Graphic Medicine International Collective (GMIC) board member Dr. Theresa Rojas is the director of the Latinx Comic Arts Festival which will be broadcast on their YouTube channel, March 12 & 13 from 11am to 3pm (PT). More information and festival schedule available on the festival website.

My name is Janina and I create comics about living with Type 1 Diabetes. My comics have been featured on Brut America, The Mighty, and two of them have been shared by the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2019. I started an Instagram account and website called Miss Diabetes to document my life with Type 1 diabetes in 2016, because my diabetes nurse told me there were a lot of young diabetics in the community that were feeling down about living with this chronic disease. And that made me really sad, because I had been there myself and I knew exactly how they would be feeling. I wanted to find ways… Read More

After several years of work and unavoidable delays, I am thrilled to announce the launch of Essential Graphic Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography! Funded by an ALA Carnegie-Whitney grant, which supports the preparation and publication of reading lists and other bibliographical aids, Alice Jaggers and I have been developing this tool since early 2018 as a way to aid library workers in the development of graphic medicine collections. For library folks new to the idea of comics, much less graphic medicine, it can be difficult to know where to begin and what might be considered important early titles for a collection… Read More

  “The Graphic Medicine 2021 UnConvention: What Are You Working On?” Call for Videos! The Graphic Medicine International Collective is pleased to announce our 2021 UnConvention , whose unorthodox theme and form are created in response to the unconventional circumstances in which we are currently living. Our conference theme: What are you working on? Our conference date: August 13-15, 2021 Our place: online, participation link to be distributed with conference registration Our format: self-made, one-minute videos that we will organize for collective viewing and discussion. We invite participants to submit one-minute videos that address the conference theme: What are you working on in… Read More

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

The November session of Drawing Together will be held Sunday November 29th at 1pm EST (convert to your time zone here). Our theme will be gratitude and our host will be MK Czerwiec (Comic Nurse). If you have already attended a Drawing Together event, you are on our list and will get an invitation. If you have not, you can register by emailing MK via her website. Hope to see you there!