The geographic concept of scale is not merely a mathematical concept: it functions rhetorically and narratively in the 2016 work of graphic medicine, “The Invisible War: A Tale on Two Scales”. This work, created collaboratively by Dr. Gregory Crocetti, Briony Barr, Dr. Jeremy Barr, Ben Hitchings, and Ailsa Written, explores the concepts of symbiosis and conflict as they are enacted at two highly divergent scales during the First World War: on the European battlefield of the Western Front and in the body of an Australian nursing sister who contracts bacterial dysentery. Through its rhetorical deployment of the principle of scale, “The Invisible War” challenges the ways we frame the institutions of medicine, warfare, biology and geography. I will explore these rhetorical challenges, while noting some of the aesthetic and epistemological limitations produced by the two-scale narrative mode.

A lecture at the Berlin Comic Colloquium by PathoGraphics visiting fellow Prof. Susan Merrill Squier followed by lightning talks on contemporary projects and varying approaches to comic research in Germany and the USA (lecture and talks in English)