a picture is worth a thousand hurts: representing illness through the fantastic in comics

Open Access
- Author:
- Goldenberg, Michael David
- Area of Honors:
- Interdisciplinary in Comparative Literature and English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Dr. Scott Thompson Smith, Thesis Supervisor
Sydney Sue Aboul Hosn, Thesis Honors Advisor
Dr. Marcy Lynne North, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- comics
medical humanities
graphic medicine
illness
medicine
graphic novels
epilepsy
Alzheimer
superman
Huntington's - Abstract:
- Within the burgeoning niche of comics’ studies is rising a new discipline that seeks to synthesize the power of comics with the understanding and furthering of medicine. Graphic medicine as a discipline (i.e. the intersection of the comics medium and medical discourse) has recently grown in both production and exploration of realistic medical-based comics; however, there is a noticeable lack of discussion of those graphic works which fall outside the category of memoir or realism. This work aims to bring into the spotlight comics which initially may not seem as productive for the discussion of the medical humanities. Mediating illness and death through the fantastic, David B.’s L’ascension du Haut Mal (Epileptic), Paco Roca’s Arrugas, Steven Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen’s It’s a Bird.., and Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant’s All Star Superman add to the broader discussion of comics and medicine in a non-traditional way. Each of these texts will be analyzed in relation to fantastic elements in their plots and images, and their way of understanding and representing illness through fantasy will be explored. This work will introduce the aforementioned overlooked texts into the discourse of graphic medicine in specific, and comics studies in general, hoping to bridge the gap between the marginal and the mainstream in aiding understanding of some of the most unintelligible of human conditions.