Here is another comic pamphlet from Singing Dragon, the imprint of Jessica Kingsley Publishers that has released a number of titles of relevance to Graphic Medicine, under the stewardship of Mike Medaglia. The author, Samuel C. Williams, tackles the subject of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by interviewing his friend, Matt, an ex soldier, who has opened up to him about his own PTSD. Walking the dog, Samuel asks Matt about his experiences during his 20 years in the army and Matt, who has been through therapy and so knows some theory, does a good job of explaining how trauma disrupts the processing of memory –… Read More
Podcast Episode 13: Meaning Making Through Drawing and Comics
In this week’s Graphic Medicine podcast, the first in a series, we’ll hear two lightning presentations from the 2015 Comics & Medicine conference in Riverside, California. Both presentations discuss how making art and comics helps create meaning and understanding, and can, in some cases, change behavior. You can listen to an image-enhanced version of the podcast here: Or you can find the episode in iTunes here. First we’ll hear from Roderick Castle, an art therapist in Rochester, New York, who works with veterans. You can learn more about Roderick from his feature in this month’s “Art Therapy Today”, published by the… Read More
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
Comics and Trauma
Another story on the trauma comic, this one by National Public Radio in which the entirety of the comic can be downloaded, is available here. I love NPR, but unfortunately, based on the headline, they have not read this great piece by Dylan Meconis on how NOT to write about comics.
New Podcast: Graphic Pathographies
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. This wonderful panel, moderated by Michael Green, presents the creators of three unique and insightful graphic pathographies. Jenny Lin is a visual artist based in Montreal. She has created experimental narrative-based works in the formats of 2-D print, artist books, video and site-specific installation. She recently worked as a medical illustrator at McGill University and she currently teaches at Concordia University in the Print Media program. www.jenny-lin.ca. She writes of her presentation, In my presentation, Skinny… Read More
New Podcast Wednesday: Joyce Brabner’s Keynote Address
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. This week’s podcast is the keynote address Joyce Brabner gave on July 23 at the 2012 Comics & Medicine conference in Toronto. She opens by describing her talk as, “What happens to us when we tell these stories.” Brabner then talks about some experiences in writing reportage comics, primarily about young victims of war and other atrocities. She talks about collaboration with her husband Harvey Pekar, and she talks about her role as “character Joyce.”… Read More
Emma Vieceli illustrates Tranexamic Acid comic for Emergency Teams
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine have created a comic influenced by the Japanese manga style to help busy medical staff who treat patients suffering from bleeding. Professor Ian Roberts devised a storyline to highlight the latest research into the life-saving benefits of tranexamic acid (TXA) in a way which he hopes will appeal to doctors, nurses and paramedics on the front-line of medicine. The comic by professional artist Emma Vieceli and colourist Paul Duffield sets the scene in a busy emergency department as staff rush to treat people following two explosions. As well as… Read More
Skinny Leg
‘Skinny Leg’ recounts the story of Jenny Lin’s recovery from a serious leg injury caused by a road traffic accident. It is availiable from the artist as a stunning screen printed, hand made, limited edition artists book and as a regular paperback http://jenny-lin.ca/skinny.html from the author’s website: ‘”Skinny Leg” is an image and text-based artist book that is a first-person account of an accident I was involved in in December 2009 in which I was run over by a truck while cycling to work. The book incorporates drawings, pop-up book components and fold-out pages and takes visual inspiration from medical… Read More
The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time
I read this some time ago, in almost total ignorance of the context of ‘DB’s story within Gary Trudeau’s long running Doonesbury strip. Indeed, I read it in almost total ignorance of Gary Trudeau’s views and vast body of work, as well as the significance of Senator John McCain’s foreword. On top of this, I now realise, I read it in ignorance of the development and background of the DSM4 catagory of PTSD and it’s relavance to stories about soldiers returning from war. I was wondering what to say about it, but couldn’t get it straight in my head. So… 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