Culturally powerful ideas of normalcy and deviation, individual responsibility, and what is medically feasible shape the ways in which we live with illness and disability. The essays in this volume show how illness narratives expressed in a variety of forms—biographical essays, fictional texts, cartoons, graphic novels, and comics—reflect on and grapple with the fact that these human experiences are socially embedded and culturally shaped.

Edited by Susan Merrill Squier and Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff

Available from Penn State University Press

ISBN: 978-0-271-08617-0

Presentation of the virtual book launch, May 2021

List of Contributors

Introduction
Susan Merrill Squier and Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff

1. The Reflecting Physician
Einat Avrahami

2. Assembling a Shared Life in Anders Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
Tahneer Oksman

3. Ways of Looking: Reading PathoGraphics
Nina Schmidt

4. The Comics Pain Scale and Comics About Pain
Ariela Freedman

5. The Tightrope to Equilibrium: Parkinson’s Disease in Literature and Comics
Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff

6. "Her Leg”: Chris Ware’s Body of Work
Rieke Jordan

7. Crafting Psychiatric Contention Through Single-Panel Cartoons
Helen Spandler (available as Open Access courtesy of a grant from the Wellcome Trust)

8. Subverting Stigma: Community Building in Serial Comics
Leah Misemer

9. Psychosis Blues: Schizophrenia, Comics, and Collaboration
Elizabeth J. Donaldson

10. The Quickening
stef lenk

11. Interview with stef lenk on The Quickening
Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff and Susan Merrill Squier

12. Desire Paths: PathoGraphics and Transgenerational Trauma
Maureen Burdock

13. Scaling Graphic Medicine: The Porous Pathography, a New Kind of Illness Narrative
Susan Merrill Squier