CaringKind Chronicles is a serialized comic about one family’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease. It is written by Jennifer Camper, drawn by Ivan Velez, and published by CaringKind, New York City’s primary resource for Alzheimer’s and dementia caregiving. The story begins when the grandmother, Estella, begins to have memory problems. In each episode the family confronts different problems, and turns to CaringKind for help. The comic appears in CaringKind’s quarterly newsletter, in English and Spanish, and online at www.caringkindnyc.org/comic For over thirty years CaringKind has provided New York City residents with a 24-hour Helpline and free programs and services for caregivers…. Read More

2016 Graphic Medicine Conference Keynote and champion of comics and creativity Lynda Barry visited The Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine as Artist-in-Residence in December 2017. Michael Green and the PSU library’s One-Button Studio created a series of videos to help inspire their students and all of us to create more and with more joy. All of the videos from Lynda’s visit with Michael can be found here.

As promised in our previous post, here are a few more great videos of Lynda Barry working with Michael Green during her December residency at Penn State Hershey.      

2016 Graphic Medicine Conference Keynote and champion of comics and creativity Lynda Barry visited The Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine as Artist-in-Residence in December 2017. Michael Green and the PSU library’s One-Button Studio created a series of videos to help inspire their students and all of us to create more and with more joy. We’ll be sharing these wonderful videos here a few at a time. Play along at home with Lynda and Michael! Post your eight faces in the comments here or on social media.  

Last week was an exciting one for graphic medicine. We were hosted by the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD to celebrate their new exhibit and  graphic medicine collection curated by Ellen Forney. Our celebration day culminated in a panel conversation event with Patricia Brennan, director of the NLM. Director Brennan is a nurse with a unique perspective on the importance of graphic medicine. “Without graphic medicine we were incomplete…it addresses an unaddressed dimension of health and it provided us a way to archive these expressions of that dimension.” -Patricia Brennan In an interview for the Graphic Medicine Podcast, director… Read More

The February 2018 issue of the AMA’s online Journal of Ethics is devoted entirely to Graphic Medicine and Health Care Ethics. It’s an open access journal and, in addition to fourteen articles discussing the issue’s topic, it also includes an interview with two comic artists who created important works of graphic medicine, Brian Fies and Phoebe Potts. Be sure to check the entire issue out. Lots of great stuff in it. The AMA has also conducted two special online features to accompany the issue. The first was a week-long online discussion forum titled, “Using Comics to Promote Person-Centered Medicine.” Participants… Read More

Call For Papers This year’s Comics and Medicine Conference invites participants to share and reflect upon how graphic medicine works. In the context of health and its relationship to comics, “work” can refer to a number of activities: the work of medical and related professionals; the functioning of our bodies and minds; the creation or study of artistic and educational materials; the study of the archive or images/texts; work with reader communities; and the organization of collaborative community health efforts. The spaces in which “work” takes place provide another point of reflection: public healthcare centers, classrooms, home studios, private clinics,… Read More

MK here. Just back from Berlin where Ian and I had the great honor of attending and speaking at the PathoGraphics conference and seeing the amazing Sick! art exhibit. There is much to report – far more than I can give fair coverage to here, as I took 29 pages of notes during the four days of events, but I want to highlight a few things. First, there is a chronologic Storify of all of the tweets arising from the conference. (You can also find PDFs of the art exhibit and conference program here.) Included in the Storify you will… Read More