Space is a fundamental element of all narratives, since everything that happens must necessarily happen somewhere. However, not all media are equally dependent upon spatial meaning when conveying their stories. The space of a novel, for example, is flat and strictly linear, while storytelling on the radio does not involve any spatial dimension at all. By contrast, the theatre and comics both rely heavily on the concrete ‘performance space’ of the stage or the page, respectively, in order to create the virtual ‘dramatic space’ of the world that is being narrated. The relationship between these two kinds of space is complex: While the performance space may act as a straightforward mimetic representation of a concrete location in the world of the story, in many cases it (also) refers to more abstract spaces, including the inner world of characters’ thoughts, values and emotions (Donahue 1993; Ubersfeld 1999).
This talk focuses on the metaphorical meaning potentials of vertical and horizontal orientations in comics. Drawing mainly on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Experimental Psychology, I argue that the meanings of such spatial orientations are based in concrete, embodied human experience. For example, the need throughout life to expend much physical effort to resist gravity and stay upright leads us to associate ‘up’ with success, power, physical wellbeing, and happiness, whereas ‘down’ equates with their opposites (Burford 1998; Casasanto & Dijkstra 2010). Similarly, there appear to be universal correlations in human cognition between left-right orientation and more abstract concepts such as evil-good, active-passive, and past-future, though the direction of these correlations depends on whether individuals are left- or right-handed, and/or on the conventional direction of reading and writing in their culture (Casasanto 2009; Casasanto & Bottini 2014; Santiago et al. 2007). According to CMT, such metaphorical correlations have a profound influence on the way we think, act and express ourselves, albeit at a mostly unconscious level (Johnson 2007; Lakoff & Johnson 1999).
Using Ellen Forney’s graphic memoir about her bi-polar disorder, Marbles, as a case study, I examine the meaning potentials of vertical and horizontal orientations – with respect to both the representation of characters, and the arrangement of elements within panels and on the page – in graphic illness narratives. In particular, I will compare the ways in which such spatial orientations are used to represent Ellen’s experience of the manic and the depressed phases in her life.
For HIV-negative individuals, post-test counseling is a critical period in which to increase risk perceptions and decrease risk behaviors. In Latin America, where resources for testing are limited and the stigma surrounding HIV and risk behaviors is high, health providers and counselors may skip crucial risk behavioral screening (e.g., questions about unprotected anal sex) during post-test counseling. To address this issue, in 2014–2015 with funding by the U.S. Naval Health Research Center's Department of Defense HIV/AIDS Prevention Program, RTI International piloted the development of a self-administered post-test counseling interface for Voluntary Counseling and Testing centers in the armed forces of the Dominican Republic and Belize. The tablet-based interface aids in post-test communication about risk factors and behaviors associated with contracting HIV. Visuals were needed to help explain terminology and various aspects of HIV prevention, including risk behaviors and preventive measures (e.g., condom use). Often, the public health illustrations that typically are used to display images of sex may reinforce the stigma surrounding sex. Many members of the military population in the region are young and exposed to western media, so it was thought that casting characters in comic art would be more appealing. Two virtual comic characters, Bob and Britney, were created to guide users through two gender-specific risk assessments. A visual narrative was developed around the characters to assist with explaining survey questions, including demonstrations of risk behavior (e.g., unprotected sex), and to encourage safe behaviors. In preliminary tests of the interface, the visuals eliminated confusion about the survey questions (as there had been in the past). A 3-month pilot study of 128 military clients was conducted that measured the ability of the interface to enhance the impact of the behavior change messages provided. The positive response to the visuals led to updating the artwork in companion flipchart tools.
Ten Little Memories: Visual Theater for Adults with Mental Health Conditions - Steven FraserDo It Theatre create Private Plays – unique theatrical events for adults who live with mental health conditions. Our work centres on illustration, literature and animation to convey theatrical stories within settings that remove the stimuli from traditional theatre that some individuals may find uncomfortable. In Private Plays, dialogue is replaced with text, characters replaced with illustrations and the audience becomes immersed in an original form of performance. Private Plays are presented in a specific method. Individuals enter the theatre space and are given a ‘zine. Inside this ‘zine is a theatre script, illustrations and a comic all conveying a story. The audience then walks around a theatre set that presents props, found objects, illustrations, animated flip books and interactive puppets. Participants read the script in the ‘zine and follow the instructions. Here they experience a theatrical performance that requires the use of imagination to bring the story to life. We embrace DIY culture and exciting ways to perform engaging stories. In 2014 Do It Theatre won a New Emerging Company Award from New Diorama Theatre London. We have also received Creative Scotland Open Funding and a Tom McGrath Grant to develop our work. We have presented our stories at festivals and venues throughout the UK including Rich Mix London, All Change Festival at the Lyric Hammersmith and the Horror Souk Festival Sheffield. Our new Private Play, Ten Little Memories, is taking place at the BasicSpace Festival London (17-21 February 2016), with subsequent performances at Ignite Sparks Festival Dundee (14 May 2016) and Hidden Door Festival Edinburgh (27 May - 4 June 2016). We would like to present the findings from staging Ten Little Memories and discuss how successful the performance has been in using illustration, ‘zines and comics in presenting theatre to adults who live with mental health problems.
Patients who experience alexithymia, the inability to label and therefore effectively communicate emotions, present a unique challenge to health care professionals across all medical disciplines – from combat veterans in post-deployment psychiatric care, to patients manifesting emotional stress physiologically in a primary care setting. As individuals struggle to put words to their suffering or understand the nuance of felt sense, health care providers struggle to provide effective care. Understandably, this leaves both members of the dyad feeling unheard. Psychologists are often tasked, sometimes in partnership with physicians, to help patients learn the connection between mind and body in hopes of them eventually using words to express feelings. The Superhero narratives, with their highly imaginative scenarios, simplistic good vs. bad story elements, and ubiquitous media presence can be used as a facilitator or conduit for patients who struggle to identify emotions within themselves. We propose to develop an easy-to-use digital lexicon of recognizable Superheroes and their corresponding emotional metaphors to be used as an aid by medical professionals treating patients with alexithymia.
Diabetic Patients' Visual Narratives of Illnesss - Yoko Yamanda
We propose a “visual turn” in narrative theory that offers a new approach to qualitative research. The image drawing method (IDM) was designed to transform invisible worlds into visible ones across different social and cultural contexts. Our study “Visual Images of My Illness,” used IDM achieved two goals. First, we examined how patients with diabetes visually represent the relationships between themselves and their illness in the past, the present, and the future. Second, we compared the contents and functions of stories of narrative interviews and visual narratives. Participants were 26 diabetic patients from 40 to 70 years of age. The realistic life events and life habits were told by interviews. The visual narratives represented patients’ feelings, values and meaning of life. These patients need to control their lives and maintain their motivation to follow their medical treatments throughout their life spans. Visual narratives can help us to understand their psychological experience of, and attitudes toward, their illness and their lives. As patients and the medical professions have different views and experiences of illness, they may hold conflict perspectives. Their joint attention to the same mediator – “visual narratives” – can facilitate looking at things from the other person’s perspective and bridging the differences in their experiences and feelings.
Navigating the Fishbowl: Comics and Small Town Medicine - Caroline ShoonerBeing a patient or a physician in a small town has its rewards…and its challenges. Friends become our patients, doctors become our friends, and generally everyone knows each other’s business (or, at least, they think they do!) Some years ago, I was involved as a physician in the hospitalization of a young woman, Hilary Thorpe, who suffered a psychotic break after delivering her baby. We knew each other socially, as much as anyone does in a small town. Months later, as she was recovering from this life-changing event, we reconnected over a poem. One thing led to another, and we started collaborating on comics exploring the doctor-patient relationship (http://www.theboondocs.org/comics/on-the-run). Over a two-year period, via emails and over picnic tables, Hilary and I explored what it means to live in our small town, what we thought of each other during our shared medical encounter and how we continue to navigate personal and public expectations. The medium of comics allowed our preferred modes of expression (Hilary – writing, me – doodling) to come together in a creative and efficient way, and added an element of playfulness to our earnest and often emotionally trying explorations. Our work is now part of a larger project, the art show Sick, involving 11 artists, which will open on April 1, 2016 at the Haida Gwaii Museum (http://haidaheritagecentre.com/ – see attached brochure). The art opening will also coincide with the launch of the printed version of my web comic The Boon Docs: Small Town Medicine (www.theboondocs.org).
