Enitan Awe, Isabelle Bradberry, Taylor Burey, Itzy Cuellar, Tristan Cummings, Liza Daniels, Trinity Davis, Maya Eggert, Cynthia Fan, Joe Gallinghouse, Emma Goodman, Cam Hall, Mia Hodges, Lisset Jarquin, Anna Jones, Patrick Kelly, Ethan Landen, Katy Lawlor, Alexis LeMone, Clare Mackie, Jared McDonald, Brigham McKee, Luis Montero-Lopez, Meghan Rankins, Jack Robinson, Andrea Shill, Claire Sibold, Liz Small, Lucy Smith, Kianna Speight, Cassie Stoltenberg
Faculty Sponsor: Ann Fox
This display shows the range of comics made by the thirty-one students enrolled in ENG 110 Graphic Medicine: Drawing Disability. Over the course of the semester, students read a range of graphic novels depicting the experience of navigating illness and medicine as patient, caregiver, or medical practitioner. In combining visuals and text, such novels are an important way to show the social and economic contexts of medicine, the lived experience of disability and illness, and push back against old stereotypes of stigma, shame, or fear. Students wrote their own disability narratives and then turned them into comics of their own. They were able to write about any disability experience they liked: it could be something that they witnessed, something that happened to them, or something that happened to someone they loved. In translating those stories into comics, the only stipulation was that the work be original and drawn by their own hand (i.e., no comics-generating programs). They each had to make decisions including: how can I push past worrying about virtuosity to make a visually meaningful comic? How should I sequence my narrative? What visuals convey the tone and ideas I want to share about this experience? What tropes can I lean on — and which do I want to reject? What materials do I want to use? Should I color my comic? Ink it? Use photographs or other archival materials? What do I want to leave my reader thinking about beyond my own experience? What work is this comic meant to do in the worlds of medicine, illness, and disability?