Graphic Medicine enriches and expands the field of Medicine and Literature by providing an additional, visual, modality for understanding stories of illness and well-being. Combining words and pictures, the hybrid medium of comics engages both left and right hemispheres of the brain, which can lead to more immediate, intuitive, and complete comprehension for the reader/viewer than text alone. This essay briefly addresses the origins and commitments of Graphic Medicine and illuminates, through Visual Thinking Strategies, why and how comics are particularly effective in the domains of clinical medicine and medical ethics – that is, for healthcare providers and medical learners, and for patients as well.

This chapter explores scholarship on comics in education, examining the following themes: teaching with comics, teaching about comics, and teaching through creating and producing comics as a way of processing and communicating information. The chapter discusses each of these interrelated approaches in turn, examining the ways in which comics can be used in various learning contexts, demonstrating how educators, academics, and creators can work together to understand how comics might be used to encourage visual literacy and multimodal thinking for students.

Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. The chapter maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows, who some of the pioneers were, and how exhibition standards have developed over time.

What makes a comic a graphic novel? Is it having a long, complete narrative? Being published as a book? Having a complex storytelling technique that leads to literary awards and critical acclaim? All these criteria have been deployed at some time or another to define the graphic novel, and they recur throughout this chapter as we follow a history of the ways in which comics have been hailed as novels since the mid-nineteenth century. With an emphasis on the United States, key moments are considered such as the woodcut novels of the 1920s and 1930s, the start of the direct market in the 1970s, the first graphic novel boom of the 1980s, and the popularity of graphic novels in the twenty-first century. Notable texts, creators, and publishers are discussed, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw Books & Graphics, and we see the changing economic contexts out of which graphic novels have emerged. This chapter ends by outlining how the Internet has transformed the production, distribution, and selling of graphic novels, with contemporary creators unshackled from the idea that a graphic novel has to be a book.

This chapter contextualizes narrative drawing, first identifying the types of drawing that are specific to comics. It proposes that the comics medium intervenes in the long history of drawing, by introducing polygraphy as a recurrent feature of comics. Referring to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony (or multiple voices) in the novel, polygraphy accounts for the techniques of accumulating diverse graphic indices of the labor and ideas of drafters and comics producers and distributors. The chapter shows how polygraphy produces comics, considering the work of William Hogarth, Katsushika Hokusai, Rodolphe Töpffer, Marie Duval, George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Osamu Tezuka. Through this cast of creators, the chapter also foregrounds important moments in comics history such as the boom in periodical print in the nineteenth century, the influence of acting and performance practices, and, later, movie. This chapter equips readers with the necessary tools to understand the fundamental means of visualizing stories in comics – drawing – and offers a comics history contextualized through relevant developments in popular visual and print culture.

The introduction offers an overview of recent scholarly discourse and approaches to comics and graphic novels. It provides brief close readings of panels from Rodolphe Töpffer’s L’Histoire d’Albert, the anonymous comic strip, Lucy and Sophie Say Good Bye, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, and Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters, which apply comics methodologies of reading language (Hannah Miodrag) and analyzing graphic novels (Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey), among others. To further highlight the scope of comics analyses across the variety of forms of the medium, the introduction discusses the comics in the light of Rita Felski’s concepts of knowledge and enchantment.

The introduction ends with an overview of the Companion’s seventeen chapters, from the first part on Forms, to the second one on Readings, and ending with Uses.

The Introduction begins by considering two dominant critical approaches to the graphic novel. While prominent authors have denied the relevance of the concept, instead preferring the term comics, many scholars have sought to align the graphic novel with prestigious literature. The chapter identifies the practical and institutional resources that the term provides, tracing the evolution of book-length comics under this mantle. Section 1.1 considers the relevance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel for understanding the graphic novel and puts forward a new periodization of the latter. The first cycle, lasting from 1980 to 2000, centers on the book for the first time in US comics history. Starting in the early 2000s, integration into the literary marketplace initiates a second cycle that effects several important changes, from an increase in the use of color to a diversification of visual styles. Engaging with recent work in cultural sociology and political economy, Section 1.2 situates the aesthetic evolution of the graphic novel in the ongoing transformation of contemporary society.