In this talk I explore the visualisation of contemporary motherhood through the re-appropriation of religious iconography and text. I begin with a selection of Bobby Baker's diary drawings. Bobby Baker is a performer and artist. In 1996 she was diagnosed with borderline personality and throughout her illness and recovery Baker made diary drawings, a select number of which were published in Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me (Profile Books 2010). In a series of two interviews with Baker at her home in 2010 and 2013, the artist showed me some unexhibited and unpublished diary drawings. Within these artworks Baker portrays the tensions she experienced between the responsibilities of motherhood and her professional aspirations. Baker’s presentation of her crisis as a working mother simultaneously decries an unsupportive society and the limited representation of the complexity of motherhood within Christian iconography. I argue that Baker performs a feminist reparative act in these diary drawings as she creates a new visual language of motherhood through her re-appropriation of biblical iconography. I will show how Baker’s self-self-portraits, and icuntography accommodate her contemporary experiences. Then, through excerpts from my forthcoming graphic novel The Book of Sarah (Myriad Editions 2017), I will present how my own artwork records my struggles as a mother, artist, creator and writer. My graphic novel developed from the lack of female voice within Old Testament texts, and the silence of my biblical namesake, Sarah. My drawings and animation films act as Medrash, a term I created to describe my extended use of midrash. Midrash is a method of interpreting biblical stories that supplement gaps within the original texts. Medrash are autobiographically based additional artwork and texts, about silenced experiences, in this case of birth, pregnancy and motherhood.
Performing Single Pregnancy, Explaining Away Absence: From the Research 'Stage' to the Comics Page - Penelope Mendonca
Given the unprecedented growth of the fertility industry, and delayed childbearing, it is no surprise that autobiographical graphic novels are addressing conception, pregnancy and alternative parenting. The last two years have seen the publication of Phoebe Potts' Good Eggs, AK Summers' Pregnant Butch; Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, and Matilda Tristrams’ Probably Nothing; a diary of not-your-average nine months. These feminist narratives provide remarkable insights into the issues faced by their creators, as they try to become pregnant, or bear children, often within challenging circumstances. Yet the question remains, to what extent are graphic novels being used to explore inequalities between women, including their contrasting experiences of first‐time motherhood? This paper will discuss my practice-based PhD, which aims to offer a perspective on this question by positioning varied accounts of single pregnancy alongside each other. Mothers Storying the Absent Father: A Graphic Novel, involved undertaking twenty graphically facilitated interviews and workshops with single, pregnant women/single, first-time mothers of babies, aged between 16 and 52. Participants visually and verbally represented their experiences of biological father absence, while playfully exploring the ways they negotiated questions from family, friends, strangers, health and social care professionals. The issues raised ranged from falling in love or choosing a sperm donor, to sex, singleness, miscarriage, homelessness, drugs, birth and the new born baby. The raw material from these sessions was then filtered and condensed into a creative non-fiction graphic narrative, which explores difficult “truths”, while being humorous in tone. I will conclude by suggesting that combining graphic facilitation with comic art, in order to access and represent contemporary social and health related issues, may offer new knowledge, and enable researchers, practitioners and the public to access alternative representations of lived experience.
Tracing the Legacy of Women's Health Cartoons and Comics in Britain - Nicola StreetenWhat is the connection between women comic artists, health and feminism in Britain? This paper will trace the legacy of recent long form comic works by women around health related subjects to the work of women cartoonists’ from the 1970s onwards. My focus will be on British women’s works. Publications such as Nursing Times regularly commissioned women cartoonists and I will consider the type of cartoons that were included, by cartoonists such as Cath Jackson. I will then interrogate how and why women cartoonists’ work began to increasingly populate health related subject matters during the 1980s and 1990s and how the comic form was used in a widening variety of contexts. In particular I will look at the work of Corinne Pearlman; Janice Goodman and Suzy Varty. I will compare these with contemporary works including Rachael Ball’s graphic novel, The Invisible Woman (2015), and Paula Knight’s forthcoming graphic memoir, The Facts of Life. My questioning will take place within the social, economic and political context of the times, locating the position of feminism within that. Whilst North American academic Hilary L. Chute’s work in Graphic Women Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010) identified the recurrence of trauma in women’s autobiographical comics works, I will emphasise the presence of humour as a constant key ingredient in the works, both historical and current.
RICK's Story: The Arrival of Cancer, and the Experiences and Coping Mechanisms of Those Affected in the Form of Comic Cooks-Gordon Shaw
RICK is a series of comics of one man and his inoperable and incurable brain tumour, told through a collaged series of stories and flashbacks; a multi-faceted approach that illustrates the impact brain cancer has on the author and to everyone around him. Comics are an excellent form for understanding difficult events, as shown by Roz Chast, Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman. The presentation will take the variable thoughts and reactions further by discussing how the structure of the books are used to echo the confusion, and eventual understanding, of cancer. The comics use the fragmented thoughts and experiences of friends and family to supplement those by the patient (the author) to stitch together a story of the realisations, the fears, anger and reflections of dealing and living with a brain tumour (anaplastic astrocytoma). Some speak of the moment of “the phone call”, immediately and subsequently. These are highly emotional, but often are hidden or played down when in the company of their friend, brother or son. This is mirrored by the “mask” worn by those with cancer when around others. Some stories may touch upon the character’s way to accepting the diagnosis, whereas others may have more of a struggle. Attempts at talking about cancer are often broken with humour, connected or completely random, either to escape the realisation of mortality. Or to attack the tumour itself. On the other hand, there are people who cannot verbalise their emotions even to themselves, some delay the reality and some simply deny it. The emotions and coping mechanisms displayed by family and friends are also recognisable with those with cancer: denial, fear, depression/anxiety, fond memories, laughs, acceptance and hope. This culminates with a personal conversation with the tumour.
Jenny Drew is an author and Preventions Keyworker for B&NES Youth Offending Service. Since obtaining her Advanced Diploma in the Therapeutic Application of the Arts, she has been using comics as a therapeutic storytelling tool with seldom heard young people. Everyday, yet complex, life narratives and themes are explored through text and image, in a way that is accessible and unthreatening. Through understanding this visual language, young people are able to express their own ideas using the comic form. Jenny will share the stages of her experience of using comics to understand her own narratives during the therapeutic process, which she embarked on during her training, and how this led to her keeping 'doodle diaries' to understand areas such as attachment theory and the effects of trauma.
Jenny now uses different collaborative methods to help young people create their own comics about their experiences. Engaging a diverse range of young people, from those who are at risk of offending, to those having been in the care system, or those working with mental health services. Introducing the Comic Participation model, this workshop will explore the various approaches to using comics as a tool to engage young people who find it difficult to trust adults and share their stories with others. The session will explore methods for 'non-therapists' to communicate with others face to face when using this visual language, especially when facing the natural stage of resistance - including: curiosity vs analysis, applying the rules of improv to creative work, and using mindfulness with creativity. Each will include a short practical activity such as drawing games that can be used with anyone of any age.
