MK Czerwiec

Timed for the 20th anniversary of the critically acclaimed, Eisner Award–winning webcomic-turned-graphic novel, Mom’s Cancer is a revised and expanded edition featuring 32 pages of all-new material. With 22 additional comics pages and new essays from Brian Fies; nurse MK Czerwiec, cofounder of graphicmedicine.org; and editor Charles Kochman, this edition is a must-have. Winner of the first-ever Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic, Mom’s Cancer was the reason the category was created, and has been hailed as one of the 10 most important Eisner Award winners of all time by Comic Book Resources (CBR). An honest, unflinching, and sometimes humorous look at the practical and emotional effect that serious illness can have on patients and their families, Mom’s Cancer is a story of hope—one that has changed the lives of readers worldwide, created new fields in the comics industry, and was the inspiration for Graphic Medicine, a field that explores and supports the interaction between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. Mom’s Cancer first gained notice online as a webcomic. It was posted anonymously by Brian Fies, with the intention of sharing information and insights gained from his family’s experience. Just prior to publication, Mom’s Cancer became the recipient of the first-ever Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic, and went on to win the German Youth Literature Prize, the Harvey Award for Best New Talent, and the Lulu Blooker Prize, and received multiple nominations, including Best Book for Young Adults from the American Library Association. It has also been translated into seven languages and counting (Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Slovenian, and Spanish). Twenty years later, Mom’s Cancer continues to resonate with readers all over the world. This revised and expanded anniversary edition features 32 pages of of all-new material, including 22 additional comics pages and essays from Fies and nurse MK Czerwiec, cofounder of graphicmedicine.org, that will provide readers and teachers and practitioners with context and resources for how to use this book, and an introduction by editor Charles Kochman.

A decade ago, Graphic Medicine Manifesto established a bold new framework for understanding the intersection of comics and healthcare. It was a call to action—an invitation to rethink the ways we engage with medicine, illness, disability, and caregiving through the power of visual storytelling. Now, ten years later, this landmark volume returns in a special anniversary edition that expands and reimagines its mission for a new era. With a new critical preface, this tenth-anniversary edition reflects on Graphic Medicine Manifesto’s legacy and its impact on healthcare, scholarship, and comics. It reaffirms the power of comics to challenge disciplines, amplify marginalized voices, and transform teaching in a range of health fields. Organized into six sections, the introduction explores the manifesto’s origins and ongoing relevance, its role as a radical tool in comics, the power of storytelling in health education, the expanding influence of graphic medicine on disability studies and the humanities, the importance of community and collaboration in breaking disciplinary silos, and the future of the field. Featuring these newly contextualized insights alongside the original essays and visual narratives by Ian Williams, MK Czerwiec, and other leading practitioners, this new edition reaffirms Graphic Medicine Manifesto as an essential text for scholars, healthcare professionals, creators, and anyone engaging with medicine, illness, and caregiving through the power of comics.

Fear of contagion, isolated patients, a surge of overwhelming and unpreventable deaths, and the frontline healthcare workers who shouldered the responsibility of seeing us through a deadly epidemic: as we continue to confront the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, Taking Turns reminds us that we’ve been through this before. Only a few decades ago, the world faced another terrifying and deadly health crisis: HIV/AIDS. Nurse MK Czerwiec began working at the Illinois Masonic Medical Center’s HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 in the 1990s—a pivotal time in the history of AIDS. Deaths from the disease in the United States peaked in 1995 and then dropped drastically in the following years, with the release of effective drug treatments. In this graphic memoir, Czerwiec provides an insider’s view of the lives of healthcare workers, patients, and loved ones from Unit 371. With humor, insight, and emotion, MK shows how the patients and staff cared for one another, how the sick faced their deaths, and how the survivors looked for hope in what seemed, at times, like a hopeless situation. Drawn in a restrained, inviting style, Taking Turns is an open, honest look at suffering, grief, and resilience among a community of medical professionals and patients at the heart of the AIDS epidemic.

This inaugural volume in the Graphic Medicine series establishes the principles of graphic medicine and begins to map the field. The volume combines scholarly essays by members of the editorial team with previously unpublished visual narratives by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, and it includes arresting visual work from a wide range of graphic medicine practitioners. The book’s first section, featuring essays by Scott Smith and Susan Squier, argues that as a new area of scholarship, research on graphic medicine has the potential to challenge the conventional boundaries of academic disciplines, raise questions about their foundations, and reinvigorate literary scholarship—and the notion of the literary text—for a broader audience. The second section, incorporating essays by Michael Green and Kimberly Myers, demonstrates that graphic medicine narratives can engage members of the health professions with literary and visual representations and symbolic practices that offer patients, family members, physicians, and other caregivers new ways to experience and work with the complex challenges of the medical experience. The final section, by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, focuses on the practice of creating graphic narratives, iconography, drawing as a social practice, and the nature of comics as visual rhetoric. A conclusion (in comics form) testifies to the diverse and growing graphic medicine community. Two valuable bibliographies guide readers to comics and scholarly works relevant to the field.