Disability & Society

ISSN: 0968-7599 (Print) 1360-0508 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdso20

Disability in comic books and graphic narratives

Disability in comic books and graphic narratives

Carolyn Ogburn

To cite this article: Carolyn Ogburn (2017) Disability in comic books and graphic narratives,
Disability & Society, 32:10, 1683-1684, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2017.1372948

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1372948

Published online: 15 Sep 2017.

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 DISABILITY & SOCIETY 1683

Disability in comic books and graphic narratives, edited by Chris Foss,

Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016, 216 pp., US$109.00 (hardback), US$84.99 (ebook), ISBN 978-1-
137-50111-0

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 nar-
rative. 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 wheel-
chair. 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
1684 BOOK REVIEWS

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 dif-
ferences both graphic novels and comics rely on similar visual elements. It is disappoint-
ing, 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 some-
one 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
caogburn@unca.edu
© 2017 Carolyn Ogburn
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1372948

Madness: a history, by Petteri Pietikainen, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015, 346 pp.,

£34.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-41-571318-4, £105.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-
41-5771316-0

In Madness: A History, Pietikainen sets out to present a comprehensive yet accessible

account of madness from antiquity to modern times. It is a formidable challenge, but
Pietikainen succeeds in delivering a fascinating and beautifully written account, which is
completely enthralling and at times quite horrifying. The structure of the book is similar
to a guided tour in an art gallery: the reader is taken on ‘a walk through the history of
madness’ (4), and at certain points along this walk the author stops to examine in more
detail significant events, discoveries and key individuals who have played a major part in
the development of this rich subject matter.
The author begins by suggesting there is ambiguity regarding the definition of mad-
ness, and this suggestion recurs throughout the entire book. Pietikainen argues that in the
course of history, many different social, medical, judicial and religious meanings have been
attached to madness and that definitions of, and criteria for, madness change temporally
and locally (7). The difference between the sane and the insane, he argues, is a matter