Announcing the Shortlists for the 2025 GMIC Awards

The Graphic Medicine International Collective (GMIC) is thrilled to announce the works shortlisted for the 2025 GMIC Awards.

These awards honor outstanding health-related comic projects in three categories: educational, short-form, and long-form. Works submitted were completed and/or published in 2024. The Graphic Medicine Awards committee and the board of GMIC thank our shortlisting judges for their diligent work in deciding on these three shortlists from the eighty-nine submissions received. The shortlisted works will now be shared with a new group of judges who will select winners in each category. The winners will be announced in an online ceremony in July 2025.

These awards are made possible by a generous matching gift in memory of Nancy and Herbert Wolf, and are intended to honor and carry on their legacy of service and care. You can read more about Nancy and Herbert here. This is a matching gift, so donations to support this award are needed and appreciated. Please donate here if you are able!

A new category for our awards this year is educational graphic medicine comics. This category is intended to celebrate excellence in health-related comics created primarily with an instructional aim. These comics emphasize one or more medical topic, treatment, disease, device, and/or biological function. They are intended to teach medical professionals, medical students, patients, caregivers, or the general public. Submissions in this new category can be of any length. When evaluating educational comics, our judges consider the following criteria:

• Innovation and creativity
• Potential for impact on learning outcomes
• Community engagement and collaboration
• Medical accuracy (required, but conventional medical illustrations are not)
• Accessibility and ease of understanding
• Effective use of the comics medium

The 2025 Shortlisted works for EDUCATIONAL comics are:

Abortion Pill Zine: A Community Guide to Misoprostol and Mifepristone

Isabella Rotman, Sage Coffey, and Marnie Galloway

Silver Sprocket (ISBN: 979-8886200546)

Isabella Rotman, Sage Coffey, and Marnie Galloway co-wrote and co-illustrated a short guidebook, Abortion Pill Zine: A Community Guide to Misoprostol and Mifepristone. Rotman, Coffey, and Galloway weave together sequential art and hand-drawn infographics that help readers navigate the legal, financial, and medical aspects of abortion care. The co-creators start that journey by introducing themselves, taking the form of comic characters in their own narrative, to turn their guidebook into a conversation between the three of them and the reader. After their introductions, the perspectives and styles of the three co-creators quickly meld into a unified voice. That voice speaks in plain and inclusive language that recognizes that transgender and nonbinary individuals are among the people who can experience pregnancy and abortion. It’s a voice that affirms that pregnancy and abortion can happen for a wide range of reasons and under a wide range of circumstances—and that no one can understand those circumstances better than the people experiencing them. More than just a how-to guide, the book also takes readers through a social history of abortion and an explanation of its changing legal landscape, offering doses of counseling, encouragement, and candor along the way. – Matt Peters, from his review here.

Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding

Maia Kobabe and Dr. Sarah Peitzmeier

Penguin Random House (ISBN: 978-0593855836)

University of Michigan Professor Dr. Sarah Peitzmeier teams with award-winning graphic novelist Maia Kobabe to deliver the experiences of over two dozen transgender and nonbinary individuals with chest binding. As transphobia makes binding more dangerous (Time Magazine), the best health practices for chest binding’s implementation are literally vital: its important role in gender-affirming care, particularly for AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) individuals, aids in peoples’ presentation to more comfortably match their identities. With Kobabe’s own Gender Queer earning the dubious honor of “most banned book of 2021 and 2022,” this graphic ethnography undoubtedly comes at a time of intense political debate and high vulnerability. Featuring respondents from a number of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, Breathe prioritizes personal health and self-acceptance above all, drawing from Peitzmeier’s own work as a social epidemiologist focusing on marginalized populations. Booklist praises it as a “unique, thoughtful, and evidence-based book perfect for individuals of any age considering binding or for readers interested in understanding the practice more thoroughly.” – A. David Lewis

