Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Marc Chalufour

A. David Lewis didn’t always look for deep meaning in his comic books. As a kid, he just wanted to be transported to the worlds of his favorite toys, like G.I. Joe, Transformers, and He-Man. Gradually, he began to appreciate the medium on new levels. “I was a voracious reader and I credit comics, particularly superhero comics, with giving me my vocabulary,” he says.

As an English major at Brandeis University, Lewis (GRS’12) began to study comics as works of literature. At Boston University, where he earned a PhD in religion and literature, he considered how they fit into the canon of mythic lore and morality plays. Now, he focuses on graphic medicine—the portrayal of healthcare in comics.

Lewis is an associate professor of English and health humanities at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, where he teaches multiple courses about graphic medicine. In October 2025, he helped to organize the New England Graphic Medicine Summit, a conference for storytellers and healthcare workers. And his new book, Body, Soul, and Comics: Graphic Religion and Graphic Medicine (University Press of Mississippi, 2026), comes out in May.

“My mom said something great to me once when I was young: ‘You’re probably training for something that doesn’t exist yet,’” Lewis says. Now, he’s at the vanguard of a growing field.

Comics that take on serious subjects aren’t new. Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) published a comic in 1957 to publicize the nonviolent activist movement. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Pantheon Books, 1991), which tells the story of his family during the Holocaust, was the first graphic novel to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

“Comics are disarming,” Lewis says. “They work for both high and low literacy—they work for kids and then work in a whole new way for adults.” Telling a Holocaust story from the perspective of mice, as Spiegelman did, opens the door to audiences reluctant—or unable—to read a longform story on the subject. That, he says, makes comics “attractive to big, powerful, even revolutionary messages.”

When Lewis looks back at some of the superhero comics of his childhood, he sees a subtext that he hadn’t considered. For example, Wolverine, one of Marvel’s X-Men, has mental health issues. “He’s an amnesiac. He has rage issues. There’s something amazing about a hero who suffered, who didn’t trust his own mind,” he says.

With his new book, Lewis brings together his study of religion and medicine. “I don’t think it was an accident that I shifted to healthcare,” he says. “I’ve noticed the shared concerns, the shared approaches, the shared questions that they have, and comics are a wonderful space for them to engage each other. The through-line is that both of these fields represent selfhood.”

Lewis’ most popular course at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences is Cancer in Comics. For the reading list, he’s able to draw on what has become a rich genre that includes Brian Fies’ Mom’s Cancer (Abrams, 2011), about the author and his siblings dealing with their mother’s illness, and Kimiko Does Cancer (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), author Kimiko Tobimatsu’s story of facing breast cancer as a young, queer woman.

“There’s something about the medium that invites those who don’t have power, those who are marginalized and vulnerable, to express themselves,” Lewis says.

There’s also evidence that these stories can improve health outcomes. A 2019 study by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine showed that comics—specifically My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson’s (Penn State University Press, 2015) by Peter Dunlap-Shohl—increased doctors’ empathy for people with Parkinson’s.

“Comics can deliver messages and thoughts and experiences in a mediated way,” Lewis says, “in a way that doesn’t assault the reader, but still can deliver some really hard truths.”