Comics have always responded to pandemics/catastrophes, documenting the way we deal with such crises. Recently, graphic medicine, an interdisciplinary field of comics and medicine, has been curating comics, editorial cartoons, autobiographical cartoons, and social media posts under the heading "COVID-19 Comics" on their websites. These collected comics express what we propose to call covidity, a neologism that captures both individual and collective philosophical, material, and wide-ranging emotional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Treating such comics as the source material and drawing insights from theorists Ian Williams, Alan Bleakley, Susan Sontag, and others, this article examines graphic medicine's representation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conceptual metaphors of war, anthropomorphism, and superheroism are used to represent and illustrate the lived experience of the pandemic, and the article investigates metaphor types, their utility, and motivational triggers for such representations. In doing so, the essay situates graphic medicine as a productive site that presents the pandemic's multifarious impact.
Effective doctor patient relationships are predicated on doctors' relational engagement and affective/holistic communication with the patients. On the contrary, the contemporary healthcare and patient-clinician communication are at odds with the desirable professional goals, often resulting in dehumanization and demoralization of patients. Besides denigrating the moral agency of a patient such apathetic interactions and unprofessional approach also affect the treatment and well-being of the sufferer. Foregrounding multifaceted doctor-patient relationships, graphic pathographies are a significant cultural resource which recreate the embodied moment of clinical encounters as they also lay bare qualitative tensions between patient' illness experience with doctor's professional understanding of the same. Taking these cues, the present article drawing theoretical postulates of Rita Charon, Deborah Lupton, and Havi Carel close reads Peter Dunlap-Shohl's My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson's (2015), Brian Fies' Mom's Cancer (2006), and Stan Mack's Janet & Me: An Illustrated Story of Love and Loss (2004) to investigate the nature of doctor-patient relationship vis-à-vis communication and the implications of bad doctoring/communicative practices on patient identity and emotions. Furthermore, the article also examines the aesthetic and functional role of comics in bringing into relief the graphically mediated doctor-patient relationship.
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