Guest review by Lorraine Chun All too frequently we hear or read in the news about another shooting at a school, but rarely do we hear about its impact on students. The Golden Hour by Niki Smith addresses how an adolescent copes with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing his teacher gunned down. This is a story about healing and resiliency, new friendships, and even young love. Manuel Soto is a latchkey middle schooler whose mother puts in long hours as a nurse at a health facility. He takes solace in his photography art work and is a loner at school with no friends and is by himself when he gets home. The story begins with… Read More
Mis(h)adra
Guest Review by Adela Wu Mis(h)adra, the title of this remarkable graphic novel by Iasmin Omar Ata, breaks apart into “mish adra”, or I cannot in Arabic. Viewed another way, Mis(h)adra can also be “misadra”, a term for seizure. Trigger warning from Mis(h)adra and this review including mentions of self-harm and suicidality with some additional available resources: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255), Crisis Text Line: Text “Home” to 741741. Isaac, the main character, is a young Arab college student struggling with controlling his epilepsy and growing feelings of disconnection from the people around him, on top of wrangling his classes… Read More
When Stars Are Scattered
Author websites: Omar Mohamed ( https://www.refugeestrong.org/); Victoria Jamieson (https://www.victoriajamieson.com/); Iman Geddy: (https://www.imangeddy.com/) Guest Review by Justin Wigard, Michigan State University “For me, the first years are lost” – a poignant beginning by Omar Mohamed to When Stars Are Scattered, visually magnified by a spectacular night sky, purple and dark with stars of pink and fuchsia. This becomes immediately juxtaposed on the next page, a splash spread showing a young Omar and his younger brother, Hassan, looking through a barbed wire fence at other refugees in the bright and arid desert of Kenya, in a refugee camp called Dadaab. These two sequences reveal… Read More
Rinse Spin Repeat
Guest Review by Adela Wu How can one make sense of global and personal tragedy? With simple, stark hand-drawn lines in the graphic memoir Rinse Spin Repeat, Edith Fassnidge paints a vivid landscape of her experience—and trauma—during the deadly tsunami that claimed over 200,000 lives in Southeast Asia on Boxing Day in 2004. The book’s title itself refers to the metaphor Fassnidge assigns to her emotional trauma: a cycle that drowns her in a giant, vicious wave. Everything seems idyllic at the start of Edith’s journey. She and her boyfriend Matt plan a trip of a lifetime in Thailand… Read More
Spring Rain
Grass and Not on My Watch
Book Reviews by Kevin Wolf Before I delve deeply into the two graphic works under review here, I have three issues to address: whether you should even read this review, whether I should herein use gentle (as in Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim) or more explicit words to explain events, and the elephant in the room. Let me explain. You may not want to read this review because of the subject matter. At the beginning of Not on My Watch: A Bystanders’ Handbook for the Prevention of Sexual Violence, Second Edition by Isabella Rotman there is a warning, so I… Read More
The Shepherd Vol 1-3
Book review by Kevin Wolf The Shepherd is a supernatural graphic novel series of three volumes (so far) with at least one more in the works. I will spend less time here on Volume One, because it doesn’t have significant medical content, but I’m providing background of that volume for the reader to better understand the second and third volumes (The Path of Souls and The Path of Dogs, respectively) which do have more medical content. In the first volume and early in the second volume, especially, there are religious metaphors based on the New Testament; Andrea, the primary… Read More
For Real, Issue One: The Oven
Review of For Real (Issue One): The Oven by James Romberger By Kevin Wolf Though I grew up reading comic books, I rarely read stand-alone comics today. I usually wait for a graphic novel to come out, which might be a multi-comic story arc. Comics are often sold as twenty or so page “pamphlets,” often with regular frequency. Some single stories in a single comic have achieved acclaim (e.g. The 8-page story Master Race by Al Feldstein writer and B. Krigstein artist in Impact issue 1, March 1955 EC Publications; about a holocaust survivor encountering a Nazi war criminal on… Read More
This Week in Graphic Medicine (2/23/18)
‘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
Trauma is Really Strange
Guest review by John Pollard. Trauma is a complex and dense subject. Developing something approaching a full understanding of it can take years. In Trauma is Really Strange, Steve Haines and Sophie Standing have produced a solid and digestible jumping-off point for those wishing to begin an exploration of the topic. It is clear from reading this comic that it is not just written for those who may have an academic interest in the subject: it is also appropriate for those who are struggling to understand their own firsthand experience of trauma. As in their other comic, Pain is Really Strange, Haines and Standing offer up a clear,… Read More