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This Week in Graphic Medicine (2/23/18)

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‘This Week in Graphic Medicine’ highlights relevant articles (and tweets) about comics in medicine published during the week (Saturday – Friday). Links are typically presented without commentary, unless clarification of relevance is necessary, with credit given to those who flagged them up where possible. So without further ado… Matthew’s Pick of the Week… This week I want to keep it short and sweet by highlighting Just Peachy Comics – a webcomic I just discovered this week on Facebook thanks to a friend’s share. Holly describes her comics as a way to journal as her therapist suggested – lucky for us, the… Read More

CALL FOR PAPERS Disability and Superheroes

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We invite abstracts for essays to be published in a collection showcasing new work on the representation and conceptualization of disability in superhero comics. We encourage examinations of mainstream titles and characters (such as those published by Marvel and DC) as well as considerations of other texts that engage disability and the superhero genre in creative ways (such as Cece Bell’s El Deafo). We are especially interested in contributions that explore additional intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. The collection envisions a diverse selection of contributors (scholars from the humanities, comics studies, and disability studies; disability activists; comics creators; medical… Read More

New Podcast: Comics & Producing Identity

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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. This Toronto conference panel is moderated by Ian Williams. Managing difference through graphic cancer narratives, Juliet McMullin, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside A common refrain in cancer disparities research states that while cancer mortality rates have dramatically decreased over the past decade, these gains have not accrued evenly across populations. Yet, there is little surprise in the findings of difference in cancer mortality rates. Cancer has always been about difference; difference in cells, in… Read More

New Podcast: Comics & Caregiving

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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

New Podcast: Representing Mental Health

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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. In this week’s episode, three speakers address mental health and comics. First up is An Nguyen with her paper, My Partner Has Depression: Japanese depictions of illness experiences in the day to day.  An Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. She is currently finishing her dissertation on Japanese youth street fashion subcultures and has an interest in the global flow of media and things and their interpretation across cultures. Describing… Read More

No Life Lessons Here: Comics, Autism, and Empathetic Scholarship

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No Life Lessons Here: Comics, Autism, and Empathetic Scholarship Sara Birge, Pennsylvania State University Disability Studies Quarterly Abstract: Comics, a relatively understudied medium for representations of disability, have enormous potential for providing important critical perspectives in disability studies. This article examines two recent comics that portray individuals with autism: The Ride Together by Paul and Judy Karasik and Circling Normal, a compilation of the comic strip Clear Blue Water by Karen Montague-Reyes. I argue that these comics’ unique narrative geometries make them ideally suited for depicting cognitive disabilities in the nuanced context of embodied life. Through their reworking of stereotypes and their unique portrayals of autism, Circling… Read More

So long as they grow out of it: comics, the discourse of developmental normalcy, and disability

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So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability Susan Squier Journal of Medical Humanities, 2008 Jun;29(2):71-88 Abstract: This essay draws on two emerging fields–the study of comics or graphic fiction, and disability studies–to demonstrate how graphic fictions articulate the embodied, ethical, and sociopolitical experiences of impairment and disability. Examining David B’s Epileptic and Paul Karasik and Judy Karasik’s The Ride Together, I argue that these graphic novels unsettle conventional notions of normalcy and disability. In so doing, they also challenge our assumed dimensions and possibilities of the comics genre and medium, demonstrating the great… Read More

I Am Not These Feet

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Thanks to Adam Cadwell, who put me onto Kaisa’s work. He met her at a comics convention and didn’t realise she didn’t have (flesh and blood) feet until she pointed out that what she stood on were hi-tec prosthetics. Kaisa was born with deformed feet that caused her discomfort and made walking distances problematic.  As she got older, arthritis set in, requiring painkillers and orthopedic shoes. After meeting a prosthetist and a number of amputees, Kaisa decided to get both her feet amputated. If that sounds like a radical move to you, it seems that her doctor was of a… Read More