ABSTRACT
The medium of comics has been acclaimed over recent years as being worthy of study by scholars as a significant cultural product, both in a material sense and as a philosophy and practice (for example, Versaci 2007; Witek 1989; Hatfield 2005; Chute 2010). Due to the inseparability of the medium and its attendant culture, this chapter uses the collective singular form of ‘comics’ throughout to refer to both. ‘Comics’ holds particular value as a narrative form because the interplay between its hybrid elements – words and pictures – exceeds the sum of their parts to produce a uniquely cogent medium, capable of articulating complex and multilayered concepts. The myriad comics titles that appear each year include stories of disease or trauma known as ‘graphic pathographies’ (Green and Myers 2010: 574), many of which focus on problems that impact on society as a whole such as abortion, child abuse, mental illness, cancer and HIV/AIDS. Popular media will tend to reflect the concerns of the times in which they are produced, and in this chapter I shall examine the impact that medicine has had on comics, from the early years of the medium through to the development of the graphic novel. I will suggest that comics not only mirrors prevailing attitudes to, and advances in, healthcare, but also inform the way that illness and disease are culturally perceived, influencing what Deborah Lupton calls the ‘iconography of illness, disease and death’ (Lupton 2003: 75).
