ABSTRACT
This article explores some of the social, cultural, and historical developments that led me to comics as I tried to grapple with the challenges of the medical and health humanities. I argue that comics, and then graphic medicine, have served me as a third space as I have worked in the medical, and then the health, humanities. I begin with a personal, and even idiosyncratic, description of a third space as a zone where one can play with ideas not yet accessible to linear thinking, draw together concepts, communities, and practices conventionally kept separate, and enjoy the fireworks that result. I then review the ways I have incorporated comics in my scholarship from 1990 to the present. After engaging in the retrospective view that this essay opportunity offers, I conclude that graphic medicine tallies with the formal description of a third space offered by Edward Soja: “a meeting point, a hybrid place, where one can move beyond existing borders… a place of the marginal women and men, where old connections can be disturbed and new ones emerge… a precondition to building a community of resistance to all forms of hegemonic power”.
