librarypunk - 025 - Graphic Medicine

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

This week we’re joined by Matthew Noe to talk about graphic medicine!    https://twitter.com/NoetheMatt   Graphic Medicine Manifesto Introduction - this is probably the most important of these for background https://www.graphicmedicine.org/ - probably worth just clicking around, seeing what the org is up to Essential Graphic Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography - ALA funded project. The project description briefly touches on one of my big things: the risk of canonization  Mapping the Use of Comics in Health Education: A Scoping Review of the Graphic Medicine Literature    Pawpaganda https://twitter.com/ALALibrary/status/1426302296334520320?s=20 Free Comic Book Day https://abc7ny.com/10957902/?ex_cid=TA_WABC_TW&taid=611c41f0ced6e00001763b50&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+New+Content+(Feed)&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter  Aaron David Lewis: https://www.graphicmedicine.org/resources/liaison-program/comics-studies/

We'll all be wrong about something. It's library funk. I'm Justin. I'm a scholar communications librarian. My pronouns are he-him. I'm Sadie. I am a system admin at a public library. My pronouns are she and they.

I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian. My pronouns are he-him. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian. And my pronouns are she-her. I have a guest. I'm Matthew No.

I'm a health sciences, collections librarian and my pronouncer he had. Yeah. So you were recommended as a guest by a friend of the pod. Another Matthew. We only have Matthews on this

podcast now. So if you're Matthew and you want to talk about library stuff, let us know. We are Legion. We are many. We are Matthew. We're basically turning but yeah, we're basically turning into a noise show with our Matthews.

I mean, I'm okay. with that. It wouldn't be the first time. So we have two things for our opening segment today to warm up. So the first one, what's wrong in LA? Poppaganda strikes again. The American Library Association put out a tweet that says to celebrate the release of the Paw Patrol movie on August 20th. We've teamed up with writer and crew to send some free bookmarked. marks the libraries. I think writer's the cop. I don't know. The cop dog. And everyone just made fun of it. Writer is the name of Guy Fiatty's younger son. No. I think writer Fiatty predates the Paw Patrol, though. He's the original writer.

Also, the way you say popaganda, it just made me think of like the U-W-W like Mr. Obama. Like, like, he is. I'll do anything, anything, then perish. Anyway. I can't believe if the ALA just like fell for it again. Like, did you not get enough feet? You fell. You know.

They fell right into it. Did you not see what we did to hardcover? Yeah. Like, you didn't learn your lesson the first time. And like when I went and looked at the tweet, like literally every comment was just no cops in libraries or a variation. thereof. Like, just don't even post it to Twitter if you've got to do it. You know your audience, really. They're not even good bookmarks. First, they arrested Diary of Wimpy Kid for Wimpy Crimes, and then now this. And we have a second one, which is more on topic. Carrie just found this.

And, oh, that's what's wrong at LA. I've got way too many drops now at this point. A Long Island, I... So does my butt. It's because I have a medical condition. I poop. lot. And you also had Taco Bell recently, knowing you. No, I didn't actually. I did not recently have Taco Bell. Well, you should fix that. Well, too late. I had a burrito from another place tonight. I hope it was good. It was great. Talk about the trail. Yeah, I go to other restaurants like Arby's. Kelsa Breeze. A Long Island Library accidentally gives up pornographic comic to families during free comic book day, the Farmingdale Public Library, and apparently what happened is they get the comics from the publisher.

Although I do need to read this part. So the cover of the comic, Tales of a Grownup Nothing, shows a teenage girl skateboarding, and makes no allusion to the pornographic material inside. The comic features pictures of people in various sexual positions, and one woman using a sex toy. I really enjoyed this part. It also features a picture of a man appearing to kill a police officer

with the words at the Antifa. super soldier cookbook above it. I want this comic book. And like, do they expect comic books to actually just say porn like on the cover? Because like I own a couple of those and they just look like normal comic books.

Like, did not a single librarian just thumb through any of those before you started handing them out? It just this is not an issue of Fangoria. It's like you had one job. And you did it badly. I mean, usually not. Honestly, you're probably underfunded at a public library in Long Island.

