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In recent years, medical educators have increasingly incorporated comics into their teaching to promote humanism and empathy and to encourage reflective practice. However, it remains unclear how and to what extent comics-based courses effectively address persistent challenges in medical education, such as the need for more engaging, multimodal learning strategies and the cultivation of emotional intelligence alongside clinical competencies. The aim of this study is to investigate the experiences of students who have enrolled in courses on comics and medicine during medical school. Students in North America who had taken such a course during the previous 5 years were invited to participate in an interview about their experiences. 17 students from 10 different medical schools in North America were interviewed. To explore the students’ views on the value of such courses to their medical education, we used a constructivist grounded analytic approach, employing thematic analysis to understand and interpret our interview. Students reported that comics-based courses support key aspects of their medical training that traditional pedagogical approaches may overlook, such as fostering self-reflection, enhancing empathy, and encouraging creative engagement with complex medical narratives. Moreover, comics contributed to their individual and collective professional identity formation by providing a space for introspection and shared discourse.

Comics are increasingly recognized as a flexible and multimodal medium capable of eliciting, constructing, analyzing, and disseminating qualitative data. Far from being merely illustrative or humorous, comics offer complex visual-narrative forms that can reflect and critique social realities, stimulate reflexivity, and engage diverse audiences. This approach highlights the scientific, ethical, and epistemological implications of using comics in research, particularly in relation to representation, positionality, and the visual construction of meaning. Comics can serve as tools for pedagogy, public sociology, and participatory inquiry, especially in areas such as health, gender, and digital cultures. From autoethnography and zine-making to the co-production of illness narratives, comics-based research encourages an inclusive, affective, and visually literate rethinking of qualitative inquiry. By situating comics within broader debates on methodological innovation, this perspective invites scholars to embrace the transformative potential of graphic storytelling in the social sciences.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the comicisation of qualitative sociology, i.e., the use of comics as research methods and analytical tools in sociology, drawing from case studies related to illness and neurodivergence. In the first part, we will pinpoint how comics as qualitative research methods enhance the reflexivity of sociologists themselves in the various phases of their research projects: from the definition of a case study to the choice of research and analysis techniques up to the communication of research outputs. In line with El Refaie’s (2012) concept of pictorial embodiment, we will show how producing drawn versions of the self helps to both enhance extended reflexivity and engage with physicality. In the second part of the paper we will illustrate two research experiences, related to the interdisciplinary research area of the Graphic Medicine (Czerwiec et al., 2010). The selected case studies are particularly meaningful in two respects: first, they show how the use of comics in qualitative sociological research contributes to go beyond standard individualistic epistemologies and helps to highlight meso and macrostructural factors which are crucial to analyse social phenomena. Second, they shed light on how comics provide multiple opportunities to portray embodiment and reflect upon the social and cultural dimensions of embodiment processes, thanks to their language and socio-cultural specificities as a medium and cultural object. We will conclude with some reflections on how graphic narratives may be used in qualitative research to investigate how socially marginalised people experience daily interactions and social conditions.

This paper illustrates how the design of health-related comics contributes to reflecting on the methodological and ethical challenges of qualitative research. In line with Comics-Based Research (CBR), we demonstrate how creating a comic on medical topics emerges from continuous and iterative dialogue among multiple voices: patients, sociologists, artists, and physicians. On an ethical and methodological level, our study explores the creation of a comic book about pancreatic diseases with varying stages of severity and possibilities for cure and recovery. Constructing a comic in such contexts provides a new way of visualizing and understanding the illness experience. Representing traumatic memory in comics can profoundly affect readers and those whose memories are depicted, while also helping researchers to amplify the voices of individuals whose experiences have been marginalized or misunderstood. Our goal was to create a product that was both a graphic memoir based on true stories and a scientific and informative resource. However, the graphic novel was not merely a tool for disseminating research; it was the central focus of our project, with all aspects designed around this medium. This included the development of interview protocols and the selection of participants, ensuring that the process remained aligned with the principles of participatory and co-constructed storytelling.

This special collection of Health Promotion Practice introduces critical narrative intervention (CNI) as a key theoretical framing for an asset-based, narrative, and participatory approach to promoting health and addressing social inequality. Innovative digital and visual methodologies highlighted in this special collection—comics and graphic novels, cellphilms and other participatory film, story booths, digital storytelling, and photovoice—are changing the way critical public health researchers and practitioners forge new knowledge, creating new possibilities for interdisciplinary and activist-based inquiry. Public health research and engagement efforts that critically contend with historically repressive structures and intervene through narrative and participatory processes to enact change with and for disenfranchised communities are long overdue. This special collection showcases six CNI projects that promote equity and justice in the context of LGBTQ, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse young people; people who inject drugs living with hepatitis C virus; young women who trade sex; undocumented and formerly undocumented immigrants; and people living with HIV/AIDS. It is our intent that this collection of exemplars can serve as a guidepost for practitioners and researchers interested in expanding the scope of critical public health praxis. Individually and collectively, the special collection illustrates how CNI can create space for the increased representation of historically silenced populations, redress stigma, and provoke important questions to guide a new era of health equity research.