagues and students.

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON RIGHT NOW: I have a number of projects on the go at the moment but perhaps the ones that will be of most interest to you are those involving the interface between art, science and medicine.  I have really enjoyed working with artist Anna Dumitriu on a series of events entitled Trust Me I’m an Artist and my colleague Sue Eckstein and I take great pleasure from hosting an on-going series of Ethics in Performance events at our medical school. On a more everyday level my research is focused on the experience of health care professionals and scientists working in ethically contested fields of biomedicine.

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW: I am very interested in discovering more about some of the new names in comics that I came across when judging the abstracts submitted to the conference.  I’m still something of a newbie in this area so every new book is exciting. I cannot go to London now without having a look in the Wellcome Trust bookshop which is committed to having a good section on graphic medicine. (You can follow them on Twitter at @WellcomeBlckwll.)

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: it is my honour and pleasure to be giving a very short introduction at the beginning of the conference, and I am chairing one of the sessions, but beyond that I shall be in the audience.

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE: I’m really looking forward to meeting the members of the organising committee who have been so wonderful and have helped us so much. Skype and conference calls are all very well but it will be good to shake hands. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that all our hard work will mean that everyone will have a great time in my home town.

We are honored to share two of the conference keynotes as Graphic Medicine podcasts. First up is Graphic Medicine site co-director, Ian Williams.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

WHO I AM: Sue Eckstein

WHAT I DO: I teach clinical and biomedical ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School and am also a novelist and playwright and occasional blogger at http://sueeckstein.wordpress.com/

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE: Bobbie Farsides and I organised an Ethics in Performance event on Graphic Medicine at Work and invited our colleague Muna Al Jawad, and my fellow Myriad authors Nicola Streeten and Nye Wright to come and talk about their wonderful work. I have to admit that this was my first real exposure to graphic medicine and I was hooked.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: I am just beginning to find ways of using graphic medicine in my work.  I have been particularly impressed by some of the great comics on depression which I’m hoping to use in my Bedlam and Beyond student selected component next term. 

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON RIGHT NOW: I have just been appointed editor of the BMJ journal Medical Humanities.

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE:  Absolutely everything – particularly looking forward to meeting colleagues with whom I’ve been corresponding over the past months and seeing the timetable come to life.

WHO I AM: MK Czerwiec (that’s pronounced sir-wick)

WHAT I DO: I’m a nurse currently working in the medical humanities. My past clinical experience is in HIV/AIDS care,  hospice care, and nursing administration. I make comics under the pseudonym Comic Nurse, and am currently the Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine.

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE: During my MA program, I focused some of my studies on the question of whether or not comics could have a legitimate place in critical dialog about health care. In 2010, I presented at the first Comics & Medicine conference in London, and was recruited as on-the-ground organizer of the second follow-up 2011 conference in Chicago. I’ve been on the organizing committee for Toronto and also this year in Brighton.

Last year, Ian Williams and I worked with a web developer to merge the 2011 conference website and his Graphic Medicine site, and we have been sharing the work of running the Graphic Medicine site since. I host and edit the Graphic Medicine podcast, which primarily aims to bring our conference presentations to interested folks who may not be able to attend the conferences. The podcast also periodically presents interviews with people working at the intersection of comics and medicine.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: Graphic Medicine is the primary content of my teaching and academic writing. I give lectures and workshops on drawing in the health care context. In my artwork, I am heavily influenced by many other creators in this sub-genre.

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON RIGHT NOW: 

• A yet-to-be-named graphic memoir project I started this spring
• My chapter and some artwork for the Graphic Medicine Manifesto, which, as others have mentioned, is the first installment in the Graphic Medicine Book series from Penn State University Press. Reading chapters by my co-authors, and incorporating their feedback into my chapter has helped me to better organize my thoughts about the role drawing and reading comics can play in health care.
•  My first graphic novel project, Taking Turns: A Careography. It is an illustrated oral history of caregiver response to the AIDS crisis as it happened in one Chicago hospital. Excerpts from this project  will be shown in Human Beings II, an exhibit curated by Riva Lehrer at WomanMade Gallery in Chicago, part of the Bodies of Work festival (exhibiting with many awesome artists, including Andrew Godfrey!)
• Working with Michelle Hwang on an article about “Hospice Comics” that we hope to target to a population of caregivers perhaps not familiar with Graphic Medicine
• The next issue of Ivy zine with Mita Mahato, which is a great joy and keeps me inspired
•  Laydeez do Comics Chicago, which is also an inspiration. I enjoy editing the audio and images from these events so they are available online.
•  Planning a long trip to UK this summer – first to London for the launch of the International Network for Narrative Medicine, a conference at which Mita, Ian, Linda Raphael, and I will present on aspects of  Graphic Medicine.  Then on to Glasgow (via Lincolnshire) to attend the International Bande Dessinee conference, then touring around Manchester, Bristol, and Bath, then to Brighton for the Comics & Medicine conference. Along the way we will attend THREE Laydeez do Comics events – London, Glasgow, and Brighton! The trip is going to be amazing and utterly exhausting.

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW:

•  Toronto Comics & Medicine presenter Nancy Andrews is making a film inspired by her experiences with ICU psychosis. Details at her funded Kickstarter.
•  The Churgeon’s apprentice’s successful  Indigogo for the film, “Medicine’s Dark Secrets” telling the human stories behind some of the pathology specimens at St. Bart’s Pathology Museum in London.
•  A film in production about the history and current state of newspapers and comics, Stripped. I’m quite eager to see this film.
• Ian mentioned Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow, and I share his enthusiasm for this project. It’s been inspiring visiting with, and chatting on Skype, with Katie as she finished this project.
• I’ve been following Lynda Barry’s Unthinkable Mind course at the University of Wisconsin for the past term, and I LOVE what she is doing integrating neurology, drawing, and comics.
• Quite thrilled with the work Brighton conference organizer Muna Al-Jawad is doing on her dissertation regarding the use of comics as a research methodology in medicine.
• I really, really, really want Carol Tyler to win at least one of the several Eisner Awards she is nominated for. (You can vote at that link!) Her series You’ll Never Know is absolutely amazing work of Graphic Medicine, addressing themes of PTSD and elder care. Though I am younger than she is, I was also raised by the WWII generation, and many of the issues she addresses in her book are really important in my life, and, I think, unrecognized generally.
•  The work Brighton keynote Nicola Streeten and her Laydeez do Comics colleague Sarah Lightman are doing to turn comics into feminist activism. I’m thrilled and honored to have adapted their model in Chicago and hope to see other women doing the same in their home cities throughout the world.

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: I’ll be talking about a potentially useful visual approach to bioethical decision making utilizing maps… I’m honored to be collaborating with a pioneer of literature and bioethics, Dr. Martha Montello, on this endeavor.

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE: It is going to be fantastic to see  presenters from prior Graphic Medicine events again, and also to meet new people working in the field. In addition, I am absolutely giddy with excitement about bringing home a new set of audio recordings for Graphic Medicine podcasts. Editing and posting the podcasts has been a fantastic opportunity for me to interact with each presenter about their ideas.  I’m also really excited about the addition of a marketplace for creators to share their work in con-style fashion.

WHO I AM: Lydia Gregg 

WHAT I DO: I’m an instructor and medical illustrator in the Division of Interventional Neuroradiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. I teach medical illustration as part of a full time joint appointment in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine.

My work in radiology involves illustrating, animating and writing about the neurovascular conditions treated in the division for medical publications, device patents and websites. In addition, I create patient education material such as brochures, medical comics and educational videos. My areas of interest in research include cerebrovascular anatomy and embryology, vascular malformations, and the development of effective communication material for patients. My full profile for the Division of Interventional Neuroradiology can be viewed here.

I also write and draw comics after-hours and run ProAtlantal Studio with my husband, Fabian de Kok-Mercado. As a side note, we both love volunteering with non-releasable birds of prey.

