**7. Implications for further research**

Using a lens founded upon philosophies from semiotics, communication, and biomedical ethics, this analysis examined the communicative value and potential use of SARS-CoV-2 *Health Capsules* as a modality of health communication in a pandemic. This study was conducted to answer the WHO's call for health communication research during global health crises and emphasizes the importance of health communication in accordance with the ACGME and other stakeholders, coming to several conclusions.

Comics have the potential to communicate appropriately in manner, relevance, quality, and quantity, as well as to disseminate medical information beneficently, justly, non-maleficently, and in a way that supports patient-autonomy. The findings of this analysis show that medical comics could fulfil in part the WHO's search for multimodal methods of health communication during pandemics.

This analysis also demonstrates that comics could be used effectively and ethically to communicate during pandemics and in health communication generally, using semiotic features, such as using facial expressions to create emotional connections, using physical proximities to set tone, using vectors to direct the reader's eye, using humor to aid recall, using simple language to increase comprehension, and using illustrated step-by-step instructions to guide patients. However, without exhaustive research on the topic, there are no current best practices for the creation of biomedically and communicatively ethical medical comics.

The findings of this analysis call for a broader scope of the use of comics in medicine and suggest standardized guidelines for their use. Guidelines that establish regularized uses of facial expressions, ellipses, vectors, physical proximity, humor, step-by-step instructions and other semiotic values typically found within comics, should be established prior to the general and widespread use of comics as means of health communication.

#### **Author details**

Jonathan de Rothewelle Harry S Truman College, United States

\*Address all correspondence to: jcomynderothewelle@gmail.com

© 2021 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
