Messy Graphic Medicine: Epistemic Aesthetics of Disorganization in the Psychosis Webcomics and Collages of Andrew Field and Five Seventeen

Narratives of lived experiences of mental distress are often shaped by mediating actors such as editors, literary agents, friends, and publishers, who encourage coherent and accessible structures (Van Goidsenhoven and Masschelein 2018, 4–5). While such coherence may facilitate publication and readability, it can also suppress formal and experiential elements central to mental illness itself. This is particularly true of disorganization in psychosis, a clinical term encompassing disruptions in affect, behavior, thought, and speech (Biancalani et al. 2025, 921–22). This paper will argue that graphic medicine can evoke experiences of psychotic disorganization through deliberately fragmented and ‘messy’ aesthetic forms that challenge “diagnostic certainty” (Woods 2011, 105). Examining the work of the American cartoonist and writer Andrew Field and the Canadian artist Five Seventeen, I will explore how webcomics and collage can offer distinctive strategies for representing discontinuity, fragmentation, and epistemic uncertainty. More specifically, I will focus on closure and gutters in Field’s Dissonance webcomic series (2023) and layering and archival multimodal assemblages in Five Seventeen’s Laglands: Double Bookkeeping (2024), a graphic construction combining notebooks, photographs, Post-it notes, emails, and healthcare documents. I will propose the term ‘messy graphic medicine’ to describe graphic illness narratives that resist coherent recovery-oriented storytelling in favor of incomplete, excessive, or disorganized forms. Rather than treating fragmentation as a failure of representation, I will attempt to show that these works position incompleteness and ambivalence as epistemologically productive (La Cour and Poletti 2022, 9). In doing so, they offer alternative ways of understanding psychosis that may challenge dominant assumptions surrounding psychiatric diagnosis, recovery, and treatment (Spandler 2020, 127; Woods et al. 2022).