On July 4, instead of celebrating our independence from the British again this year, I was arriving in Brighton, England to begin the 2013 Comics & Medicine conference. My hostesses were the warm and entertaining Jane & Muna.
En route to the opening reception, and every day of the conference, we passed through the most beautiful downs, made all the more amazing by the fact that the poppies were in bloom (and a horse racing track passes through them!)
There is a comic about this field here.
The stadium above is the home of the Brighton & Hove Albion Seagulls.
This is the fantastic venue for the conference, Brighton & Sussex Medical School.
The first event was a cocktail reception and art exhibit. This is a jam comic Ian and I did during his residency in Chicago last year. In a charity auction the following weekend it was bought by our host medical school for display in their offices. Couldn’t be more pleased!
Here is our hostess, geriatrician and comics artist Muna, with her artwork. I purchased this in the auction and will display it proudly in my studio!
I displayed a comic from Ivy Zine introducing the content of the presentation I gave the following day, one developed in partnership with Martha Montello of the University of Kansas, on Mattering Maps, Graphic Medicine, and bioethics.
You can see & hear our talk here.
Skipping ahead to the next day,It was my turn to present. One of the best things about presenting at Comics & Medicine conferences is that you can count on being represented in a broad range of styles and voices. I love this. Art begets art.
This one is by Lucy Lyons, whose dissertation work on knowing through drawing I quoted in the presentation.
And this one is by my traveling companion and Ivy Zine collaborator and BFF Mita.
And a recently discovered third by Sarah MacLeod.
The conference was two and a half days of amazing presentations, art, and community. With breaks for tea. You can learn more about the conference on the Graphic Medicine site, and follow the podcasts of all the talks as they are posted weekly through the coming year.
Sunday I was free to finally explore the seaside and a bit more of Brighton.
The Pavillion
More photos of this fun outing, and the entire trip, on my Flickr photostream.
Before I close, must point out that in Brighton we also attended a Laydeez do Comics, bringing the trip total to three – four if you include the one in Chicago before we left. You can hear Laydeez co-founder Nicola Streeten describe the ethic of Laydeez do Comics in this post of her talk at the conference in Glasgow, “From Wimmin to Grrrls to Laydeez do Comics.” Quite proud to be part of this franchise.
The next morning I headed back to the States, knowing it would take weeks to process the entire trip, as I’ve done here in the past month. Thanks for traveling along via this blog.
Planning now begins for Comics & Medicine 2014 in Baltimore!