Few graphic narratives have made the connection between stage and page more explicit than Charlotte Salomon’s proto-comic and serial narrative Leben? Oder Theatre? (Life? or Theatre), which opens with a painting of a red curtain and divides the story into three acts, outlining a full cast of characters. Rather than simple graphic autobiography, we can call Life? or Theatre? an act of self-fashioning, centrally and consciously preoccupied with the performance of identity. Salomon inserts her artistic signature onto every page, through the linked C and S that is her constant insignia. Her multimodal artwork, complete with musical cues that channel the subtitle of Singspiel, or Song-Play, explores a family legacy of mental illness and suicide in the ouroboros of the text—the circular trauma that encompasses and swallows the narrative. The story begins with the suicide of her aunt and namesake, and ends with the suicide of her grandmother. In the interim, six other friends and family members take their own lives, including her own mother, who she is told died of the flu. This is the role that Salomon is herself expected to play—in the theatre of her life, suicide is the anticipated final act, and in the bildungsroman of the story, Salomon’s challenge is to find a different way to stage her future. Life? or Theatre? explores the problem of mental illness in a fraught and dangerous era. Charlotte Salomon came of age as an artist at a time when she was told that her art and her race were both an expression of mental illness and a vector for mental illness. Ultimately, as Salomon chooses not the escape of the window but the potential of the page, she rejects the inevitability of madness, and in doing so, rejects the Nazi alignment of Judaism, modernism and madness.
This panel will blend the theoretical and the personal in order to reflect on “illness as performance” in graphic narratives. Calling attention to both form and function, we will analyze how the genre shapes and is shaped by the experience of being ill, and how we might more critically engage with Graphic Medicine by making our own readings more performative. If comics are indeed stages upon which authors perform their illness, how might Graphic Medicine be used as a filter through which to view and respond to other people’s experiences, as well as our own? How might the subject “become” through drawing? And how might a better understanding of the performativity of patienthood help us breakdown obstacles to care? Each speaker will present his or her work, leaving ample time for Q&A. Lisa Diedrich will explore the way the representation of illness and identity is staged through the doubling of mirrors, photographs, and other imaging technologies in the graphic narratives of Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, and Brian Fies. Andrew Godfrey will draw on his own experiences with Cystic Fibrosis, as well as reader-response theory, to investigate reading as performance in Graphic Medicine, along with his own performances of being ill. Sarah Hildebrand will examine scenes depicting therapy within the graphic works of Alison Bechdel, Ellen Forney, and Marjane Satrapi, positing the therapist’s office as a stage upon which both patients and doctors are called to perform uncertain roles. Together, we will deconstruct the performative nature of illness, offering new perspectives on the strengths and limitations of graphic narratives in providing a stage for sharing these experiences.
Michelle Hadjiconstantinou: Animation as a vehicle to enhance awareness of Type 2 diabetes awareness in healthcare professionals and patients.
Approximately 3.8 million people in the UK are currently living with diabetes. Ninety percent of individuals have Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and risk short- and long- term complications notably nephropathy, neuropathy and cardiovascular disease, costing the NHS annually over 10 billion pounds. These complications can be reduced with appropriate behavioural and lifestyle change, however this can be challenging to convey and may significantly compromise quality of life and wellbeing. Prevention of complications can be addressed via effective health messages (NICE, 2015). Cartoon animation has been utilised for other health messages and can be more effective than conventional health promotion, especially among minority populations. As part of a wider study of psychosocial factors, a Whiteboard animation video was created to enhance awareness of T2DM for individuals at risk of/with T2DM, and healthcare professionals. Whiteboard animation delivers a story with pictures drawn on a whiteboard, with accompanying narration. The animation sought particularly to translate complex information around T2DM into simple language with amusing visual adjuncts. The Whiteboard animation was presented to two groups for scrutiny: healthcare professionals (GPs and nurses) and lay people. Evaluation of content and process was assessed via recall and recognition indicating that key messages were effectively communicated. Qualitative data suggested that the apparent simplicity of image and message was well received and its potential for wider use and dissemination was advocated The feedback received for this whiteboard animation highlights the growing potential for cartoon communication in the service of healthcare education. Future examination, on larger populations to assess palatability and meaning, appears warranted as does assessment of impact over a longer timeframe. This type of information tool can be used in future research to enhance general population awareness and risk mitigation
Ciléin Kearns: "Levelling-up doctors with a cartoon video game."
A sneak peek at a video game under development that uses health cartoons to train doctors in the art of differential diagnosis.
Cathy Leamy: Suzie & Ray: A Comic for Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Considering Insulin Therapy
As a patient information medium, comics provide unique benefits, including the use and casual repetition of visual metaphors, the employment of exaggerated fantasy scenes to express emotion and capture readers’ attention, and the modeling of interactions among patients and their caregivers, friends, and family. Suzie & Ray: Just Another Tool for the Toolbox is a comic created for Massachusetts General Hospital for people with Type 2 diabetes who are considering starting insulin therapy. Its primary goals are clearing up misconceptions and addressing emotional barriers; however, it also presents new “roles” for readers by breaking out of stereotypical provider/patient/family portrayals and demonstrating ways of seeking medical advice, methods of involving family and friends in care routines, and the acceptability of revealing vulnerability and emotion. This talk will discuss the creation of this comic, its approach to patient education, and distinctive aspects of the comics medium deliberately used in this project.
Juliet McMullin: Creating Comics for Palliative Care Symptom Management
The past decade has seen great strides in investigating the therapeutic effects of the literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts. There is evidence these arts interventions have positive physiological effects on the body, and improved subjective wellbeing. However, despite the growing popularity of comics as a medium for sharing and performing medical experiences, little attention has been paid to the potential therapeutic effects of comics creation by patients. The medium of comics combines text and image in such a way that their creation requires conversations about the sharing and indeed the performance of illness narratives through storytelling and drawings that can, but do not have to, reflect the “real” world. This paper discusses preliminary findings from an ongoing study wherein palliative care patients create comics about their illness experience. During the comics workshops we engage in ethnographic interviews and observations to better understand the meaning-centered understandings and practices related to the relationship between the narrative and imagery in the patients’ comics and social interactions related to their own care. Imagery from the patients’ comics blur boundaries in a way not permitted by text alone and provide a mechanism to perform deep and even contradictory concerns, hopes, and states of relationships.
Megan Sinclair: Close to the Heart: An exploration of trauma and loss in comics and the creational process of making an autobiography to raise awareness for heart disease
This paper aims to examine traumics (comics that deal with themes of trauma) in relation to their representation of death and mourning. Karen Espiritu refers to the process of creating comics about trauma as ‘putting grief into boxes.’ The focus will first be to analyse the narrative strategies and aesthetics of these comics, then the psychological impact of using comics as a means of self-therapy and reflection for the creator. The paper will then move on to discuss the wider value of depicting personal trauma and how it can be used as an educational tool. The final section of the paper will deal specifically with my own experiences of trauma and my work-in-process, a project called ‘Close to the Heart’, which aims to raise awareness about heart disease through the creation of an autobiographical comic that deals with the sudden loss of my Father. I shall comment on traumics and graphic memoirs that have influenced my work, such as Ross Mackintosh’s Seeds, and will analyse the ways in which this has helped shape my comic and helped me contextualise and represent my experiences and emotions in the format of a comic. My aim is to educate readers on the causes, impact and statistics of heart disease, and if possible, use it as a means to donate to the British Heart Foundation through sales of the comic.