They're probably giving a lot of money to the cops over there. So the books came from the distributor. And then what they do is they tell the distributor what they want, if they want to receive all ages teen or mature. And then they get an assortment of titles based on requested age ratings. So I don't know if that means that the, publisher saying, hey, you requested all ages, so you should have looked. I think they're trying to blame the library. But anyway, and the library had separated the titles with a

giveaway bag for children, teens, and adults, so it should have been looked at. But then the very last line of the article is, the library will not participate in free comic book day again. which aren't all comic books at the library free to begin with taxpayers jay they're taxpayers this time we're taking freebies from the publishers instead of the taxpayers oh there you go finally we got something back and it was porn they'll find someone to blame this on though

I mean to me this is the ideal outcome If we finally get something back from the publishers, make them give us porn. I see no issues here. Isn't that more useful than another pen or a mouse pad? Although I think Carrie would very much like lens cloths. That's the only thing of value to me in this world is like lens cloths. That's the only thing I want for free. Because I'm really particular about everything else in my life.

Like, I don't want just any pen. Although, who was it? There was a German publisher that gave out Stabilos at ACRL one time, and that was incredible. Oh, that was, anyway, but like, I'll take any lens claw. I will take any lens claw. Like, it doesn't take anything for me to take your lens claw. I took one with puppies on it. I hate puppies.

But do you want a Paw Patrol one? Yeah, it was a Papaganda lens. claws. This is a Pop Patrol lens cloth for nerdy kids. Damn, do I really putting me up like you're really challenging my value. I mean, I really do hate Pot Patrol because dogs are cops. Apparently. It's not just the Paw Patrol ones though. It's like there's a Twitter thread somewhere where like this person is telling people like show me a picture of your dog and I'll tell you if they like would have tried to catch runaway slaves. I wish the listeners at home can see all of our faces right now.

Or like if they would have barked. And it was like overwhelmingly like yes. I mean. Oh God. I think there was a blog that was like, it was. Something like ACAB of the day. And then the one post they had to win viral was them saying, like, the dog from Paw Patrol is a bastard.

They would just show different cop fictions and be like, is a bastard. And, yeah, apparently this is like an insanely popular show. I mean, if X-Files is popular with adults. X-Files fucking rules. It does rule. And so does Twin Peaks. And so does Hannibal by. three favorite shows and they're all the FBI.

Yeah, but it's like the FBI is trying to destroy their own. So there's like an internal destruction element to all of those shows. Well, to two of the three at least. I don't remember the FBI doing bad things and Twin Peaks. They did. Oh.

Yeah. I don't remember that. But yeah, at least with X-Files, it's like, is it aliens or is it the government? And it's both. Okay. So on to our... main topic.

We didn't ruin it. Ruin what? That's not the point of the X-Files. You're talking about X-Files and I just tuned out. I don't know anything about the X-Files. Well, you should fix that. It's great. I've tried.

First of all, David Docoveny is hot. Second of all, Gillian magazine is hot. Yeah, I have a lesbian magazine that has a centerfold. The Morley Man. The Morley Man is hot. No. He's the only one.

No. Everyone on that show was hot. Matthew is losing it. That is hot. I'm just picturing this is just a different version of a scene from Parks and Rec, where everyone on Games of Thrones can get it, except in this case, it's the X-Files. Okay, can I talk about graphic medicine now? Yeah.

Can I ask about it? No. We're going to make Matthew, like, listen to us talk about the X-Files. For an hour. Bitch, I might believe. So I've actually got a lot of questions just kind of lined up based on the reading. You gave us some really good stuff to read.

And I want to say it was great that this is the first time we've had a reading that was a comic, which was the graphic medicine manifesto. So I kind of used that to put together some questions. But I wanted to hear it from you. What is graphic medicine? So, I mean, you've got the basic answer is the graphic medicine is, you know, anything that's comics and health mashed together into one thing. More academic-y-speak, it's the discourse, or it's the intersection of the discourse of health with the medium of comics. And, yeah, it could be anything from, you know, an educational comic to a web comic to, you know, published mainstream comics.

Some of the superhero comics count, too, if you really want to get down into it. Like Dr. Strange actually doing brain surgery? Sure. And that's graphic medicine. You could make a case. The death of Captain Marvel is a common one. Spoilers for anyone hasn't read it. It's like 30 years old, so I don't feel bad.

Marvell, like, dies of cancer, so it's a whole thing. It's a pretty common example of health and superhero stories. but it's usually talking about things like memoirs and you know public health education comics yeah well a big theme I saw in what I was reading through was that it's a way of doing narrative medicine which is like case studies I guess I don't know if there's other types of narrative medicine I guess memoirs would count um it's kind of narrative medicine varies it can also like so case studies are not necessary. So like some graphic medicine is case studies, but like not all graphic medicine are case studies. No, I just want like a graphic novel of everything Oliver Sacks has ever written. Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. That would be fantastic. Yeah. But so narrative medicine is a, is a touchy subject. Because so you've got like, it really is. Yeah. Yeah. You've got the institutionalized version of narrative medicine that basically Columbia, like, owns and holds onto.

