Comic Relief: Webcomics About Grad School & Mental Health

Grad school is a meat grinder. The long hours. The tedious, meticulous work. And the endless, unrelenting pressure. Pressure to perform, to get results, to keep up in classes, to troubleshoot experiments. And that’s just in school. There’s also keeping up with bills and ever-increasing living expenses on a graduate student’s salary. And God help you if you try to maintain a life outside of grad school. 

Amidst this perpetual haze of stress and anxiety, it’s almost inevitable that your mental health will be tested - often and continuously. Due to the chronic nature of these trials, you are very likely going to need to find ways to cope. After all, most of your problems will not have immediate solutions. Sometimes you will just need to persevere. 

In order to do that, you will need the mental and emotional resources from which to draw. Like a diver swimming through an underwater cavern, catching her breath at little intermittent pockets of trapped air, or a desert traveler stopping to refill his canteen at the rare oasis, often it will be the small things that give you what you need to keep going one more day: a hot bath with bubbles, a beer with friends at the end of a long week, or, sometimes, even just a simple, reassuring word of encouragement. 

And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a few panels with word bubbles ought to be worth at least a few thousand and change, which is why, in this article, I’m going to be talking about one of those most accessible, poignant, and cathartic sources of commentary and camaraderie on academia and the battle for our collective sanities: webcomics about grad school. 

We live in a world that moves fast and only seems to be getting faster. There aren’t too many of us left that can enjoy a quiet evening of repose reading a book after dinner. Instead, there are late nights at the lab, at-home research, or trying to take care of errands or tidy up the apartment after a long grueling day. Our moments of respite are brief. Things like image macros, memes, and comics provide us with a release we can enjoy in these ever-narrowing windows.

You may not have the time or mental bandwidth to watch a whole movie, read an entire chapter, or even finish this article (hey, no hard feelings), but a webcomic that sends up the absolute gauntlet that is the peer review process? You can fit that in!

When discussing comics in academia, the unquestioned OG is Piled Higher and Deeper and started in 1997 by Jorge Cham, Ph.D. Comics covers everything, from procrastination to anxiety to impostor syndrome and beyond. Sometimes its subject matter is humorous. Sometimes it’s informative. Sometimes it’s depressing, but in that cathartic “yeah, tell me about it” sense. And sometimes, it manages all three at once. It’s usually worth a minute or two of your time while you’re on the bus or the toilet.

Next up is Randall Munroe’s xkcd (so named because it was a “combination of letters… that didn’t have any meaning, didn’t have any pronunciation, and didn’t seem like an obvious acronym for anything” [1]. Despite its nonsensical name, xkcd is anything but. To the contrary, xkcd is one of the longest-running and most widely re-posted webcomics in science and academia.

Described by the author as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” xkcd certainly delivers on every single one of those fronts. XKCD also sometimes delves into the emotionally vulnerable and deals with issues of loss, exhaustion, fear, loneliness, and wonder.

Perhaps the broadest comic on this list is SMBC. SMBC is definitely the most flippant of the bunch and deals more with academia, sci-fi, and politics. While it does touch upon subjects like mental illness, existential dread, loneliness, etc., it always does so in a manner couched in nihilistic sarcasm. However, it definitely touches upon the absurdity of things like academic publishing or the pressure to fudge data.

The remaining two comics don’t necessarily concern academia. Still, they deal heavily with mental and emotional health struggles, topics which, as previously mentioned, are no strangers to people in grad school. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh, whom I can best describe as a socially gawky, manic ball of self-conscious neuroses who’s just doing the best she can.

Be it social awkwardness, procrastination, or those times when it seems like anything and everything just piles on you and compounds until you’re ready to burn the world, Allie’s got you covered.

Last on our list is Just Peachy Comics by Holly Chisolm. Holly is the most recent entrant of the five onto this stage. Her work is, by far, the most touchy-feely, snuggling-a-pillow-while-drinking-warm-chai-tea-in-a-big-T-shirt-and-fuzzy-socks of our little quintet, so, if that’s your vibe, this will be right up your alley. I’ll be honest: I don’t find Just Peachy comics funny. But sometimes what you need isn’t exactly “funny.” Sometimes you need that small, tiny voice telling you it’s okay to be afraid and cry and that you’re fine the way you are. And that, Holly’s work has in spades.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again (and again and again…) - grad school is tough. You will need to make use of whatever resources you can to keep your sanity together. In so doing, don’t overlook these comics and also whatever else makes you smile or, at the very least, allows you to blow off some steam, if even just an ounce. 

References

PhD comics: https://phdcomics.com/

SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/

xkcd: https://xkcd.com/

Hyperbole and a Half: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

Just Peachy Comics: https://www.instagram.com/justpeachycomic/?hl=en

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/xkcd#fn3