Laura E Smith and Aaron Hurwitz: Consequences of Serendipity
This is a tale about two individuals whose paths crossed, and how their respective endeavours are making a positive, notable impact on medical students by helping them process difficult situations and feelings that arise in their training which might otherwise go unaddressed. Aaron Hurwitz participated in a graphic medicine workshop led by Alison Bechdel in November of 2014 at the UVM College of Medicine and happened to sit at the front of the room next to Laura E Smith. Bonding over crayon drawings and some advice about linear perspective, the two shared their passion not only for educating, but also for helping others make meaningful connections through creative reflection. The clinical years of medical school are challenging, and Laura and Aaron each foster a culture of self-expression and imagination for their students. Despite utilizing varying approaches (graphic and/or narrative), they are both literally and metaphorically presenting medical students with a “blank canvas” upon which to give physical form to their stressors. Through the simple act of putting something down on paper students are able to articulate their thoughts in a way that makes them tangible, which can often lift a weight they may not even realize they were carrying. See the “TH-INK” comic (below) for an illustration of this principle. Laura’s workshops and Aaron’s class sessions provide a safe and respectful space, as well as opportunities for students to discuss their experiences with their peers, which can help prevent isolation. Laura and Aaron continue to find ways to encourage empathy and incorporate humanities into medical training, engaging students with unique, interactive, and fun lessons that have proven to be therapeutic and germane to their day-to-day experience as physicians-in-training.
Katelynn E Carver: To Make Visible What Might Never Have Been Seen: Building Bridges From Physical Injury to Psychological and Moral Injury within the Marvel Universe
The portrayal of the comic book superhero has recently proven ubiquitous in modern culture, dominating text, film, television, social media, smartphone applications, and beyond. The archetypal fulfillment of this role is one of superhuman strength, classically demonstrated through physical means: either against an externalized enemy that must be vanquished in battle, and/or against physical disability or ailment from which the character suffers. However, more recent comics and their filmic adaptations have taken on the antagonist within – psychological conditions and mental illness – and have created entrées into dialogue with what it means to be “super”, “heroic”, and perhaps most importantly, “human.” Counte
...
Elizabeth Shefrin and Bob Bossin: Love, Sex and Stitchery: the Embroidered Cancer Comic
When someone you love has a life-threatening illness, how do you tell that story lightly without making light of it? How do you respect their boundaries, without diminishing the artistic integrity of the piece? How can the person your work is about contribute to the artistic process when that process turns on their vulnerability? As soon as we learned that Bob had prostate cancer we started making cancer jokes. Every time we laughed, one of us said, “That goes in the comic.” I am a fabric artist so I got out my needle and started stitching the Embroidered Cancer Comic. By the time of the 2016 Graphic Medicine Conference the comic will be print, published by Singing Dragon, an imprint of Jessica Kingsley Publishers of London and Philadelphia. I didn’t have to make up much of the story because most of it really happened. Bob has been open about the cancer, and we have worked together on the changes which it brought to his body and to our relationship. Bob has consistently supported the project even when the jokes were about his penis. (His surgery included cutting the erectile nerves.) Little of the cancer literature talks about this from the partner’s point of view, or about its effect on the relationship. Please join Bob and me, as we share the stories behind the comic, the places where we told the truth and the places we didn’t, and maybe even the jokes we left out. As Dr Peter Black, Bob’s surgeon at the Vancouver Prostate Centre, says, “Bob and Elizabeth started the journey no different than most patients, but the comic shows how they stuck together, rolled with the punches, and emerged perhaps even closer together than when the journey started.”
Expressing Myself Wordlessly: Intertextual Self-Portraiture in David Small's Stitches - Madeline GangnesIn Stitches: A Memoir (2009), David Small depicts his young self’s use of creativity to cope with a difficult home life and trauma related to his medical conditions. Small employs a variety of visual styles in portraying young David’s journey, many of which are references to comics and illustrated fiction. Small incorporates these styles into his own in order to create an intertextual piece that illustrates the impact of his artistic influences on his personal and creative development, but also as a commentary on the nature of his illness, and the way it impacts his ability to communicate.
Elisabeth El Refaie argues in ‘Of mice, men, and monsters: body images in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir’ (2012)[1] that “the very process of producing multiple self-portraits in a graphic memoir can be seen as enabling the development of [an] integrated body image” (56). Small’s incorporation of various visual styles makes his production of “multiple self-portraits” an intertextual act, complicating the idea of an “integrated” body, and perhaps turning his body into a performing body on which the various influences are enacted. His self-representation highlights the importance of performance in David’s development, and his response to his illness. David thus plays the roles of recognizable figures from comics and illustrated fiction. Furthermore, his performances are presented in contrast with the performances of identity enacted by other characters, notably David’s parents, who he portrays through similar (but not identical) methods to his own mode of intertextual performance.
This paper examines specific images from Stitches that are references to other comics and works of illustrated fiction in order to analyse Small’s self-portraiture through David and his surroundings. The visual references discussed in this paper contribute to Small’s portrayal of David’s use of performance and creativity to cope with traumas he experiences during childhood and adolescence.
[1] Elisabeth El Refaie, ‘Of mice, men, and monsters: body images in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 3:1 (24 July 2012), pp. 55-67.
Christina Maria Koch: Stage 4 Cliffhangers: Illness Progressions and Ways of Being Sick in Comics
Across cultures, generations, classes, genders, or ethnicities of their patients, medical professionals schooled in “Western” medicine often attempt to uphold universal definitions of diseases and guidelines for treatment. However, individual ways of being sick can differ radically. From the early days of medical sociology, Kasl and Cobb’s terminology of “illness behavior” or Parson’s “sick role” attest to the significance of these culture-bound attitudes and actions.
Autobiographical accounts of illness experiences showcase behaviors towards being sick and seeking or receiving treatment over a course of time. As Rita Charon reminds us, people in their newfound roles as patients are often stuck in a “timeless enduring,” a perception of an illness progressing or treatment unfolding without much of their doing, or without certainty about the impact of their actions. In order to make sense of their plight, autobiographers may then portray and recast their illness as a quest or tell a story of restitution rather than chaos (Frank; Couser).
Many critics have argued that there seems to be something special about representing ways of being sick in graphic memoirs. This paper wants to explore this claim by pursuing two analytical routes: different autobiographical personas we find in comics and medium-specific ways of engaging with temporality. Drawing from a range of North-American alternative comics, we might see differences in represented illness behaviors depending on whether works are rooted in indie diary comics or prose illness narrative traditions. Inherent markers of seriality, genre conventions, and the spatio-temporal nature of graphic
Putting on a Good Face: Secrets, Stratecies, and Shame in the Depiction of Depression - Peaco ToddMy mother hid her descent into clinical depression from everyone except her husband and child. She did it by “putting on a good face” – a strategy she had learned as a young woman steeped in the decorous traditions of the South, where raw emotion was synonymous with messiness and lack of control tantamount to a failure of manners (a mortal sin). It was a heartfelt lesson she passed down to me, her daughter. I hid my mother’s depression from everyone: my closest friends, my teachers: revealing her condition felt like betrayal. Depression, with its attendant rages and chaotic misery, was our family’s most closely guarded secret. And its secret heart was shame.
Shame – the notion that someone is defective in his/her very nature –is too often an adjunct to illness. Illness is a kind of disorder: systems fall apart and vulnerability can devolve into indignity. This can be particularly true in cases of mental illness, when one’s very identity can seem exposed and defenseless, open to scrutiny and judgment. My mother felt that her deep depression was the manifestation of a self intrinsically flawed – she was ashamed of being mentally ill, a condition she considered a weakness, one she should have been able to “rise above.” In graphic memoir, the page becomes the stage, a place where ultimately the masks that patients assume to obscure what can feel like intolerable truth can be examined and erased. In this presentation, based on new work on my graphic memoir-in-progress Table for One
, I will explore the role that shame plays in depression: the erosion of self, the strategies for concealment as well as the possibility of rejecting shame and accepting instead the vulnerabilities that make us all human.
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.
Muscle Memory
Al Davison was born with Spina Bifida and later developed M.E. (Myalgic Encephomyolitis) He will discuss how these conditions, and the fact of also being a survivor of physical child abuse, effected his work thematically, and technically, how he has been able to mesh techniques that were born of necessity with the appropriate thematic approach, while maintaining an anarchic streak of humour that balances the often dark subject matter.