And it's kind of like looking at healthcare through the lens of storytelling, like a kind of in a fictional English, like a field of English studies, kind of looking at healthcare stories. And you're investigating what the patient is telling you and using that narrative arc to better serve health. Sometimes it's case studies, sometimes it's not. And the audience is other physicians? That can be part of the audience, and it's part of the target audience, but it also exists as a genre of literature, like Matthew was saying, right? Yeah, so you've got narrative medicine, like, as a practical tool, like a tool set of things that you incorporate into the way you practice medicine.

And then you have narrative medicine, the genre, which is the... the published stories of fiction or nonfiction and case studies and memoirs and all of that. And some graphic medicine is narrative medicine, but not all. I can't say it correctly either. It doesn't go both ways all of the time. Exactly. Yeah. There's some inconsistencies that doesn't quite catch at all either because there's like

even some cases of graphic medicine that like deviate, they're, they're complicated and deviate from like what would be acceptable for medicine and even for like for like fiction for like genre literature too. I was wondering if, well, I have a question here. I shouldn't go out of order so I don't forget anything. I was reading about this is kind of relevant to what I think about a lot, which is new forms of scholarship and then like tenure and promotion. So is there sort of a larger group effort of getting graphic medicine recognized in tenure and promotion? Or is it sort of just grassroots at this point? Is there like a Dora for this? I think grassroots is a good word for it.

Like as a defined, so the term itself graphic medicine is only 14 years old, something like that. Ian Williams coined the term. He's a physician in the UK. He started Graphicmedicmedicine.org as like a blog during his master's in medical humanities. And then there was a conference came out of it. And then people were using comics in like medical classrooms. Michael Green is a big like early adopter of comics in medical classroom settings. And so he's published papers and everything.

But this was all happening. He was already tenured when he started doing it. this. So it wasn't a like breakthrough thing. Now there are people, there are people in the field writing studies on using comics in medical education and with patient education and they are publishing

it in sometimes pretty big journals. And, you know, it's included in their tenure packets. And then there's this whole semi-related piece to graphic medicine where people are using comics as like an actual tool for

understanding, kind of in a Linda Barry kind of way, you know, like drawing as a method of meaning making and understanding and studying. And so that's kind of like an applied cartooning world that's part of graphic medicine but adjacent to, and people are using that in their tenure and promotion packets in an attempt to anyway. I don't know anyone who's actually formally been given tenure just because of their cartooning work yet, but I'm hoping it gets there. In library world, I don't know much. I've never had a tenure track library position. We're staff here, so it's all any of the academic work I do is actually, you know, just for fun. I will say that, you know, that I'm only in my second professional position and both of them

have been faculty. My first one wasn't eligible for tenure, but I still had all the same expectations as tenure track faculty, so that was fun. But at both institutions, the discussion of like do creative, does creative output count? And especially at my first institution, there was a book art studio and those faculty were also library faculty. So kind of de facto. And so the librarians were starting to investigate more like what creative output could be like with library stuff. And then I recently had a conversation of the same degree with my committee and whatnot people, because I'm getting it so interested in digital humanities and digital scholarship like 10 years too late. And so I would definitely say that like, you know, two different institutions across the, you know, the country from one another are having these discussions about like, yeah, creative output is a form of scholarship because often it does involve research and expertise and, you know, people can, you know, it can influence the field in some way. So I'm hopefully I'm hoping that a lot of academic libraries are starting to have the, how does this?

use your expertise and demonstrate it as opposed to just did you publish in this journal that has whatever h factor that is made up i don't know what other people's experiences though yeah and i wanted to ask is there um like an overlap with zines and creating like uh alternate forms of narrative medicine that people are doing yes question mark um awesome the the the the line between the line between like the so pre-pandemic I was able to attend you know local comic-cons buy things for the collection you know that could circulate and be part of the you know the research collection here directly from creators and that line between you know it says a self-published 15-page mini comic or is it a z like that line gets really messy and blurry right there for me

And, you know, these things, you know, they have a role. There's a place for them. It's just when you start incorporating all of that stuff, zines into conversation, the descriptive cataloging and the circulation of them gets a lot more complicated. But that's, you know, that is part of the field. And it's, it is often difficult enough to get comics to be taken seriously in medical settings. So going even further outside of that realm is a whole other extra step. Like I'm always having the Why are Comics relevant?