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE: I’ve been creating and publishing comics that involve scientific and medical concepts for over a decade. First as shorts published in graphic anthologies, and now as part of my job as a medical illustrator. Phoebe Gloeckner, who I fortuitously met while attending the University of MI, introduced me to the Graphic Medicine group after she presented at the 2011 meeting in Chicago, IL. I’m now looking forward to working with the group to organize the 2014 meeting.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: Our interventional neuroradiologists treat and manage many rare and under-diagnosed cerebrovascular conditions. Some of these conditions, such as intraocular retinoblastoma and spinal vascular malformations, can be more easily explained with imagery and a storyline that are relevant to the patient’s experiences and concerns. I’m interested in how comics can help patients by altering their perceptions of various conditions like these these. My personal work deals with medical and scientific topics in a metaphorical sense.

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON RIGHT NOW: I’m currently working on a project to develop a graphic narrative for patients with spinal vascular malformations, an under-diagnosed condition that can lead to permanent loss of spinal cord function if left untreated. My team is working alongside patient consultants to create the most beneficial material possible.

My current medical illustration projects involve the study of anatomical variations of the ophthalmic artery and spinal vascular anatomy as it relates to spinal cord stroke.

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW: I’m looking forward to Dash Shaw’s forthcoming book, New School. I’m also enjoying Hans Rickheit’s ectopiary, and Nate Neal’s The Big Trip, both posted online first as they come together as graphic novels. And of course, I’m looking forward to Ian William’s new book, The Bad Doctor.

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: I’ll be giving a workshop on digital editing, coloring and preparation of graphic narratives for distribution.

 A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE: I’m excited to catch up with everyone since the last conference. And of course, seeing David B.’s lecture, along with all of the great presentations that have been lined up for this year.

The comic panels will be published in Greenwoman Magazine, but they, and Sharon, have been kind enough to let us share them here.

As Sharon introduces the project, “This is my mother. I brought her the chicks. And then I listened and took notes of what happened.”

WHO I AM: Michael Green

WHAT I DO: I am a professor in the departments of Humanities and Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine. I work as a physician in general internal medicine, and I am a teacher and researcher. The general focus of my research is on bioethics and humanities. Over the years, this has generally taken the form of empirical work on medical decision-making and communication. I am currently engaged in an NIH-funded project to help patients make more informed decisions about end-of-life medical care, and to find ways for them (and their family caregivers) to be more empowered to make medical decisions.

I have been involved in Graphic Medicine for a number of years, and am part of the editorial collective of the forthcoming Graphic Medicine book series at Penn State University Press. I will be one of the co-authors of the first book with Susan Squier, Ian Williams, MK Czerwiec, Kimberly Myers and Scott Smith, which is a Graphic Medicine Manifesto of sorts.

In 2012, I served as a jurist for the Lynd Ward Prize for the Best Graphic Novel of the Year, and had the opportunity to read and review many of the finest comics from 2012.

I am also an amateur artist, having been engaged in creative work for much of my life, especially photography and watercolor painting. In recent years, I have been working to integrate my professional activities with my creative ones, and this has been enormously satisfying.

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE: Five years ago, I began teaching a course on Comics and Medicine to 4^th year medical students at Penn State College of Medicine. At that time, no one else was doing this, so I had to invent the course from scratch. As I explored existing resources, I stumbled upon Ian William’s “Graphic Medicine” website, and we began to correspond. Our conversations soon led to the idea of hosting the first-ever conference on Graphic Medicine, which Ian pulled together in London several years ago. Since then, I have been on the organizing committee for the subsequent Graphic Medicine conferences held in Chicago, Toronto, and now Brighton. I continue to teach my Comics and Medicine course, have published several essays and articles on comics and medicine, and am working hard to legitimize this medium within mainstream medicine.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: I am particularly interested in exploring how comics can be used to educate health care professionals. Not only do I believe that reading comics can be helpful for teaching students how to think critically about the practice of medicine, but also that creating comics can help them communicate more clearly and effectively. I write about these issues in the scholarly literature and continue to explore new ways to teach medical students using comics.

I also recently published my own comic story in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which recounted a traumatic experience from my medical training where I misdiagnosed a patient who ended up dying unexpectedly. Writing this comic helped exorcise some of my diagnostic demons, I am proud that this was the first comic published in a mainstream clinical journal, and hope that this will open the door for others to do the same. In fact, the editors of the Annals have expressed an interest in publishing more work using the comic format, so please talk with me if you are interested in submitting something and I will explain what they are looking for.

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW: I’m excited by so much going on in the comics world right now which seems to be experiencing an creativity explosion. In the Graphic Medicine world, I’m particularly excited by the essays in our book series, which I hope will help frame and define this genre for years to come.

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: I will be moderating some sessions and participating in a plenary lecture on the interplay between comics, medicine and ethics.

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE: I am looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and learning about all the exciting activities under the banner of “graphic medicine.” The keynotes excite me as does the marketplace. This is a great time for our new field, and I am so pleased to be part of it, and to see the diverse activities in which others are engaged.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: Graphic Medicine IS my work! I write about it and talk about it. Making comics forces me to focus intently on my medical practice: the process of turning life – real or imagined – into a comic is a great reflective tool. I get medical students to talk to patients in various settings: terminal care or homeless centres with the express instruction to listen to the narrative and forget about formulating a differential diagnosis or management plan. This gets them to think about the patients story rather than the ‘history’. Then I get them to make a comic about the story.

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON RIGHT NOW: I’m writing a graphic novel- entitled ‘The Bad Doctor’ for Myriad Editions which is due out next year. I’m also finishing a book chapter for our forthcoming Graphic Medicine Manifesto from Penn State Uni Press.

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW: I can’t wait for Katie Green’s Lighter than My Shadow to be launched in October and Darryl Cunningham has expanded Science Tales for a a second edition.

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: I’m going to talk about The Bad Doctor 

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE: I’m really looking forward to hearing David B’s talk. I’m also looking forward to hearing Alan Blum, as I missed his talk at Toronto. I’m chairing the session he is talking in this time round. I’m really going to MISS Brian Fies! its the first conference he wont be present at.

WHO I AM: 

Muna Al-Jawad

 WHAT I DO:

Consultant in Elderly Medicine, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals.

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE: 

Local coordinator or Chair of 2013 Comics and Medicine conference in Brighton

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK: 

1. Superhero alter-ego helps me make sense of what I do

www.oldpersonwhisperer.tumblr.com

2. Teach medical students and other healthcare professionals to make sense of what they do using comics

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON RIGHT NOW: 

Attempting PhD research using comics to investigate identity of medical practitioners. For more on comics as methodology see:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10912-013-9205-0

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW: 

I was completely overwhelmed by the quality and diversity of abstracts submitted for the 2013 conference. There is so much good stuff going on at the moment, from artists to clinicians to academics to comics enthusiasts and lots of combinations of those- we hope to represent that at the conference and do the work justice.

I think what excites me about the concept of graphic medicine is that everyone learns something from it. It takes all of us out of our comfort zone. It gives a voice to those people that might be otherwise unheard. It allows us to say the unsayable. Both reader and creator learn through the process.

In terms of naming a specific thing, my screensaver at the moment is by Nick Wadley.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2012/jul/23/drawings-of-doctors-nick-wadley?newsfeed=true

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: 

What has medicine done to me? Using comics to explore how doctors accept and resist medical “regard” and the impact this has on humane practice

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE: 

1. The general buzz/chat

2. The comics marketplace

3. Seeing the Brighton SSC-comics students present their work (Go Beth, Kuru, Bethany and Jaymi!)

4. Getting loads of ideas for my ongoing research work (thanks everyone, you’ll all be credited)

WHO I AM: Susan Squier

WHAT I DO:  Teach English and Women’s Studies at Penn State University, co-edit the Graphic Medicine book series at Penn State University Press with Ian Williams, and in 2014 I  will be editing a special issue of CONFIGURATIONS, the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, on “Graphic Medicine.” Submissions welcome. Finally, I’ve just signed on to join Jacalyn Duffin as Joint Green Visiting Professors at the University of British Columbia for a week in February 2014, where we’ll be discussing graphic medicine when we talk about “critical studies of health and medicine.” We’d be very happy to have any comics people come out for those events.

