Dispatches from the Graphic Medicine Conference: Day 1

Brigid Alverson reports from the scene of the 2018 Graphic Medicine Conference in Vermont, which is focused on graphic novels that describe the experience of illness and of being a patient.

I’m up in White River Junction, Vermont, home of the Center for Cartoon Studies and, for this weekend only, the Graphic Medicine Conference. Actually, the conference has two venues—it starts at CCS and moves to the Dartmouth medical school on Saturday.

Stephen Bissette giving the opening address at the Graphic Medicine Conference

The term “graphic medicine” may conjure up an image of a comic about healthy eating or the wonderful world of the circulatory system, but graphic medicine in this case has a more literary bent. It’s part of the field called medical humanities and focuses not on educational comics but on graphic novels that describe the experience of illness and of being a patient, embracing titles as disparate as Jennifer Hayden’s The Story Of My Tits, Ellen Forney’s Marbles and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (I wrote a short primer on the topic for School Library Journal recently.)

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DC Comics goes nuclear this Christmas

‘DC Nuclear Winter Special’ features 10 holiday stories set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

DC Comics will continue their holiday on-shot tradition, albeit with a somewhat radioactive theme this year — DC Nuclear Winter Special will arrive in comic shops and bomb shelters in November.

Like in previous years, the holiday special will feature various characters from the DC Universe, all in stories featuring a “nuclear winter” theme. The release says it’ll include stories starring Batman, Superman and Flash, while the cover also shows Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn and Kamandi (the latter of which makes perfect sense).

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