Graphic Medicine
Home / death

Medical Mentions Book Reviews III

by

Where to Buy: https://bookshop.org/shop/graphicmedicine   Book Review by Kevin Wolf   Medical Mentions is a group of graphic works. The graphic works reviewed here are books whose primary topics are not medical, and yet they cover a medical topic with some depth at some point in the work. The rest of the work might be fictional or nonfictional, while the medical portion is often technical and five pages or more. The reviewer will usually neither recommend nor discourage reading the work, except when the rest of the work is deemed outstanding or terrible, respectively. Typically, six graphic works will be part… Read More

Grief and Anger

by

Guest review by Jasmin Tomlins   With a title that speaks to precisely what is discussed within, Grief and Anger by Stefan Salinas is a patient, compassionate, and non-judgmental exploration of several of the ways one of the least socially acceptable expressions of one’s grief in our culture—anger—is found and acted upon within sorrow. While the graphic work has no particular focus on medicine, the medical system and the myriad of caregivers that work within it are addressed in terms of being among those who might be lashed out at and speaks to their genuine desire to be of help…. Read More

Sterben ist echt das Letzte

by

The Fumetto Comic Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, hosts a series of satellite exhibitions every year as a significant component of their programming, turning the city into a fascinating forum for emerging artists to display work publicly, in venues as diverse as shops selling eyeglasses to run-down bars to disused swimming pools. In 2018 the works of two comic artists framed the doors to a small rectory in the city centre: on the left, my own graphic narrative looking at mental conflict as it manifests in utero, and on the right the original pages from Eva Müller’s graphic novel Sterben ist… Read More

The Shepherd Vol 1-3

by

Book review by Kevin Wolf   The Shepherd is a supernatural graphic novel series of three volumes (so far) with at least one more in the works. I will spend less time here on Volume One, because it doesn’t have significant medical content, but I’m providing background of that volume for the reader to better understand the second and third volumes (The Path of Souls and The Path of Dogs, respectively) which do have more medical content. In the first volume and early in the second volume, especially, there are religious metaphors based on the New Testament; Andrea, the primary… Read More

Ghosts

by

Review by Kevin Wolf Ghosts is another wonderful all-ages graphic narrative by Raina Telgemeier, whose earlier award-winning works included the autobiographical Smile and Sisters. Ghosts is the story of a family moving to a new home in a fictional northern California town (Bahía de La Luna; Moon Bay in English) whose air is supposed to be better for the youngest daughter (Maya) who has cystic fibrosis. Cystic Fibrosis is a degenerative genetic disease that causes mucus to build up in the lungs making breathing difficult. Graphic Medicine community member (and 2016 conference organizer) Andrew Godfrey reports that current median life expectancy… Read More

Billy, Me & You: A Memoir of Grief and Recovery

by

Guest review by Dr. Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Anu Mary Peter, National Institute of Technology, India. Review Published in 2011 by Myriad Editions, Billy, Me & You: A Memoir of Grief and Recovery (hereafter Billy, Me & You) is a graphic memoir by Nicola Streeten, an illustrator and academic. Serialized initially in Liquorice magazine, Billy, Me & You was later collected into a graphic novel thirteen years after the death of Billy, author’s first child who died after cardiac surgery at the age of two. Suffused with subtle humor, if the memoir chronicles the complexities of human grief and bereavement it also deftly records the emotional… Read More

Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe

by

Guest review by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Raghavi Ravi Kasthuri, National Institute of Technology, India. Published in 2007, Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe by Tom Batuik is a compilation of comic strips about the breast cancer experience of Lisa Moore, a popular fictional character in the Funky Winkerbean series. Syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers, the Funky Winkerbean series is celebrated for illuminating socially relevant issues such as teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, gun violence, suicide, among others. Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe is no exception in that Batuik, through a series of two tier black and white cartoons, meditates upon the diagnosis,… Read More

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow

by

An Intrusion of Illness: A Story of Young Mourning Review by Alycia Best. Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow takes its readers through the light-hearted joy of a relationship—the comical and touching moments of two young people’s many adventures together—and, eventually, the emotional trauma that accompanies losing a loved one to a crippling illness. The novel manifests itself in varying modes of illustration, through hand-drawn cartoon images and realistic depictions, photographs, scanned copies of actual letters and postcards, and diagrams. This is the record of Anders and Cheryl, a couple who is forced apart by the suffocating grips of cancer,… Read More