Beyond the panels: Malaysian medical students’ perspectives on empathy through Kid Gloves

Empathy declines during medical training, and comics offer a promising but underexplored intervention, particularly outside Western contexts. This qualitative study examined how Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoir Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos shaped empathy among 17 clinical-year Malaysian medical students through focus group discussions and thematic analysis. Participants’ engagement was predominantly cognitive rather than affective as they interpreted the protagonist’s emotional and relational experiences with depth and contextual awareness, although personal emotional resonance was limited. This pattern likely reflects collectivist cultural norms, the participants’ demographic profile, and the reflective distance inherent in the comics medium. Visual-narrative mechanisms, including dual coding, symbolic representation, and the cognitive work of closure, produced interpretive engagement rather than emotional immersion, suggesting that comics may be well suited to the reflective perspective-taking that clinical empathy requires. Participants’ suggestions, considered alongside the broader literature, point to a set of design conditions—modular encounters paired with structured reflection in an active-learning format, culturally grounded content, and recurrence across training stages. This study offers one of the first empirical accounts from Southeast Asia of how comics engage medical learners and proposes curricular conditions under which such engagement can cultivate empathy.