The intersection of dwarfism and gender in Alisa’s tale: Raising awareness through graphic narratives.

This note explores how experiences of people with dwarfism are explored in the graphic narrative Alisa’s Tale (A short story) by Al Davison. The purpose of Alisa’s tale is for young people to emphasise the lived experiences of people with dwarfism. This demonstrates how the graphic narrative uses imagery to convey the everyday social and spatial encounters experienced by people with dwarfism and subsequently Alisa’s experiences of psycho-emotional disablism. Unlike conventional forms of awareness raising, the graphic narrative forces the reader to stare at the dwarf body and witness the common reactions towards it through multimodal forms of representations. Graphic narratives provide expressive possibilities for vivid meaning-making through multimodal forms of representations (Garland-Thomson, 2016). Unlike conventional stories, the use of graphics within Alisa’s tale aids in situating the reader within Alisa’s perspective. This helps to demonstrate the world seen through the gaze of a young woman with dwarfism and position the average sized person as problematic. In the narrative, the average sized people who react negatively towards Alisa are depicted as monsters. According to Garland-Thomson (2016), the most distinct representational opportunity comics offer is hyperbole. Presenting average sized people as monsters helps to situate them as villains. How the narrative uses imagery to construct other people, who react negatively to Alisa’s presence, as monsters do two things. Firstly, as a reader with dwarfism, I can relate to the story. For average sized readers, it helps them to question their ableist beliefs and reactions towards people with dwarfism. According to Foss, Gray and Whalen (2016), graphic narratives offer the unique potential for transforming our understanding of disability in truly profound ways. This note will demonstrate how graphic narratives are beneficial in raising awareness about dwarfism. 

Using the Graphic Narrative to Stimulate Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory in Learners

This article describes a bounded action research case study that examines how reading and discussing a graphic narrative ( March Book Two, a comic autobiography of John Lewis’s life as a civil rights activist) enabled transformations in a group of seven adult student participants at a Canadian postsecondary institution. Data primarily gathered from photocopies of student work, including reflective journal entries, postsemester interviews, and the primary researcher’s daily reflexive and reflective research journal entries, were evaluated with Kitchenham and Chasteauneuf’s framework of assessing transformative learning with critical reflection types such as objective and subjective reframing of assumptions. The authors found that both the participants and the primary researcher engaged in a number of shifts, including engaging in systemic critical self-reflection of and on assumptions.

Comics in and of the Moment. The COVID19 pandemic: a graphic narrative.

ABSTRACT FOR GRAPHIC SUBMISSION TO:“COMICS IN AND OF THE MOMENT”. THE COMICS GRIDMónica LalandaBack in March 2020, when it became obvious that we were heading a big global disaster, I created a folder called Coronavirus Graphic Medicine. Since it was a unprecedented health care crisis, I expected a huge amount of art material related directly to the illness, the symptoms, the medical care, tests, treatments…I saw it as a great oportunity to confirm the use of such fabulous communication tool. Everytime I came accross a comic, infographic or cartoon in social media (mostly twitter and Instagram), I’d save it in my folder. I concentrated on work created in spanish but also foreign ones without any text.Within weeks, I was already surprised that the amount of graphic outpour was huge but there was little in terms of “proper” graphic medicine. As I continued to look into it in more detail, analysing all these amazing pieces, I could see that the illness itself was not the main character of the story, the protagonists of the covid-19 crisis were not the patients or the disease. It was clear that there was little contact with the patients, either locked in ther own rooms or in hospitals with no visitors. Covid-19 victims were surprisingly not the real issue. This in itself is very meaningful. .The illustrators also drew a lot about death but little about the dead ones, creamated without witnesses and buried almost in solitute . As the vignettes continued to enter my folder, I could see that somehow they were able to give an amazing narrative of the pandemia, there was hardly any graphic medicine but more of a story about a whole society going through a unique and damaging common experience. A kind of social graphic medicine of some sort. The suffering of a whole society rather than the illness of the individuals.They fitted into various themes that were obviouly catching the artists’ imagination. In my on-going analysis I ended up creating subfolders that allowed me to clasify and study them in a more logical way. These were the issues that gave way to more pieces:- Health care providers as heroes- Health care providers as victims of the system- Coping with the confinement.- The virus itself (anthopromorphism)- Death- “The curve”- Face masks- Timely themes (schools, Halloween, christmas…)- Information for people to avoid illness- vaccinesNow that things have settled, there is a new and different creation with a kind of retrospective eye. Yet again graphic medicine as such is missing. I’ve recently being invited to write the introduction of an anthology of comics about the pandemia where some of the best spanish comic creators have produced their own pieces about covid19. I notice a tendency to search for answers, to look into our society and our communities with some queries, to measure the effect of social inequalities or the importance of belonging, there is a concern about the psicological effect of those deaths that we were not allowed to mourn, the oportunity to value small things that we never noticed before. I almost sense a call to forget the ugly and to rebuild a new society upon the old ashes. It’s surprising the change in tone. Deep pesimism mixed with cheerful expectations.I’d like to create a comic reflecting on the analysis of all those hundreds of cartoons and comics that I’ve been looking at for over a year.My own work during the pandemia has been mostly graphic medicine as such and here is a link to some of it:https://monicalalanda.com/

Graphic Trauma

In this essay, I explore examples of what I call graphic trauma and the processof drawing as a form of working through the experience and event of sexual violence. I contend that comics and graphic narratives are a medium well-suited for rendering trauma, and the trauma of sexual violence in particular, as I show in an analysis of Una’s graphic narrative Becoming Unbecoming and Chanel Miller’s animated short film I Am With You. I argue that for both artists, drawing becomes a form of consciousness-raising, a collaborative feminist practice of memory work that attempts to create conditions – formal, therapeutic, and political – for women to say #MeToo and “we.” In my readings of Una’s and Miller’s draw-ing as working through sexual violence, I also demonstrate close verbal/visual description as a practice of care that keeps the testimony moving, drawing out the feminist practice of memory work in time and space and across modalities. A brief coda at the end of the essay offers an image of a hybrid figure from Miller’s graphic iconography and a concept and practice she calls “the third element.” I argue that this third element functions as a formal provocation for counter- modalities that change the story of sexual assault, creating a portal to resistance and healing.

Analisis Struktur Penceritaan Webtoon Horor Creep Episode 11

Webtoon is a form of graphic narrative that interweaves words and images through panel arrangement like a printed comic. However, webtoon’s vertical orientation is one of the few differing factors that excludes webtoon from the printed comic category. Like other genres in fictional graphic narrative, horror webtoon also adjusts its narrative structure through some of webtoon’s building aspects. This research aims to find out how the horror atmosphere is built in a popular Indonesian horror webtoon titled Creep created by Ino Septian by examining one of the representative episodes. This analysis is conducted by applying Zpalanzani's triangulation analysis model perfected by adding the structural affect theory of stories by Brewer and Lichtenstein. The results of this study indicate that some building aspects of webtoon such as the gutter space, the vertical orientation of the canvas, and the arrangement of the text that connects each panel are utilized to build the horror narrative and atmosphere. These three aspects provide the readers with a more emotional experience of the horror itself. Keywords: horror; webtoon; visual narrative