“I’ve made a couple of short autobio comics in the past and had intended to stop, but here we are again. The medium is a really useful one for processing life events. This is a short story about a pregnancy which came and went with almost nobody knowing about it. I made this to acknowledge its existence, pick through the feelings or lack thereof, and gently lift it out of the silence where it otherwise would’ve stayed.” –  Niki Banados   https://nikibanados.com/ https://www.instagram.com/stickwriter/

Call for Submissions: Graphic Medicine Annual Conference, July 13-15, 2023 University of Toronto Downtown Campus, Toronto, ON, Canada The Graphic Medicine conference is returning to Toronto! This will be a hybrid conference, with in-person and virtual attendance options. The conference theme is “Graphic Medicine: Encounters and Invitations”. We invite the submission of a wide variety of abstracts focusing on health, illness, caregiving, and disability as they intersect with comics in any form (e.g., graphic novels and memoir, comic strips, manga, mini comics, web comics, etc.). Presentations may explore the following questions and topics, or others you feel are relevant to… Read More

SPECIAL THANKS to our book reviews editor, Kevin Wolf, and all of our new and returning guest reviewers who answered the call!  Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide to Your Mind & Behavior How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual The Book of Niall

The Drawing Together community convened again on Sunday, November 27. Our session was led by nurse, cartoonist, and educator MK Czerwiec. You can learn more about her work on her website, www.comicnurse.com. She presented this session from the Eastern coast of Lake Michigan, the unceded land of the Kickapoo, Peoria, Potawatomi, and Myaamia tribes. For every section of our work today, you can watch and work along with the following videos or follow the written prompts below. Set your timers and supply your own music if you like. We started with a warmup exercise built around box breathing. First, let’s start by… Read More

guest post (and interview) by A. David Lewis  Even in a world of superpowers and arch villains, healthcare can still be fraught, frustrating, and even futile. In Matthew Klein and Morgan Beem’s series Crashing (IDW Publishing), Dr. Rose Osler must push against her hospital’s policy of refusing treatment for “Powered” individuals, even if it costs the doctor her hard-won sobriety. Klein was kind enough to answer some questions about his book, particularly how addiction and workplace burnout might function in an admittedly fantastic, but recognizable, setting.  A. David Lewis: Why set the story in Boston? Matthew Klein: I thought Boston… Read More

The Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability in collaboration with Comic Studies and the Program in Visual Impairments at San Francisco State University hosted two international conversations to explore cutting edge strategies for making comics accessible to blind and low vision readers. They assembled a network of comic artists, access providers, and blind experts – now called the Accessible Comics Collective (ACC). To encourage further development in this realm, they hosted a prize competition to support innovative approaches. The ACC has selected five exceptional teams who have either adapted existing comics into accessible formats or have created an original comic… Read More

Would you like to review a book for the graphic medicine website? Do you have students for whom reviewing a work of graphic medicine could be a great assignment? Be in touch with Kevin Wolf, our reviews editor! He just finished his 101st review and  needs some help! A few thoughts from Kevin below: Do you have a specific book that you’d like to review? If so, let me know what it is. If you want one or more suggestions, let me know, so I can try to match you up with the type of graphic medicine (GM) book that interests… Read More

guest post by Erin Fitzgerald (a.k.a. A Girl Named Earl) I started drawing comics quite by accident. In 2016, I attended Lynda Barry’s Writing the Unthinkable workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. I did not go there to learn comics. That was not my intention or my goal. I went there to get out of my comfort zone, get some good creative energy, and work on some writing. And while all of those things did happen (especially the part about the comfort zone), they turned out to be only a small part of my experience there. The… Read More

The Drawing Together community convened again on Sunday, October 30. Our session was led by Elizabeth A. Trembley, a Lambda Literary award-winning mystery writer who now tells her stories in comics. Her new graphic memoir Look Again explores the fragmenting nature of trauma by tracing the convoluted evolution of her own story through six variations of the same event. Elizabeth has a PhD in literature from the University of Chicago, and currently works for the Sequential Artists Workshop. She lives in West Michigan with two big dogs, two cats, a collection of Batman toys, and her episcopal priest wife. She walks in the… Read More

Our guest host for Drawing Together #42 was Liz Argall. Liz is an Australian cartoonist, game designer and author based in Seattle. In the world of comics, she’s been a script writer, artist talent scout, worked with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to create social message comics (with topics as diverse as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, end of life planning and sustainable hunting practices.) Liz creates the webcomic Thingswithout.com. She’s a professional member of SFWA, graduate of Clarion Writers Workshop and has been an Associate Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Liz began our session by… Read More