MY CONNECTION TO GRAPHIC MEDICINE:  Got there via feminist theory, science studies, cultural studies of medicine, and the Medical Humanities. (Wrote about it first in my book Liminal Lives: Rethinking the Human at the Margins of Biomedicine, and am writing about it in the book I am working on now, Epigenetic Landscapes.) Also have written about comics in articles that have appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, and Perspectives on Biology and Medicine.  Last year I was on the jury for the Lynd Ward Prize for the Best Graphic Novel in North America.

HOW I USE GRAPHIC MEDICINE IN MY WORK:  I teach graphic medicine courses to graduate students in English and Women’s Studies at Penn State University, and I find I’m writing about graphic medicine more and more.

PROJECTS I’M WORKING ON RIGHT NOW: Just gave a talk on sex education comics from the 1970s through 2013, including a discussion of Saiya Miller and Liza Bley’s “Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf” zine series, at the Mediating Public Spheres: Genealogies of Feminist Knowledge in the Digital Age conference of the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center. Saiya was a respondent (wonderfully) and her mother was in the audience: a terrific event! Twenty or so of us–aged 60′s to ‘teens–collaborated on creating a sex education comic that is now housed in the library at Hampshire College. It was tremendous fun. The conference talks will be Media Sited soon, but in the interim I have a very brief clip of Saiya Miller teaching a ‘zine workshop in which I participated:

Click here to view the embedded video.

PROJECTS BY OTHERS I’M EXCITED ABOUT RIGHT NOW:  The forthcoming BOOK publication of Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf (the press is Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press)  To be released August 13, 2013. There will be a book tour, coming to a city near you!  (exact dates and locations TBA). Also excited about the fabulous comic Ian Williams is working on right now; and the book that I am co-writing with Ian, MK, Kimberly, Michael and Scott,  The Graphic Medicine Manifesto.

WHAT I’LL BE PRESENTING ON IN BRIGHTON: Anders Nilsen’s BIG QUESTIONS as an epigenetic landscape.

A FEW THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE 2013 BRIGHTON COMICS & MEDICINE CONFERENCE: I can’t even say just a few things: the keynotes, seeing the great GM crowd, the tables of comics to peruse and even purchase, and the conversations!

Don’t forget to register for the coolest conference on earth! Early bird discounts will end will end soon! Click on images or here to register.

“I put something amusing in every two pages.” - Joyce Farmer

“Every exit should be special.” – Paul Gravett

The last session from our 2012 Comics & Medicine conference in Toronto presents the magnificent Joyce Farmer in conversation with Paul Gravett. They discuss her long career making comics on medical themes, from “Tits & Clits” to “Abortion Eve” to Special Exits.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

The featured image for the podcast is a crayoned self-portrait Joyce did during Michael Green and MK Czerwiec’s workshop at the conference.

All photos from the conversation are by Michael Green.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

Mita Mahato (These Frames Are Hiding Places) is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound where she teaches courses in contemporary Visual and Cultural Studies. Her scholarship explores the reception of illness stories across several narrative forms, including comics and blogs. She also makes comics and likes cutting things up. She writes of her presentation, “Signs of life: Framing terminal illness, death, and grief through comics:”

When it comes to terminal illness and its aftermaths, the “thing” that comics narrative makes manifest, known, familiar, is paradoxically absence, loss, death. A year ago, I began developing a comics project in order to work through my experiences of caregiving for my mother, who died in 2007 from colon cancer. In sharing my work on this project in progress, as well as exploring images in other illness comics that deal specifically with terminal illness, death, and grief, I hope to provide a creative and personal lens through which to understand the transformative value of comics under loss of life.

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Aliceheimer’s: Graphic pathography as healing, Dana Walrath

New to the world of comics, my work on Alzheimer’s disease integrates the anthropological (PhD, University of Pennsylvania), creative writing (MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts) and artistic threads of my life. A faculty member of University of Vermont’s College of Medicine, I established and directed their medical humanities program.

Drawing on examples from my Aliceheimer’s stories, a depiction of life with my mother Alice before and during dementia, this paper focuses on the power of graphic storytelling to heal and support individual caregivers, to support those with dementia, and to re-write the dominant biomedical story of how we age in North America. Because stigma and social death typically surround mental illness and disability, the dominant narrative desperately needs revision. Graphic narratives can bring back the humanity of a person with dementia while also capturing the care giver/receiver reality disjunction that poses such a challenge in life with dementia.

You can see the original blog posts of the Aliceheimer series here. You can read a review of Dana’s work here, and see the most recent Aliceheimer’s story Dana made during the 24 hour comic challenge at Angouleme 2013 here.

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Peaco Todd is a syndicated cartoonist, the author/illustrator of several books, and professor in the Union Institute and University’s online BA program. In addition to the book upon which her presentation is based, she’s working on an environmental education project for middle-school children utilizing cartoons. Her website is www.peacotoons.com. She writes of her presentation, “A mild case of cancer”—Using cartoons to express the multiple narratives of one disease:

Disease can comprise several narratives: pathologies that researchers study, medical professionals who diagnose and treat, patients who undergo the assault of illness and its remedies, and the perceptions of those outside the clinical setting who tell their stories. This presentation examines the collaboration between a cartoonist and a biologist-turned-cancer-patient to convey her experience with thyroid cancer. One narrative thread documents the emotional roller-coaster ride that her diagnosis and treatment invoked. Another communicates the science involved and the treatments through which thyroid cancer can be targeted. The images, infused with humor and imagination, integrate and interpret both personal experience and medicine.

You can see more of Peaco’s comic and illustration work here. The presentations are followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

Ian Williams is a comics artist, physician and writer. He has studied Medicine, Medical Humanities and Fine Art and he originated the website GraphicMedicine.org, coining the term that has been applied to the interaction between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. You can see learn more about his work here. He writes of his presentation, “Radical visions: The iconography of illness in comics and graphic novels,” 

The proliferation of image based media has ensured that iconographic representations of health, illness and disease have become more important in western societies. Medical imaging and illustration, traditionally the preserve of medical professionals, could be seen as constituting the ‘official’ visual rhetoric of the discourse of healthcare, shaping the mental schemata of illness in the minds of professionals and laymen alike. The medium of comics, particularly that section which has developed from the radical underground, acts to some extent as a counterweight to this official iconographic control and it could be argued that the makers of autobiographical illness comics, by portraying their own diseased bodies, are seizing power and changing the illness experience of others, altering their expectations and perceptions.The way that illness is represented in popular media, and the way this influences patients’ conceptions of illness is not generally considered in medical education. The contemplation and discussion of graphic narratives could be a valuable edition to medical education and, indeed, medical journals and educators are beginning to use the graphic medium. This paper argues that the subjective portrayal of illness and disease by comics artists, and the area of study known as Graphic Medicine, constitute a valuable resource which can be more illuminating than ‘traditional’ medical illustration.

__________

Andrew Godfrey is a comic artist and blogger from Bristol, UK. He was born with the chronic illness cystic fibrosis. He also collaborates with his close friend Emma Mould (under the name Sicker than thou) on her autobiographical comics chronicling her experiences with the mental health service. You can learn more about his work here. He writes of his talk, “Navigating the margins between the cartoon self and the ‘real’ self: Irony, authenticity, and disillusion inThe CF Diaries,”

In this talk I discuss how I have attempted to present a more rounded representation of illness than we see in media. I give a brief overview of my influences and how they have helped shape the way in which I tell my story, in particular my use of humour. I explain why I think comics is the perfect medium to play out the schizophrenic split between the ideal self, the real self, and the self that others see. Finally, I recall the impact your story might have on those closest to you when you are often alienated from the truth of the subject matter yourself.

