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Lucille

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Medical and potential trigger issues: eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, sexual assault, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), alcoholism, mental health, suicide, death, grief   Review by Alison Kent Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme is a startlingly beautiful book that starts out with a young woman walking through the woods. Her cellphone goes off; it’s her mother. She lies, saying she didn’t take a detour home from school. The woods are her only apparent solace. Socially awkward and full of self-doubt, it quickly becomes apparent that she is also seriously anorexic. Her solitary sexual explorations fill her with more self-loathing than relief. She is… Read More

How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual

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Guest Review by Maren Kyle   How to be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual by Rebecca Burgess is a charmingly illustrated coming-of-age story about being asexual and learning about what that meant for the author as they grew up and began to navigate platonic and romantic relationships. Each chapter tells part of the author’s story, from high school through young adulthood, and then ends with an infographic or vignette that covers terminology, pride flags, pop culture representation, and microaggressions. For example, early on Burgess defines asexuality (Ace for short) as “having a lack of sexual attraction.”  There is… Read More

Medical Mentions Book Reviews V

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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 of the review with one paragraph… Read More

Tyranny

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Guest Book Review by Ryan Wright     According to a 2020 report from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Boston Children’s Hospital, 28.8 million Americans will experience an eating disorder in their lifetimes, and one person dies from an eating disorder every 52 minutes.1 The insidious nature of eating disorders, in this case Anorexia Nervosa, is aptly portrayed as a tyrannical demon in Lesley Fairfield’s book Tyranny. In Tyranny, Fairfield masterfully depicts the struggle of Anna, a young woman grappling with unrealistic portrayals of women in the media, peer pressure, and a family that, although well… Read More

Lighter Than My Shadow

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Guest review by Crystal Yin Lie added 20/3/18 “Pictures mark an increase in the symbolic tenor of the discourse of anorexia,” writes Erin O’Connor in her study of how late-19th century medical photography came to frame anorexia nervosa as a discrete pathology. Wresting the representation of anorexia (and eating disorders more generally) from the realms of medical science, contemporary writers and artists have turned to a different pictorial form—the graphic form—creating a profusion of narratives including British artist Katie Green’s debut memoir, Lighter Than My Shadow (2013). In My Shadow, Green depicts Katie’s experience with eating disorders—beginning with childhood anorexia—anxiety,… Read More

Thick and Thin by Bruce Mutard

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I have just returned from the Graphic Novel Conference at Mansfield College Oxford, where MK, Michael Green and I conducted a panel on Graphic Medicine. Among the speakers was the Australian graphic novelist and writer Bruce Mutard to whom I was introduced by Paul Gravett. Bruce was interested in what we are doing at Graphic Medicine, and told me that he had previously drawn a strip on eating disorders in the male. The strip is viewable online  (scroll down through Bruce’s short stories to find it) Published in Tango, Love and Food. Edited by Bernard Caleo, published by Cardigan Comics. This… Read More

The House That Groaned

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Awaiting GM review Karrie’s talk at Comics and Medicine: Visualising the Stigma of Illness Amazon blurb: “141 Rottin Road ‘A cosy, one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a charming Victorian conversion. Newly decorated and with a separate kitchen and reception room. Located just a bus ride away from a wide range of shops, restaurants and bars.’ Welcome to The House that Groaned and the six lonely inhabitants of its separate flats, characters so at odds with themselves and their bodies that they could only have stepped out of the pages of a comic novel. There’s Barbara, our make-up artist heroine and… Read More