Polite Dissent

I thought I’d take a minute and go over my philosophy on reviews, and medical reviews in particular. I love comics. I’ve been reading them for over two-thirds of my life. I have tremendous respect for anyone who has the talent and ability to write or illustrate a comic. I don’t review comics to be snarky or seem clever. I review comics because I’m concerned about what I’m reading. I am troubled by the amount of medical misinformation in the media (and that includes comic books) and the amount of typos and other blatant mistakes in comics. When I see these two problems — especially together — I feel compelled to act.

Medicine is rarely straightforward. It is complex and confusing and getting more complicated by the day. There is a large amount of bad and misleading information out there (especially on this new-fangled “world wide web” ). I see the same sort of incorrect information in magazines, on news reports, and on movies and TV shows (and let’s not even mention infomercials or spam). Patients get medical information everywhere; they’ll come in and ask me about what they saw on movies, TV, or the news. I spend much of my day correcting misunderstandings. These same mistakes are creeping into comic books (for instance, despite what Batman and Elektra would have us believe, you can’t treat viruses with antibiotics). I review comics to bring these mistakes to light, and to provide a little medical education (and hopefully a little entertainment along the way).

I pay my hard-earned money for comic books and I expect a professional job. I don’t want to find typos, poor grammar or other blatant errors. I can sympathize with mistakes on fan publications or websites but not from professional publishers. The recent image from The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Wolverine 2004 demonstrates the problem perfectly: 6 mistakes in a single image. 4 of these mistakes could have been prevented with a simple minute’s Google. I have no patience and no sympathy for such unprofessional errors in a product that I am expected to buy.

I don’t pre-select comics for medical reviews*, I just read through my monthly stack of books. If I come across any sort of medical scene, I put it aside. I’ll later re-read these comics. Ones with good (or bad) scenes, I’ll put in my “to do” short box. Comics with a particularly egregious scene get put next to my computer and addressed right away.

It really doesn’t take much to write a good medical scene. Almost all the information you could ever need is in the library or on the internet. Check some of the sites on my sidebar. It there are still any questions, my e-mail’s on the top up there. Just remember, a little medicine goes a long way; don’t overdo it. As for grammar and spelling, that’s what proofreaders and editors are for, not readers.

*I do take requests, if there’s any particular comic scene you wonder about.