It didn’t occur to me until writing this blog post that my webcomic How Mom Died is a story about caregiver guilt.  For a while I have described the project in a longer and less focused way: It’s the story of my wife and I taking care of my mom in her final years. It’s about the complexity of our healthcare system and how easy it is to fall between the cracks. It’s about how we narrowly avoided disaster. And it’s about sharing our experience so others can learn from it because nobody teaches you this stuff in school. Oh,… Read More

Drawing Blood: Comics & Medicine  Curated by Jared Gardner with support from Morgan Podraza  at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Sullivant Hall, The Ohio State University Review by Kevin Wolf Graphic medicine was on display during the recent CXC (Cartoon Crossroads Columbus) conference in late September 2019 at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Sullivant Hall at The Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio. The exhibition, entitled Drawing Blood: Comics and Medicine, began April 20, 2019 and will end October 20, 2019 and is curated by Professor Jared Gardner, OSU Department of English and author of… Read More

View this email in your browser Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award Applications for 2020 open now! Will Eisner and Lucy Shelton Caswell This award of up to $2500 supports researchers who need to travel to Columbus, OH to use the collections of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. Awards may be used to defray travel expenses, living expenses in Columbus, or research costs. ELIGIBILITY: The award is open to non-OSU graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars (including scholars with or without advanced degrees or without institutional affiliations) who are at least 18 years old and live more than 60 miles… Read More

  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