Graphic Medicine
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Wink

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Book review by Kevin Wolf     First person fictional memoirs written in present tense have made me wonder. Am I, the reader, supposed to think that the protagonist is writing this memoir after the fact and recalling the events? Or that the character never writes this stuff down but lives the events and I’m virtually watching them as they happen? Or am “I” vicariously the memoirist living out this life? Or should I treat it like a non-fictional memoir in the present tense and I’m being given the gift of entry into the memoirist’s mind and life? And is… Read More

Go with the Flow

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Book Review by Kevin Wolf   In its own quiet way this graphic novel, Go with the Flow by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann, provides an excellent teaching tool. Though it’s mainly for middle and high school students, I highly recommend it for all ages, genders and orientations. This graphic novel’s actions are in real time with all dates lining up with the 2019-2020 school year. It’s about friendship, menstruation, bullying, frustration with school administration, fighting back, and taking responsibility. Go with the Flow revolves around four diverse characters Christine, Brit, and Abby, three friends from childhood, and the new… Read More

Wait, What? A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up

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Book Review by Kevin Wolf When I was a child, perhaps age 8 before my younger brother was born, my mother sat down to read me a book with the title Where Do Babies Come From? I don’t recall the author. It was a picture book. My mother wasn’t very comfortable talking about sex, and used this book to give me my sex education; I only remember the picture of a sperm finding an egg. There’s a new graphic sex education guide with five fictional adolescents (Rico, Malia, Max, Sam, & Alexis) talking “about everything.” The book is called Wait,… Read More

Sky in Stereo

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Book Review by Kevin Wolf I recommend this black and white graphic novel which is narrated in the first person by Iris. Starting in 1989 Iris’ mom, Gina, becomes a Jehovah’s Witness. Gina’s live-in boyfriend is skeptical about the Witnesses. Iris initially joins her mother’s new belief system through supporting “evidence” in the apocalyptic messages in her childhood Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Iris finds the Kingdom Hall meetings tame relative to the end-times that they’re supposed to be awaiting. Iris becomes frustrated in her teen years, flees the conservatism of her mom’s religion, and turns to illicit drugs to… Read More

Lucille

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awaiting review on GM amazon blurb: ‘Winner of the Rene Goscinny Prize! With Lucille, Ludovic Debeurme takes on the difficult world of adolescence, following the life of a young anorexic woman and the difficult relationships she has with others, who have significant problems of their own. Influenced by psychoanalysis and the exploration of dreams, Debeurme explores life and fantasies with elegant clean graphics and a profound love of the games of childhood.’

The Most Natural Thing In The World – collected edition

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By including Francesca Cassavetti’s collected edition of TMNTITW here, I don’t wish to ‘medicalise’ childbirth. As the title suggests, women had been doing it themselves for a long time before maternity units, midwives and obstetricians. I am including it because medical staff do have a role to play nowadays and it is good to know how ‘we’ are percieved by the ‘service user’ so I will happily include any comics with depictions of healthcare workers. I also include it because I think it’s a great little graphic novel; It is funny, light-hearted, self depreciating, and very, very well observed. The… Read More

Monsters

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The funniest book about herpes you’ll read this year. Let me make my opinion clear from the outset: this book is superb. A work of genius. I don’t think anyone is able to graphically imbue their characters with such a sense of anxiety and dejection as Ken Dahl does. Many thanks to Martha Cornog for allerting me to the work of Gabby Shulz, a.k.a. Ken Dahl who, according to his blog, still plods on in a series of day jobs in order to pay the bills. He deserves great things, indeed he has just won an Ignatz Award for Monsters. This… Read More

Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy

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According to Augusten Burroughs (2009), there are two types of therapists: ‘those who are truly gifted with perspective and empathy, and those who are profoundly confused and possibly sick, and must feed off others’.  After reading Couch Fiction (twice) I am reasonably confident in the feeling that Philippa Perry must fall firmly into the former category. In an interesting departure from the usual graphic novel format, Couch Fiction both tells and analyses the theraputic relationship between Pat Phillips, an experienced psychotherapist, and James Clarkson Smith, her client. James is a successful barrister from a priveliged background who has developed a… Read More

I Never Liked You

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To include this great little book in a list of  “medically themed” graphic novels may be stretching the point somewhat, or tending towards the medicalisation of normal life (doctors are good at that, but maybe not as good as Big Pharma). I include it because of the thread narrative that concerns Chester Brown’s relationship with his mentally ill mother. The main theme of this memoir is Brown’s somewhat troubled adolescence, growing up in the 1970’s in a Montreal suburb. Chester is the slightly geeky teenager whose quiet, thoughtful manner and skinny, longhaired good looks get him plenty of (seemingly unwanted)… Read More

Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story

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Blue Pills, by Swiss artist Frederick Peeters, chronicles his relationship with Cati, a wild, vivacious girl he meets at a New Years Party. They connect and become lovers. Before long Cati tells Fred that she and her three-year-old son are both HIV positive. He is filled with a mixture of passion, pity and desire, but he does his best to act cool. Although disconcerted, he wants the relationship to work, and so it does.   The book charts Fred’s evolving relationship with Cati’s son, cataloguing his periods of illness, his stays in hospital and the routine of his medication- the blue… Read More