Blog

“Advocating for Yourself in a Medical Appointment” is my latest of several healthcare-centric comics created in the last year. I am interested in teaching others how to understand and access healthcare services despite inexperience or financial barriers. The for-profit healthcare model is inherently predatory. We need to feel confident in the ability to advocate for ourselves as patients and challenge the existing structure as activists. Accessing healthcare is tricky and I enjoy trying to distill that information into the most palatable format imaginable: cartoons! I have a BA in Recreation Therapy with a focus in geriatric mental health. I created… Read More

Graphic Medicine at PCA 2021 In conjunction with the Popular Culture Association (PCA) holding their 2021 conference in Boston, contributors and attendees of the New England Graphic Medicine (NEGM) Virtual Summit are proposing a slate of programming that now is welcoming additional participants. Two complete panels of 3-5 participants will be offering “Collaborating on and Creating Graphic Medicine” and “New England Graphic Medicine” line-ups, respectively. Potential speakers and topics currently include: Collaborating on and Creating Graphic Medicine Sarah Mausner (Teen Health Comics) Janine Georg (endometriosis) Maria Photinakis (mental illness and climate anxiety) New England Graphic Medicine Sarah Levin-Lederer A. David… Read More

Our August 2020 Drawing Together session was hosted by artist and educator Sarah Leavitt. She is the creator of Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me as well as Agnes, Murderess. She is a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. You can learn more about her work on her website, https://sarahleavitt.com and her Instagram, @Sarah_leav. In an effort to guide us toward the workshop’s focus, Sarah gave us a wonderful presentation on how her work has evolved over the past ten years. WARMUP: Sarah asked us to write down the… Read More

by Vanessa Shealy  Understanding NF2 is a new short comic book based on the life of Billy Nguyen, who was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 2, or NF2, at the age of six. NF2 is a rare disease characterized by the development of benign tumors on the hearing nerves. The story tracks Billy’s childhood struggle to understand his diagnosis and navigate this difficult disorder. His Vietnamese parents spoke some English, but all the medical terms were too overwhelming, leaving young Billy to make a lot of adult decisions on his own. I work as the Director of Communications at the Children’s Tumor Foundation, and much of… Read More

by Vanessa Shealy  Moxie and Sparx Explain NF1 is a short educational comic created for the Children’s Tumor Foundation (CTF), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for treatments for a rare disease called neurofibromatosis. The comic features a young girl named Maria who is asked to explain her diagnosis to her friend Jackson. Since NF is sometimes hard to explain, CTF superheroes Moxie and Sparx swoop in to help! In my work as the Director of Communications for CTF, I wrote the script for this comic in order to supplement the patient brochures and resources for adults that were… Read More

Graphic Medicine International Collective board member Dana Walrath has shared several comics she created in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown. As you may know, Dana is an artist, writer, and medical anthropologist. She is best known among the graphic medicine community as the creator of Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass.  On her website, Dana writes about these works, Activists across the globe have made visible the layers of privilege inherent in the call for “social distancing” to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic globally. Displaced people in crowded camps, incarcerated people, people without large disposable incomes do… Read More

In case you were unable to join us for our July 2020 Drawing Together event, here is a recap of the exercises we did together. Our host was Shelley Wall, GMIC board member, medical illustrator, and an assistant professor in the Biomedical Communications graduate program at the University of Toronto (UofT). We started the session with the following warm-up exercise: Take a few seconds to sit quietly and pay attention to what you can hear: Birdsong? Sirens? The hum of the fridge? Your family’s voices? Your dog snoring? Then take two minutes to draw the shape of those sounds. For our… Read More