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!

Our October Drawing Together meeting was hosted by Theresa Rojas, artist and professor of English at Modesto Junior College in Modesto, California. She is a member of the Graphic Medicine International Collective and the Founding Director of the Latinx Comic Arts Festival (LCAF). LCAF is the California Central Valley’s international celebration of Latinx comic arts creators and friends, highlighting Latinx cartoonists, writers, animators, artists, and comic arts educators.   From Theresa: (Video for these exercises will be posted soon.) “Today’s focus is SENSE MEMORY.  Sense memory refers to the emotional recall we experience through one or more of the five senses: taste, smell,… Read More

Our September, 2020 Drawing Together session was hosted by doctor and comic artist Ian Williams. Ian is the creator of The Bad Doctor, The Lady Doctor. Ian recently received an Arts Council grant to complete his trilogy with the book, The Sick Doctor. Ian also is the founder of this website and coined the term ‘graphic medicine’. Ian said: “Sometimes, particularly now as most news seems like bad news, it is good to focus on the Small Pleasures of Life. This session is inspired by Philippe Delerme’s book of that name, which I bought in the ’90s and which has often inspired… Read More

“The Most Costly Journey (El viaje más caro)” is an ethnographic cartooning project that employs collaborative storytelling as a tool to mitigate loneliness, isolation, and despair among Latin American migrant workers on Vermont dairy farms. The collected comics are now available for pre-order in an English language edition via the group’s Kickstarter (through 9 November 2020). The following is excerpted from the book’s preface by Julia Doucet (RN, Open Door Clinic), which describes the project’s genesis in her patients’ undiagnosed symptoms… I first met José Luis in 2017 when he came for an appointment at the Open Door Clinic in… Read More

My name is Joanna Conings and I am currently an international student from Belgium studying at Creighton University in the hope of obtaining my Master in English on the creative writing track. Since I arrived in the US I have been introduced to a complete new health care system which has been very difficult to navigate. I fell sick multiple times but had no american insurance. Thus, I discovered what it meant to be sick in the US when you are an immigrant. Last semester, I had a class named ‘The Rhetoric of Medicine’ led by Dr. Joshua Prenosil. We… Read More

Find Stephanie’s full Pain Dairies comic here. “Pain Diaries” is a comic describing my experience with endometriosis as well as the fears, frustrations, and suffering that comes with having chronic pain. Endometriosis is a disorder where the uterine lining grows outside of the uterus, causing severe pain and a myriad of other serious health issues. From age 12 (when I first got my period) to age 29, I lived without a label for my suffering. Experiencing daily chronic pain without a diagnosis felt like I was existing in a large empty body of water, constantly drowning but never dying. Living with a… Read More

We live in turbulent times. Graphic Medicine’s Drawing Together meetups, at first weekly and now monthly, have been a helpful community of practice as we navigate these waters. The following comic started as a rough, raw journal entry and a one-page comic at one of those meetups. Thank you for creating such a powerful space. Many thanks to critiquers and sensitivity readers. Creating this comic was hard, fulfilling and I wish such vivid examples did not come from too many cruel, personal stories. I hope it adds to the conversation, I hope you share it or use it as ammunition… Read More