Graphic Novels

Empathy levels decline through medical training. This has been associated with poor patient and physician outcomes, and strategies to combat this decline are increasingly recognized as critical aspects of medical education. The aim of this study was to qualitatively determine factors associated with empathy decline, and to assess the impact of a comics/graphic novel-based curriculum on enhancing empathy and a patient-centered approach to care in post-graduate medical learners.

Discusses how graphic novels are increasingly being embraced in education for their ability to engage reluctant readers, support visual learners, and improve comprehension and interpretation of complex themes and literary devices. As graphic novels gain traction in classrooms, the article argues that students in teacher education programs should have ready access to them for professional preparation, not just recreational use. Integrating graphic novels into curriculum and instruction collections in academic libraries helps meet the evolving research and training needs of future educators and aligns with broader educational goals.

Comic books and graphic novels offer an excellent way to democratize the classroom and improve student learning by giving them the ability to understand social issues and social institutions in a relatable way. This article is a conversation exploring the validity of comics as tools to teach sociology. Specifically, the article does this through examining the effectiveness of comics as a way to analyze gender, the looking glass self, and the sociological imagination and exploring the use of graphic novels to replace traditional texts in the introductory sociology classroom. If one of our disciplinary goals is to change society for the better by boosting the development of sociological imaginations, looking at comics may give us the best format to do so.

A review of recent literature and publication opportunities reveals that we are not alone in our interest in these formats as platforms for scholarly thinking, research, investigation,and teaching. These nontraditional media formats and their potential are reflected in our own discipline. They are also gaining attention and prominence in other disciplines, such as the growing interest in graphic medicine in the medical and public-health fields, and by scholars from diverse fields who are using arts-based research methods. In different ways, we each present drawing and visual artwork as a fieldwork method, or as a way to communicate our research to others beyond our discipline.

Many libraries and librarians have embraced graphic novels. A number of books, articles, and presentations focus on the history of the medium and offer advice on building and maintaining collections. Few, however, give attention to the integration of graphic novels into a library's instructional efforts. This paper explores the characteristics of graphic novels that make them a valuable resource for research and information literacy instruction, identifies skills and competencies that can be taught through the study of graphic novels, and provides specific examples of how to incorporate graphic novels into instruction.

Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and histories, and offers a sense of the new frontiers emerging in the field of comics studies. Across more than fifty original essays, Keywords for Comics Studies provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for comics and sequential art. The essays also identify new avenues of research into one of the most popular and diverse visual media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Keywords for Comics Studies presents an array of inventive analyses of terms central to the study of comics and sequential art that are traditionally siloed in distinct lexicons: these include creative and aesthetic terms like Ink, Creator, Border, and Panel; conceptual terms such as Trans*, Disability, Universe, and Fantasy; genre terms like Zine, Pornography, Superhero, and Manga; and canonical terms like X-Men, Archie, Watchmen, and Love and Rockets. This volume ties each specific comic studies keyword to the larger context of the term within the humanities. Essays demonstrate how scholars, cultural critics, and comics artists from a range of fields take up sequential art as both an object of analysis and a medium for developing new theories about embodiment, identity, literacy, audience reception, genre, cultural politics, and more. Keywords for Comics Studies revivifies the fantasy and magic of reading comics in its kaleidoscopic view of the field's most compelling and imaginative ideas.

This inaugural volume in the Graphic Medicine series establishes the principles of graphic medicine and begins to map the field. The volume combines scholarly essays by members of the editorial team with previously unpublished visual narratives by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, and it includes arresting visual work from a wide range of graphic medicine practitioners. The book's first section, featuring essays by Scott Smith and Susan Squier, argues that as a new area of scholarship, research on graphic medicine has the potential to challenge the conventional boundaries of academic disciplines, raise questions about their foundations, and reinvigorate literary scholarship--and the notion of the literary text--for a broader audience. The second section, incorporating essays by Michael Green and Kimberly Myers, demonstrates that graphic medicine narratives can engage members of the health professions with literary and visual representations and symbolic practices that offer patients, family members, physicians, and other caregivers new ways to experience and work with the complex challenges of the medical experience. The final section, by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, focuses on the practice of creating graphic narratives, iconography, drawing as a social practice, and the nature of comics as visual rhetoric. A conclusion (in comics form) testifies to the diverse and growing graphic medicine community. Two valuable bibliographies guide readers to comics and scholarly works relevant to the field.

