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On a frigid afternoon in January, students and community members in Billings Library aren’t poring over primary documents or using the space to study. Instead, they’re drawing comics. At one table, a student draws peacocks. Another student, a quick study of faces. Across the room, Luis Vivanco discusses drawing and comics — and leads this monthly meeting, Working Wednesdays, part of his Comics-Based Research Lab at �պ�����.

Vivanco — professor and chair of the Anthropology Department in the — is a latecomer to the illustrated medium. But he’s come to realize that, just as the pen is mightier than the sword, so too is the comic often more resonant than the research report.

And he’s discovered other researchers across campus embracing comics too. The Larner College of Medicine’s hosts many examples of “graphic medicine,” like comics and illustrations on vaccines, how children cope at war in Ukraine, and the cost of diabetes care in New York City.

“The more conversations I have on campus here, the more I realize people are interested in comics,” Vivanco said. “For example, I hadn’t know about Jeremiah Dickerson, a psychiatry professor in the medical school who teaches this one-credit comics course to medical students, using graphic medicine to tell illness stories in comics form.”

Knowing that colleagues across the university are interested in comics — while some faculty members are already using comics to teach and translate research — inspired Vivanco to start the Comics-Based Research Lab. To spread the word, he participated in the Office of Research’s Faculty Activity Network, which encourages faculty members to share and experience each other's laboratories, studios, or other research spaces. Last October, faculty members from the Rubenstein School, Larner College of Medicine, the College of Education and Social Services, and others showed up to learn about comics-based research and Vivanco’s approach.

“What we do first is make connections, like during Working Wednesdays,” Vivanco said. “It can also be a skill-building session and a break during the day with a nice, quiet hour of drawing, where people from across campus can come connect with each other.” The comics lab also offers workshops and brings in public lecturers on comics, illustration, and translating research into comic form. Last semester, Vivanco hosted a University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor of education who both teaches and draws comics.

“An hour-and-a-half workshop is nothing like a week-long workshop hosted at the in Vermont, but it still builds comics intelligence,” Vivanco said. “It creates opportunities for people to see how their research can connect to comics.”

Comic Inspiration

Vivanco’s trajectory into comics began in 2017 when he was the director of the �պ����� Humanities Center. “Someone asked me if they could organize a comics conference. People were taking comics and graphic novels seriously, and I didn’t have much awareness,” Vivanco said. But during one of these conferences, the ‘Pulp Culture Comic Arts Festival,’ inspiration struck. “I sat in on a panel discussion that featured history professors from around the country, and one of them recently a published a graphic novel through Oxford University Press. That was his research.”

The book, , is a graphic history based on an 1876 court case where Abina Mansah, a wrongfully enslaved West African woman, fought for her freedom in British-controlled territory. The author, Trevor R. Getz, Professor of History at San Francisco State University, worked with South African illustrator Liz Clarke to bring the story to illustrated life. There is one issue that prevents much historical research from receiving this kind of comics treatment, however.

“Illustrators are expensive. Each of those pages was hundreds of dollars” Vivanco said, flipping through Abina and the Important Men. Undaunted, Vivanco started approaching comics artists at the Fleming Museum, where the conferences were held, about illustrating his research.

“Everyone eventually asked me, ‘Well, how much will you pay me?’ And I said I had nothing,” Vivanco said. “But I have this do-it-yourself spirit and I wondered if I could do this for myself.” Years later, Vivanco is still drawing, taking his research, historical analysis, and ethnographic studies and making small, hand-drawn comics.

Anthropological Animation

Vivanco’s work as an environmental anthropologist lately revolves around bicycles. For more than a decade, he’s studied the history of urban bicycle culture, the political debate over bikes in the last century, and how green urbanism adopted bicycle culture and why.

“I wrote a book about the anthropology of bicycles and one small piece of that book was on the history of bicycles in Vermont in the 1800s, when there was this huge bicycle craze,” Vivanco said. After awakening his love of drawing and establishing his grounding, he started taking his lecture material and archival sources on the history of bicycles and turning it into mini comics.

“I bring them to my talks. I give them away, thousands of these little things, these comic zines,” Vivanco said. “It’s brought me in direct contact with the comics community in Vermont. I took classes and workshops and started devoting more and more of my energy and time and passion into this, asking, ‘what stories do I have in my research that I can tell in comics form?’” 

Vivanco has a trove of archival material dating back over a century detailing just how both revolutionary and revolting the bicycle was. “I have sources like the American Journal of Medicine, the British Journal of Medicine, dating from the 1800s. They were very afraid of bicycles and their physical impacts, and doctors actually made diagnoses,” Vivanco said. “One of them is ‘bicycle face.’”

Vivanco chronicled ‘bicycle face’ as well as other early bicycle-related diagnoses in his comic, “.” The explanatory also includes “cyclomania,” a condition in which patients suffer from a “most unnatural passion for wheeling,” riding, “too often, too far, and too fast.”

Drawing More to See More

This semester, Vivanco is teaching a class that uses an ethnographic study on how farmers in Paraguay are grappling with climate change. “This book is from the University of Toronto Press. They’re actually publishing ethnographic research in comic form,” Vivanco said. “There are things happening.”

Ultimately, for Vivanco and others, comics help people see. After drawing — both doodling and seriously producing comics — for years, comics have become more than a useful ethnographic tool for him. 

“When you’re in the field, drawing, you might be paying very close attention to details that the typical training in cultural anthropology might ignore,” Vivanco said. “And when you pair the traditional ethnographic report with the comic, they reinforce each other.” 

In short, Vivanco’s work highlights the power of comics to illuminate complex stories and reshape how research is communicated.

You can read more about Vivanco's work and view his comics at