Explain Cancer to Me: A Comic to Answer Common Questions about Cancer

Julia Shangguan, writer/producer/illustrator, Kathryn West, editor/writer, Jane Kollmer, editor/writer

University of Chicago Medicine – Comprehensive Cancer Center – OCECHE (Office of Community Engagement and Cancer Health Equity)

Julia Shangguan, a PhD student and artist at the University of Chicago, has joined with other researchers at the University of Chicago to create Explain Cancer to Me, a series of comics intended “to provide clear answers to common questions about cancer in an approachable and enjoyable visual format.” This 14-page digital zine covers the topics “Why don’t we have a cure for cancer yet?”, “What causes cancer?”, “How is cancer treated?”, and “How do I talk about cancer?”. It uses a question-and-answer format, with the narrator, Julia, guiding the reader through accessible explanations illustrated with visual metaphors and simplified treatment icons. The color palette is bright and inviting; each chapter is accompanied by a list of references to ground the information in evidence-based research. – Shelley Wall

Gendered bodies: A graphic medicine commentary

KC Barry Councilor and Ann E. Fink

Social Science and Medicine Journal; Sponsored by the National Institute of Health

KC Barry Councilor and Ann E. Fink combine a dialogue in comic form with more traditional academic discourse to frame a special issue of Social Science & Medicine on “Gender, power, and health.” A two-page introduction provides context for the use of comics for research translation and gives a brief overview of the field of graphic medicine. This is followed by a thirteen-page comic drawn by both authors in which they discuss and present “embodied, complicated narratives about gender, sexuality and health” with a particular focus on queer and transgender individuals’ experience of healthcare. The authors note that “to speak of gender and health is to speak of POWER, in all of its manifestations. Gendered stories of illness are built not only on major acts of violence, but on a lifetime of little moments.” Comics allow those individual moments—“the bittersweetness of being a person”—to emerge from behind the master-narrative of biomedical science, in a demonstration of how comics can “queer traditional forms of scholarship”. – Shelley Wall

Let’s Talk About the HPV Vaccine!

Beatrice Katsnelson, Ahmed Elzamzami, Caroline Valdez, Annika Mengwall, Michael Weinstock, Sarah Maurrasse, Sam Schild, Erik Waldman, Avanti Verma

Division of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, Department of Surgery, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA 

The ear, nose and throat (ENT; aka Otolaryngology) division at Yale University School of Medicine sponsored and several of their staff authored this short 8-page comic entitled Let’s Talk about the HPV Vaccine! The reason ENTs are interested in this subject is that the human papilloma virus has been linked to mouth and throat cancer among other cancers. In color with anthropomorphic virus and vaccine characters, Let’s Talk about the HPV Vaccine!  provides facts (e.g., “nearly everybody (70% — 90%) has been or will be exposed to HPV … [3]” and “The HPV Vaccine can prevent throat cancer … and the HPV infection itself [5]”). In a straightforward, interesting, and entertaining way this graphic medicine work educates the reader and public about who (everyone between ages 9 – 45) should get the vaccine and why. Furthermore, though not part of the comic, the authors used this comic for the “first study-to-date to validate the role of graphic medicine in patient education [9].” – Kevin Wolf

The 2025 shortlisted works for SHORT FORM comics are:

Closing the gap: How a church-hospital intervention on Chicago’s West Side is aiming to reduce hypertension

Josh Neufeld

The Journalist’s Resource and Chicago Sun-Times

For the third year, Josh Neufeld has made the short-form shortlist. In 2024 it was Empathy 101; in 2023 for Vaccinated at the Ball, which also won the short-form 2023 GMIC Award. This time his shortlisting is for a seven page color, graphic journalism work entitled Closing the gap: How a church-hospital intervention on Chicago’s West Side is aiming to reduce hypertension. Neufeld uses quotes from the people involved, map of the area, and public health information and presents it with eye-catching graphics. Neufeld uses the metaphor of a leaking firehose from specific causes (“systemic racism … poverty … poor diet … mistrust of healthcare”), while AFN helps repair the leaks.”

