Body, Soul, and Comics

A. David Lewis is associate professor of English and health humanities at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS). Lewis is also an Eisner Award nominee (2015) and judge (2023) as well as coeditor of Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation. A founder of library collections at both Boston University and MCPHS, Lewis focuses his teaching and research on the depictions of cancer and of loneliness in comic books and graphic novels. He is inaugural coeditor of the Graphic Medicine Review journal and the acclaimed author of such comics as The Lone and Level Sands and the one hundredth anniversary comics adaptation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

• PrefaceIntroductionChapter 1: Islam, Comic Books, and the Aniconism FallacyChapter 2: Jewish Comics and the Krypton HypothesisChapter 3: Superman Graveside: Superhero Salvation Beyond JesusChapter 4: What’s Next for Muslim Superheroes?Chapter 5: Fictoscripture and the Wormhole SacredChapter 6: Building Toward Graphic MedicineChapter 7: A Graphic-Medicine PrescriptionChapter 8: Comics as a Dysoncological MediumChapter 9: Enpaneled Being, Being EnpaneledAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesCreditsIndex

"Body, Soul, and Comics is a personal and thorough new exploration of body/comics themes, a meeting of the fields of religion and medicine through comics. Lewis is a poet. While it’s readable and clear, the language is often beautiful, and the points, while rigorous, are theological in import." - Elizabeth Rae Coody, coeditor of Monstrous Women in Comics"By forging a compelling connection between comics, religion, and graphic medicine, Body, Soul, and Comics opens an original line of inquiry. It demonstrates how visual storytelling can mediate questions of suffering, care, belief, and embodiment in ways that are both ethically attentive and critically nuanced. A significant contribution to health humanities and graphic medicine scholarship, this book will reshape how we read graphic illness narratives within spiritual, religious, and cultural contexts". - Sathyaraj Venkatesan, professor of English at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India"Body, Soul, and Comics: Graphic Religion and Graphic Medicine is a smart, engaging, provocative, out-of-the-box study of two crucial fields and their perhaps-surprising overlap. In a work both scholarly and personal, A. David Lewis shows us why he’s one of the most dynamic writers in comics studies today. An important contribution to multiple disciplines." - Hillary Chute, Distinguished Professor of English and Art Design at Northeastern University and author of Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere"Body, Soul, and Comics offers important contributions to narrower fields like graphic medicine and graphic religion and wider fields like comics studies and the health humanities and has the rare quality of appeal for both students and masters of its subjects. Its true gift, however, lies in its complication of the very scholarly binary its subtitle emphasizes. Blending scholarship, memoir, and a welcome taste of activism, Lewis imagines a future where the oft-discussed transdisciplinary nature of a field like graphic medicine expands further, to a place where the whole of human experience is considered in comics." - Matthew Noe, lead collection and knowledge management librarian at Countway Library, Harvard Medical School"With impressive scholarship and vulnerability, in a refreshingly clear and personal tone, A. David Lewis convincingly celebrates the full range of human experience—physical and spiritual—in the comic form." - MK Czerwiec, author of Menopause: A Comic Treatment