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
Making the Impact of the Virus Accessible
Guest Post by Lucy Bergonzi Books Beyond Words is a publisher of picture-led books and resources for people with learning disabilities. These wordless stories, dealing with many of life’s issues, are designed for people who find it easier to read using pictures rather than words. I’ve been one of Books Beyond Words’ illustrators since 2015. The Covid pandemic has affected all of us to a greater or lesser extent, but for people with learning disabilities the crisis has been particularly difficult and damaging. The British Medical Journal says ‘the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect… Read More
Resistance by McDermid and Briggs
Awaiting Review
Cartoons in Time of COVID
In Partnership with the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland (RCPI) Heritage Centre Exhibition curated by Dr. Eoin Kelleher and Harriet Wheelock, RCPI Keeper of Collections Guest Review by Jane Burns This exhibition has been developed from the artwork of Eoin Kelleher who has produced a series of Living with COVID Comics in the Irish Independent Newspaper since the start of the pandemic. Eoin is seasoned artist who has a fantastic way of connecting complex, emotive, and personal perspectives in comic formats. The exhibition is developed using Microsoft SWAY which makes it user friendly, interactive, and easy to share and… Read More
COVID Chronicles, Nib’s Pandemic & Comic News
Book Review by Kevin Wolf COVID Chronicles: True Stories from the Front Lines of COVID-19 The Nib #7 – Pandemic Issue The (Santa Cruz) Comic News – April 2020 Issue COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology I’ve heard it said that journalism is the first draft of history, because it’s writing about events that are currently happening and doesn’t have the hindsight that time provides to try to figure out how all the events fit together and global look of its causes and effects. This review covers the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The most recent events mentioned are from… Read More
Fever Year & Invisible War
Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918, A Tragedy in Three Acts The Invisible War: a Tale on Two Scales By Kevin Wolf There are two graphic works that take place during World War I (WWI) and provide imaginative stories of bacterial and viral diseases. The spread of these diseases was helped by those war conditions. The viral one began in the United States—misnamed the Spanish Flu because of wartime censorship (more about that later)—and spread to the world as soldier-carriers traveled to the war front. The bacterial infection was dysentery—generally water- and food-borne—and spread by unsanitary conditions which… Read More
Great Hanoi Rat Hunt & Plagues
By Kevin Wolf In our current days of social distancing, worries, and sickness or deaths from COVID-19, the past can be instructive, but how much do we learn from history? Our memories seem to be short and society often has to reinvent what we once learned. A good place to start relearning about pandemics is two excellent books; one about a specific plague in a specific location and the other a more general learning tool. In The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Rat Hunt), Michael G. Vann and Liz Clarke (illustrator) use… Read More