guest review by A. David Lewis A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns is a not a work of Graphic Medicine; it is a work for all audiences, regardless of field, thereby making it perhaps just as vital to, if not targeted for, Graphic Medicine. Whereas sex-positive informative works like Oh Joy, Sex Toy! or women health-focused anthologies like Graphic Reproduction clearly announce their relevance to gender and medical concerns in the comics form, A Quick & Easy Guide… could easily get overlooked, dismissed as a narrow exploration for linguists, activists, or youth educators. And that would be Graphic… Read More
New Podcast: Representing Mental Health
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. In this week’s episode, three speakers address mental health and comics. First up is An Nguyen with her paper, My Partner Has Depression: Japanese depictions of illness experiences in the day to day. An Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. She is currently finishing her dissertation on Japanese youth street fashion subcultures and has an interest in the global flow of media and things and their interpretation across cultures. Describing… Read More
Of Comics, Disease, and Stigma
Dr. Ian Williams Comics Forum June 10, 2011
Epileptic
Epileptic is like no other Graphic Novel. A masterpiece in which the margins of reality, dreams and immagination are blurred. David B grew up with an elder brother, Jean-Christophe, who suffered from severe epilepsy. David (christened Pierre-Francois Beauchard, but changing his name during the story) are very close as young children. Jean Christophe is a bright imaginative child with a talent for drawing that he shares with his brother. The book chronicles the development of Jean-Christophe’s illness, his reaction to it and the strains and confinement it puts on family life as they search in vain for a cure for… Read More
More on Leeds and Beyond
Andrew Godfrey (Sicker than Thou, The CF Diaries) has done a wonderful report on the Graphic Medicine conference on his blog. Thriving, eclectic, warm, encouraging, inspiring, and with plenty of laughs to be had, this open discourse between artists, academics, and health care professionals is surely an optimistic sign of the times. Thanks, Andrew – and not just because you said nice & helpful things about my talk. (But that’s certainly not discouraged. I had an artist patient who once told me, “I show my work to other people so they can tell me what they see.” I very much had that… Read More