Benjamin Bates: The Truth about Captain America: Partial challenges to the celebration of medical/military experimentation
In 2003, Physicians for Human Rights reported that US medical personnel were involved in researching more effective “enhanced interrogation” techniques; more commonly known as torture. In their report, and surrounding media discourse, these experiments were compared to other abuse allegations involving the US military and medical systems, in particular the Army “Medical Research Volunteer Program” and the Central Intelligence Agency’s “MKULTRA” mind control experiments. Later that year, Marvel comics released its Truth: Red, White & Black limited series. This series re-narrated the origins of superhero Captain America, an origin that usually celebrates medical/military experimentation. In the original story, the “Super Soldier Serum” transformed 98-pound weakling Steve Rogers into a “peak human” soldier. Truth may be, in part, a response to concerns about military/medical experimentation and explores the untold story of the development of the Serum. Making the “original” Captain America African-American also emphasizes the differential impact that US medical/military experimentation has had on communities of color. Truth re-narrates medical/military experimentation through two primary moves. First, the original narrative emphasizes Rogers’ active consent, Truth shows the 300 Black men experimented on to develop the Super Soldier Serum were denied both informed consent and autonomous choice. Second, agents who conducted the experiment are transformed. For example, the code-name “Doctor Reinstein” is moved from the original narrative’s Abraham Erskine, a kindly patriotic American, to Wilfred Nagel, a eugenicist Nazi affiliate. These moves echo contemporary standards of ethical research that respond to a shared history of medical/military experimentation. The Truth series also inadvertently reinforces narratives that justified US medical/military experimentation, particularly arguments that the subjects of experiments were less valuable members of society and that the results – in this case, the creation of Captain America – justify unethical means. Ethical/social implications of this retelling of the narrative are discussed for how we perform research.
Crystal Lie: Crip Time as Space: Putting Critical Disability Studies and Graphic Life Narrative in Conversation
This paper turns the lens of feminist disability studies (DS) onto graphic life writing narratives. These narratives have been mobilized in the service of healthcare-centered fields such as Narrative Medicine – a field that I contend has failed to interrogate unequal doctor-patient power relations and engage with disability as both a complexly material and socially constructed identity inseparable from political practices. While there is merit to training medical professionals in narrative competence to make them more empathetic and attentive to patient experience, this approach by-and-large has left the hegemonic medical model of disability unchallenged. Concomitantly, this approach reinforces the privileged status of diagnosis as “truth” and narrative expectations of what Sidonie Smith calls the “certitudes” of traditional (masculine) autobiography – i.e. chronological time and the fixedness of identity that can be definitively known by its reader (or doctor). I posit “cripping” the study of graphic life writing can help us explode these norms and illuminate new meanings, centering the marginalized perspectives of disabled people. I also argue the formal qualities of sequential art in particular contribute to conversations in DS surrounding chronic illness and crip time. Because comics stage time as space, examining graphic temporalities help expand our knowledge of how disability affects one’s orientation to time. Following Alison Kafer’s call to examine “disability in time,” I read chronic illness memoirs such as Julia Wertz’s The Infinite Wait (2012) – which centers on her diagnosis with Lupus – as opportunities to theorize how disability in comics forcefully articulates non-normative temporalities; plotlines beyond the curative; and defies expectations and conventions of (dis)closure. Such comics powerfully perform what it means to both be a patient and be patient with the ever-shifting experiences of illness and its social consequences. Comics orchestrate productive spaces of indeterminacy and open-ended histories of embodiment that need be witnessed, not merely diagnosed.Esther Bendit Saltzman: Performing Disability: Parts of a Hole Mainstream comics and disability
“Hello, villain. I have a performance for you,” threatens Echo as she smiles before attacking Daredevil. The “performance” exhibits her exceptional ability to mimic the movements of others, allowing her to learn new skills upon observing them. Thus, by studying Daredevil’s moves, she can anticipate them in combat. Since Daredevil is blind and Echo is deaf, they take advantage of each other’s disabilities in subsequent battles. Comics have been including disabled characters for some time. The field of disability studies examines the role of social construction in the way that society views the disabled. Since comic books can reflect societal attitudes and attempt to change them, we can look to the representation of the disabled in comic books as a tool to understand these attitudes. Echo’s declaration addresses the necessity of the individual to perform in certain ways to be accepted as “normal” in today’s society. In fact, the idea of performance is used as a trope throughout the Daredevil comic, Parts of a Hole. Daredevil’s performance is his music, which becomes a metaphor for aspects of the world that he cannot see. Similarly, Echo performs dance and martial arts, but in front of an actual audience. This paper examines the use of this performance trope to communicate issues in disability studies, and argues that the treatment of disability in comics is in need of further research.
Maria Stoian: Character Design for Real-Life Stories
Take it as a Compliment is a collective graphic memoir dealing with sexual violence, composed of 20 real-life stories submitted anonymously. I collected stories via e-mail, Tumblr, and carried out some interviews. I hoped it would challenge the expectations of who survivors and perpetrators are – that no one asks to be violated, and that rapists aren’t strangers hiding in bushes. They are all everyday people. Part of the thinking behind Take it as a Compliment involved considering how character design is interpreted. I composed an activity book to help me understand how character design, and particularly my illustrations, were understood. Among other activities, I asked participants to match personality traits to a series of (what I thought were) neutral faces, and to label them as heroes and villains. Some said the activity was difficult because the faces were “too neutral” to fit any description. Participants expressed, either verbally to me or in notes on the activity book, anxieties over the inability to “correctly” identify the traits. This need for the characters’ appearances to reflect their personalities is in my opinion the most important piece of information from this study. It is a product of years of exposure to generalizations about character in children’s and adult media. The idea that a character labelled with negative qualities must visually suit those qualities is something that I believe contributes to rape culture, and how we interact with the individuals perpetuating or experiencing abuse.
Linda Raphael: “Comical Stages” in Medical Education
The first time I presented on teaching comics and medicine was the inaugural Graphic Medicine Conference in London, 2010. Not only did I meet the terrific gang who have become mainstays of the Graphic Medicine community, but I learned about texts I did not know, and began to develop some theoretical concepts about graphic texts. Although I was prepared to push on this year with another theoretical paper, building on some ideas I have presented before, the Commix class I am teaching has led me to think about stages in medical education seen through the lens of graphic texts. As it turns out, the MS IV elective, who is not a course on graphic texts, has revealed some impirtant matters about the way a graphic text may intersect with medical-student stages. The particular text is canonical in the world of Graphic Medicine - Brian Fies' Mom's Cancer. The text is often discussed in tersm of patients, families, and the behaviour of medical professionals - this look at it will be from the perspective of the graduating medical students.
Mónica Lalanda: Comics specifically designed to educate medical students: do they work?
Teaching ethics and communication to medical students has traditionally proved to be difficult and it is well known that the level of empathy in medical students drops faster and deeper than that of any other University students. This has been the topic for many articles and studies. At the end of my Masters Degree in Bioethics I dedicated my dissertation to research on the use of comics in medical education. I studied what has already been done using by authors such as MK Czerwiec, Michael Green and Ian Williams and was tremendously inspired by them and their achievements. Being both an illustrator and a doctor with specialized training in medical ethics, I decided to move from pure research into action. I teamed up with the Department of Ethics and Communication at Zaragoza University Medical School (Dr Altisent and Dr Delgado) and their research team on the development of the comic as a tool to transmit specific areas of their program. We chose "Confidentiality and Medical Secrecy" which is part of Year 3 syllabus. I designed a six-part comic and then we divided the class into two random groups, using the comic in one of them and the traditional case-based lecture on the other one. The seminar was organized in three parts: personal review of the comic in paper; student discussion of the cases with teacher as moderator; and a short creative exercise where students drew their own comic on a confidentiality case. We then used three different tools to measure the achievement of both groups: a student satisfaction survey, resolution of a practical case before and after the teaching and the MCQ exam results on those questions related to confidentiality. We confirmed our hypothesis that comics is an excellent tool to educate medical students on certain issues. During the first term of this school year, we've continued our innovative project and used a specifically designed four-part comic for Year 4 medical students on the area of "The Ethics of Prescription". We then assessed their achievement with a practical case and the results have also been excellent.
