“Losing Thomas & Ella” presents a research comic about one father’s perinatal loss of twins. The comic recounts Paul’s experience of the hospital and the babies’ deaths, and it details the complex grieving process afterward, including themes of anger, distance, relationship stress, self-blame, religious challenges, and resignation. A methodological appendix explains the process of constructing the comic and provides a rationale for the use of comics-based research for illness, death, and grief among practitioners, policy makers, and the bereaved.

As a doctor and practitioner researcher, I use comics as a research method. This graphic article is an attempt to convince you, the academy and perhaps myself, that comics are research.

Though graphic narratives (or comics) now permeate popular culture, address every conceivable topic including illness and dying, and are used in educational settings from grade school through university, they have not typically been integrated into the medical school curriculum. This paper describes a popular and innovative course on comics and medicine for 4th-year medical students. In this course, students learn to critically read book length comics as well as create their own stories using the comics format. The rationale for the (...) course, its general content and format, and methods for teaching are described. Finally, the author offers some reflections on why this medium resonates so powerfully with medical student learners. (shrink)

This essay considers the ways in which graphic caregiving memoirs complicate the idealizing tendencies of ethics of care philosophy. The medium’s “capacious” layering of words, images, temporalities, and perspectives produces “productive tensions... The words and images entwine, but never synthesize”. In graphic memoirs about care, this “capaciousness” allows for quick oscillation between the rewards and struggles of care work, representing ambiguous, even ambivalent attitudes toward care. Graphic memoirs effectively represent multiple perspectives without synthesis, part of a structural and thematic ambivalence (...) that provides a provocative counterpart to the abstract idealism of ethics of care philosophy. (shrink)