And why are we in this prestigious institution, prestigious in air quotes, for people who can't see me, like, why are comics relevant here? And it's a constant battle. Yeah. Yeah, we've talked about trying to do collection development with comics and just in general in the roadblocks that people have, but yeah, I was just kind of curious because I've been reading. So one of the things that was mentioned was graphic pathologies, which are illustrations of illnesses and sort of the advantages that that has over narrative descriptions. And so I was thinking I just

read Nagata Cabi's My Alcoholic Escape from Reality. And so she was showing, like going into alcoholism and then showed like what it was like to be in the hospital with pancreatitis. And she also talks about her mental health. And she uses like the manga style to like, oh, I'm like whispering away because it's very like expression has like an expression language to it. And so that's why I was thinking about zines is, uh, I imagine there's a lot of people writing about like what it feels like to deal with depression or what it feels like to deal with chronic illness or so that was why I was thinking about zines was I bet there's probably

a lot of, but it just depends on who the audience is, really. I know that's popular with Twine games, actually, like, interactive text-based, like, especially on Twine, like, depression quest. I'm pretty sure it was on Twine if I'm not mistaken. I'm going to do a speed run of depression quest. I'm going to put it on games done quick.com. You mean my life? No, it just gets drawn out because you spent 10 years trying to figure out which

medicine works. The audience piece of that is interesting. So, like, I never draw or, I mean, I do draw and write things, but I never do it for anyone but me to see or like, you know, my partner. Occasionally I'll post silly things on social media.

But, like, you know, I have a chronic pain condition and I will illustrate it out and try to draw what that feeling is like because, you know, Pain charts are effectively useless, and the variations of kinds of ways pain can be are endless, and sometimes words just don't do it. And so trying to illustrate it out can be really helpful.

And that can be really helpful for diagnosis purposes as well. The different kinds can, you know, nerve pain presents differently than blunt force trauma and so on. And so having some sort of illustrative way of communicating that can be really powerful. That would be a really interesting pain scale, like, you know, like versus like sharp versus like diffuse kind of like picking out different elements to like create it like a picture of a particular person's pain. I don't know. It's just that would be an interesting art and diagnostic thing, I think. Yeah, like that to me that brings up a question of how much. of graphic medicine, especially in, like, comics, how much of that is medical professionals

doing it either as like actual, you know, as doctors or maybe like researchers who teach, I know nothing about medicine, but I'm assuming some people in the medical profession don't actually do doctory things. But like how much of it is like people in that field versus people with health conditions writing about it? And is there any overlap there that you've noticed. There's definitely both, and there's often overlap. So, like, most of the published easily purchasable comics in graphic medicine are written from a perspective of a patient or a caregiver. The majority of the things that you'll find created or written by physicians or nurses or public health practitioners and on and on in all the health care fields, those are usually

more created for a specific study and then you never can find the actual comic again or drawn in the clinic and then it's gone forever. Though there's a long history of using comics for public health awareness and, you know, it's predating, you know, most of the comic companies that exist now through the HIV crisis, through COVID, you know, M.K. Sirwick, she's a nurse and cartoonist, one of the like, main figures in graphic medicine. She wrote Taking Turns. It's an oral history project of an HIV-AIDS unit in Chicago, and that she's been doing a lot of research on prevention comics in the 80s and 90s, and then comparing them to the kind of comics we've been seeing coming out of COVID,

and what differences there are and similarities and how the two pandemics are actually are different and similar. So I think we're going to see a lot more of that kind of comparative study work coming up. And if not, there's a pitch for somebody to go do it if you haven't thought about it. Yeah, because I've definitely seen a lot of criticisms of various approaches to public health campaigns right now, coming from people who either, you know, lived through or slash continue to live through the HIV-AIDS epidemic or are public health professionals who specialize in that. So yeah, I'd be interested to see because, yeah, in the episode with Matthew, the nonfiction comics, I mentioned the one with death from Sandman, like teaching people how to use a condom. And that definitely came out as like a,

I would imagine as like an AIDS public health type of thing. So I would really, I'd be interested to see that because I know that was a comparison that was kind of frowned upon early. Like I remember when ACT UP posted the face mask that said, if I die, dump my body on the steps of Mar-a-Lago or something. And everyone was like, how fucking dare you? But I've definitely seen just like from public health perspectives comparisons and what we might learn and do differently versus do the same. And so, yeah, like the illustrative aspect of that, like, even not just talking about it, but as part of campaigns itself, like, you know, there's been little cartoons and whatnot that, like, other countries have put out, like, this is how you wash your hands or this is what vaccines do.

So what in the lyrics to your favorite song to learn how to wash your hands. I did this corrosion by Sisters of Mercy because the chorus, the forehand. Now Now's, it's perfect 20 seconds if people want to know. I lost it. I got too busy laughing about the hand-washing songs. It's graphic medicine. It's musical medicine. Arial medicine.