Ciril Horjak: Endodontocomix
In 2012 I and my dentist friend Rok started working on a novel idea. We decided to make a short comic book about an endodontic procedure. Our aim was to make an easy-to-read booklet in which the stages of the procedure would be explained. Three years later, the 80-page book was finished. We decided to call it ENDODONTOCOMIX. The book was thoroughly tested with the patients and dental specialists. The drafts and final versions of the book were tested in one Slovenian and one international dentist's conference. I will present the story of how our comic book was made. We gave a lot of thought to the format and number of panels in a page. Since I knew the comic would feature many scenes from the dental surgery, we made a 3D model of the dentist's chair, light and tools. Renderings were used as a blueprint for final drawings. Characters were designed in such a way that that are easily recognizable. The character of Dr Greta (the main dentist in the comic book) is made out of oval forms while the microbes have clawed hands. Contrast between soft and sharp has been used to render the figure of dentist as pleasant as possible. The story is divided into two parts, one for each operation. It has been test-read for a number of times to ensure good comprehension by the patients. To our surprise, Endodontocomix turned out to be a success with Slovenian edition being sold out. It has been translated into Dutch and Croatian languages. Rok and I met though working for Student radio in Ljubljana. I would like to suggest that at University campuses like Dundee, with top graduate and postgraduate studies in comics and in medicine (with teachers like Sue Black), medicine students should mix with art students. In the future many interesting collaborations between comics and medicine can provide us with interesting and useful stories.
Sarah McNicol: “I can’t talk to you, but this is what I’m feeling”: exploring alternative patient roles through heath education comics
Traditionally in healthcare interactions, the doctor, or other healthcare worker, and the patient occupy distinct roles, with former usually being viewed as being in a more powerful position as they have control over what advice and medical treatment is made available (Stoeckle 1987). Drawing on findings from a recent Wellcome Trust-funded study of the social and emotional impacts of health education comics (McNicol, 2015), in this presentation I will explore how, through becoming an active participant in the reading experience (Rosenblatt 1994) and reading from a critical stance (McLaughlin and DeVoogd 2004), comics readers have the potential to subvert traditional clinical hierarchies as well as other conventional patient roles. While many types of resource can empower patients by providing independent access to health information, I argue that comics can challenge traditional roles in deeper ways, by increasing patients’ self-awareness of their actions and responses; the ways in which they manage their condition; and their relations with other “actors” on a variety of “stages”, including clinical settings. For example, a patient might use comics to model consultation “scripts”; or to find a way to move the discussion to something not identified as significant by the clinician, but important to their life, perhaps something that is difficult to express verbally. In addition, comics may offer a means to explore potential conflicts between roles extending beyond clinical settings, for example, the role of patient and the role of parent. There are, however, some limitations to the use of comics to challenge traditional roles. For instance, in many comics used for this project, medical staff are portrayed as unassailable experts who impart information, making it difficult for the reader to find a space to explore alternative configurations of power.
“Paging the stage” alludes to graphic medicine and media as testimony--an embodiment of the ways in which relationships in healthcare often prescribe “staged” relationships for both patients and caregivers, and within families and communities. Our panel examines how graphic medicine as genre both gives shape to and ruptures assumptions of responding to illness in others and living with our own illness.
Amy Hickman: Rhetorical Economy of Graphic Medicine: Creative Interdependency and Rupture in Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles.
This paper will consider the power of comics’ form to transgress normative assumptions of the body, self, health, and illness through creative interdependencies of text, image, and affect. Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles, A Story about Alzheimer’s My Mother and Me, opens to multiple readings of the body, personhood, family roles, and relationships. Through her embodied experiences of loss, grief, anger, guilt, Leavitt’s work calls into question medicalized understandings of the body and pushes the boundaries of personhood and human relationships in ways that resist easy closure. How does comics’ form interact with the writer’s use of emotion in order to shape affective potentialities? This project considers how affective (Ahmed, 2004) and rhetorical economies create new meanings and agency through the writing and reading of graphic pathography.
Staging Contagion - Irmela Marei Krüger-FürgiffSevere (i.e. potentially lethal) contagious diseases threaten individual schemes of life and may provoke extensive ‘epidemic horror’ in Western societies. Since most contagious diseases involve a period of latency and some go along with ambiguous symptoms, the ‘staging’ of normalcy and the protective performance of ‘minor health constraints’ instead of a clear clinical picture may be crucial to counter stigmatization. At the same time, society expects infected persons to adhere to specific regimes of hygiene and to accept their prospective patient role. Given the fact that comics and graphic novels not only reflect changing bodily experiences but may also present different layers of time simultaneously (such as the body as an immunological battlefield and a social stage for the successive phases of infection, incubation period, disease outbreak etc.), my talk analyzes the artistic representations of real or fictitious contagion. My focus will be on the dynamics of spreading and intrusion, the logic of latency, strategies of individual protection and social immunization, the recourse to (or refusal of) public health care which entails or precludes certain patient roles, and the ways in which graphic art uses infected bodies as a stage resp. contagious diseases as a means to symbolically negotiate political conflicts. Possible works to be discussed are: Héctor Germán Oesterheld / Francisco Solano López: Eternauta (1957-1959), Frederik Peeters: Pilules Bleues (2001), Charles Burns: Black Hole (2008), Ken Dahl: Monsters (2009).
Paul Fisher Davies: Goffman's “Frame Analysis”, modality and comics
An activity framed in a particular way – especially collectively organised social activity – is often marked off from the ongoing flow of surrounding events by special set of boundary markers […] These markers, like the wooden frame of a picture, are presumably neither part of the content of activity proper nor part of the world outside the activity but rather both […] One may speak, then, of opening and closing temporal brackets and bounding spatial brackets. The standard example is the set of devices that has come to be employed in Western dramaturgy: at the beginning, the lights dim, the bell rings, and the curtain rises; at the other end, the curtain falls and the lights go on.
— Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (1974)
This paper will explore how comics can “frame” experience, temporally, spatially, and socially. It will take “frame analysis” in two senses: firstly, the “framing” of comics in the sense of their nesting in bookended narrative structures, drawing attention to the hypotaxis inherent to graphic narrative, and drawing a parallel to the framing of experience in Goffman's sense, especially that of creative and fictional “stagings” of experience. Secondly, with a focus on the frame itself, the panel border, attending to how this can be used to signal the status of the material enclosed, that is, to modalise the narrative in ways parallel to those suggested by Goffman. The paper will bring together Goffman's social pragmatics and MAK Halliday’s functional approach to multimodal texts, offering not only an approach to the reading of comics texts, whether those by practitioners or patients, but also a method for comics creators to present imaginary, fictional, remembered and otherwise “framed” experience. In the course of discussion, the paper will also consider disruptions of framing, and transitions from frame to frame, both in the sense of panel-to-panel and from modality to modality.
Sexual trauma is a pervasive problem across the world as is the control of information around reproductive health. The forms of sexual trauma are many and the harmful effects individuals experience from them are also greatly varied. Information on, and access to, reproductive and sexual health are contested topics with information on each obscured in rhetoric-filled debates. Comics have the capacity to provide rich visual narratives of reproductive health and sexual trauma. The affective engagement of comics of readers allows for a empathetic interaction with the narratives and a kind of being present with the stories that have historically been silenced. This presentation explores the complex communication of taboo topics and experiences of trauma through comics. An analysis of such works as
Abortion Eve (1973), Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf: A Sex Education Comic Book (2014), and Becoming Unbecoming
(2015) reveals the ways visual narratives offer more complex tellings of the narratives of taboo and trauma.The use of the visual illuminates the truths of the lived experiences of reproductive and sexual health as well as the truths of trauma and its aftermath. It is these truths that are not able to be conveyed through text alone. Through comics, a different kind of telling of these stories is made possible.
