Graphic Medicine
Home / death

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas

by

By M. T. Bennett From “A Walk to Remember” to “The Fault in Our Stars”, teen romance stories are awash in the cliché of falling in love with someone who has a terminal illness. Author Yoru Sumino and artist Idumi Kirihara (translation by Beni Axia Conrad) give their perspective on it in the manga novel, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas which also has an anime and live-action adaptation. As is often the case, in these kinds of stories a troubled young boy falls for a slowly dying girl. We will call the main character “MC” for this review because… Read More

Radium Girls

by

By Karol Kovalovich Weaver Cy.’s Radium Girls tells the story of a group of twentieth-century American working-class women who suffered from and died as a result of radium poisoning. The women worked in a watch factory painting the numbers on watch faces. Unaware of the dangers of the radioactive paint, the women prepped their brushes with their tongues. In addition, they used the paint as nail polish, applied it as makeup, and decorated their dresses with it. Ultimately, they developed radium poisoning, experiencing tooth loss, miscarriages, pain, the inability to walk, and death. Facing physical, emotional, and economic hardships, the… Read More

Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir

by

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

Look Again

by

by Tenli Yavneh Elizabeth Trembley’s excellent and moving graphic memoir Look Again: A Memoir delves into the complex issue of traumatic memory .  The lens is the author’s lived experience of trauma and the evolution of her understanding of that experience over years of her life.  To that end, the book begins with a raw depiction of the initial trauma itself:  In the fall of 1996, Trembley was out walking her dogs in the woods early in the morning, and discovered a dead body hanging from a tree next to the trail.  The moment is vividly depicted:  on one page,… Read More

Spotlight: VEOLI

by

Graphic Medicine doesn’t always take the form of a book: sometimes it can be a collaboration. This is the case for the Visualizing End of Life Issues group (VEOLI). This international group of graphic recorders, artists, facilitators, death doulas, grief specialists, and authors have practiced listening to people describe their end-of-life thinking and, in real-time, capture these thoughts by making drawings and using words.  Members of VEOLI have devoted over a year to creating and fine-tuning a process for leading people through a journey to capture their thoughts and feelings about their dying and death. Undertaking the very personal experience… Read More