WHEN GRAPHIC MEDICINE IS COMICS JOURNALISM: PANDEMIC STORIES IN COMIC STRIPS

Abstract

Comic book genre, understood as "a juxtaposition of words and images, in a certain sequence, with the aim of communicating stories and ideas", has made the leap to health communication through what is known as Graphic Medicine, which combines the language of comic strips, with health information content, from graphic pathographies to autobiographical or informative stories. A, emerging and trendy concept. Also, historically, Comic Journalism has been considered as a mere reporting format, chronicle, or, according to some studies, as a subgenre of graphic journalism. Although it is clear that this "slow journalism", which, in the words of Joe Sacco, focuses on "the people who are under the headlines", is already something different, innovative and unique which goes beyond the theoretical and conceptual framework of journalistic genres, leaving these works in a complicated limbo to classify. Major newspapers and magazines such as The New Yorker, Details, Time, New York Time Magazine, XXI, El País, El Norte de Castilla... have used these non-fiction comics in the same way and at the same level as their reports, photographs or infographics. This global phenomenon has also been established, reaching the point of moving into first-rate informative or narrative proposals in traditional media, beyond the longest works of graphic novels. Comic Journalism and Graphic Medicine; two novel concepts that converge on a fine line, especially when in 2020, a global pandemic came to change everything. From then until now, several pieces on the limits of journalistic comics and graphic medicine have emerged all over the world. Along these lines, the following stand out in Spain: Side Effects. 19 covid comics, by AA.VV.; Pandemic, by AA.VV, and A Tale of Confinement, by Paco Roca. This text intends to delve into the use of journalistic comics in graphic medicine with the case study of the works that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, within these informative parameters, such as a new format, a new communication and health trend full of potential. A review; a roadmap of this new journalistic genre that is on the rise, slowly but surely, and its confluences with the concept of graphic medicine.