William J Doan: Limbo: A Journey Into Severe Traumatic Brain Injury
When your sister says, “I saw what you used to do in the barn,” you listen. When she says it from deep inside a coma, you really listen. Drawn from a graphic novel titled Limbo, in development for the Penn State Press Graphic Medicine series, this presentation is about two siblings and the desire to connect across the great divide of a severe traumatic brain injury. Their connection is the discovery of how deeply they’ve become part of each other, making it possible to dance, laugh, and say goodbye from somewhere beyond the mind and the senses.
Psychiatry as Groundskeeping: Mother Come Home and the Priority of "Little Systems of Explaination" - Tammy Birk
This presentation will examine the interface between potentially useful instances of Graphic Medicine and academic audiences, with a focus on higher education in the domains of psychotherapy and social care. Original data regarding comics and their academic use was gathered from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, a specialist mentalhealth training and treatment centre in North London, United Kingdom. A survey and followup questionnaire were implemented during October and November 2014 to test attitudes toward comics and their utility with a sample of 108 students and staff. This was accompanied with semistructured interviews with four clinicians at the Trust to give further insights into how comics are perceived in this unique academic setting. Additional original data was gathered from the comics industry through semistructured interviews with 15 participants involved in creation and production to reveal attitudes to the origination and dissemination of mental healthrelated comics, as well as interactions with academia. Analysis of the combined data sets reveals that while limited use of comic strips is being made in the context of teaching and treatment at the Trust, challenges remain in getting this type of document accepted for use as a learning tool in the context of this academic population.
Marie-Jean Jacob: Bringing comics into the hospital
During this presentation I will discuss how I used comics as a tool, taking advantage of their accessibility, and bringing them into the hospital setting. Working as an artist with Waterford Healing Arts Trust at the University Hospital Waterford, my aim was to engage the patient population in meaningful, creative experiences by creating, reading, and interacting with comics. This work focused on inviting patients to take on a new role within the hospital environment, empowering them in a space where they may feel like have very little say over their lives. By shifting attention to the comics, the patients’ focus is transferred away from their illness or disability, if even for a little while. I worked alongside occupational therapists and speech and language therapists, from the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Unit (CAMHS), designing, co-ordinating and facilitating workshops that focused on particular patient and/or client needs. I also ran storytelling and comic creation workshops within the Department of Psychiatry and the neighbouring psychiatric hospital's ATU unit (St Otteran's Activation Therapy Unit). I found different ways in which to approach bringing comics into the hospital setting: The aforementioned workshops; Gift-bags (containing a handmade gift, information leaflets, selections of comic strips, activities, etc.), and life-size comic panels on the walls (with whiteboard speech bubbles inviting the staff visitors and patients to interact with them). Throughout this presentation I hope to share the challenges and rewards that come with bringing comics into the hospital; the stages of the creative process in the comics can be used in a positive way to brighten up daily life in the hospital.
Julie Anderson, Claire Watson and Lydia Wysocki: Making great comics and books with the Great North Children’s Hospital
We are creating the first in what we hope will become a suite of materials for use by young patients at the Great North Children’s Hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to help them understand their treatments. This has developed from an idea by Radiology staff to involve colleagues from across the Hospital and Newcastle University, and this new project builds on two previous projects at Newcastle University (Newcastle Science Comic, and the Body Matters website). Our first output is currently a work in progress. It focuses on supporting children’s understanding of what it is like to have an MRI scan. This sets it apart from existing materials aimed at parents/carers, in use at other hospitals. We are working with children and young people through the Hospital’s Young People’s Advisory Group as part of our process in creating these outputs, so will also share our reflections on the early stages of this involvement. In this session we will share our plans and works-in-progress for possible comics, children’s books, colouring books, apps, and digital comics, acknowledging fuzzy boundaries between these formats. We would particularly appreciate feedback from comics and medicine practitioners on the practicalities of creating print-digital hybrid projects for use in a hospital environment
Dr Theresa Maatman and Dr Kathlyn Fletcher: For Coping and Giggles: Pilot Course on Use of Cartoons to Reflect in Medical School
Reflection is used to combat higher rates of depression, anxiety and burnout in medical students. Comics, by using humor, can be an effective way to promote reflection. The Medical College of Wisconsin offers fourth-year students a Humanities elective with sessions on topics including reading, writing, and art. In one session, on cartooning, students brainstormed ideas and drew a comic strip about something they found stressful in medical school. Students then shared their cartoons with the class and discussed them in a student-led format. Ten students evaluated the session. Sixty percent of students stated they enjoyed having time to write, draw and create, or viewed the session as a break. Twenty percent of students reported viewing their experience in a different light; another 20% reported that it reinforced their current opinions. Thirty percent of students thought there was a benefit in learning that their peers had similar experiences. Additionally, students reported finding value in the process of putting their thoughts into words and the use of humor in coping. Eleven comics were analyzed for emotional content revealing 82% expressed a scared emotion; 64% mad (angry), and 45% sad. Common settings of the comics included rounds, surgery, and the classroom. Perceived barriers of the session were limited time, difficulty brainstorming, and concerns about drawing capabilities. Students met the objective of reflection as demonstrated by their comments and the comics themselves. Even if the students did not change their perceptions, there was an evaluation of their current opinions. The most important parts of this curriculum were providing time for students to create and a setting where they can share. Small class size promoted conversation among students. Overall, this is a useful tool that can facilitate reflection on medical school stress.
Cynthia Clark Harvey: Drawn To You, A Graphic Panegyric
Rachael House: Red Hanky Panky Repositioned
Paula Knight: The Facts of Life
Zara Slattery: Coma Comic et al
John Swogger and Liesl Swogger: Acting Like One Of Those People
Evi Tampold and Carol Nash: Keeper Of The Clouds
Dana Walwarth: Facing Dehumanization through Comics
Venus: Cooking with cancer
Ian Wiliams: The Lady Doctor
From Sad Ghosts to Bad Thoughtz-Jillian Fleck
For full abstracts click on speaker bios
The paper focuses on autobiographically motivated graphic narratives, namely Debbie Drechsler’s Daddy’s Girl (1996) and Summer of Love (2002) and Katie Green’s Lighter than My Shadow (2013), and examines representations of the violated female body in relation to the surface of the page. Both authors use the expressive power of background, and build on the emotional potential of patterns against which the body is performed. Furthermore, both Drechsler and Green utilize the notions of presence and absence their visual representations of deeply traumatized heroines. Drechsler deconstructs the idea of form and background in her tragic and disturbing stories about incest: she often visually disguises her female protagonists by making them blend in with backgrounds. Simultaneously, her work features backgrounds of dark rhythmic patterns, minute strokes and curves as a canvas on which the character’s emotions and moods can be represented. Green uses a system of visual markers of anorexia, anxiety and guilt – such as the gaping mouth or the black cloud of scribble – not only to indicate the emotional state of her protagonist, but on a different level also to structure the pages and the connect layout with content. In the works of both Drechsler and Green, emotionally motivated visual markers eventually influence the very structures of the narratives, and in Green’s case, the very format of the published work. The very body of this heavy, more than 500-page long book that promises lightness in its title can be interpreted as a metaphor for the body – think, for instance, about its scrapbook-like design and the disintegration of the protagonist’s body. Apart from form and pattern, absence will also be studied: Green’s sequence of black (142-145) and white (384-386, 388) pages will be interpreted as performative gestures and performative spaces where the anorexic body is present by its disappearance
Act Yourself Out - Jules ValeraIn my paper I’ll be discussing themes of performativity and dissociation through an exploration of my own comics work, and the process I undertook making them. I’ll be examining four of my current published strips, as well as work from an upcoming anthology collecting autobiographical comics drawn during different points in a mental health breakdown I suffered between 2011-2013.The first part of my talk will discuss the “acting out” of a breakdown – the social performance that we put ourselves through in order to maintain a “normal” appearance which, ironically, is often what pushes us over the edge into the socially unacceptable chaos of a mental health crisis. I’ll also talk about the phenomenon of dissociation as a means to travel freely between key events in our lives, our different identities, and the spaces they occupy. The second part will discuss the process of drawing as performance, talking about my experience of using drawing comics both as an immediate substitute for self-harm, and in the long term, to delay the process of really acknowledging what had happened to me. I will talk about the process of carefully excising the narrative from my own recollection of events, drawing parallels between the organic process of drawing and the process of exposure therapy – a talk therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder which focuses on putting traumatic memories into order and establishing a completed narrative, which the patient can then lay to rest. The final part will address moving on from a traumatic event, the process and performance of recovery, discussing certain elements of recovery which are necessary to ‘act out’ in order to rejoin society and “pass” as mentally well. I will also talk about performing identity, reconciling the shadow identity of “traumatised” and “mentally ill” as a part of the whole.
