Graphic Novel – UH Press

“Graphic Medicine,” a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, has been selected as Honorable Mention (second place) for the Best Special Issue Award in this year’s Council of Editors of Learned Journals contest.

The CELJ judges offered the following assessment of the special issue:

Honorable Mention: “Graphic Medicine,” a special issue of Biography

The number and quality of submissions for the 2022 CELJ Best Special Issue Award was truly impressive, making adjudication both delightful and difficult. We were inspired by the range of topics and approaches. In making our decision, we considered the clarity of editorial vision, the significance of the contribution, whether or not an issue was conceptually interesting beyond a single field, formal and methodological innovation, and evidence of collaborative engagement across individual contributions to the broader project of the issue.

The award review committee recognizes “Graphic Medicine,” a special issue of Biography on life narratives in the medium of comics, with an honorable mention. The decision to include different genres—both scholarly essays and original autobiographical comics—resulted in a multi-genre issue that compellingly explores the possibilities and concerns raised by living with (and/or alongside) illness and disability. The scope of the articles encompassed a broad but interrelated investigation into the topic, and the editor’s introduction effectively contextualized these articles in relation to the field of interdisciplinary medical humanities while making a persuasive argument about how comics “expose the subjective experiences of health and healthcare systems that may be difficult for both practitioners and patients to understand or explain in either verbal or visual language alone.” We appreciated the wholistic approach taken in developing the issue, with contributions being collectively workshopped as part of the process. Finally, the layout, typesetting, and graphics all contributed to an excellent reading experience.

Congratulations to the coeditors—Erin La Cour and Anna Poletti—and the contributors to the special issue—Safdar Ahmed, Suzy Becker, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Jared Gardner, Crystal Yin Lie, John Miers, Nancy K. Miller, JoAnn Purcell, Susan Squier, and Julia Watson.

Biography has been recognized by CELJ for special issues twice before: in 2017, when it won the Special Issue Award for “Indigenous Conversations about Biography” edited by Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista, and in 2012, when it won for “(Post)human Lives” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser.

Biography Graphic Medicine — *Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly*, vol. 44, nos. 2 & 3, 2021

Editor Q&A

Read how this issue came together in this interview with Anna Poletti and Erin La Cour.

Read Graphic Medicine

The issue is available on Project MUSE.

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Figure 6. From page 48 of Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand; Art by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. © Copyright 2011 and reproduced by permission of the authors. — From *Radical Graphics: Martin Luther King, Jr., B. R. Ambedkar, and Comics Auto/Biography* in this issue. Figure 6. From page 48 of *Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability*, by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand; Art by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. © Copyright 2011 and reproduced by permission of the authors.

This quarter’s Biography contains the following interdisciplinary scholarly works including Pramod K. Nayar’s article on ‘radical’ graphic novels:

From *Radical Graphics: Martin Luther King, Jr., B. R. Ambedkar, and Comics Auto/Biography* in this issue. Figure 2. From page 58 of King: A Comics Biography, by Ho Che Anderson. © Copyright 2010, and reproduced by courtesy of Fantagraphics.

In the midst of the memoir boom of the late twentieth century, a sub-genre
in a wholly new medium made its presence felt: the graphic memoir and auto/biography. Using Ho Che Anderson’s King (1993–2002, published in a single edition in 2010) about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and S. Anand and Srividya Natarajan’s Bhimayana (2011, with art by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam), about the Indian social reformer, maker of the Indian Constitution, and leader of the so-called “untouchables” (“lower-castes” in the Hindu social order, now called “Dalits”), Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, I will argue that graphic auto/biography offers a new mode in which to talk about social issues like racism and caste-based oppression.

Continue reading “Biography Vol. 39 No. 2 (2016)”