This workshop will introduce participants to the diary comic, a mode of autobiographical cartooning that offers people dealing with illness, whether mental or physical, different modes of engaging with and representing their experiences. The diary mode offers the important capacity to slow things down, a practice that can help us respond to the challenges of illness, medical treatment, and care-giving. We will also engage more broadly with the diary in comics, examining what it means visually to integrate this mode of autobiographical telling with its own particular formal qualities (lyric rather than narrative; resistance to closure; encapsulation of the temporal) as well as its uses, imports, and practices. Are there ways, for example, in which the visual diary offers forms for creative engagement between those creating the diary and those reading and looking at it? Are there limitations embedded in not only the form itself but also the assumptions made about what the diary offers? Offering four different perspectives on the form and function of diary comics, each speaker will discuss one page or panel exemplifying the diary comic or the diary in comics. These examples will be chosen from the four-panel daily strips of James Kochalka (The Cute Manifesto), the extended daily diary entries incorporating words and images of Matt Freedman (Relatively Indolent but Relentless) and the retrospective storytelling exposés of Jennifer Cruté (Jennifer’s Journal), and the personal diary comics of MK Czerwiec. Following that analysis of the comic excerpt, each speaker will then offer participants one brief activity designed to illuminate how they believe the diary comic (or the diary in a comic) can function in and outside of a healthcare setting.
