www.mddus.com


PHOTOS COURTESY OF DR IAN WILLIAMS


One very detailed strip describes how A&E


doctors would “wake up” patients feigning unconsciousness in distinctly unpleasant ways. Underlying the strip is a strong sense of outrage that these supposed “time-waster patients” were being punished for displaying a mental dysfunction, while the dysfunction itself remained unattended. Immersing himself in the new form, Ian took


his comics to fairs in London and began to get a reputation for himself. “I was going down to London every month when I was living in North Wales to meet up with other comic people, to attend comics events, to take part in them, to get to know people in the scene.” He even started a website, www.


graphicmedicine.org, to look at “the area of interaction between comics and medicine”. It was then he realised he was not alone. “I thought that I was being pretty clever and there wouldn’t be any person interested in this but when I set the website up people started contacting me from all over the world,” he says. The site, which he runs with MK Czerwiec,


who makes comics under the sobriquet Comic Nurse, is a hub for this crossover between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare and features reviews, podcasts, a blog and more. Along with others, the pair have run


conferences every year since 2010 – with the most recent held at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. The events aim to examine the ways in which comics can be used to highlight important ethical issues in healthcare, portraying patient experiences, and even as eff ective communication and learning tools in medical training. The conferences have been well received but, Ian admits, this remains a fairly niche subject area. “If you go in to the dean of your average medical school and say, ‘I want to teach your medical students about comics,’ they will say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I’ve stood


PHOTO S (clockwise from left): GP and graphic novelist Dr Ian Williams; the fi ctional Dr Iwan James lets off steam in an excerpt from The Bad Doctor; Ian illustrates typical thought processes in OCD.


in front of audiences of doctors and told them that they should read graphic novels and they just look at you like a complete idiot.” Nevertheless, there is a fi rm place for


comics in healthcare, he believes, and his new book stands as one of many that have off ered perspectives that might otherwise remain invisible. “I fi nd autobiographical comics in which people are talking about their own experiences fascinating. I am also interested in how authors fi nd ways of representing their illness. The way that we visualise somebody with meningitis or cerebral palsy is traditionally under the control of doctors and medical illustrators. But these comic artists who are drawing themselves, drawing their illness, are having some slight eff ect on the public consciousness or the way that we visualise disease. I think that’s really interesting.”


Adam Campbell is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to MDDUS publications


The Bad Doctor is published by Myriad Editions.


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