They made a ballet out of one of Oliver Sacks's case studies. Or an opera, too, I think. There's been a few. Such a J-Fact to know. It really is. I love Oliver Sacks. He was gay and wrote a motorcycle and broke a squat record on Muscle Beach.

He was called Dr. Squat. It fucking rules. I did not know any of those facts about him. I'm definitely more interesting. He's like the best thing in the entire world. He's like, yeah, I was Dr. Squat, a broker record. Also, let me tell you these like really nice little case studies and like how I'm like losing eyesight or something.

I was like, Jesus. Okay. There's supposed to be like an animated documentary coming out about Oliver Sachs. Something I backed on Kickstarter years ago and it's still. like in progress so hopefully it eventually happens. I love him. You haven't got him kickbacked yet. No.

So I was reading about like mapping the use of comics and health education and you mentioned the conference in London in 2010, which is kind of more recent than I thought. So when did you get involved in graphic medicine? Even more recent than that. It seems like it's been forever. But so I started working with graphic medicine my first semester in library school, which was in 2014. I accidentally stumbled across the website doing terrible first semester librarian searching things for health sciences. But it was a happy accident, and I've just been running with it since.

And it started out just learning about the field. And then I started doing this like, I used to do a weekly like blog kind of post where I was collecting all these links and tweets and everything about graphic medicine. I call it this week in graphic medicine and then use like the stranger things font and everything. I had to stop doing that a couple years ago. It was just unsustainable. Like the number of people involved in writing and publishing and discussing the field became too much for, one person to keep up with doing that. But yeah, so that's when I got, I've been doing it for seven years now, more intensely for

the last six. Yeah. Did you go to library school specifically thinking about health sciences? So it was not the reason I applied, but I, it was funny. So I got an internship in the medical library at the University of Kentucky where I was going immediately because I, it was entirely because the intern who was leaving was a philosophy undergrad with me at UK. So he was like, hey, they were like, I'm leaving. So here, apply for this. And I'll put in the good word for you. And so I got, it was very lucky and fortuitous. And it

just kind of, UK has a health scientist track, like one of the few that actually still has a whole program around it. So I was. I had my foot in the door, and so I just ran with it. I don't think I've met anyone who, like, has a job in what they planned to get their job in when they went to library school. Oh, yeah, I guess Jay did. I forget that, yeah, we did go over career paths, and Jay was like, no, I had it. I had it figured out. I also bounced around.

I, like, that was my stable 20 hours a week throughout library school position, but then I also worked in the, in the archives and in cataloging. in like 10-hour positions here and there where I could. As long as I didn't go over 30 hours a week, I could take on these extra 10 hours in places, trying to hit all the fields at once because I went into library school without really any work experience. So it was do all the things I could in two years. Yeah, I mean, but that's the way to do it. I had the only experience I had was volunteering in my old university's archives for a summer. And then I finally landed a job in archives when I was in library school.

And now I don't work in archives. But yeah, that's pretty cool. It has a whole health sciences track. I've never heard of that. That's really neat. Yeah, because a lot of places will have like a, like a, you want to be a school librarian. And so you also get like a certification at the same time. And I know at least two, if not more, have one where like you earn your JD at the same time or something.

A lot of, yeah, a lot of schools have joint programs. like the program at UWRM has like a joint music librarianship program. Yeah. I did for a while anyway. And there's a few programs that have like the joint degree programs or specialty programs that are attractive for different kinds of books. Yeah. Especially like with stuff like that where it's like you basically need a serious background in something that makes. I'm glad there's like a health sciences one.

Yeah. I mean, now, like, we have a health informatics program at the school where I work. And, like, some people will get those degrees, but, like, you can't go be a health sciences librarian with an informatics degree. Like, you have to go do other stuff with that. Yeah. So that's a little different, I guess. But, yeah, I mean, like, my program had a few, like, I think it had one or two classes. health sciences librarianship but yeah i think i remember that yeah because i was in a class with someone

who was really fixated on health librarianship and i was like oh not interested in that and it look where i wound up uh turns out it was really interesting to be fair i don't have the typical health sciences library job like i don't do a lot of pub med searching my my whole thing is collection development and occasional outreach programs so like yeah i do very little of that stuff whereas I am very focused on research and instruction assistance and a little collection development and outreach. Is your undergrad in like biology or health or anything? Did I miss that and forget it?

No, I have a philosophy degree for undergrad, so it's not related to health at all. Yeah, that's the beauty of health science. That's even less useless than mine is. I'm kidding. I would actually love to have gone back and done philosophy. But I managed restaurants in between undergrad and grad school, so that's what I used that degree for. Just serving people, hi, can we talk about Derrida? There's a manga like that.

