Comics and Graphic Narratives

Comics and graphic novels have long been dismissed as trivial, but researchers across medicine, education, and the humanities now take seriously how sequential images paired with text can convey complex human experiences—illness, trauma, identity—in ways that prose alone often cannot. Scholars examine how graphic narratives function in medical education, helping students develop empathy and diagnostic thinking, and how patients use comics to process and communicate experiences that resist clinical language. The visual grammar of the form—panel composition, color, the interplay of image and caption—is itself a subject of analysis, not merely a vehicle for content. Open questions include how effectively comics translate across cultural contexts in global health communication, and whether the emotional engagement they produce leads to measurable changes in how readers understand or respond to disease and care.

Works

60,810

Total citations

107,301

Keywords

ComicsGraphic NovelsMedicineNarrativeEducationVisual Communication