A very cool video and post on Science Friday’s site today shows more insight into the owl character in the comic! Watch for Lydia’s cameo as she helps demonstrate the owl’s special skill.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

“Facing” illness: what the “funnies” can teach us about caregiver role, response, and needs

Sarah Russe and Judith Kaplan-Weinger

An overt focus on the effects of illness is still rare in mainstream syndicated comics. One of the few examples can be found in the “Funky Winkerbean” comic strip, by Tom Batiuk, which not only highlights a woman’s ultimately terminal experience with cancer, but also provides great insight into how the illness experience affects her husband, who must learn to be supportive of her needs while not sublimating his own. (The collected strips were published as a book titled Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe.) Using a broad discourse analysis framework, we examine how his feelings, needs, words, and actions evolve, intersect, and interact with each other and with this situation.

Sarah Russe is a scientific director at Discovery Chicago where she specializes in community advocacy projects. She holds a master’s degree in linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University, is completing another in Bioethics & Health Policy from Loyola University, and is committed to exploring the synergies between these two fields.

Judith Kaplan-Weinger is professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago where she teaches courses and conducts research in discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Her current research focuses on the linguistic and visual semiotic analysis of texts of loss, grief, and mourning.

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Fertility, Domestic Abuse and Mammograms: Three Story Lines in the syndicated newspaper comic strip, “Between Friends”
Sandra Bell-Lundy

“Between Friends” is a slice-of-life comic strip that features three forty-something women friends and is syndicated worldwide by King Features. It is primarily a humour strip but because it is reality-based, Sandra occasionally writes sequential story lines that explore serious issues relating to women. Sandra will show selected strips from the story arcs about fertility and about domestic abuse and discuss the influences behind these comics as well as reader reaction. She will also show cartoons featuring her “Between Friends” characters that were created specifically for the Canadian Cancer Society for their campaign to promote mammograms. You can watch the animation of these strips here.

Canadian  cartoonist Sandra Bell-Lundy is the creator of the comic strip,”Between  Friends”.  Her strip is syndicated  by King Features to over 175 newspapers in North America as well as ten  international countries including India, Saudi Arabia and Australia. “Between Friends” has been anthologized in  two book collections and has been featured in a Canadian Cancer Society campaign  to promote regular mammograms.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

This Toronto conference panel is moderated by Ian Williams.

Managing difference through graphic cancer narratives, Juliet McMullin, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

A common refrain in cancer disparities research states that while cancer mortality rates have dramatically decreased over the past decade, these gains have not accrued evenly across populations. Yet, there is little surprise in the findings of difference in cancer mortality rates. Cancer has always been about difference; difference in cells, in a body, between bodies, in access to resources, knowledge, and medical care. Graphic novels that have cancer narratives at their center, such as Mom’s Cancer, Alicia en el mundor real, or Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, provide insights into the processes by which difference is revealed and biomedical citizens and selves are (re)made. This process is keenly observed through the specter of cancer and its unresolvable entanglement with biomedicine. Through the analysis of graphic novels of cancer, this paper examines the co-production of metaphors and practices of disparity and difference. The multiplicity of cultural meanings associated with these narratives have important and yet sometimes confounding implications for understanding cancer disparities. By examining the intersections of metaphors, activism, and biomedicalization in graphic novels we can gain insight into the simultaneous creation and erasure of cancer as difference. The entanglement with biomedicine leads to a proliferation of spheres through which one can not only come to know cancer as difference and marginalization but also know themselves as biomedicalized citizens.

The slides that correspond to Juliet’s presentation can be viewed in Prezi format here.

Disability, Dismodernism and Kaisa Leka’s ‘I Am Not These Feet’ (2003), José Alaniz. associate professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Washington.

In 2002, Finnish comics artist Kaisa Leka, who due to a congenital condition had long suffered severe pain from arthritis in her lower extremities, chose to have them amputated. She chronicled her controversial decision, journey through the surgical procedure and its aftermath in her autobiographical comics, I Am Not These Feet.Proceeding from Disability Studies scholar Lennard Davis’ concept of Dismodernism (for its critically body-based approach to Postmodernist identity), this presentation addresses some key issues raised by Leka’s work and life story: the resistance to medical, sentimental, humorless and “overcoming” models of  impairment, in favor of a social model; the place of prostheses in contemporary posthumanism; and the comics representation of the disabled, autonomous self.

Cancer superwoman: Performing femininity in Marissa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen, Jessica Wolpert, Master of Arts in Literature and Medicine from Kings College, London.

In her graphic novel Cancer Vixen, Marisa Acocella Marchetto feminizes the metaphor of battling against illness by depicting herself as a superheroine who uses fashion, exercise, and diet as weapons to defeat cancer. Unlike the traditional male superhero, Marchetto is in a fight to the death against her own body—a battle already familiar to the readers of women’s magazines, the intended audience of Cancer Vixen. This story of a cancer superheroine is both comfortingly familiar and deliberately prescriptive, creating a narrative universe in which the feminine culture of breast cancer–Barbara Ehrenreich’s “pink kitsch”–can literally be a lifesaver.

“Der Soldat began as a response to my job as an emergency medical technician in New York, and evolved into a broader film about what it feels like to care for others.  I wanted to make something that conveyed the feeling of that work.  The animation is hand-drawn on paper with pencil, totaling about nine-hundred drawings, and then they were filmed one-by-one and digitally edited together. A few years after making this I decided to go to medical school, to return to the root of the experience.”

Der Soldat from Max Cohen on Vimeo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

sketch by Riva Lehrer

First, The Power Within, an anti-bullying comic.

Second, Transposes, a graphic novel by Dylan Edwards with foreword by Alison Bechdel.  From the Northwest Press site:

Dylan Edwards’ Transposes separates gender from sexuality and illustrates six fascinating true stories of transgender men who also happen to be queer. The result is laugh-out-loud funny, heartbreaking, challenging, inventive, informative, and invites the reader to explore what truly makes a man a man.

Also see this Sequential Tart piece about gender identity in comics.

Most recently, Northwest Press has released Positive, a graphic novel by Tom Bouden. From  the Gay League review,

The story frankly, tenderly, and humorously follows Sarah as she learns of her HIV infection, deals with doctors and medications (and scatological side-effects), tackles the issue of sex with her HIV-negative partner, and makes her way from terror and uncertainty to hope for the future.

I’ll be posting reviews of Positive and Transposes soon, but wanted to draw this great collection to your attention. You can also purchase Northwest Press titles on Gumroad here.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

This panel from the 2012 Toronto Comics & Medicine conference was moderated by Shelley Wall.

First up is Steven Bergson, an administrator in the Research Department of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and  Vice-President of the Ontario chapter of the Association of Jewish Libraries. He also maintains three blogs on the subject of the representation of Jews and Israelis in comix, including this one.

Of his presentation, “From Ivanhoe to Rex Mundi: Jews and Medicine in Comic Books, Comic Strips, and Graphic Novels” he writes,

Although the number of examples is quite small, a content analysis of certain comics can provide insight into six areas which have been overlooked by comix scholars: the humourous use of the Jewish doctor stereotype, the portrayal of Jews as patients, the portrayal of Jews as healers, the portrayal of Jews as victims of Nazi doctors, the portrayal of Jewish contributions to medicine (by non-physicians), and the portrayal of Jewish medical ethics.

You can find the titles and images from all the comics depicting Jewish doctors/medicine that Steven discusses in this Flickr photo pool.

Next  up is Jeffrey Monk, a Penn State Hershey pediatric medicine intern, with his presentation, “A ghost of an idea: A reflection on my comic adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” for the medical humanities.” He writes,

I am a lifelong comic enthusiast, but with no experience as a comics creator. My process of devising a graphic story began with a single idea: use the widely known “A Christmas Carol” as the backbone for my tale, but adapt it to speak to a medical audience. Early on in the process of writing my script, I discovered a quote from Charles Dickens, wherein he referred to the theme of his story as “the ghost of an idea” which, he hoped, would “pleasantly haunt the reader.” I decided to use empathy as the central idea of my story and strove to create a narrative where this idea would haunt the central character, as well as the reader. I wanted to show examples of the importance of communication, both verbal and nonverbal, in displaying empathy and facilitating a relationship between physician and patient. After acquiring new skills in art and learning much about the creation process, I produced an eight page story that, I believe, achieves my goals. In my story, Dr. Richard Charles, a doctor with no sense of empathy for his patients, student, or nurse, is visited by the Ghosts of Medicine Past, Present, and Future. Each Ghost shows Dr. Charles an example of how important empathy is to a healthy doctor-patient relationship. In the end, when Dr. Charles sees his future self as a patient receiving no empathy from his physician, he finally learns from his experiences and makes an important decision to visit a patient he had formerly neglected.