Founded in 2011, AFN [Alive Faith Network] is a partnership between Rush University Medical Center and coalition of Chicago-area churches [emphasis in original, 1].” Their goal was to close the 9-year life expectancy gap—due to cardiovascular disease made worse by hypertension—between African-Americans & everyone else in Chicago. AFN used a combination of Community Health Workers (CHWs) from the churches as the connectors between hospital providers and congregants to follow diet suggestions and medication rules. It’s hard for habits to change, while education and reinforcement helps. – Kevin Wolf

I Now Pronounce You Dead

Ryan Montoya

Boston Congress of Public Health Review

The question comes from the young boy Freddie sitting in the hospital room of a deceased family member. The body is still there, and Dr. Montoya has been paged to officially determine the boy’s kin as no longer alive. “How do you know he’s dead?” chirps Freddie, which Dr. Montoya frankly finds courageous. The short comic explores the legal, medical, and familial complexities of what should apparently be a simple determination: where does life end? In fact, author and artist Ryan Montoya offers not only an autobiographical account of his work as a hospital physician but also hints at the vagaries and idiosyncrasies in pronouncing a time of death. Across six short grayscale pages (with splashes of intervening color), Montoya delivers a detached-yet-compelling account of doctors’ last engagements with patients’ mortality. Informative and moody, “I Now Pronounce You Dead” appeared online in the BCPHR Journal as part of his ongoing comics installments on the oddities of the U.S. healthcare system. – A. David Lewis

Sunflowers

Keezy Young

Silver Sprocket (ISBN: 979-8886200379)

Sunflowers conveys the author’s experience of bipolar disorder. One of their aims in creating the comic, they write in the Afterword, was to combat the stigma of psychotic illness by showing what it is like to live with the disorder. The first-person narrative describes the breathless rush of hypomania, the terrors of psychosis, and the intense loneliness imposed by mental illness. The comic is beautifully illustrated in a retro style: at one point, a page enumerating management/coping strategies is laid out like the ads in the back of old comic books; on another page, the colored circles in a mood-tracker resemble Ben-Day dots. Sunflowers, at the outset of the work, are associated with the amped-up emotions of mania; by the end of the work, they seem to represent, instead, the act of opening up, of sharing a troubled aspect of personal history in an attempt to connect with other people. – Shelley Wall

True Stories from an ICU (3 comics) The Sisters, Recovery and Decline, and Calluses 

Ernesto Barbieri (writer), Jess Ruliffson (artist), Heather Hopp-Bruce (art director, animator, editor), Marjorie Pritchard (editor), Jim Dao (editor)

Boston Globe

These three 8-page comics were treated as a group, because these comics arise from the work of ICU nurse Ernesto, cartoonist-collaborator Jess, and editors at the Boston Globe. With thoughtful and compassionate reflection, these three ICU story comics share the daily struggles of patients and those who care about/for them.  Topics covered include end-of-life decision making, addiction, caregiving shortages, medical futility, and caregiver fatigue. For example, The Sisters is a story of “knee surgery, gone septic [1]” and doctors being reluctant to discuss end-of-life care.  Appearing sequentially in the Globe’s online edition allows for creative use of sound, color, and spot animations in the comics as well as reader reactions to each comic. – MK Czerwiec

Uprooted: Voices of Student Homelessness

Ashley Robin Franklin (artist/writer); Alexandra E. Pavlakis, Meredith P. Richards, J. Kessa Roberts (writers/researchers); Kacy McKinney (book designer, editor, book project lead)

Southern Methodist University (ISBN: 979-8218462956)

