Re-imagining care in comics: an interview with Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins

As an existential practice, predicated on human interdependencies and labour, care attains remarkable significance in sustaining the life of the ill/disabled and is an indelible part of families and healthcare. Families, medicine, and institutional caring centres (such as old age homes, hospices among others) justify their commitment to care through emotional and practical/ technical approaches towards illness/disability. COVID-19 pandemic has just made human interdependency and significance of care exceptionally visible through laying bare the inevitable physical and social vulnerabilities. However, in the contemporary neoliberal society that favour autonomy and efficiency, care is overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and often linked with vulnerability and precarity. Graphic caregiving memoirs drawn by caregivers themselves are ideal sites for re-imagining, validating, depicting and reconceptualising experiences of care. In this email interview graphic artists Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins reflect on care, the wide range of issues concerning its practice and suggest an alternative perspective towards caregiving. In Part A titled Of Comics and Care the authors respond to generic questions about their interest in comics, works, life, among others. In Part B titled What was I expecting? Compassion? Validation? The authors respond to questions related to their respective graphic narratives. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

"I AM NOT A VIRUS": COVID-19, Anti-Asian Hate, and Comics as Counternarratives.

Ever since the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, East Asians across the globe have been ostracized, othered, pathologized, and subjected to numerous anti-Asian hate crimes. Despite contemporary China's rapid modernization, the country is still perceived as an Oriental and primitive site. Taking these cues, the current article aims to investigate the Sinophobic attitudes in the wake of COVID-19 through a detailed analysis of sequential comics and cartoons by artists of East Asian descent, such as Laura Gao and Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom. Drawing theoretical insights from Alexandre White's "epidemic orientalism" and Priscilla Wald's "medicalized nativism," this essay investigates how these chosen comics function as counternarratives through first-person storytelling. In so doing, these comics, while reinstating the dignity of East Asians, also challenge and resist the naturalized methods of seeing that justify violence and dehumanization. The article further argues that Sinophobia and anti-Asian hate crimes are motivated as much by the origins of COVID-19 in China as by the political, economic, and technological variables that have shaped modern China.

COVID-19, Graphic Medicine, and Thinking Beyond Data.

Datafication has allowed us to quantify every facet of the corona-virus pandemic. A significant quantity of data sets on infection and recovery rates, mortality, comorbidities, the intensity of symptoms, region-by-region statistics, vaccination, and virus variants, among other things, has been made publicly available. However, these data sets relentlessly reduce human beings to mere numbers and graph points. The present study employs a close reading of comic panels to demonstrate how graphic medicine uses data to critique, supplement, and expose its lacunae. The article draws from graphic medical narratives and panels such as Andy Warner's "The Nib Bureau of Statistics" (2020), Sarah Firth's "State of Emergency" (2021), and Randall Munroe's "Statistics" (2020). Though data visualizations and comics are both graphical representations, their treatment of COVID-19-related issues is radically different. Graphic medicine "re-draws" data visualizations through imitation, subversion, and displacement to showcase multiple temporalities, marginal agencies, and the affective nature of human existence. Furthermore, the humanistic intervention of graphic medicine deftly reclaims individual lives and attendant stories in a world dominated by technologically mediated data. This essay does not dismiss the performative force of data; instead, it insists on humanizing and contextualizing a sensitive presentation of data to convey our entangled existence and collective states.

Critique of Data Visualisation, Graphic Medicine and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Data sets were plentifully used in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although they were utilized for documentation, policy formulation, course correction, and research among others, data sets relentlessly reduced human beings to mere numbers and glossed over the affective and emotional experiences which characterize our lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarrelling with such decontextualized, depersonalized, and hegemonic impacts of data, graphic medicine while not entirely dismissive of the performative authority of data, criticizes and supplements data only to arrive at a complex model of data. Using close reading of comic panels created by Andy Warner, Sarah Firth, and Randall Munroe, the present article demonstrates how graphic medicine imagines different ways of engaging data through enfolding the social/individual and structures of feeling to convey the embodied nature of our existence. Put differently, graphic medicine rematerializes and reclaims the individuals from datasets through a process which we call "redrawing." Redrawing is a textual practice and strategic engagement with the authority of visual/verbal discourses and its attendant technologies through rhetorical operations of irony, satire and genre blending among others. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to humanize, contextualize, and sensitively present data so as to convey the collective, entangled and affective nature of our existence. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of QScience Connect is the property of Hamad bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Re-imagining care in comics: an interview with Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins

