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A collective of artists from Europe, China and the United States got together to distill the experiences from the remarkable year of 2020 into a zine. That zine, The Lockdown Lowdown: Graphic Narratives for Viral Times is now available for order. “The Lockdown Lowdown is a publication about possibilities within this new, abnormal, world of restrictions. It is a rich harvest of stories, filled with surreal drawing, the thread of time, pathos, transforming penguins, humour, anxious denial, luscious exuberance, a talking fox, biting snakes, popping eyeballs, political consciousness, bra freedom and disillusioned spoke wheels.” -Sarah Lightman, author of The Book of Sarah… Read More

guest post by Rachel D.L. When I was thirteen years old, I fell suddenly ill. An unsafe home environment, doctors who dismissed my symptoms, and the resultant changes with my eating, became the only tool at my disposal to help me cope with my symptoms and trauma. This led to my hospitalization at Comer’s Children’s Hospital of Chicago. I was then transferred with little warning to a psychiatric hospital. As a result of those traumatic experiences, I’d learned the danger of listening to my body and myself. Unfortunately, the summer before my sophomore year of college when I was nineteen,… Read More

For our November Drawing Together session, MK Czerwiec asked us to contemplate GRATITUDE Warm up exercise (5 minutes)  “This is an exercise I am borrowing from the wonderful illustrator Wendy MacNaughton and it’s called ‘Weather Check.’ (http://wendymacnaughton.com) (@wendymac on Instagram)   Wendy suggests six possible states of weather, but you may experience others.   The exercise instruction for the warm up is to draw your personal weather today.  As I like to practice this exercise, your weather can be internal, external, or any way you want to interpret the instruction. So draw your weather. Take 5 minutes.  Main exercise: FOCUS… Read More

guest post by Nita Chen (@neurologicalpanda) On one of my medical school interviews, I was asked what alternate career I would have chosen if not medicine, and I replied with stop motion artist. It’a an odd alternative, but I think it speaks to the duality of my passions. Although I have pursued a career in medicine for most of my life, having a creative outlet has always been important to me. In many ways, creating art served as a way for me to process my thoughts on hard days and to express myself. My affinity to creating things led me… Read More

Gender, Eating Disorders, and Graphic Medicine (Routledge, 2020) by Anu Mary Peter and Sathyaraj Venkatesan  The book investigates how graphic medicine enables individuals to represent eating disorders as an aftermath of potentially traumatizing experiences like coercion, abjection, body shaming, and powerlessness. Although many verbal narratives of eating disorders in women have emerged since 1978, not many have successfully transcended the philanthropic and cathartic imperatives of autobiographical writing. While most of the available memoirs remain guidebooks on treatment and diet plans with scant glimpses of affective and phenomenological realities, graphic medical narratives portray how eating disorders are caused by a plethora… Read More