On time and space: An excerpt from ‘Drawing unbelonging’

Abstract

This short comic is an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation ‘Drawing unbelonging’, where I draw comics with an experimental approach to explore the potential of the medium and its uses in scholarly communication and graphic medicine. Throughout the dissertation I make use of several innovations enabled by the medium, such as the De Luca effect (where the artist draws multiple images of a single character in different stages of action against the backdrop of one static scene), to demonstrate how the medium allows for multiple temporalities to co-exist simultaneously on the page. My goal is to use comics not as an illustrative tool to supplement the text, but as a method to think, strategize, find patterns, give form to an inchoate idea through investigative drawing and develop a deeper understanding of how the visual grammar of comics can be utilized to map the connection between the public health challenges of our time, and socioeconomic, racial and environmental inequality. In this excerpt, I use the ‘sequential and simultaneous’ nature of comics to show the various and intersecting uses of the medium through visual metaphors.