Jeffrey’s full comic, and many more Penn State medical student comics, can be seen here.

The final presenter on this panel is Lorenzo Servitje, a first year PhD student in English at the University of California, Riverside. He holds a BA from California State University, San Bernardino, where he studied English and Biology. His professional interests pertain to medical discourse in cultural and literary studies with an emphasis in addiction studies. Of his presentation, “Empathy in the gutter: Participatory delusion in graphic adaptation of Shutter Island” he writes,

“Empathy in the Gutter” explores the ability of the graphic adaption of Shutter Island to engender empathy for psychotic illness. Using Scott McCloud and other critics’ understanding of closure and reader participation, I argue that the graphic adaption of Shutter Island gives the reader an opportunity to experience delusion, along with its brief moments of clarity. The implications of this work suggest that the graphic novel format contains the potential for practical use within medical humanities. It conveys what film, the DSM-IV, mental health pamphlets, and first-hand accounts cannot: what it is like to experience delusion.

In the meantime, it recently came to my attention that some of the audio from the 2011 Chicago Comics & Medicine conference was lost when we switched to the new site. So I’m going to add back some of that now.

First up is David Small, and his keynote address “The Voice of The Eye” in which he discusses his graphic novel, Stitches, and some of the behind-the-scenes stories of its creation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This year, the winning entry in the Dalhousie Dept of Psychiatry Student Writing Competition (medical student category) was a graphic novella on PTSD by Stefania Spano… For those interested graphic novels in health humanities, it is worth checking out.

Agreed, highly worth checking out. Spano’s innovative use of color, creative frame work, and compelling narrative help make this a fantastic graphic medicine project. She even linked to our site in her entry. Thanks, Stefania, for spreading the word!

Thanks for sharing on the Literature & Medicine list serve, Lara!

“Bolte Taylor 11″ by Comic Nurse, doodled whilst listening to this amazing TED talk.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

Our eleventh panel from Toronto and they just keep getting better and better! I, MK, had the honor of moderating this panel and am quite pleased to revisit and post it here.

The first speaker is Michelle N. Huang,  a Master’s Student and University Graduate Fellow at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include disability studies, war literature, and cultural studies in the twentieth century.

She writes of her paper, The “Good Enough Daughter” in Special Exits and Tangles: 

This paper examines the representation of maternal decline in two recent book-length autobiographical comics that portray individuals with Alzheimer’s disease: Tangles by Sarah Leavixtt and Special Exits by Joyce Farmer. Retracing the experiences of caregiving and the eventual death of mothers, both texts show the transformative effects of dementia on the sick as well as their caregivers. How can the transitional space enacted by Alzheimer’s unsettle normative conceptions of selfhood and a natural trajectory of life? Can the onset of dementia be viewed not as uniformly tragic, but instead as holding possibilities for mutual recognition between mother and daughter?

 

The second speaker is Amelia DeFalco, a Banting postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University researching the ethics of caregiving in contemporary Canadian literature. She is author ofUncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2010) as well as essays on authors Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro, and filmmaker Todd Haynes.

Of her paper, Graphic Care: Gender, Comics, and Dependency Work, Amelia writes,

This paper considers the ways in which graphic memoirs complicate the idealizing tendencies of ethics of care philosophy. The medium’s “capacious” layering of words, images, temporalities, and perspectives produces “productive tensions. . . The words and images entwine, but never synthesize” (Chute 5). In graphic memoirs about care, this “capaciousness” allows for quick oscillation between the rewards and struggles of care work, representing ambiguous, even ambivalent attitudes toward care. Graphic memoirs effectively represent multiple perspectives without synthesis, part of a structural and thematic ambivalence that provides a provocative counterpoint to the abstract idealism of ethics of care philosophy.

 The Q&A that follows the talks benefits from the insights of Marsha Hurst and Special Exits creator Joyce Farmer. 

read the review here

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

On this panel from Toronto, we’ll hear four great speakers.  Unfortunately the audio starts slightly into Courtney’s presentation, but one can catch up quite quickly.

First up is Courtney Donovan. Courtney is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Human Environmental Studies, San Francisco State University. Of her presentation, Visualizing Medical Data Through Graphic Novels, she writes,

In more recent years, there has been a burgeoning interest in graphic novels exploring health and medical themes. Researchers and practitioners across different fields have in particular been drawn to these texts as medical narratives. That is, these texts are ways of conveying the health care experiences of individuals affected by health and medical issues. In this presentation, I wish to explore how graphic novels of health and medicine act as a form of medical data visualization.  In this respect, graphic novels of health and medicine provide an alternate and complementary way of conveying health and medical related issues previously represented exclusively through spatial and statistical data. To illustrate this idea, I will compare the spatial and statistical depiction of breast cancer data with how such information is presented in graphic novels of health and disease on the same subject.

You can scroll through the images from Courtney’s presentation here.

Second, we hear from Adam Mollinger, introduced by Neil Phillips. Adam is a doctor who has worked in general hospitals, forensic units and outpatient clinics across Australia. He has attained a Masters of Psychiatric Medicine. He is currently completing specialist qualifications in consultation-liaison psychiatry. He is interested in the interface between physical health and mental health. Of his presentation, Adam writes,

Comics demonstrate the illness experience and the doctor-patient relationship. There are a selection of comics that present useful snapshots of the behaviour of patients and doctors. There are biological, psychological and social factors influencing how we experience illness and how we relate to our healthcare providers. Comics are a tool to reflect on this entirety of an individual’s illness experience. Such reflection is useful to doctors when the relationship between doctor and patient goes awry. This review uses comics to provide insight on how to manage such impaired relationships.

Our third speaker is Janel Lee-Evoy. Janet Lee-Evoy is a third-year medical student at the University of Western Ontario with an interest in family medicine and psychiatry.  She documents and reflects on her experiences through journaling, and writing and illustrating comics.  In addition to writing, she also advocates for literacy promotion in health care settings. Of her presentation, she writes,

Through writing a graphic novel about medical school I am attempting to provide an illustration of “how we train doctors”.  I am documenting the transition from being a person “outside” the healthcare system, to becoming an inexorable component of that same system, with the hope of bridging some of the gaps between patients and doctors, and enabling some mutual understanding.  Through this I also reflect on a number of ethical issues that have arisen during my medical school training, and will touch on how this practice of reflection is integral to becoming an effective physician.

Janet says so eloquently in her presentation of making a graphic novel about medical school,

“It’s so important to reflect on experiences (ethically charged situations) because  that’s all the teaching you’re going to get.”

And our fourth and final speaker is Danaka White. Danaka is a student at the University of Western Ontario completing her Masters of Science in Occupational Therapy. Throughout her educational training as an occupational therapist she has combined her passion for the arts into the scientific practice of occupational therapy through artistically reflecting on experiences she has encountered in clinical practice. Of her presentation she writes,

Reflection is an individualized experience that informs clinical reasoning, heightens awareness and encourages professional development (Kinsella, 2001). As a student occupational therapist, I have participated in clinical placements that have introduced me to the reality of working as a health care professional within the Canadian health care system. I have created comics that visually captured ethically challenging situations, which allowed me to engage in reflection and critical reflection in a unique way. These comics depict ethical tensions faced by healthcare professionals on a daily basis, revealing themes of personal judgement within healthcare practice, informed consent, and informal approaches versus formal approaches of assessment.

Ian

answers to ian@graphicmedicine.org (or post a comment here)

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

This panel from Toronto, “Comics and Rhetoric,” features Brandon Strubberg, Tim Elliot, and Matt Kaske Cirigliano.

