This week’s guest strip is by John Keogh of Lucid TV. Just as they romanticize the medical profession, hospital dramas make a big effort to humanize doctors. Patients are problems to be solved - not just their ailments but the strange circumstances of their lives, their social quirks, their stubborn family members. We may sympathize with them but our side is clearly on the professionals’; it’s their reactions we care about and we want them to do and say the right things. In real life though, most of us are patients. Many of us are intimidated by hospitals, wary of doctors, mistrustful of the system. Our insides are tested, studied and treated in a place that does not know us, as we wait naked in a cold room behind a closed door. Lucid TV taps directly into that anxiety. The art sets up a 1950’s sense of security, then the punchline reveals that your surgeon is a monster as selfish and careless as an eight-year old boy. It will not at all calm your fears of being mishandled or neglected by the medical industry. But it turns those fears into something consistently clever and funny.    

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