Joe the Barbarian

by Matt Peters

Content Advisory: Brief depictions of bullying and homophobia and extensive depictions of insulin shock

In Joe the Barbarian, a pre-teen named Joe Manson finds himself uprooted from his familiar reality and cast into a strange realm where ancient magic coexists with exotic technology. What sets Joe on his surreal journey is something strikingly ordinary by comparison—in fact, a daily part of his existence. Joe has type 1 diabetes, the autoimmune disorder that disrupts blood sugar regulation by attacking insulin-producing cells. One day, while Joe is alone at home, he slips away from reality when his blood sugar reaches a dangerous low.

Written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Sean Murphy (artist) and Dave Stewart (colorist), Joe the Barbarian was first released as an eight-issue comic book series that premiered in 2010. It was later released as a graphic novel in both print and digital editions. The print edition has been through multiple printings, most recently (at the time of this writing) in 2024.

Morrison is mostly known for their work on superhero comics, having written runs of Doom Patrol, New X-Men, Animal Man, and many other DC and Marvel titles. Joe the Barbarian is simultaneously a departure from and an extension of Morrison’s work in that genre. It centers someone without superpowers but immerses the character in a world of fantasy and science fiction.

Joe the Barbarian initially grounds its conflicts and constraints in realism, giving Joe a host of problems that place him in familiar and relatable territory. Joe’s father has recently died, and his mother now struggles to pay their mortgage. As an introvert with a solitary hobby—drawing fantasy art—Joe is the target of bullies. In an opening scene at Joe’s school, one bully utters a homophobic slur, kicks Joe’s drawing pad, and steals a snack that Joe was about to eat. After school, Joe endures even more taunting on his bus ride home.

Since his mother isn’t home, Joe returns from school to a dark, quiet house. After shedding his backpack, he quickly heads to the second floor and climbs a rope ladder to get to the attic. The attic is a refuge and hangout space for Joe, complete with a desk, computer, bunk bed, posters, toys, and a cage for his pet rat. Most of Joe’s toys are the kind that are popular in middle boyhood, things like scale-model military vehicles and a variety of action figures based on superhero, fantasy, and space adventure characters. Collecting himself after his school day, Joe crawls onto the top bunk of his bunk bed and stares up at the skylight above him, slowly dozing off.

What starts as an ordinary nap turns into a harrowing journey for Joe as he’s snapped back and forth between reality and hallucination. Since his afternoon snack was stolen earlier in the day—and since he didn’t think to eat something else when he got home—Joe wakes up to a state of insulin shock beyond anything he has previously experienced. Also known as hypoglycemia or diabetic shock, insulin shock is caused by extremely low blood sugar, and its symptoms can include headaches, shaking, disorientation, and anxiety—and, in some cases, delirium and hallucinations.

Still coherent enough to understand his situation, Joe realizes he needs to get his blood sugar up as quickly as possible, and that sets him on a quest to get from the attic to the ground floor to get a soda. However, that task becomes a monumental one as he struggles with his weakened state and his erratic grip on reality. As Joe tries to navigate his house, his surroundings take on new forms. Action figures become life-size people and robots. The attic becomes a mysterious wharf floating in the sky. The rope ladder that he takes to the second floor becomes the cape of a humanoid rodent—a giant version of his pet rat. He clutches the cape as he and the mega-rodent leap from the wharf to escape a band of cloaked knights.

As Joe makes his way through his house, he continues his parallel journey through a hallucinatory world, traveling to new lands, meeting new characters, and facing new challenges. The world that Joe hallucinates is rich in detail, containing its own history, mythology, and cultural tapestry, and all of it is beautifully illustrated throughout the story. For readers who enjoy world-building, Morrison, Murphy, and Stewart offer a treasure trove in Joe the Barbarian. For other readers, the world-building might seem overwhelming or tedious as they try to keep up with a growing list of people, places, and creatures—Water Dwarrows, Hearth Castle, Monster Moor, Cloud Quay, Backbone Bridge, Skyland, Hell Hounds, the Silver Legion, and the Army of the Unnatural, to give just a quick sample.

While hallucinating, Joe retains fragmented memories of his normal life, including the death of his father. Likewise, he retains some awareness of his current circumstances, including his urgent need to manage his diabetes. That leads to a sense of inadequacy, a feeling that he’s not living up to the legacy of his father, who died in the line of duty while serving in the military. As Joe struggles to keep himself alive in the safety of his own home (and the hallucinatory world that parallels it), he grapples with the meaning of his immediate and ongoing medical needs, questioning whether they preclude the kind of courage and honor he sees in his father. However, self-doubt eventually turns to self-discovery as Joe starts to see a path for himself, one that can lead him out of his medical emergency and give him a sense of purpose and accomplishment afterwards.

With that story element, Morrison had an opportunity to interrogate the gender expectations that impacted Joe’s sense of self and emotional well-being. It’s easy to imagine that Joe’s ideas about power, strength, and agency took some cues from the hypermasculine attributes embodied in his superhero and sci-fi action figures, in addition to the heroism he ascribed to his father. Morrison, who identifies as non-binary, is known for writing aspects of their own life into characters and plots, as well as challenging gender stereotypes in many of their stories. When they were writing New X-Men, Morrison was credited with putting female characters at the center of narratives and putting male characters in more passive and reactive roles. Over at DC, Morrison created a handful of characters who are gender nonconformists. On top of that, Morrison spent considerable time delving into women’s history and feminist literature so that they could give new context and character development to the iconic Wonder Woman (a project that started around the same time they were writing Joe the Barbarian and eventually led to the Wonder Woman: Earth One graphic novel series).

However, in Joe the Barbarian, Joe’s concepts of masculinity go without remark (though they’re arguably subverted slightly in one of the book’s final plot twists). For some readers it may seem like a missed opportunity. Others may view it as a wise choice, one that avoids heavy-handed storytelling or a narrative that’s any busier than it already is.

Ultimately, Joe the Barbarian offers a unique take on the hero’s journey plot, one that explores how an adolescent faces a serious medical event and learns more about himself in the process. Both visually stunning and inventively written, Joe the Barbarian is a compelling mix of fantasy, adventure, and medical narrative—though it is one that suffers at times from overdone world-building.

Matt Peters is a program manager at Health Sciences Design, an interdisciplinary health innovation program at the University of Arizona Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. He is also a longtime comic book reader and collector who can be found from time to time at his local comic book shops. Views expressed are his own.