health

Health Care Comics

Comics, Plug, Work

I’ll be debuting a new print project this month, Health Care Comics! Published by The Journalist’s Resource (a project of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center), the 32-page comic features three recent stories of mine: “Empathy 101” (2023), “Vaccinated at the Ball” (2022), and “A Tale of Two Pandemics” (2020).

All three pieces in Health Care Comics deal with issues of health equity. I explore and explain an array of recent public health research, drawing on peer-reviewed articles, my interviews with their authors, and additional sources. The authors, activists, and teachers themselves appear as characters in the stories.

All three stories appeared online on The Journalist’s Resource (JR), but in Health Care Comics this is the first time they’ll be collected in print. As ever, I’m grateful to my amazing editor at JR, Carmen Nobel, for making this project happen.

I’ll have copies of Health Care Comics at the excellent one-day festival at the Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase (BICS), taking place on April 13 in Industry City, Brooklyn (natch).

Being that H.C.C. is a Harvard U./Creative Commons project, I’m not allowed to sell the comic, BUT I can offer it as a giveaway with any other purchase of my work. And I’ll have plenty of other items for sale at BICS, including recent issues of The Vagabonds, Keyhole 25, and of course my books A.D., The Influencing Machine, and A Few Perfect Hours. 

So come to BICS and say hi: further enticements to attend are the planned presences of my old pals Dean Haspiel, Whitney Matheson, and Nick Bertozzi, who will be debuting new work as well! Remember: April 13, 2023, at St. Mark’s Comics in Industry City. Here’s a link.

A Tale of 2 Pandemics

New comic: “A Tale of Two Pandemics”

Comics, Plug, Work

I’ve been working the last three months on a 10-page comic about COVID-19, “Black immunity,” and historical health inequities. Titled, “A Tale of Two Pandemics: Historical Insights on Persistent Racial Disparities,” it was published yesterday by Journalist’s Resource (out of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center).

The piece springs from the work of three doctors — Lakshmi Krishnan, S. Michelle Ogunwole, and Lisa A. Cooper — and a recent paper they wrote for the Annals of Internal Medicine. In their paper, they discuss the similarities between the COVID crisis and the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic, particularly racial health disparities and the spread of misinformation.

With their piece and my interviews with them as the frame, I take readers through some of the misinformation about coronavirus circulating on social media, and the impact of that on communities of color, particularly given that African Americans have been dying at a much higher rate than white Americans during this crisis.

I learned a lot while working on this piece — particularly the insidious myth of “Black immunity” to disease that was used in our country as rationale for all sorts of horrible things, from Benjamin Rush urging Philadelphia’s Black citizens to act as nurses for white people during the 1793 Yellow Fever outbreak, to J. Marion Sims’ 19th-century experiments on enslaved Black women, to the infamous 20th-century Tuskegee syphilis study.

No wonder polls show that many African Americans are distrustful of any potential COVID vaccines in the offing!

But I also learned about the work of Black newspapers and columnists from the World War I era, who worked to combat misinformation about the Spanish flu as it related to their readers. So one thing I really appreciate about the doctors’ paper and my conversations with them is their commitment to finding paths forward — like working with “trusted voices” and with modern organizations devoted to protecting the lives of BIPOC. As we enter a new, deadlier third wave of the virus, that’s something to look forward to.

Right?

Anyway, check out the story (and looks for cameos from Idris Elba, Cardi B, and Ariana Grande!): https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-health/pandemics-comic-racial-health-disparities/

P.S. As a companion piece to the story, Journalist’s Resource also published a Q&A with me on comics journalism and my particular approach. You can find it here: https://journalistsresource.org/coronavirus-research/documenting-pandemic-comics-journalism/

"A Scanner Constantly," my new collaboration with Adam Bessie

Comics, Work

scanner01-teaserThere’s a new piece out this week that I haven’t had a chance to write about: “A Scanner Constantly,” my new collaboration with writer Adam Bessie. He and I have worked on a couple of prior pieces, but this one is the most involved and the one closest to my heart.

Adam is bravely living with a brain tumor, all the while remaining a devoted husband and dad, and a university professor. And a prolific comics writer—check out all the pieces he’s done over the last few years…

“A Scanner Constantly” explores what it feels like—what it means—to undergo a constant regimen of scanning—MRI’s, X-rays—and the way that forces you to look at yourself. It’s also about the way others look at you. And it gets into some fascinating existential stuff, thanks to “guest stars” like author Philip K. Dick and Italian artist (and crowd-sourcer) Salvatore Iaconesi.

I feel that the piece asks some important questions—not only about one’s sense of self, but also concerns we all have about our increasing techno-security state…

The excellent journal Pacific Standard has published the piece; why don’t you check it out?