Review first published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2016 The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James is a riveting, debut graphic novel by Ian Williams, a celebrated medical humanist and founder of the Graphic Medicine website. He previously published using the nom de plume Thom Ferrier and contributed a series of comic strips for the Guardian. In The Bad Doctor, inspired by Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and by his own experience of the continuing secondary effects of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), Ian Williams deftly evokes the world of country GP Dr Iwan James’s deep… Read More
The Bad Doctor
Reviewed by Dr Ian Fussell, first published 25 Nov, 14 BMJ Medical Humanities Blog. http://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2014/11/25/the-reading-room/ The Bad Doctor is the debut graphic novel by Ian Williams, himself a pretty good doctor, I reckon, by the insight and humanity shown throughout this book. It was published in June 2014 by Myriad Editions and is a beautifully presented book. Ian is a physician working in General Practice and GU Medicine in Brighton. He is also the founder of the website graphicmedicine.org for which he coined the term “Graphic Medicine.” Following his training in medicine he studied fine art and achieved a… Read More
New Podcast: Ian Williams “Medical Examinations” Keynote
Juliette McMullin at the University of California, Riverside recently organized a conference titled, “Medical Examinations: Art, Story, Theory.” It was sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society as well as Department of Anthropology. We are honored to share two of the conference keynotes as Graphic Medicine podcasts. First up is Graphic Medicine site co-director, Ian Williams. 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.
You’ll Never Know
This series of three gorgeous memoirs shares Carol Tyler’s effort to investigate and retell her father’s traumatic experiences in World War II. Along the way we are also witness to struggles with her marriage, raising her daughter, her efforts to be a good daughter herself, and much more. Carol, a painter, has a stunning visual style, and she uses the landscape format of the book, meant to resemble a photo album, to her (and our) great advantage. Paul Gravett chose You’ll Never Know as the best autobiography/biography of 2012. In his blog post he wrote, …in the end what floored… Read More
The Nao of Brown- Inkstuds Interview with Glyn Dillon
Robin McConnell’s interview with comics artist Glyn Dillon, author of the wonderful Nao of Brown. Glyn explains the thinking behind the book, which tells the story of a young woman who has OCD. Graphic Medicine gets a mention in the interview! LISTEN
The Nao of Brown
Publisher’s Blurb: ‘“A young woman’s struggle with love, life and murderous thoughts ” Nao Brown suffers from OCD, but not the handwashing, overly tidy type that people often refer to jokingly. Nao suffers from violent morbid obsessions, while her compulsions take the form of unseen mental rituals. Working part-time in a “designer” vinyl toy shop, while struggling to get her own illustration career off the ground, she’s still searching for that elusive love – the perfect love. And in meeting the man of her dreams, she realizes… dreams can be quite weird. Nao’s meditation practice is an attempt to quieten… Read More
I’m Crazy
Not reviewed yet on GM.org This is an autobiographical graphic novel about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) read a review on Metapsychology here
Map of My Heart
Not reviewed yet by GM.org Drawn and Quarterly website blurb: MAP OF MY HEART celebrates the twentieth anniversary of John Porcellino’s seminal and influential comics zine, KING CAT COMICS, which he started self publishing in 1989 and which has been his predominant means of expression. In this collection, while Porcellino is living in isolation and experiencing the pain of divorce he crafts a melancholic, tender graphic ballad of heartbreak and reflection. Known for his sad, quiet honesty rendered in his signature deceptively minimalist style, Porcellino has a command of graphic storytelling as sophisticated as the medium’s more visually intricate masters…. 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
Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler
In his introduction, Art Spiegelman credits Justin Green with inventing the genre of autobiographical comix and states explicitly that without Binky Brown there would have been no Maus. In its day there was (apparently) nothing else like this; Green paved the way for his better known peers, like Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. So without this book, all the others listed on this site might not have existed. I have to admit that this is probably my favorite book of all the one’s I have listed on this website. It was reprinted in 1995 after being unavailiable for 20 years. The… Read More