ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the interactive meaning-making potential of comics as graphic medicine and examines how multimodal social semiotic resources are deployed as brief visual narratives to semiotically operationalise public health information about COVID-19 in a selection of short comics from “The COVID-19 Chronicles” published by the National University of Singapore (NUS). There is a need for effective public communication of information about COVID-19 because of the pandemic’s extent and impact, continuously evolving scientific knowledge about the COVID-19 virus and the threat of inaccurate information about the virus exacerbated by the viral nature of digital and social media. Our findings show how semiotic resources of image and text are co-deployed strategically in these comics to construct visual stories that simplify and gradually develop complex concepts by leveraging the causal development of the narrative, engage the audience using affective appeal via humour and positive appraisal, and represent particular actions taken by the Singapore government positively.