In order for students to reap the benefits of graphic novels, teachers need to first incorporate them into their classrooms. Graphic novels are not only a viable option to improve student retention of literature, but also the cornerstone of several potential lesson plans. The multimodal nature of graphic novels allows teachers to shape their lessons in new directions. When the validity of graphic novels is no longer a question, students and teachers alike will discover the countless benefits of multimodal learning.

Autobiography is one of the most dynamic and quickly-growing genres in contemporary comics and graphic narratives. In Serial Selves, Frederik Byrn Køhlert examines the genre’s potential for representing lives and perspectives that have been socially marginalized or excluded. With a focus on the comics form’s ability to produce alternative and challenging autobiographical narratives, thematic chapters investigate the work of artists writing from perspectives of marginality including gender, sexuality, disability, and race, as well as trauma. Interdisciplinary in scope and attuned to theories and methods from both literary and visual studies, the book provides detailed formal analysis to show that the highly personal and hand-drawn aesthetics of comics can help artists push against established narrative and visual conventions, and in the process invent new ways of seeing and being seen. As the first comparative study of how comics artists from a wide range of backgrounds use the form to write and draw themselves into cultural visibility, Serial Selves will be of interest to anyone interested in the current boom in autobiographical comics, as well as issues of representation in comics and visual culture more broadly.

A revisionist history of women's pivotal roles as creators of and characters in comic books. The history of comics has centered almost exclusively on men. Comics historians largely describe the medium as one built by men telling tales about male protagonists, neglecting the many ways in which women fought for legitimacy on the page and in publishers' studios. Despite this male-dominated focus, women played vital roles in the early history of comics. The story of how comic books were born and how they evolved changes dramatically when women like June Tarpé Mills and Lily Renée are placed at the center rather than at the margins of this history, and when characters such as the Black Cat, Patsy Walker, and Señorita Rio are analyzed. Comic Book Women offers a feminist history of the golden age of comics, revising our understanding of how numerous genres emerged and upending narratives of how male auteurs built their careers. Considering issues of race, gender, and sexuality, the authors examine crime, horror, jungle, romance, science fiction, superhero, and Western comics to unpack the cultural and industrial consequences of how women were represented across a wide range of titles by publishers like DC, Timely, Fiction House, and others. This revisionist history reclaims the forgotten work done by women in the comics industry and reinserts female creators and characters into the canon of comics history.

Expert Librarian Stephen Weiner, with the crowdsourcing help of professionals in the field, from artists to critics to leading comic store owners, has sifted through the bewildering thousands of graphic novels now available to come up with an outstanding, not-to-be-missed 101.

This comic book about comics is an examination of the art-form of comics, what it is capable of and how it works. It also answers questions such as: How do we define comics? What are the basic elements of comics? How does the mind process the language of comics? Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.

In Graphic Medicine, comic artists and scholars of life writing, literature, and comics explore the lived experience of illness and disability through original texts, images, and the dynamic interplay between the two. The essays and autobiographical comics in this collection respond to the medical humanities' call for different perceptions and representations of illness and disability than those found in conventional medical discourse. The collection expands and troubles our understanding of the relationships between patients and doctors, nurses, social workers, caregivers, and family members, considering such encounters in terms of cultural context, language, gender, class, and ethnicity. Graphic Medicine helps us recognize that however unpleasant or complicated it may be, interacting with such stories offers fresh insights, suggests new forms of acceptance, and enhances our abilities to speak to others about the experience of illness and disability.