Body, Soul, and Comics

Body, Soul, and Comics: Graphic Religion and Graphic Medicine follows A. David Lewis’s unique scholarly journey through graphic religion and graphic medicine, exploring how comics intersect with healthcare, clinical practice, spirituality, patient experience, and belief. Drawing on more than two decades of academic research, Lewis reframes both fields through the distinct narrative and visual language of comics. Though often seen as opposites—spiritual versus scientific—religion and medicine share concerns with selfhood, community, personal well-being, and transformation. Through comics, Lewis reveals these shared concerns and examines how selfhood, identity, and embodiment emerge through visual storytelling. Blending scholarship with autobiography, Lewis weaves personal moments—a religious conversion, experiences with anxiety, and academic work within a healthcare setting—into a broader analysis of representation and meaning in comic books. His account resists the traditional divide between theory and lived experience, grounding abstract ideas in the personal and the visual. Body, Soul, and Comics is both a call for disciplinary reunification and a meditation on how comics themselves bridge seemingly disparate realms—text and image, body and spirit, illness and meaning.