Brandon Strubberg and Tim Elliott are second-year PhD students in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University. Brandon’s Master’s thesis focused on rhetorical representations of diabetic identity, and he has presented on the topic in the past. His current research projects include examining the interactions between identities of disease and technology as well as the usability of medical manuals. Tim has presented a number of papers on superhero comics and popular culture, mostly recently on a panel  titled  “Giant Sized Introductions: Using X-Men Relaunches as a Vehicle for Introducing Students to the Superhero Comic,” presented at the Rocky Mountain Conference on Graphic Novels. He remains interested in the possibilities for comic books as a medium for conveying complex information to mass audiences. Of their presentation, Humanizing Medicine Through Graphic Storytelling: A Rhetorical Analysis of Student-Created Graphic Narrative, they write,  

This oral presentation focuses on a rhetorical analysis of the comics produced in Dr. Green’s course, “Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives,” particularly those students’ comics that represent communicative interactions between themselves and the physicians they work with and learn from in clinical settings. After a brief literature review covering the comic medium’s adaptability to various rhetorical situations within medical discourse, we will present the results of a content analysis of 19 student-created comics. This analysis provides statistical evidence for communicative trends between senior medical students and their supervising physicians. We will close our discussion with several exemplar texts that elaborate on medical student agency during this initial period of clinical training.

Brandon can be emailed at  brandon.c.strubberg@ttu.edu, and Timothy at  timothy.elliott@ttu.edu. They are working on a blog that will, as they describe it, “discuss graphic medicine in the context of rhetoric (medical rhetoric, scientific rhetoric, and public rhetoric) specifically.” Looking forward to linking to that blog ASAP!

Matt Kaske Cirigliano received a BA in Biomechanical Design from Gettysburg College and an MS in Biomedical Visualization from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has received merit awards from the Association of Medical Illustrators and UIC, exhibited artwork internationally, and has worked in patient education at TheVisualMD and Understand.com. He writes of his presentation, Conquering cells:  Promoting science and medicine through sequential art: 

The appeal of entertainment media begs to question whether it can be used as a supplement to classroom teachings, inspiring students to pursue scientific knowledge through narrative. To begin, one must understand the needs of the audience. Using Q-method analysis, five distinct temperaments were defined in a population of biology students, each with a distinct attitude towards reading an edutainment graphic novel parallel to their studies. These results offer tantalizing insight into how we can design graphic novels to cater to each of the five factors, making complex topics approachable through the familiar action, adventure, and narratives of sequential art.

The video promo at the beginning of this presentation can be watched here. You can reach Matt by emailing cirima01@gmail.com and see more of his work at  http://www.mattcirigliano.com/

LISTEN

would like to  officially announce the preliminary details of our 2013 Comics & Medicine conference!

4^th International Conference of Comics and Medicine

5^th-7^th July 2013, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK

CALL FOR PAPERS HERE!

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

This panel from Toronto, “Studio Time in the Literature and Medicine Classroom,” features Susan Squier, Tess Jones, and Scott Smith.

They write of their panel,

“We will present our experiences introducing ‘studio time’–a time dedicated to creating our own comics (text and images)–into classes that are customarily occupied with discussing comics, either as examples of literature or as modes of communication in health care settings. After brief paper, we answer questions and encourage discussion and comments among the attendees.”

Tess Jones is an associate professor in medical humanities who has been studying the rationale for and the impact of incorporating the visual arts, including comics drawing, into medical education. Her talk is titled, “Running the Risk: Studio Thinking in Medical Education.”

Scott Smith is an assistant professor of English whose undergraduate classes on comics have included the opportunity for students to make their own comics individually or in collaboration. His talk is titled, “Reading Comics, Making Comics.”

Susan Squier is a professor of Women’s Studies and English who teaches comics in graduate seminars in those fields. Her talk is titled, “Studio Time in the Literature Classroom.” Ideas from Susan’s presentation in this panel will appear in different form in the upcoming issue of Atrium.

The presentations are followed by a lively discussion. Voices heard include Marsha Hurst, Mita Mahato, Nicola Streeten, MK Czerwiec, and Joyce Farmer.

The article in Discover article, titled, “The Brain, The Charlie Brown Effect”  looks closely at sequential art with and without narrative significance.

“People are able to predict what’s coming next,” Cohn says, “even if there’s no meaning to it.”

The study the article is citing (full PDF courtesy of the author) is available on researcher Neil Cohn’s website.

Also an earlier article (pdf full text via author’s website) where Cohen takes on Scott McCloud’s theories on sequential art.

Chapter one is here and chapter two is here.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

This wonderful panel, moderated by Michael Green, presents the creators of three unique and insightful graphic pathographies.

Jenny Lin is a visual artist based in Montreal. She has created experimental narrative-based works in the formats of 2-D print, artist books, video and site-specific installation. She recently worked as a medical illustrator at McGill University and she currently teaches at Concordia University in the Print Media program. www.jenny-lin.ca. She writes of her presentation,

In my presentation, Skinny Leg, I will describe my artist book, Skinny Leg. Skinny Leg is a first-person account of an accident I was involved in in December 2009 in which I was run over by a truck while cycling to work. With images, text, pop-up components and fold-out pages, this book blends clinical and matter-of-fact descriptions of the accident together with intimate anecdotes of seemingly inconsequential details surrounding the event. What is revealed is the strangeness and banality of the experience as well as the mutability of memory.

Nancy Andrews’ work has been presented by the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, and Flaherty Seminars; six of her films are in the MoMA collection.  She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in filmmaking, 2008; and, MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Andrews teaches at the College of the Atlantic. http://www.nancyandrews.net

This talk, Loupette and the Moon: A graphic pathology of genetics, destiny and trauma,  explores the development and expression of ideas, memories and emotions in a semi-autobiographical comic book, Loupette and the Moon. The narrative of Loupette, a girl with hypertrichosis, presents ideas about the mind, sanity and perception, based on my experience as a person with a genetic disorder experiencing delirium and medical trauma. Loupette connects to a series of drawings, “Delirious”, that depict the devastating territory of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) delirium and its psychological aftermath.  This talk will question the ways that drawn narratives enter into dialogue with medical research, patient education and public awareness of health/medical issues. Andrews also discusses her work around intensive care unit psychosis.

Sarafin is a Toronto area artist, writer, and activist. A self-described “psych heretic”, Sarafin’s art mainly involves themes of madness, spirituality, psychiatry, and drug culture. She enjoys making comics, shopping, spending quiet nights at home in contemplation, and drinking chai tea lattes. http://www.asylumsquad.com/pages/about/ Sarafin also designed the Mad Pride Toronto logo. http://www.madprideto.com

Life with psychosis is tough… spending a year in CAMH’s 1001 Queen Mental Health Centre is even tougher. To get through the experience, artist/writer Sarafin coped using her joy of creating comics. And so, Asylum Squad Side Story, the webcomic, was born. 44 pages into the serial, and Sarafin was discharged, but she continued the comic, developing a following in the Mad Pride and psychiatric survivor communities. This presentation will discuss the comic itself, Sarafin’s personal experiences with healing and the Toronto mental health system, as well as the Mad Pride movement.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

Another fantastic panel from Toronto! This one is moderated by Brian Fies and discusses comics in relation to two major public health issues: smoking and hypertension.

First up is Alan Blum, an authority on the tobacco industry. In 1977, he founded Doctors Ought to Care (DOC), the first physicians’ organization dedicated to ending the tobacco pandemic. As editor of the Medical Journal of Australia and the New York State Journal of Medicine in the 1980s, he published the first theme issues on smoking at any journal.

He describes part one of his presentation, “Seeing patients: The sketchiest details” 

As a medical student, Dr. Blum began sketching his patients on prescription pads and jotting down snippets of their stories. Culled from more than 5,000 such artworks, this presentation pays tribute to the patients he has been privileged to know.

Dr. Blum’s sketches can be seen in this article by Hektoen International Journal and Pulse Magazine, “Ladies in Waiting” and “Gentle Men.”

And in part two of his presentation, “Cartoonists take up smoking” Dr. Blum, 

 retraces the modern history of anti-smoking advocacy as seen through the eyes of newspaper editorial cartoonists. These trenchant works of art have mocked politicians, publishers, and even physicians for being in cahoots with the tobacco industry, but they have also made fun of sanctimonious anti-smoking zealots. 