Is it about me? No, it's called bartender, but like one of the guys, one of the bartenders. J-tender, I mean, my first job, I was a food server. One of the dudes has a philosophy degree in the city, and so he's just like, he just talks about philosophy. be with people while he's serving, while he's tending bar. That's fun. Having worked in kitchens and in bars,

that actually seems really natural to me. Yeah, especially if you're a bartender and having to talk with people. Yeah. Yeah, you're paid to stand there and be receptive. Yeah. And you could radicalize people. My favorite server at the brunch place that I frequent is like a poet. And like he and I just hang out.

talk every like Saturday and Sunday more. It's like, hey, Brady, what's up? And he's like, oh, you know, just working on some new chat books. Chat books. So I was also going to ask, we've talked a little bit about like the utility of graphic medicine, patient education, patient like activism, I guess, like saying that, look, this is what I'm going through. What are some of like the actual like artistic merits of graphic medicine?

Because we talked about in nonfiction comics with Matthew Murray, we talked about how some of these comics are really interesting, but they're not really like good comics. Are there really like graphic medicine comics that are out there, like winning awards for their art style or for their, or do they, is there a separate category for graphic medicine awards? Oh, that is such a big question. So a lot of graphic medicine suffers the same thing that graphic nonfiction in general does. You get a lot of stiff, formalized, you know, here's some text, here's some images. They don't necessarily always flow together. But on the other hand, you've got things like menopause, an anthology of comics about menopause, just won an Eisner Award for Best Anthology this year.

So it kind of runs the gamut from boring, we just threw images in here in the hopes that people would read it kind of stuff, to some really interesting, you know, award-winning comics. There's one, this is where the, the, the, the squishiness of the field gets really contentious. There's a comic that just came out called crude, and it's about, you know, the oil industry devastating South America, but it talks about the ill health effects and the environmental destruction and this, all of that is like, the social determinants of health issues are all clearly graphic medicine.

And so we kind of have to push the boundaries of what is for. formally medicine a lot, but, but it's a like beautifully illustrated, like, watercolory kind of comic. And I think it tells the story in a more meaningful, artistic way than prose would have. And so there, there are examples of that out there. And it's, you know, you can take a spread from that comic and open it up and it's punch, you just have to stare at it because it's like punching you in the face. And that's to be violent about it, I guess. That's what I want these kind of, you know, activist, let's tell you what's wrong with the world comics to do, is to make me have to sit there and stare at it. And some of them do that really well.

Yeah, is there like an overlap between graphic medicine and then, like, I guess in this instance, it might be like environmentalism or even, you know, critiques of capitalism. You know, what sort of interdisciplinary stuff do you see in graphic medicine? So I'm always for pushing and opening and expanding it because, you know, For me, a critique of capitalism absolutely fits in graphic medicine because especially in the U.S., that's defining who has health care, not just access to it, but who actually can get treated and how they're going to be treated. We include comics about the civil rights movement. I include March in our graphic medicine collection just because you kind of need to know the history of this country and the way people are treated to understand. how to be a good physician to those people.

How are you going to be in a room with somebody and not understand where they're coming from, but then expect them to trust you. You have to build that background understanding. So if you go very broad with it, you can wind up with graphic history being part of graphic medicine, and the lines get blurred. And I try really hard not to set hard boundaries on this stuff. If someone comes up to me and says, this Batman comic is right. relevant to graphic medicine.

I'm going to ask them, okay, tell me why. And if I'm convinced, that's fine with me. Like, it's relevant. You know, I don't recommend using Batman comics with your patients necessarily, because they have, they're notoriously awful with mental health. But, you know, that's useful as an interrogation tool, too. You mean a comic book hero who all the villains are, like, based off a various psychiatric disorder?

Is it good for that kind of thing? Okay, where do Paw Patrol comics get into the graphic medicine canon? I guess... Are there Paul Patrol comics? There must be. Hypothetically speaking, but I'm almost positive. There has to be. You're positive?

I'm positive. The saddest ham horn. ever. Tocel's going to get a sad ham horn. I will accept public troll comics when you do a critique of them and tell me why they're terrible. I figured the Batman comic could be like graphic medicine. It's like the issue where he's trying to figure out where the clitoris is.

Wait, what? So it's like sex ed. Because Batman doesn't eat pussy. I was just about to say, is this going back to the hole? Cat woman is enraged. Batman won't eat out. Yeah, I saw in the notes, maybe I'm getting ahead of all of us here, but like in one of the things is like, how graphic is it? Does this include sex ed?

