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I have known since childhood that I wanted to make comics. I started making doodle comics in high school (or “scribble comics” as I called them) about the lives of me and my friends. I didn’t get serious about making them until I was in my mid 20s and went to a meeting for the DC based comics collective Square City Comics. I then went to the Center For Cartoon Studies to get my MFA, though I knew that I never wanted to make comics my career (I had just been fortunate enough to pursue it as my passion).  The… Read More

In case you were unable to join us for our sixth Drawing Together event, here is a recap of the exercises we did together. You can read the prompts below or watch the video: Our host was MK Czerwiec, a GMIC board member, nurse, and cartoonist. She is a co-author of the Graphic Medicine Manifesto,  the creator of Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371, and editor of the forthcoming Menopause: A Comic Treatment. Our warm up exercise comes to us via Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. Take a piece of paper and make a large, very random scribble on… Read More

In case you were unable to join us for our fifth Drawing Together event, here is a recap of the exercises we did together. Our host was Ebru Ustundag, a GMIC board member and a critical feminist geographer interested in intersections of health/care and social justice.  Our warm-up exercise was to think about how spaces and temporalities have been shifting during the Covid-19 pandemic. During these unprecedented times, our bodies are navigating in everyday spaces in novel ways, and our relationships with ourselves, our bodies, and others have been significantly altered. In this exercise, we were asked to think about… Read More

In case you were unable to join us for our fourth Drawing Together event, here is a recap of the exercises we did together. Our host was Michael Green, GMIC board member, physician, bioethicist, and artist. Our theme was “masks.” Michael Green walks us through the entire session in this video! (Or you can read the summary below.) Our warm-up exercise combined work from Danny Gregory’s Sketchbook School and Lynda Barry’s face jam. We made a grid of 8 rectangles on a page about 8.5×11. In each box on the page we drew a face, with the intention being to… Read More

guest post by Tatiana Gill This is my story of 24 years on psychiatric medication, and how I discovered behaviors that help my mental health in sustainable ways. I’ve taken many anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications throughout my life and I hoped other people on their own “head med” journeys might benefit from my story. My original intention was to create a comic that depicted the medications I took, why I took them, and their benefits and side effects. To this end I combed over old medical records and journal. Instead of a single narrative I found a hotbed of intertwined… Read More

In case you were unable to join us for our third Drawing Together event, here is a recap of the exercises we did together. Our host was Dana Walrath, GMIC board member, artist, writer, and medical anthropologist. Our theme was “ancestors.” Our warm up exercise borrowed from Lynda Barry’s workshop called “Writing the Unthinkable” that she offered at our Dundee Graphic Medicine conference in 2016. You can find the exercise online here. Introduction from Dana: We draw spirals to unleash the subconscious and let words and stories begin to flow.  Unthinkable referred to stuff you didn’t really know was there…. Read More