4th International Conference of Comics and Medicine

Ethics Under Cover: Comics, Medicine and Society

5th-7th July 2013

Brighton and Sussex Medical School

Brighton and Sussex Medical School in collaboration with Brighton and Sussex University Hospital Trust and Graphic Medicine invites papers for the fourth international conference on Comics and Medicine. Previous meetings have been held in London, Chicago and Toronto (more information atwww.graphicmedicine.org).
This interdisciplinary conference intends to appeal to a wide audience, including healthcare professionals, comics creators, students, academic scholars, comics enthusiasts, and various stakeholder groups. The meeting will consist of a mix of peer reviewed academic papers, lectures and workshops. There will also be an exhibition and stalls for participants’ work.
We invite proposals for scholarly papers (15-20 minutes) or panel discussions (60 minutes) focusing on medicine and comics in any form (e.g. graphic novels, comic strips, graphic pathographies, bande dessinées, manga, and/or web comics). The theme of this year’s conference means we are interested in work with an ethical flavour. In particular, we seek presentations on:

Ethics under cover (i.e. how ethical issues are tackled under the surface of graphic works)

Illness narrative and the comic form

Balancing humour and respect in comics about illness and disability

Comics as resistance to the biomedical mainstream

Comics as a way of seeing and representing illness and the role of healthcare professionals

Comics in practitioner research and as a method of reflection

Comics in cross-disciplinary education as both subject and tool

Comics in literature, medicine and the bioethics classroom

Comics within different healthcare systems

European and international perspectives on graphic medicine and the scope for cross cultural analysis
We also welcome workshops (120 minutes). These are intended to be “hands-on” interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to comics and medicine. Suggested subjects for workshops are:

Creating comics

Understanding, reviewing and critiquing comics

Getting comics published

Teaching and learning with comics


Proposals may be in Word, PDF, or RTF formats with the following information in this order:

author(s)

affiliation

email address

title of abstract

body of abstract

Sample images or weblinks to work being discussed

Please identify your presentation preference:

oral presentation

panel discussion

workshop

Please also specify equipment you might need (e.g. AV projection, whiteboard, easel, etc.)

300-word proposals should be submitted online by Friday, 22nd February 2013 to submissions@graphicmedicine.org


Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by 15th March 2013. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice of presentation format, we will attempt to honour people’s preferences, and we will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals submitted.
Please note: Presenters are responsible for session expenses (e.g. handouts) and personal expenses (travel, hotel, and meeting registration fees). All presenters must register for the conference (maximum registration fee will be £70 or approximately US $115).

Parallel Lines

Parallel Lines (English) and Samanantar Rekhayein (Hindi) are the second in the series of Devcom (development comics) published by World Comics India. It has a foreword by Polyp, a British cartoonist based in Manchester.
These comics start describing development from where the earlier ones left and take it a level further, not just in terms of description but visual aesthetics and storytelling techniques as well. All stories have a different art as well as narration style owing to the different backgrounds of the artists. It is to be noted that most of them are not trained artists and have learnt the art over a period of time working with World Comics and their local organizations.
The stories this time are longer (14-16 pages) contributed by Sunder Mohan Murmu, Rajeswari Saha, Siddharth Sarathi, Amrith Basumatari and Lakhindra Nayak. The comic took an year in the making and throughout that period the creators had extensive discussions and workshops on the art of making comics, visualization, frame composition, inking, texturing etc. They also had prolonged discussions on their stories where each had to defend their story from the critical view of the rest as well as accept suggestions.

Review of 'Disrepute' in BMJ Medical Humanities

Book Review by Michael Green

Comics from the dark side of medicine: Thom Ferrier's Disrepute

"Thom Ferrier's new collection of graphic narratives, Disrepute, was recently published by Graphic Medicine Press. While the book may not be easy to find, it is well worth the effort. But be forewarned: this doctor-centric collection is neither the melodrama of Rex Morgan M.D. nor the droll silliness of New Yorker cartoons. In Ferrier's capable hands, the doctor's dark, angry and complicated inner world emerges. His comics are full of the stuff that doctors think about privately but do not dare say in public. It is about the insecurities that come with being uncertain, the exhaustion of being on the receiving end of others’ constant expectations, and the dark thoughts that (some) doctors have about death and dying. In short, it is about life itself, written and drawn by someone who has seen and experienced a fair slice of it as an experienced rural general practitioner. 

Ferrier is the nom de plume of Ian Williams, a British physician/artist who founded the Graphic Medicine website devoted to the growing field of comics and medicine (http://graphicmedicine.org)."

