Article Communicable Diseases: Graphic Medicine and the Extreme Pramod K. Nayar 1 Abstract This article examines a new mode of communicating illness: graphic medicine or auto/pathography, biographies and autobiographies about the experience of illness (one’s own or that of another), written in comics form. In auto/pathography, the extreme condition of chronic pain or illness intrudes into the everyday, and the representation of this extreme is the subject of the article. The article demonstrates how the extreme is constituted by multiple temporalities, new protocols of engagement with everyday objects, the eversion of interiority, even as the narrative is cast as a sentimental one. Finally, it also unpacks the attempts by the sick to retain or assert a measure of agency in the face of illness. Keywords Graphic medicine, auto/pathography, disease writing, comics, extreme Introduction That battling cancer, bipolar disorders or a parent’s Alzheimer’s on a daily basis constitutes hardship and demands endurance on a massive scale is a truism that need not be reiterated. But how does one narrate this hardship, the monumental battles over medicine, the body’s needs and (deteriorating) functions, risky procedures and steady decline into death in some cases, or the triumphant return to a ‘normal’ state of health? How does one, in other words, communicate the experience of extreme pain through disease and accelerating debility and corporeal disability? Disease narratives are in and of themselves not new in the ield of literature. We can recall, most famously, John Keats documenting his tuberculosis, Virginia Woolf writing about her illness in On Being Ill, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1973, p. 7), to name just a few. Since the 1990s, a new genre has arisen: the auto/ pathography, an autobiographical account, in graphic novel form, of one’s experience with illness. A variant model is the pathography, a biographical account of somebody else’s—usually a loved one’s— illness. Auto/pathography is a radical new form of communicating disease, and the present article unpacks the constituents of this new form of communication. Journal of Creative Communications 10(2) 161–175 © 2015 Mudra Institute of Communications SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0973258615597385 http://crc.sagepub.com 1 Department of English, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, India. Corresponding author: Pramod K. Nayar, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, Prof. C.R. Rao Road, Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500 046, India. E-mail: pramodknayar@gmail.com at UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD on December 2, 2015 crc.sagepub.com Downloaded from