“comics … are ideal for exploring taboo or forbidden areas of illness and healthcare” – reminded me of a conversation I had in one of my classes, Critical Experiences, where we talked about how mediums change what is possible to discuss in a project.
In this discussion, we talked about film v.s. animation. I talked about how in animations (like Rick and Morty), theres a sense of gap between the animation’s world and the ‘real world.’ With this chasm, animations can be more gross visuallyithout the audience feeling too uncomfortable. For exmple, in animation, one may see a person’s head getting chopped off by a saw knife, but as long as it’s in a unrealistic style (or cute), the audience wouldn’t mind it as much as watching a real person’s head getting chopped off in a film.
Similarly, comics serve as a great tool to discuss a ‘taboo’ subject because there’s a sense of gap between the story and the reader. This is further discussed in chapter 5 of the reading: comics can “control the distance betwenn the author and the reader.”
Furthermore, I really liked the concept of making the invisible visible in narrative medicine. By creating “their own iconography of illness” and their experiences, their visual stories become so unique because no one experiences something in a same way.
This was especially true when Dahl’s comics were shown in the readings. The one that I thought was the most powerful was the depiction of a person with herpes.
Before seeing the images, when thinking of someone with herpes, I focused on the disease itself. I put emphasis on what herpes was — what it looked like, the cause of it, how it can spread, etc.. I also often found myself labeling herpes into a more negative category than it had to be; it felt like a relevation when I read that herpes, at the end, are just another “skin rash.” For some reason, hearing that phrase really changed my view point and snapped me back to see herpes in a different light.
Then, Dahl’s comics truly enhanced the shifting of my perspective on herpes. They made me realize that with the disease, there is someone who expereinces that illness.
Dahl’s comics were so powerful in their depiction of what someone with herpes might feel like. It was something I’ve never witnessed before; narrating someone’s perspective with herpes was truly something that was so underlooked and seen as ‘unimportant’ in today’s society. The comics made me self-reflect a lot on my past assumptions and made me realize that narrating experiences are so underrepresented & underappreciated by the society’s emphasis on ‘objectiveness’ and ‘properness’ of an illness.