You know, and then the porn free comic book, like how much overlap is there in like pornographic, explicit graphic medicine, I guess? That'd be fun. I mean, Ojoi's sex toy exists in his absolutely graphic medicine. Oh, I guess that is. That would count, yeah. We are of divided opinions on that comic in this, on this, I don't like it. That's totally fair.

Yeah. I don't like tweet things. It's very precious. But yeah, sometimes the graphics are graphic. And, you know, it's medicine, so of course it has to be to a degree. Would you say it's graphic wink medicine? Never regret putting the boing in there. In all seriousness, I've had to have this conversation with public librarians who want to use graphic medicine because it's an immediate concern that we're talking about body parts and anatomy.

And so they're going to have parent complaints and everything. And my stance is always, look, teenagers need accurate sex education materials. if we have a comic that explains it to them accurately and makes them feel good about it, like put it in a collection and the parents' complaints be damned. But I'm also an academic librarian who's not getting yelled at by parents, so I don't have to deal with that stress. You might get yelled at by parents. Helicopter parents of college students, I was talking about this the other day.

They are fucking weirdos. Also, you get people older than me being like, if you write young adult fiction with sex in it, you're a pedophile. while and why do adults like YA that has sex in it? So don't worry. Don't bring that discourse in this house. If I have parents

of medical students come and yell at me, that's a whole other level of helicoptering and I'm just going to leave. Dugee Houser is real. He's a boy genius. Is that baby Neil Patrick Harris? I've never watched it. Yeah, he absolutely was.

And I did watch it. He had to break a lot of news about AIDS to people. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Would Dark Place count as graphic medicine? That's a TV show. What if I made a comic of Dark Place? Yeah.

I think most TV medicine is inaccurate to make it graphic. Okay. So, like, what about fiction about? medical concerns. Like a hospital fiction. Let's say we have... Raise anatomy of comics. No.

Let's say I have a hospital procedural. The serialized. Well, I mean, yeah, the Batman would be fake. Yeah. Or like a sports manga, but it's doctors or something. I was thinking, I added that to the notes, the kind of fiction question, because I was thinking about something that Matthew Murray brought up, where they talked about what was it, the Kurosawa Corpse Delivery Service.

Oh, yes. And like how that kind of intersections like death and grief, which also seemed to be very explored to topics in graphic medicine. So like Matthew, you say like there's a broad, you have the broad interpretation. Like how much fiction do you see incorporated into these collections, particularly like when you talk to public librarians, how much of it is a mix? in public libraries it typically sticks closer to the memoir like that's the most common uh graphic medicine you see in publics that's most common that i see in academic libraries too but the fiction part is really interesting in the majority of the fictional graphic medicine i think that's in my collection is actually manga and rather than western comics like i mean blackjack was a was is a surgeon's comic and it kind of is a surgeon's comic and it kind of is this fictionalized Graze anatomy to a degree.

And this is going on. I just recommended this to somebody so it's on my brain. Like there's a kid's comic called Yuzu the Pet Vet. And vet medicine is graphic medicine. And it's real adorable. But that's fictional. And so like that counts. Yeah, the corpse delivery service thing that Sadie brought up, that reminded me because that is

their Buddhist. They're doing like Buddhist rights. So I was wondering how much overlap, like how much representation of different religious beliefs and maybe, you know, air quotes like non-Western medical practices, beliefs. Like are there graphic medicine about RUVETA, for instance, or traditional Chinese medicine? Like how much of, is there any sort of that kind of representation or just like a religious presence at all in it? there's less than I wish there was. I have a colleague who's trying to explore this stuff. Aaron David Lewis, he's a comic scholar who, like, came up on religious comics and now

is transitioning into graphic medicine and is looking at the overlaps of this stuff. But there's not as many as you would think. There is, I was trying to look it up. I can't do that and talk to you at the same time. But there is a comic version of like a classic. Chinese medicine text. It's one of those nonfiction comics. It's not super great at

integrating the words and images, but it's okay. Anytime someone mentions religion in comics, though, my brain immediately goes to epileptic, and it's not great representation of stuff. It's by David B. And there's a lot of mystic, like, epilepsy as spirits

kind of not great treatment in there. It's also not his perspective. It's not his perspective. It's his perspective of his brother's experience. Oh. That comic raises a lot of questions. Yeah. It's really beautifully drawn.

