Guest Editors: Erin La Cour (Free University of Amsterdam) and Anna Poletti (Utrecht University) Submit: Abstracts of 300–500 words in length by September 15, 2019 to biographygraphicmedicine@gmail.com. In recent years, Graphic Medicine has emerged as an important movement in changing attitudes to patient experience within the practice of Western medicine. Combining insights from life writing and comics studies, Graphic Medicine texts and scholarship evidence the efficacy of life narrative in the medium of comics for opening up new channels of communication between medical staff, patients, their loved ones, and the community; providing alternative sites for community building among patients and… Read More
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot: The Autobiography of a Dangerous Man
John Callahan was perhaps combining comics & medicine before just about anyone. This book, published in 1989, is mostly text, but includes many of Callahan’s health-related single panel gags. It also includes his story of alchoholism, traumatic injury, rehab, and life as a paraplegic who made comics. Callahan died in 2010. There’s a theoretical asterisk to his work in all of his obituaries, and might also be found when discussing it in terms of Graphic Medicine (which I have never seen done) and I’m curious to explore it. Callahan’s work generally remained on the periphery of mainstream acceptance due to its… Read More
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) chronicles the events of Bechdel’s childhood in the early 1970’s and her entry into adulthood and homosexuality at university. Her father was a repressed, unhappy aesthete, trapped in family life in his home town in rural Pennsylvania, running the family funeral home and teaching at the local school to make ends meet. He was a closet gay who had affairs with young men an ended up in court for plying teenage boys with alcohol. His death, most probably a suicide, haunts the book, an “extended meditation on history, memory, identity and trauma”… Read More
The Complete Maus
I include the Complete Maus here for three reasons: firstly, it is generally held to be one of the benchmarks against which other graphic novels are judged, a work that has made people who don’t like comics read comics, and a pinnacle of achievement that Spiegelman has spent the last twenty years trying to either live up to, or get away from. If you only ever read one graphic novel….(Actually, Art Spiegelman doesn’t like the term “graphic novel”, even though he is credited as being one of the Godfathers of the medium. He prefers plain old “comics” or “comix”). Secondly,… Read More
The Spiral Cage
Originally published in 1990, this is a bit of a gem. Al Davison was born with spina bifida. his parents were told he wouldn’t live. Then, when he did, they were told that he would never walk. He taught himself to walk aged five and attended a “normal” school, where he was called “spaka” by his classmates. Al became an artist and illustrator. Although he can walk on his “scarecrow” legs, he still suffers considerably. He endured countless operations as a child and bouts of ME as an adult. He took up karate, which came in handy on several occasions… Read More