Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine

This book invites readers to explore the field of graphic medicine through a new concept: “keywords/keyimages.” Coined by the editors to reflect the unique combination of words and images in comics, this term offers a fresh way to understand how graphic narratives communicate experiences of health and illness. Rather than defining the field, the book aims to demonstrate its range and complexity, offering a visual and verbal resource that reveals the methods, concepts, and politics shaping graphic medicine today.

The collection brings together thirty-six contributions from comics artists, scholars, healthcare professionals, and patients, each focused on a single keyword/keyimage. Organized into five thematic sections—practice, pedagogy, process, personal/autobiographical, and politics—the book guides readers through the formal elements of comics, teaching strategies, creative processes, personal storytelling, and the broader health politics at work in the field. With visual examples alongside critical analysis, the volume encourages a “both/and” approach to reading: seeing words and images as interdependent, working simultaneously and sequentially to convey meaning.

Designed as a resource for classroom teaching and independent study, Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine offers students, scholars, and practitioners a dynamic introduction to the study of health narratives in comics. It invites interdisciplinary exploration while providing practical tools for analyzing, teaching, and creating graphic medicine texts, making it a valuable contribution to courses in comics studies, visual culture, health humanities, and beyond.

“This is not your typical keywords book. Diedrich and Martino have curated an exceptional and timely volume that engages readers in the possibilities and understandings of graphic medicine. Through a visual and textual diversity of approaches that explore experiences with health and medicine, Keywords/Keyimages celebrates our differences and our shared humanity, providing new perspectives through which we can reflect on and, ultimately, reshape the structures that define health and healing.”—Juliet McMullin, author of The Healthy Ancestor: Embodied Inequalities and the Revitalization of Native Hawaiian Health

Lisa Diedrich is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism; Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism; and Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness.

Briana Martino is Associate Professor and Chair of Communications and affiliated faculty in Race, Gender, and Culture in the Gwen Ifill School of Media, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Simmons University. Their research has been published in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture and Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

Graphic Studies