They have music, art, narrative, graphics – an extraordinary combination of arts and science with an interactive element.
In addition to standard summary tables and narratives, graphics can help significantly to detect signals, understand cause effect relationships, assess mechanisms of toxicity, and may support both risk evaluation and management.
Her narrative includes graphic descriptions of brutality, slave auctions, and the cruelty of slave owners' wives to their husbands' slave children.
The paintings are packed to bursting with narrative action, graphic improvisation and echoes of artists like Barry McGee, Chris Johannson, Lari Pittman and R. Crumb.
I attended the first ever academic conference on the subject Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels last month at the University of London, where doctors, nurses, patients and comic book artists shared their experiences of medical themes in comic books.
She sees the narrative and graphic elements as complementary: the action and spatial alignment lead the viewer's eye from left to right so as to emphasize the relationship between the action and its explosive consequence.
Perhaps the most challenging design is the "living document"—a constantly changing pastiche consisting of sections electronically copied from different documents, interspersed with original narrative or graphics or voice comments contributed by persons in distant locations, whose different versions reside on different servers.
"When those books were out the eight bit computers weren't able to give very deep narratives or graphics," says Michael French, editor-in-chief of trade magazine MCV.
The shape, size, form, and positioning of the frames also contributes to that crucial thing in graphic narrative: timing.
Critics came to appreciate the narrative potential of graphic books, and Mr Spiegelman even won the Pulitzer prize in 1992.