So when you talk about the question of art is like graphic medicine beautiful, like the art style of it is really wonderful, but like the content and the voice of it is very problematic from like a disability perspective. Yeah. And with this question out there, making sure I get this this this this thrown in there that you know in the world of English language graphic medicine works it suffers the exact same problems as the rest of publishing it's primarily white it's primarily middle class it's primarily

you know cisgendered like all it's it's got some problems and that that's part of the main that's part of the reason I pushed so hard to be able to try to buy independent comics, which was a nightmare to get approval to in the library. But there's a lot more interesting and diverse and varied stories being told by self-published works than we're getting in the mainstream published works. And so trying to make sure those are represented is a big challenge. As a, because this, I think, raises an interesting collection development question, especially if the works are fictional and not necessarily nonfiction. So they're not necessarily trying to be

informational or educational. They're just telling a story. Because, like, with the ethics, because I tend to be someone, I will, like, I'm not an intellectual freedom, like, purist die hard, but when it comes to fiction, I'm one of these people, I'm like,

do whatever, kind of. And so from a collection development standpoint, with fictional graphic medicine, What are sort of your, do you have standards for like accuracy, I guess, of the health and the medicine within it? Or is it sort of that not a concern? Just because, you know, you have limited shelf space that changes things sometimes. This is where I have to give two answers because because of the institution I'm in and the breadth of what I'm able to purchase. account way I purchase anything and everything because I'm I hadn't building it towards an eye

towards the impossibility of completeness of a graphic medicine. Right. As a as a long-term research collection of what is out there. In public libraries and in my past library where I had limited shelf space, limited budget, I was making like, I was evaluating based on accuracy, based on, you know, the interests of the population Like at my past medical school, it was a public medical school. It was primarily serving lower income people. It was primarily serving.

You know, there was a lot of veteran population. So I was looking towards stories that would resonate with them and that I would ask for input, you know, and if this was authentic enough to purchase kind of thing. And in a public library setting, that's what a lot of people I talk to are wrestling with as well. But my normal day-to-day, is it health-related? I'm buying it.

We'll figure out the details once we have it on hand. I wanted to round out with this question to have something kind of like, I don't know, somewhat action-oriented. It's kind of hard to always bring that into every episode. But you kind of touched on using graphic medicine in advocacy. And you're buying like a lot of independent comics. would do you see things about that that are like more advocacy focused like medicare for all queer health care racism and health care and is that something like public libraries are are able to get in on or is it kind of in your your quest for completeness really is the only way you can purchase them all yeah the the comics that immediately come into mind that are pushing that boundary are either web comics or self-published and so it's it's things are going to be difficult for most public library collections to easily make available. On the medical racism side, I have to recommend checking out Witt Taylor's comics in the Nib,

exploring a lot of the history of that. Witt is a public health professional by training and also a cartoonist. And then on the advocacy side, so the Center for Cartoon Studies, it's available online now, But they're like doing a print run where people can request copies of it. So it's something a public library could do. They're printing them for free. They've created this comic about, oh, good Lord, I'm going to forget the name of it, too. It's included in the most recent review on graphicmedicmedic.org.

But it's an exploration of the cost of health care in the United States. Exploring how GoFundMe is like the primary driver of health care payments right now. They, for that purpose, created a GoFundMe for this comic to fund the distribution of it as a kind of a nudge. But it was created as a collaboration between the Center for Cartoon Studies and students at Harvard in the Radcliffe Institute. And they're printing enough of them that they will send copies to every staffer in Washington. And then they're distributing it to libraries and educators and everyone who wants it. It's kind of a call to action to try to push for health care reform. And so that's a really interesting example of someone taking cartooning and using it to push for change.

But there aren't that many of those with that much funding and clout behind them. Yeah, that makes sense. So if there's not any closing thoughts, I wanted to ask if you have any plugs, do you want people to know where they can find you, anything? Your Twitter, your upcoming scholarship that you do for fun, or do you want people? would leave you alone. I mean, I would like to turn my email off for the rest of forever, but I don't think that's going to happen. The easiest way to find me, if you can tolerate long Twitter rants and ramblings is on Twitter. I'm at Know the Matt, and I spend my entire life on there. It seems like most of the time. But yeah, I mean, that's the big project.

I'm working on an upcoming article with some colleagues for the Journal of Graduate Medical Education about integrating graphic medicine into residency education. So that'll be coming late this year if people have an interest in that. But other than that, I'm just kind of plugging away and doing graphic medicine work. And I guess I should throw the plug in there that if you're still, if you're in ALA and haven't completely disbanded and want to burn them down, I'm the current president for the graphic novels of comics roundtable, so you should come hang out with us and do cool comics things in ALA. Burn a bookmark. Go hang out with Matt.

Awesome. Well, then. Thanks for coming on, Matthew. Really appreciate it. This has been a really good episode, I think. Good night.