The second presentation on the panel came from Keith Hopper and Betty Oliver.

Dr. Betty Oliver earned her B.A. in Art, M.A. in Art History, and Ph.D. in Appreciation/Aesthetics from University of Georgia. A member of the graduate faculty, Southern Polytechnic State University, she teaches computer graphics and information graphics in the Information Design and Communication program; also Introduction to Painting in the Media Arts program.

Dr. Keith Hopper earned his Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from Georgia State University after a career in health professions. He is the instructional design-technology specialist for the graduate program in Information and Instructional Design. Dr. Hopper is also a registered respiratory therapist (RRT) and a Fellow of the American Association for Respiratory Care.

Of their presentation, Tension, anxiety and pressure—hypertension is no laughing matter (but laughter helps) they write,

This presentation reports our experience incorporating instructional comics in adult blood pressure measurement, plus lessons learned, and potentials revealed. The state of Georgia, located centrally in the “stroke belt” in U.S. Southern states, has aggressively funded training efforts aimed at community blood pressure trainers, such as pharmacists, firefighters, and EMS workers. Representative is a new online resource with accompanying curriculum, developed by Morehouse School of Medicine with Southern Polytechnic State University technical and design expertise. A supplemental, take-away resource that trainers can give patients and family caregivers was in order and the “comic book” approach we used shows potential.

The Grassroots Comics site that Dr. Oliver describes, World Comics, is here.

The presentations are followed by an enthusiastic group Q&A.

Update: Dr. Oliver sent these links to some of the drawing resources she mentions in her talk.

1. Drawing facial expressions

http://www.davegrayinfo.com/2010/10/28/drawing-facial-expressions/

2. “How to draw a car”

http://www.davegrayinfo.com/2008/11/20/drawacar/

3. “How to draw a stick figure”

http://www.davegrayinfo.com/2008/04/03/how-to-draw-a-stick-figure/

And the manual from World Comics can be found at:

http://www.worldcomicsindia.com/youcanuse.html

This is what Alex has to say about his project:

‘Having produced numerous cartoons and short comic strips over the past six years, last autumn I decided to enrol on an MA in Illustration at Camberwell College of the Arts in order to explore fully my interest in producing a longer narrative comic.  In 2007 my father had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, and it occurred to me that this would be a good subject to base my work upon.

The result was the 28 page comic Dad’s Not All There Anymore.  It is based on my family’s experience of dealing with the condition, and is intended to show clearly the issues that arise with this form of dementia, from the physical and mental symptoms that affect the immediate victim to the care issues that affect family and friends. Dad’s Not… also touches on our experiences of residential care, and is intended to provide accessible information on Lewy body dementia, a condition that is less well known than other causes of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease.’

Visit Alex’s website http://cargocollective.com/alexdemetris

The Boston College English Graduate Conference seeks abstracts for papers that consider the intersection between health, mental health, and literature.

Considering recent interdisciplinary developments in the field of Medical Humanities, we are interested in exploring the ways in which literature and other creative arts have attempted to represent or otherwise understand health, which is so often analyzed from a clinical or scientific perspective. We seek papers that work to synthesize clinical approaches and literary approaches to the mind and body. What can be gained by merging literary and scientific analyses?

Possible topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:

• ·        Representations of mental illness in literature, pop culture, or historical texts
• ·        The role of rhetoric, language, and creativity in medical writing
• ·        Representations of the healthy or sick body in literature
• ·        The ethics of “diagnosing” literary or historical figures
• ·        Literature’s role in normalizing, otherizing, or popularizing mental or physical ailments
• ·        Literary analyses of psychological writing or scientific writing

Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of the critically acclaimed book Lincoln’s Melancholy, will deliver our keynote address.

Our conference will be held on Saturday, March 9 at Boston College. Boston College is located in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts and is easily accessible to downtown Boston. See www.bc.edu for additional campus information.

For questions and submissions, please contact Katie Daily-Bruckner (dailym@bc.edu). Abstracts are due by Tuesday, January 15^th.

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

In this week’s episode, three speakers address mental health and comics.

First up is An Nguyen with her paper, My Partner Has Depression: Japanese depictions of illness experiences in the day to day. 

An Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. She is currently finishing her dissertation on Japanese youth street fashion subcultures and has an interest in the global flow of media and things and their interpretation across cultures. Describing her paper she writes,

Tenten Hosokawa depicts her husband’s descent into depression and the effect his illness has on their day to day life in the Japanese manga Tsure ga Utsu ni Narimashite. The comics deal with grim topics using wit and humour in an essay-like format. Considering the social stigma attached to clinical depression in Japan and the lack of widespread knowledge concerning diagnosis and resources for care, Hosokawa’s work reaches a wide audience, helping to spread awareness about a socially taboo topic. This paper will consider the effectiveness of her work and the potential for personal illness narratives to inform and teach.

The second presenter is Catherine Duchastel, an M.A. student in the critical disability studies program at York University. Her research interests are disability representation in popular culture, participatory culture, activism, feminist ethics and distributive justice. She is interested in exploring the links between cultural representation, personal narrative, and political agency. Describing her paper, Re-signifying disability in popular culture: mental illness as magic realism narrative in Love and Rockets, she writes,

Depictions of mental illness in popular culture have tended to follow either a medical model of disability, where disability is reduced to a biological defect, or a charity model, where it is reduced to a personal tragedy deserving of our pity. The social model, on the other hand, that sees disability as contextual and a form of oppression to non-normative bodies and minds, has offered an alternative way for disabled people to conceive of their experiences. I will examine how the use of magic realism in the comic booksLove & Rockets challenge both these discourses while remaining empowering.

The final presenter on the panel is Neil Phillips. Neil is an Australian rural and remote community psychiatrist. He’s interested in Indigenous mental health and in the therapeutic and psychodynamic power of metaphor which serves well in therapeutic hypnosis. He’s been drawing since infancy, a cartoonist since high school in the sixties, and now he’s working on a Comic Memoir that is stirring his emotional pot. In describing his paper, The sequential art of the mind: Parallels between comics and therapeutic hypnosis, he writes,

Metaphor as a healing technique is as old as humanity. Metaphors are expressed in stories and emotional journeys in many ways. They can be spoken, written, drawn, danced or sung. Therapeutic metaphors usually involve a sequence of images and action creating a journey through the imagination to the healing powers of the brain. Comics make their metaphors through sequential images and apt words and their usefulness in medicine is now being recognised. Hypnosis can also heal and involves similar sequential images and meaningful stories. This paper presents an ultra-quick primer on therapeutic hypnosis and then presents three hypnosis cases with comic-like qualities.

Call for Proposals

FANTASTIC!  HEROIC!  DISABLED? 

“CRIPPING” THE COMIC CON

April, 2013

Syracuse University

Syracuse, NY

DEADLINE for Proposals:  January 11, 2013

Michael Bérubé tells us that “every representation of disability has the potential to shape the way ‘disability’ is understood in general culture, and some of those representations can in fact do extraordinary powerful—or harmful—cultural and political work” (1997, p. B4).

This symposium will provide participants with the opportunity to engage in a broad array of reflective discussions about the representations of disability that exist “beneath the surface” and explicitly within mainstream popular cultures both nationally and internationally, particularly the popular culture phenomena that are comic books, graphic novels, and manga.

