Comics and Graphic Narratives

Comics and graphic novels have long been dismissed as minor entertainment, but researchers now treat them as a sophisticated medium for conveying complex experiences—including illness, trauma, and scientific knowledge—through the interplay of image and text. Scholars examine how visual narratives can make medical information more accessible to patients, train healthcare professionals in empathy and clinical reasoning, and give voice to experiences that resist purely verbal description. A central question is how the formal properties of comics—panel sequencing, visual metaphor, the deliberate gap between images—do work that prose alone cannot, and whether these qualities translate into measurable benefits in educational or therapeutic settings. Active research is also probing whose stories get told: how cultural context shapes the portrayal of illness and the bodies that appear on the page, and what it means to represent suffering with both honesty and care.

Works

58,725

Total citations

105,855

Keywords

ComicsGraphic NovelsMedicineNarrativeEducationVisual Communication