Sleepless Planet

I had the first of my four Comix Activism classes on Saturday. This class is being taught by Maureen Burdock, author of Sleepless Planet (and Queen of Snails) and this first session was on Health Justice and Graphic Medicine, a topic I’m particularly interested in since it intersects with my work on End-of-Life Issues.

Comics work well for activism: they are democratic, inexpensive, widely accessible, and can operate happily outside capitalist consumer culture. Maureen called the “portable empathy machines.”

I particularly like her take on insomnia since she’s suffered from it since she was a child and has tried just about everything to address it — and there’s no one quick fix, bur rather, it must be approached holistically. (It’s also very common for post-menopausal women to suffer from it, which has certainly been my experience.)

The comic at right was drawn during our initial warm-up exercise, whose prompt was “draw your day” — Maureen is in Europe so her day was coming to a close, but mine had just started!