Graphic Psyche: The Healing Process of Creating Humour of Out of Tragedy - Emily SteinbergTo process is human. To laugh is divine. Creatives are often plagued with depression. I was/am not exempt, and slogged through some extremely bleak times as a young and not-so-young struggling artist. One way for me to process the grimness, in addition to therapy and meds, was to put down the brush and begin to write and draw it out. The combination of words and images proved to me way more powerful than either practice on their own. The act of creating a visual narrative recasts a depressive experience into something new, less painful and sometimes even laugh out loud funny. In Graphic Therapy, a memoir in black and white, published SMITH Magazine, 2008-2010, the central relationship is between the author and Vic, her shrink. Each chapter is called a session and the duo examine Nazi-phobia, Weight Issues, pesky singledom and the ongoing artistic existential abyss with vividly blunt drawing and words.
Broken Eggs, published Cleaver Magazine, 2014, is a 67-page visual narrative that focuses exclusively on infertility and my experience of the fertility treatment nightmare. Here, images, are wildly, sometimes grossly, exaggerated. Color is flung about as emotion and words, repeated and enlarged, become a big part of each page composition. Images convey a sense of loss of control, of feeling like an experimental animal. Currently I'm exploring my mother's 6-year stint with frontal lobe dementia and the subsequent familial psychic fallout in a new story called The Gondolier in the Bathroom.
These stories are a way to process and in effect neutralize acutely painful life events. My hope, in creating such visual narratives, is to give others a voice they can identify with, force open the shrouded box of pain around such intimate issues and allow the light in.
http://www.smithmag.net/graphictherapy/2008/06/04/chapter-1/
http://www.cleavermagazine.com/broken-eggs-by-emily-steinberg/
Elizabeth MacFarlane: The Body is Just a Metaphor for the Soul: Performing grief in the work of Leela Corman and Tom Hart
This paper discusses the comic narrative as a dynamic space in which to re-enact, re-live, and re-tell experiences of grief, trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The paper will focus on Tom Hart’ s 2016 book Rosalie Lightning and Leela Corman’s 2015 comic PTSD: The Wound That Never Heals, both of which deal with the death of Corman and Hart’ s young daughter. About writing the book, Hart has said: “The attempt to relive was largely through the act of drawing and writing, in that order. The writing was the organizing principle, but the drawing was the reliving.” The paper draws on texts by Roland Barthes and John Berger quoted in Hart’ s book to investigate both the act of image-making, and the act of perceiving an image as playing crucial roles in dividing the self from the self’s grief. In each case –drawing an image and perceiving an image – the grieving self is performing its grief upon the stage of the page. This performance – a separation of self from role – is a step toward healing for Corman and Hart. As Hart’s avatar observes, during a counselling session: “I know [the counsellor] wants me to externalize my anger, chop wood, start hitting things... But he doesn’t know I do this, I write and I draw – it serves the same purpose.” I will argue for image-making and image-perceiving as processes of re-living grief and trauma, that re-living is a means of understanding traumatic events as stories, and that performing one’s traumatic stories is a means of being able to live with them.
Kurt Shaffert: "Letting the S^*+ out of the Bottle": Process Cartooning (Graphic Narrative Medicine) as a Clinical Intervention
“THE SHIT IN THE BOTTLE! hah hah...a droll typographic error, non? All stoppered up so the poison gasses can't escape...not a good situation for an ostensibly confessional, autobiographical taboo breaker. Toxic."
— Art Speigelman
(Be A Nose Vol 3: Autophobia, 3/14/07)
When I walk into a patient's room what I want to do is create sacred space; a space that transcends the IV pole, the hospital gown, the beeps, the diagnosis, the blood draws. I'm trying to free up some room where something new can be experienced, told, shared; a place for feelings, story, and meaning-making; a stage in the theater of the imagination upon which "the things on one's heart" can be expressed, explored and witnessed. Remarkably, it doesn't take much: 15 minutes with a patient, their words, their stage directions to a stick figure, and a piece of paper and a pencil to reflect back to them these "things on their heart" through a quickly sketched stick-figure cartoon. The process of cartooning with patients facilitates reflections in ways which do not occur during conventional clinical conversation. In a hospice unit, a medical/surgical floor or an inpatient psychiatry unit, a patient relaxes and reflects (it's cartooning, after all). I offer prompts and reflect back their own words for confirmation. The medium of cartooning invites patients to express and explore the most intimate and heaviest of issues with sincerity and humor. Because the process of narrating cartoon boxes both slows down the narrator, as well as boils down the wording more succinctly than in written Life Reviews and more freely than if facilitating poetry, the “heart” of what matters most to the patient often is quickly and directly conveyed. Process Cartooning ("it's about the process, not the product") is based upon the relational theories of Winnicott, Bion and Buber and draws upon the evidence-based therapeutic modalities of Narrative Therapy, Drama Therapy and Art Therapy to offer an empowerment-model, meaning-making intervention. While conventional Art Therapy is based on the patient accessing their own artistry for expressing themselves, this form of collaborative cartooning offers the skills of the clinician as a cartoonist/drawer-of-stick-figures to assist the patient in "letting the s^*+ out of the bottle". The patient has the freedom to focus on the narration as well as to see immediate responses to dictation and stage directions. Transformation and behavioral change develop through the healing intimacy of human persons encountering the sense of wonder, awe, humor and humility of conceiving and birthing together a messy, life-filled 4-panel cartoon in the midst of the beeps and blips of a clinic.
WHAT IT IS
Why do people wish they could write, sing, dance, and draw, long after they’ve given up on these things? Most people give up on drawing at about the age of nine around the time they realize they can’t draw a nose.
They could draw noses just fine before that, they just put a shape in the nose area of the face and it always worked, because human beings have such a strong relationship with upright faces that any kind of mark in that area will read as a nose. Comics are all about this first way of drawing, our original way of drawing, and way that is natural and accessible to all of us. It’s drawing as picture-message rather than a realistic rendering.
Does creative activity have a biological function? There is something common to everything we call the arts. What is it? It’s something I call ‘an image’, something that feels alive and is contained and transported by something that is not alive- a book, or a song or a painting—anything we call an ‘art form’. This ancient ‘it’ has been around at least as long as we have had hands, and the state of mind it brings about is not plain old ‘thinking’. This talk is about of our innate creative ability and need to work with images, the role our hands play in thinking and what the biological function of this thing we call ‘the arts’ may be. Please note: There will be swear words, party tricks, and jokes about balls.