Read the full review by Michael Green at BMJ Medical Humanities

 

Comic Con Express Bengaluru

Comic Con India is a startup dedicated to the preservation and promotion of comics and the graphic art medium as well as supporting artists, illustrators and writers in the medium. The Indian Comics Convention is an initiative of Comic Con India Pvt Ltd. Their prime motive is to bolster the nascent comic culture throughout India, by taking the best the Indian comics industry has to offer to people who would otherwise never get a chance to have the Comic Con experience.

“Comic Con Express” is the traveling version of the Indian Comic Con, the annual Comics Convention at Delhi. Comic Con Express was started with the aim of taking Comic Con to cities throughout India to support and boost the comics industry by increasing local interaction and participation. Comic Con Express will unfold in a creative flurry in less than a week at Bengaluru on Sept 8-9.

Happy Birthday Pran

Remembering Shankar

Cartoonist Shankar 

is the best known name in the world of cartooning in India. They were full of fun, pun and satire. He is considered as the father of political cartooning in India. He founded Shanker’s Weekly, India’s Punch for a long time. But the children of his times, be it in India or elsewhere in the world, see him as their uncle who did much to make them laugh and enjoy life.

His full name was Kesava Shankara Pillai but he became better known as Shankar. He was born in 1902 at Kayamkulam, a town in Kerala. He attended schools in Kayamkulam and Mavelikkara. The sleeping posture of one of his teachers was his first cartoon. He drew it in his classroom. This made the headmaster angry. But then he was encouraged by his uncle who saw in him great potential as a cartoonist.

Shankar took keen interest in dramas, scouting, literary activities etc. He amazingly did good campaign for the collection of funds towards flood relief. This concern for the poor and the distressed people continued all though his life and reflected in his cartoons.

He left for Bombay for higher studies after his degree but quit his law studies midway. Shankar’s cartoons were published in the Free Press Journal and Bombay Chronicle. Pothen Joseph, the editor of The Hindustan Times brought him to Delhi as a staff cartoonist. Thus he and his family settled in Delhi finally.

 
Shankar’s cartoons attracted even Viceroys like Lord Willington and Lord Linlithgow. During this time, Shankar had a chance of training in London for about 14 months. He spent the period in various Art schools, utilising the opportunity to study the advanced techniques in cartooning.

He also visited Berlin, Rome, Vienna, Geneva and Paris. When he returned to India, the country was in the thick of freedom struggle. The dawn of independence also favoured Shankar’s dreams for a separate periodical. The idea came true when Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru released Shankar’s Weekly, edited by Shankar himself.

Shankar was chum to kids. He held them very dear to himself and organized annual painting and drawing competitions for them, which became very popular. It later began drawing children from all over the world. Annual awards from Shankar’s Weekly were presented by prime ministers.

He even founded a ‘Children’s Book Trust’ which was located in Nehru House on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in New Delhi. Later the International Dolls Museum too came to be located here. Thus Nehru House became a ‘must visit’ item for kids going to New Delhi. It has now a children’s library and reading room.

Shankar died on December 26, 1989. But his 1949 cartoon of Ambedkar in a NCERT textbook prompted protest in parliament and an immediate withdrawal of the cartoon in 2012. 

As per records, neither Nehru nor Ambedkar had any objection to the below cartoon. For a cartoonist to show irreverence is natural, but there is never anything insulting about a Shankar cartoon. It is usually presented in the form of a gentle chiding. Even the outlines are gentle, a cartoon without being a caricature.

Keeping the needless controversy aside, we miss the Indian father of political cartooning in India on his birthday (31st July). 

“Comics & Medicine: Navigating the Margins”

The third international interdisciplinary conference on comics and medicine continued to explore the intersection of sequential visual arts and medicine.  2012 highlighted the perspectives that are often under-represented in graphic narratives, such as depictions of the Outsider or Other in the context of issues such as barriers to healthcare, the stigma of mental illness and disability, and the silent burden of caretaking.

The conference featured keynote presentations by comics creators Joyce Brabner and Joyce Farmer. Brabner, a comics artist and social activist, collaborated with her late husband Harvey Pekar on the graphic novel Our Cancer Year (1994), which won a Harvey Award for best graphic novel. Farmer is a veteran of the underground comics scene who nursed her elderly parents through dementia and decline as shown in her graphic memoir Special Exits (2010), which won the National Cartoonists Society award for graphic novels.

Sandra Bell-Lundy, creator and cartoonist of BETWEEN FRIENDS, participated in a panel discussion on “The Role of Comics in Provider/Patient Communication.” The detailed program is here.