The Graphic Medicine Awards 2025 nominees have been announced. The awards showcase comics that inspire and enlighten various aspects of human health. Winners will be announced in a virtual ceremony this July.
The 2025 edition of the Graphic Medicine Awards received 89 submissions across all categories. Winners will each receive a $600 prize and a special commemorative item.
As in every year so far, work spotlighted in the nominations lists highlights a wide range of subjects—abortion, trauma, cancer care, vaccines, gender, and more—from a whole mix of sources. Comics featured in each category come from traditional book publishers, small presses, medical and university institutions, newspapers, and medical journals. If you ever wonder if comics are really making inroads, the field of graphic medicine is a ray of hope.
The Graphic Medicine Awards are organized by the Graphic Medicine International Collective, a non-profit that supports the interaction between the comics medium and health. The organization and Awards themselves are supported by a mix of public donations and a $5,000 commemorative annual gift in honour of Nancy and Herbert Wolf.
Begun in 2022, this year’s edition introduces a new third category highlighting those comics from the past year with an instructive intent. This new category, Best Educational Comic, will join the Graphic Medicine Awards’ Best Short Form and Best Long Form Comic categories (short form is anything below 28 pages).
Talking about the new category, the Graphic Medicine Awards said:
“A new category for our awards this year is educational graphic medicine comics. This category is intended to celebrate excellence in health-related comics created primarily with an instructional aim. These comics emphasize one or more medical topic, treatment, disease, device, and/or biological function. They are intended to teach medical professionals, medical students, patients, caregivers, or the general public.”
Typically, the Graphic Medicine Awards are part of the annual summer Graphic Medicine Conference. Since 2025 will be a pause year, there is no concrete date on when the winners will be announced.
The last conference occurred in Athlone, Ireland, July 16-18, 2024. The winners that year were Hayley Gold’s Nervosa (Street Noise Books) in Long Form, and Elaine M. Will’s self-published anxiety minicomic Spiral Sessions in Short Form.
Graphic Medicine Award for Best Educational Comic
- Abortion Pill Zine: A Community Guide to Misoprostol and Mifepristone, by Isabella Rotman, Sage Coffey, & Marnie Galloway (Silver Sprocket)
- Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding, by Maia Kobabe and Dr. Sarah Peitzmeier (Penguin Random House)
- Explain Cancer to Me: A Comic to Answer Common Questions about Cancer, by Julia Shangguan, Kathryn West & Jane Kollmer (University of Chicago Medicine) — 14 page digital zine
- Gendered bodies: A graphic medicine commentary, by KC Barry Councilor and Ann E. Fink (Social Science and Medicine Journal)
- Let’s Talk About the HPV Vaccine!, by Beatrice Katsnelson, Ahmed Elzamzami, Caroline Valdez, Annika Mengwall, Michael Weinstock, Sarah Maurrasse, Sam Schild, Erik Waldman, Avanti Verma (Yale University School of Medicine)
Graphic Medicine Award for Best Short Form Comic
- Closing the gap: How a church-hospital intervention on Chicago’s West Side is aiming to reduce hypertension, by Josh Neufeld (The Journalist’s Resource and Chicago Sun-Times)
- I Now Pronounce You Dead, by Ryan Montoya (Boston Congress of Public Health Review)
- Sunflowers, by Keezy Young (Silver Sprocket)
- True Stories from an ICU [3 comics — The Sisters, Recovery and Decline, and Calluses], by Ernesto Barbieri, Jess Ruliffson, Heather Hopp-Bruce, Marjorie Pritchard, Jim Dao (Boston Globe)
- Uprooted: Voices of Student Homelessness, by Ashley Robin Franklin, Alexandra E. Pavlakis, Meredith P. Richards, J. Kessa Roberts, Kacy McKinney (Southern Methodist University)
Graphic Medicine Award for Best Long Form Comic
- Bald, by Tereza Čechová & Štěpánka Jislová; translated from Czech Martha Kuhlman and Tereza Čechová (Graphic Mundi)
- here I am, I am me – An Illustrated Guide to Mental Health, by Cara Bean (Workman Publishing)
- The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War, by Carl Sciacchitano (Gallery 13)
- The Jellyfish, by Boum; translated from French by Robin Lang and Helge Dascher (Pow Pow Press)