As an existential practice, predicated on human interdependencies and labour, care attains remarkable significance in sustaining the life of the ill/disabled and is an indelible part of families and healthcare. Families, medicine, and institutional caring centres (such as old age homes, hospices among others) justify their commitment to care through emotional and practical/ technical approaches towards illness/disability. COVID-19 pandemic has just made human interdependency and significance of care exceptionally visible through laying bare the inevitable physical and social vulnerabilities. However, in the contemporary neoliberal society that favour autonomy and efficiency, care is overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and often linked with vulnerability and precarity. Graphic caregiving memoirs drawn by caregivers themselves are ideal sites for re-imagining, validating, depicting and reconceptualising experiences of care. In this email interview graphic artists Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins reflect on care, the wide range of issues concerning its practice and suggest an alternative perspective towards caregiving. In Part A titled Of Comics and Care the authors respond to generic questions about their interest in comics, works, life, among others. In Part B titled What was I expecting? Compassion? Validation? The authors respond to questions related to their respective graphic narratives. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

'The time is out of joint': temporality, COVID-19 and graphic medicine.

This article aims to theorise the human experiences of time during the lockdown (in the first phase of the pandemic) and the COVID-19 pandemic through the verbo-visual exposition of graphic medicine that combines the medium of comics and healthcare. The event of the pandemic has not only bifurcated our perception of time in terms of a 'before' and an 'after' but also complicated our awareness and experience of time. Put differently, an epochal transformation caused by pandemics has shifted our temporal experience from the calendar/clock time to a queer time situated outside of formal time-related constructions. The pandemic also implies a dismantling and rearranging of the fundamental structures of time within which human beings interacted with the world. Such a discontinuity in the linear trajectory of chronological time engenders an epistemic and ontological reconfiguration of the very sense of time itself. Through a phenomenological close reading of various sequential comics, single panelled images and graphic medical narratives, this article investigates how visual narratives in the form of comics communicate the passage of time. Categorically speaking, pandemic graphic narratives on time draw attention to stagnation, repetition, acceleration, loss of referentiality and the queerness (strangeness) of pandemic time. The article argues that a shift in the perception of time precipitates an altered spatio-temporal awareness that informs postpandemic discourses and power structures.

On graphic mental illness narratives: an interview with Clem Martini, Tatiana Gill and Tyler Page

Mental illness continues to be the most stigmatized medical condition across cultures. Autobiographical accounts on affective disorders/mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression among others not only foreground the distinctive circumstances of one’s suffering but also poignantly portray what it means to undergo the disquieting phases of treatment (such as drug therapy and institutionalisation). As such, these narratives open up dialogues about mental illness which otherwise remain stigmatised and thus contribute to overcome discrimination associated with mental illness. Of late, graphic medicine, one of the burgeoning genres of comics, have widened the scope of such first-person accounts of mental illness. Coined by a British physician and comics artist, Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine, typically narrated by patients, (professional) caregivers or physicians, refers to the intersection of comics and healthcare. Prominent graphic mental illness memoirs include Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales (2010), Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me (2012), and Rachel Lindsay’s Rx (2018). In their mission to counteract medicine’s dogmatic and reductionist approaches, these visual memoirs foreground a plethora of subjective experiences as they also expose and change the current mental health procedures for the better. Taking these cues and in the context of deteriorating global mental health prompted by COVID-19 pandemics, three authors, Clem Martini, Tyler Page and Tatiana Gill, in an email interview share their views on mental illness, graphic medicine, identity crisis, stigma, and, the larger systemic challenges of mental illness treatments and care-giving. The interview consists of two parts. In the first part Drawing Mental Illness the authors respond to questions common to all of them and in the second part Greater Choice, Better Care each of them answer specific questions pertaining to their respective memoir. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Comics in the Time of a Pan(dem)ic: COVID-19, Graphic Medicine, and Metaphors.

Comics have always responded to pandemics/catastrophes, documenting the way we deal with such crises. Recently, graphic medicine, an interdisciplinary field of comics and medicine, has been curating comics, editorial cartoons, autobiographical cartoons, and social media posts under the heading "COVID-19 Comics" on their websites. These collected comics express what we propose to call covidity, a neologism that captures both individual and collective philosophical, material, and wide-ranging emotional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Treating such comics as the source material and drawing insights from theorists Ian Williams, Alan Bleakley, Susan Sontag, and others, this article examines graphic medicine's representation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conceptual metaphors of war, anthropomorphism, and superheroism are used to represent and illustrate the lived experience of the pandemic, and the article investigates metaphor types, their utility, and motivational triggers for such representations. In doing so, the essay situates graphic medicine as a productive site that presents the pandemic's multifarious impact.