Disability in comic books and graphic narratives

From the title alone, one can predict that Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives will have difficulty reining in its tremendously broad subject matter, and indeed this proves to be the case. Yet the topic is essential for any serious student of sequential art or disability studies, and to date there have been surprisingly few attempts to bring together the vast expanse of disability literature on the topic together with serious critiques of graphic narrative. To say that its subject is not fully covered here is not to say anything at all, for what Chris Foss, Jonathan Gray, and Zach Whalen have attempted to do is beyond the measure of any single volume, no matter how well curated.

Disability is ever present in the comic genre, and so it is surprising to find that this is the first serious volume to bring critical attention to the topic. In their introduction, Voss et al. name their purpose in drawing together texts ‘to provide productive and provocative ways of thinking about the nexus between comics and disability’ (2). Out-sized abilities are often directly linked to disabilities present in the origin story, an essential element in both superhero stories as well as disability narratives. In Andrew Kreisberg and Matthew Rice’s series Helen Killer, the blind and deaf woman Helen Keller becomes a cyborg, giving her the power of ‘soul sight’. Helen Keller, whose real-life persona bears little resemblance to the benign and sacrificial superheroic form in which she is often evoked, becomes a perfect vehicle for exploring this dynamic. Laurie Ann Carlson’s ‘You Only Need Three Senses for This: The Disruptive Potentiality of Cyborg Helen Keller’ draws on Donna Haraway’s work on transhumanism and disability. Disability functions as an identity category, but also highlights the fluid nature of identity categories in general.

In ‘Why Couldn’t You Let Me Die? Cyborg, Social Death, and Narrative of Black Disability,’ Jonathan W. Gray discusses the post-human role that people with disabilities can be called to play, a position fraught with racial tension. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes in her foreword:

Hyperbole makes comics a welcome home for mutants, monsters, freaks and all manner of people with disabilities, even if the characters themselves have difficulty being reconciled to their status. Disability – as both a social construction and a lived experience – exists in the spaces of the out of scale. (xii)

Alternatively, in her long-running comic Dykes To Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel includes disability in the person of Thea, a Jewish lesbian with multiple sclerosis who uses a wheelchair. As a character, she is neither tragic nor inspiration, but neither is she central to the cast and exists, it might be said, largely to make non-disabled characters around her come to realizations of their own. Margaret Galban’s essay, ‘Thinking through Thea: Alison Bechdel’s Representations of Disability’, examines with great care the ways in which Thea is both included and excluded within the social set of the strip.

Graphic novels are particularly adept at conveying violence. In David Small’s graphic memoir Stitch, he shows the emotional violence of his childhood, inseparable from the cancer that resulted in an operation which left him without speech. As Christina Maria Koch’s essay, ‘“When You Have No Voice, You Don’t Exist”?: Envisioning Disability in David Small’s Stitches’ points out, the visual–verbal medium of graphic narrative reveals how deeply mental states are connected with physical experience. Another example, this one from the siblings’ perspective, is The Ride Together by Paul and Judy Karasik. The memoir is drawn from their investigation into the possibility that their autistic brother David, in his 40s during the time of the memoir, had been subjected to physical and sexual abuse during his time living in a residential institution. Shannon Walter’s terrific essay explores the ethical questions regarding representation, particularly as they relate to intimate stories of autistic people or people with cognitive and/or intellectual disabilities.

Manga, a form of graphic narrative developed in Japan, is examined as well, through Keiko Tobe’s beautiful With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child. Chris Foss’s essay ‘Reading in Pictures: Re-visioning Autism and Literature through the Medium of Manga’ is one of the strongest pieces in the book, in part because Foss places the work within the context of other autistic narratives by authors such as Mel Baggs and Dawn Prince, as well as Ralph Savarese’s portrayal of Tito Mukhopadhyay. Foss then convincingly details the way manga is used to convey an autistic way of being. He uses the work of Scott McCloud to break down seven ways that words and pictures are used in manga, and points out its strength in conveying autistic embodiment.

Graphic novels draw from tropes found in comic literature, and for all their many differences both graphic novels and comics rely on similar visual elements. It is disappointing, then, to find that there are only three images in Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives. Some of the texts are easily found online or in libraries, but others are not. A stronger system holding together these chapters would have been appreciated. For someone interested in a general introduction to the topic, however, the expansive nature of this collection is a strength. Chapters may be purchased individually from the publisher, an option for teachers who may wish to draw from these essays rather than require students to purchase the full collection.

Carolyn Ogburn
Office of Accessibility Services, University of North Carolina, Asheville, NC, USA
[email protected]
© 2017 Carolyn Ogburn
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1372948