Bridging communication gaps is all about how to best reach your audience, and different audiences require different things. That’s how I found myself taking a graphic medicine course where I discovered a way to combine public health with comics to discuss the potential health effects of living next to unregulated coal ash landfills. I had been sitting on this topic for a long time, but I didn’t have the tools to execute it until I was introduced to comics journalism and comic scholarship. I knew the written word alone would never reach the communities I wanted to connect with, but a comic just might. 

Creating this piece taught me how to distill complex information into clear, visual narratives. It’s easy to adopt “less is more” as the perfect mantra when you have to draw everything, but deciding which information was relevant enough to make the cut helped me make my point more effectively by eliminating any truly unnecessary details. There’s a lot you can say in just a few panels without saying anything at all. There’s also a lot you can say without the need to be the next Picasso. Creating comics opened the door to a new way of thinking and communicating that I have genuinely grown to love and will continue to incorporate into my future scholarship.