Submissions incorporating genres that do not typically receive sustained attention in mainstream scholarly spaces are encouraged.  These include but are not limited to the following:

• ·         comix, anime, motion comics
• ·         films, movies, videos, television shows (including reality TV, animated TV)
• ·         advertising, newspapers, magazines
• ·         comic cons, dragon cons, geek cons, movie cons, cosplay, cult fandom, the “geek syndrome”
• ·         visual arts, painting, photography, deviantART, alternative and alternate art forms
• ·         poetry, expressive arts, popular fiction, imagetext, fanfic, slash, alternative and alternate forms of literacies
• ·         material culture, multimedia, social media, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube
• ·         websites, blogs, memes, zines
• ·         games, gaming, toys, action figures

This event is meant not only to meet unmet needs in scholarly spaces and beyond but also to address these vital areas/concerns:

1. Popular culture studies and literature do not pay consistent or adequate attention to disability; when this attention is paid, it is often via “special issues” of journals, etc.
2. Further, “Popular culture is…the discursive terrain on which larger social issues are played out, often unobtrusively and masked as entertainment–and this is precisely why pop culture needs to be examined even more closely…” (Nayar, 2011, p. 172).
3. Popular culture studies and literature continue to have a mixed reception within certain mainstream academic spaces.  Because popular culture is still sometimes not taken seriously within some of these spaces (even among some disability studies scholars and practitioners), its status remains, for some, “discounted” (at times, popular culture studies may even be perceived as “deviant”).  Consequently, this symposium’s organizers aim to:
   1. critique what is often described as “deviant”
   2. question and disrupt what “counts” as academic, mainstream, and normative
   3. The symposium organizers seek to create opportunities for all participants—particularly students and any emerging scholars—to share their work, and to make any information provided or presented accessible and usable.  We all benefit from discussing and learning about disability and popular culture in ways that include and welcome everyone’s participation. The symposium organizers and the proposal review committee strongly support the notion that “academics have a responsibility to make their work relevant for the society they exist within” (Jurgenson, 2012), and this of course includes making disability studies relevant and accessible to the disability community (Ne’eman, 2012).
   4. The symposium will be consistent with values that underscore the disability rights movement: we seek to make collective investments in disability pride, identity, and cultures.  In “cripping” the status quo, we assert, purposefully,   “Nothing about us without us.”

Submission Guidelines and Instructions

Proposal types and formats may include, among others:

1. Individual presentation
2. Panel presentation
3. Discussion/workshop/roundtable
4. Performance/video/film/art entry
5. Poster session

Please note that other forms of proposals are fully welcomed, and the above list is not exhaustive.  If you have something particular in mind, please explain the details and parameters of what you imagine, via your proposal submission(s). You are also welcomed and encouraged to submit more than one proposal.  

If your submission is a performance/video/film/art entry, you are responsible for securing permissions and rights for public viewing.  Videos and films should be open captioned and descriptions of any artwork will be required.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  January 11, 2013

Each proposal must include:

1. Name
2. Affiliation (if applicable)
3. Contact information (including email and phone/voice phone)
   1. if there is more than one presenter, please indicate the main contact and lead presenter (if these are two different individuals, please indicate this information)
   2. Title of presentation/activity/etc. (15 words or less)
   3. Short description (50 words or less)
   4. Full description (1000 words or less)

How to submit your proposal(s) — please choose one of the following options:

1. Via email to cripcon@gmail.com.  Submissions can be sent as an attachment (Word, Word Perfect, Text, Rich Text Format or PDF) or with text pasted/embedded in the body of your message.  Please put CRIPCON SUBMISSION in the subject line.
2. Via Fax: 315-443-4338.  Please indicate CRIPCON SUBMISSION on Fax cover sheet.
3. Via regular mail:

Fantastic! Heroic! Disabled?  Cripping the Con
c/o SU Disability Cultural Center
805 S Crouse Ave, 105 Hoople Bldg.
Syracuse, NY 13244-2280

Additional Information

Information and content produced as a result of this symposium will be published, with participant and presenter consent, via Beneath the SUrface (BtS), an open source digital repository on disability and popular culture to be launched at the conclusion of the symposium.  BtS will then become available to the academic community as well as to the general public, and will include an array of resources regarding disability and popular culture.

Each day of the symposium, there will be a designated time slot during which poster sessions will be offered concurrently with “open space.”

Open space will be an opportunity for participants to create spontaneous and/or planned topical interactions with other participants—in other words, open space will be a venue for you to create your own symposium “sessions,” during specific times and in specific locations.

All confirmed participants (whether presenting or not) will receive information on:

1. Completing registration
2. Requesting disability accommodations
3. Expressing dietary preferences (some but not all meals will be included)

All participants will be responsible for the cost of their own lodging and travel.

To keep informed, visit us online!

Websites:  http://crippingthecon.comand http://crippingthecon.info

if those links not working, temporary site is http://crippingthecon.weebly.com/

Twitter:  @cripcon

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CrippingTheCon

References

Bérubé, M. (1997, May 30).  The cultural representation of people with disabilities affects us all.  The Chronicle of Higher Education, B4-B5.

Jurgenson, N. (2012, May 11).  Making our ideas more accessible. Washington, DC: Inside Higher Ed.  Retrieved September 19, 2012 from:http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/05/11/scholars-must-make-their-work-more-available-and-accessible-essay.

Nayar, P. K. (2011). Haunted knights in spandex: Self and othering in the superhero mythos. Mediterranean Journal of Humanities, 1/2, 171-183.

Ne’eman, A. (2012, May 14). Making Disability Studies accessible.  Washington, DC: Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN). Retrieved September 19, 2012 from http://autisticadvocacy.org/2012/05/making-disability-studies-accessible/.

MK here – apologies for the break in podcast posting – delays not due to weather, but to false starts on two episodes.

Will be back on track with a new episode in the next week.

You can download a pdf by clicking the image below

See Thom Ferrier’s work online here

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

This panel, moderated by Brian Fies, focuses on comics and AIDS.

The first speaker is Ariela Freedman. She is an Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. She writes on modernism, First World War narrative, and comics. She is the author of Death, Men and Modernism (Routledge: 2003) and many scholarly articles, and is currently working on a project on comics and representations of pain. Her paper, Picturing AIDS,

“examines early strategies of picturing AIDS in comics at the height of the American crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, alongside a more recent graphic memoir which engages with AIDS more indirectly: Frederik Peeters’Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story. This more recent reflection on HIV not only reflects the change in treatment through which HIV is no longer “a killer on the loose,” as the AMFAR sponsored comic would have it, but a chronic, managed condition; it also filters a shift in representation in which the HIV carrier is not doomed or even defined by the virus.”

The second speaker is Julia diLiberti. She holds a Ph.D. in French Literature; she is a Professor of Humanities at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois where she chairs the Africa and African Diaspora Committee. Her current research focuses on Belgian and American comics, but she is fascinated by the intersection of comics and most other domains. Her sabbatical trip to Gabon in March 2011 led to her discovery of Fargas and has turned her attention to Yannick Dombi and AIDS education. About her paper, Conquering AIDS: The Adventures of Yannick Dombi, she summarizes,

“In his stories of Yannick Dombi, Fargas communicates the realities of AIDS with a combination of day-to-day situations and fast-paced adventure to educate and engage  readers about the disease, its prevention, and how to live with it if HIV positive. In the context of Gabonese families taking us through various social dangers of AIDS, the horror of “folk” remedies, random cures, and prejudices held about those with AIDS, this presentation will explore the varied and many strategies of AIDS education used by Fargas, a doctor working in collaboration with a non-profit medical  and research organization.”

Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below.

This week’s podcast is the keynote address Joyce Brabner gave on July 23 at the 2012 Comics & Medicine conference in Toronto. She opens by describing her talk as, “What happens to us when we tell these stories.”

Brabner then talks about some experiences in writing reportage comics, primarily about young victims of war and other atrocities. She talks about collaboration with her husband Harvey Pekar, and she talks about her role as “character Joyce.”

During the Q&A after Joyce’s address, you will see in the AAC feed Rachel Abrams’ live drawing of Joyce’s keynote address. You can see more of Rachel’s work from the conference here and learn more about her live scribing here.

One subject Joyce doesn’t discuss in her talk that I’d like to highlight is the new statue of Harvey Pekar which will be dedicated in Cleveland October 14. You can see Joyce describe the genesis of this statue on her Kickstarter project page, you can learn what Joyce did with her wedding ring as part of the project in this You Tube video, and watch more cool behind-the-scenes stuff about the statue-in-progress in this video.

If you’d like to contribute to remaining expenses on this project, to be a part of this historic event, you can learn more directly from Joyce here.