This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome A. David Lewis, author of Body, Soul, and Comics.

About 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.

About A. David Lewis: A. David Lewis is associate professor of English and health humanities at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS). Lewis is also an Eisner Award nominee (2015) and judge (2023) as well as coeditor of Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation. A founder of library collections at both Boston University and MCPHS, Lewis focuses his teaching and research on the depictions of cancer and of loneliness in comic books and graphic novels. He is inaugural coeditor of the Graphic Medicine Review and the acclaimed author of such comics as The Lone and Level Sands and the one hundredth anniversary comics adaptation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

This week’s picks:

• David: Witch Hat Atelier Manga by Kamome Shirahama
• Tracy: The History of Science Fiction: A Graphic Novel Adventure by Xavier Dollo (Author), Djibril Morissette-Phan (Illustrator)
• Patrick: WOLFBOX MF60 Compressed Air Duster

Links:

• A. David Lewis on Instagram
• Tracy Townsend on BluSky
• Patrick Hester on Instagram
• The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2026 Patrick Hester

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