Uprooted: Voices of Student Homelessness provides one continuous story of varying homeless situations with transitions seeing those in the background of one story moving to the foreground in the next story. Based on interviews of student homelessness, this poignant work covers mental health and public health issues. Shelter rules may keep family members separated. Shelter recipients often lack privacy, lose control over activities and meals, and are emotionally stressed. Children might have to act as parents or fear separation from each other or their parents. Children’s living situation can be fraught, including living in a car; not wanting to share their situation with friends, having to live with a grandparent, having a parent in prison or with an addiction (drug use or alcohol). The Afterword explains educational rights for the homeless under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, including “immediate school enrollment, access to resources, and the option to stay at their current school even if they move [24].” -Kevin Wolf

The 2025 shortlisted works for LONG FORM comics are:

Bald

Text by Tereza Čechová, Art by Štěpánka Jislová, and translated by Martha Kuhlman and Tereza Čechová

Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press (ISBN: 978- 1637790809)

Translated from the original, 2020 Czech Muriel Award winner for Best Comics Book of the Year, Bald tells the autobiographical story of journalist Tereza Čechová and her journey with alopecia areata, a condition that affects over 160 million people worldwide, a majority of them women (National Alopecia Areata Foundation). Čechová teams up with illustrator Štěpánka Jislová, fellow co-founder of their Laydeez Do Comics branch, to explore the challenges to identity, to relationships, and to community that the condition presents. Translated into numerous languages worldwide, this English edition of Bald from Graphic Mundi also emphasizes the medical and holistic approaches taken to reverse or mitigate the disease. Brave and forthright, Čechová offer this as much as her own personal experience as a historical primer for those who might be negotiating alopecia themselves (or have loved ones addressing it) or simply questioning the aesthetics of hair and hairstyles. Jislová’s style may be dot-eyed and angular, but it is also remarkably accessible and raw, utilizing techniques like transparency, juxtaposition, and spot-color to take readers across time and culture. Publishers Weekly calls it “an adept portrayal of how looks are never just about looks,” and audiences are invited to evaluate where such an open and social struggle fits in the medical landscape. -A. David Lewis

here I am, I am me – An Illustrated Guide to Mental Health

Cara Bean

Workman Publishing (ISBN: 978-1523508051)

Cara Bean’s new book for teens and tweens, here i am, i am me: An illustrated Guide to Mental Health (Bean’s capitalizations), is informative, funny, compassionate, and indisputably timely. Bean has done her research. In her third chapter, “The Mind,” Bean illustrates different kinds of negative thoughts, including catastrophizing and “black-and-white thinking,” the latter of which she appropriately defines for her primary audience as “going to extremes with your thoughts … being overly harsh on yourself or others … [and] holding yourself to an impossibly high standard [57, Bean].” Bean’s illustrations complement her text and helpfully give concrete examples of “black-and-white thinking.” “People are never nice to me [57],” and “I won’t ever succeed [57],” appear in some of the characters’ speech bubbles. For each difficult topic in the book, however, Bean helpfully provides ideas for coping. Scattered throughout are uplifting insights and thoughts, including in Chapter 3, where Bean offers the following words for dealing with stressful situations: “I’m doing the best that I can,” “Eventually things will change,” “I’m learning as I go,” and “I will be okay [55].” Content advisory: This book contains information about suicide, addiction, and other forms of self-harm. – from review by Anna Simonson here.

The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War

Carl Sciacchitano

Gallery 13, an imprint of Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 978-1982102937)

The Heart That Fed by Carl Sciaccitano is a graphic memoir structured around interwoven timelines between Carl Sciacchitano and his father, David Sciacchitano, from before the Vietnam War in 1965 to the present day. Carl has known his father to be explosive and wrought with anxiety, yet also a loving parent. Since Carl was born years after his father served in Vietnam, he relied heavily on his father’s stories, letters, and photographs from the past to create this book. He wonders if those four years served in Vietnam forever altered and shaped his father’s personality and mental health and is curious what his father was like before serving: A 20-year-old college dropout who enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted and deployed to the front lines. Side-by-side drawings of Carl and his father in similar scenes or poses further amplify the presence of intergenerational trauma. Sciaccitano’s drawings are exquisite, with subtle color shifts and other graphic cues to orient the reader to past or current timelines. As Sciaccitano clearly demonstrates, the graphic novel is the medium to show and tell complex and relatable wartime stories shared by many veterans and their families. – from Michelle Ollie’s review here.

