by Soph Myers-Kelley Bishakh Som in Spellbound introduces the reader to a memoir experience about culture, immigration, queerness, transness, tantalizing foods, and crushing identity crises. It’s ideal for older teenagers and adults. One of the most interesting creative decisions Som makes in her book is the choice to use a stand-in cisgender Bengali American character named Anjali instead of depicting her own likeness as the protagonist. Som herself is a transgender Bengali American woman, who came out as an adult. She originally created this work as a diary comic before stringing together longer chapters. This book is a complex, note… Read More
New Podcast Episode: Keeper of the Clouds and Seattle Preview
In this new episode of the Graphic Medicine Podcast, we hear from the creative team behind the wonderful graphic medicine narrative “Keeper of the Clouds” – writer Liza Futerman and illustrator Evi Tampold. You can read a new review of Keeper of the Clouds here, and purchase a copy here. We’ll also hear from Seattle Conference chief organizer-on-the-ground Mita Mahato. She’ll tell us a few insider tips about Seattle and what we can expect. Support for this podcast provided by the Department of Medical Humanities, Penn State Hershey College of Medicine.
Dana Walrath: Cultural Spaces, Comics, and Contested Memories
This week on the Graphic Medicine Podcast: author, artist, and anthropologist Dana Walrath. Segment 1: Graphic Medicine News This week the Annals of Internal Medicine posted a wonderful new comic by Sharon Rosensweig and Aaron Freeman called “The Last Ride of Mo Rosensweig” which I highly recommend. Segment 2: Dana Walrath and Aliceheimer’s Dana Walrath is a medical anthropologist, author, and artist. Her first book, Aliceheimer’s, will be published in the US by Penn State University Press. In this talk, titled “Cultural Spaces, Comics, and Contested Memories” Dana desrcibes the ways medical anthropology and comic helped her to shape a new… Read More
Roses in December (And More)
guest review by Kevin Wolf Two books , Safe Return Home: An Inspirational Book for Caregivers of Alzheimer’s (Andrews McMeel publisher 1998) and Roses in December: a story of love and Alzheimer’s (The Kent State University Press 2015) by Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers are the early and complete collections, respectively, of Crankshaft comic strips about elderly characters suffering from Alzheimer’s disease from diagnosis to death. The book Lisa’s Story: the other shoe (The Kent State University Press 2007) by Tom Batiuk is a collection of Funky Winkerbean comic strips about Lisa’s diagnosis of breast cancer, her treatment, remission, and recurrence. These stories sensitively and humorously show the effect of… Read More
“Mom’s Flock” by Sharon Rosenzweig
Through Riva Lehrer and Laydeez do Comics, we’ve learned of a project by Chicago artist Sharon Rosenzweig called “Mom’s Flock.” The comic panels can be seen here: http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2411852. As Sharon introduces the project, “This is my mother. I brought her the chicks. And then I listened and took notes of what happened.”
New Podcast: Comics & Caregiving
Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below. Our eleventh panel from Toronto and they just keep getting better and better! I, MK, had the honor of moderating this panel and am quite pleased to revisit and post it here. The first speaker is Michelle N. Huang, a Master’s Student and University Graduate Fellow at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include disability studies, war literature, and cultural studies in the twentieth century. She writes of her paper, The “Good Enough Daughter”… Read More
Wrinkles
This book has had a long (in Graphic Medicine terms) life thus far. It won the National Comic Prize in Spain in 2008, where it was published under the title Arrugas. It was also published in French under the name Rides. From the author’s website, describing the book (translated from Spanish via Google) “I considered doing this story for my parents. I wanted to talk about old age people. This is too big a subject so I focused on nursing homes. In addressing this issue was also impossible not to Alzheimer’s. Emilio, the protagonist, is inspired by the father of… Read More
Tangles: A Story of Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me
guest review by Katie Delaney, MD/MA program in Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine “Sarah: What’s it like, Dad? Dad: I don’t know. I guess sometimes it turns out that everything you thought about how the future would be just isn’t true.” – Tangles, page 46 Tangles is a poignant and clever name for Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir about her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. First, there is the way Leavitt’s partner describes the mind of Sarah’s ailing mother: “Like the garden this summer… tangled, but with spots of brightness.” (114). Then, there is the fact that… Read More