After appearing at a San Diego Comic-Con panel in 2016...
I’ve been developing public health comics since 2008, when award-winning Seattle comics artist David Lasky and I created No Ordinary Flu, a comic book that evolved from my work trying to raise awareness of the potential catastrophic nature of a severe influenza pandemic.
It’s hard to interest people in health warnings about an illness that comes around every year, and presenting the information in a standard fact sheet did little to raise their awareness.
But by using comics to tell the story of a family living through the influenza pandemic of 1918, the issue takes on emotional weight and urgency.
A narrative grounds the information in what happens to the characters.
Suddenly, a crisis that seemed abstract and distant becomes much more concrete and human.
David and I have since done a number of other projects for the health department, including Survivor Tales, a comic book series featuring real-life survivors of disasters telling their stories, and shorter comic strips such as Home with Flu.
Outside of the health department, I collaborated with a group of local comics artists and scholars on Comics 4 Health Coverage, project that invited people to tell why health insurance matters in four comic panels.
Yes, I’ve done some comics for kids, Ready Freddie and Disaster Buddies.
And we aren’t alone in our quirky endeavors. Public Health – Seattle & King County’s Emergency Medical Services has developed a comic book for the Chinese community about how to call 9-1-1. King County’s Local Hazardous Waste program and 4Culture worked with comics artist Edie Everette on a HazMatters comic book.
The Annals of Internal Medicine regularly features comics that detail the experiences of medical providers.
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