The Jellyfish

Boum, translated by Robin Lang and Helge Dascher

Pow Pow Press (ISBN: 978-2925114307)

The Jellyfish presents a charming and empathic picture of a childlike young woman, Odette, losing her sight from an undefined condition. The only (literal) blot on the landscape is a small dark image that has appeared in Odette’s vision and stubbornly remains. She visits an optometrist—indeed, the story begins with a detailed drawing of his phoropter, a testing device used to determine eyeglass prescriptions. But he tells her only that she has a jellyfish in her left eye. And that’s how it’s drawn, as a small and rather cute black marine blob with tentacles. The optometrist doesn’t seem worried, only advising her to “keep an eye out” (yes, that’s what the dialog balloon says!) for any changes. Then the jellyfish grows larger and starts to multiply. Gradually, Odette’s world turns completely black as the jellyfish take over. And she learns to negotiate full blindness with a rolling cane, dark glasses, and cautiously feeling her way around her apartment. It’s a poignant portrayal that entertains while eliciting empathy from the reader. And we learn from text on the back-cover flap that the story has its origin in the creator’s own eye problems. Boum (a pen name for French-Canadian cartoonist Samantha Leriche-Gionet) went blind in one eye from a similar condition. Boum’s art shines, however, resembling Japanese manga in the delicacy of line, endearing yet serious characters, and subtle black/greyscale hues.

– from Martha Cornog’s review here.

Traces of Madness: A Graphic Memoir

Fernando Balius, illustrated by Mario Pellejer, and translated by Richard Beevor and Malién Sganga

Graphic Mundi, an imprint of  Penn State University Press (ISBN: 978-1637790700)

Traces of Madness is Fernando Balius’s story of how “our thoughts get shipwrecked” (p. 18). Balius’s narrative, accompanied by Mario Pellejer’s illustrations, describes his experience—personal, interpersonal, and social—of mental illness in a deeply nuanced format that goes beyond memoir or essay. A central part of Balius’s experience is intervoice—hearing voices. In addition to navigating his relationship to his voices, Balius addresses the relationality involved in telling your story, and having someone illustrate your story. At times the work takes traditional comic form, with text and image working together to convey dramatized narrative; much of the time the book takes the form of first-person text accompanied by illustrations that capture the emotional/metaphorical valence of the narrative. – Shelley Wall

Long form honorable mention:

A Fox in my Brain

Lou Lubie (translated from the French by Fabrice Sapolsky)

FairSquare Comics LLC (ISBN: 978-1960171108)

Physical illnesses can often be obvious. It is hard to hide a broken arm, an open wound, jaundice, a tumor, and more. Because of this they are easily recognized by the public and healthcare providers. Mental illnesses, on the other hand, can be very difficult to recognize and diagnose. In her book, A Fox in my Brain, Lou Lubie writes and illustrates about this very thing in her journey with cyclothymia. Her journey to diagnosis is a harsh critique of mental healthcare. Therapy is very important and immensely helpful to countless people. Therapy is good, but not all therapists are. There are A LOT of things wrong with how we approach patients, and all of this is laid bare by the seven mental health providers who Lou sees. A psychiatrist tells her “Everyone has mood swings” (page 26) and so she can’t be bipolar. The psychiatrist refers her to a therapist who after one session informs her the psychiatrist was wrong and she IS bipolar which just causes more confusion for Lou. After many more visits to various therapists and the author’s own research, the book becomes a very approachable and informative depiction of the details of cyclothymia. It explains what the disease is, how it works, statistics in the normal population, and more. In a fun and colorful way, with energetic drawings it teaches the differences between cyclothymia and other bipolar disorders. Content advisory for suicidal ideation. – from review by M. T. Bennett here.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL!