Zine Making with Elders by Alex L. Combs It’s not often that artists are blessed with the elusive ‘lightning bolt’ of inspiration, but this was one of those rare moments. I am a graduate student currently earning an MFA with a specialty in Comics. Through my graduate program, I was connected with a company that serves older adults throughout the S.F. Bay Area in California. When I was hired as a “community engagement coordinator”, I admittedly had no idea what I would actually be doing. I spend the majority of my free time hunched over my drawing desk, and… Read More

CorpoRealities: Perceptions of ‘Extraordinary’ Time in Literature and Comics Workshop at Freie Universität Berlin, Thursday, June 25 to Saturday, June 27, 2020 Literature and comics are each in their own specific ways ‘temporal arts’, unfolding sequences of action, collapsing or contrasting story time and discourse time, and representing temporal sequences in narrative or visual-spatial ways. Both media can deviate from chronological time and work with flashbacks and flashforwards, fragmentation, thus evoking, for instance, the layering of time and simultaneity. When representing experiences of ‘otherness’ due to illness and/ or disability, perceptions of time that deviate from normal chronometry gain center stage:… Read More

My mother’s death opened a door from my childhood that I thought had been shut tight. Much of what came out was in the form of drawings, as if certain feelings had been preserved in amber. These images became Lacunae, a graphic memoir of grief, abuse and ultimately, healing.  Below is chapter 2: my father has been paralyzed from the waist down in an automobile accident. After five months in the hospital, he’s allowed to come home. An earlier version of Lacunae was serialized on the website MUTHAMAGAZINE.COM. My previous graphic book is Yo, Miss: A Graphic Look at High… Read More

Emotional Medical Drawings, Done in the Moment, Over Time, and Through the End guest post by Anita White  My darling husband Josh is now of blessed memory. He died very peacefully on April 10th in St Paul, Minnesota. I held his hand to the very end. Josh was very brave and endured many many medical trials. The last two years were intense, and the last four months were a series of hospital stays in Cardio Renal, and the ER, with blood transfusions and time in and out of a transitional care nursing home. In addition our Minnesota winter was the worst ever… Read More

Emily Steinberg, MFA, is the Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia and a lecturer in fine art at Penn State Abington. We are thrilled to excerpt her newest piece, Mid-Century Hipster here on Graphic Medicine. With her glorious color palette and keen observational eye, Emily shares her hip replacement surgery experience in comic form.  Click through at the end of these images to read the full comic on Cleaver Magazine. The “prequel” to this piece will appear in the upcoming anthology Menopause: A Comic Treatment (Penn State University Press, 2020).   READ THE REST OF THE STORY,… Read More