Title of Special Issue: Cripping Graphic Medicine: Approaching Comics from a Disability Studies Perspective. Guest Editors: Gesine Wegner (Leipzig University) and Dorothee Marx (Kiel University) At first glance, a wider public may find the connection between comics and disability rather counterintuitive, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson remarks: “Most of us assume that comics and disability exist in two completely different worlds. […] Comics are light; disability is heavy. Comics are inviting; disability is forbidding. Comics are cheerful; disability is dismal” (Garland-Thomson 2016: x). Yet, as a growing amount of scholarship in recent years has shown (Squier and Krüger-Fürhoff 2020; Foss et al…. Read More
There’s Only One Place This Road Ever Ends Up
Review by Kevin Wolf I wouldn’t have made a good health care provider; to act professionally without feeling what a patient is going through. I remember watching Born on the Fourth of July in a movie theater (remember those?). Ron Kovic, memoir author of the book of the same name, returns from Vietnam badly injured, paralyzed from the waist down. As I recall the movie, during his—played by Tom Cruise—rehabilitation he wants to prove he’s not paralyzed so he demonstrates this by using his arms to “walk” with rudimentary leg braces and therapy bars; and he falls and has… Read More
Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies
Special Issue: Cripping Graphic Medicine: Approaching Comics from a Disability Studies Perspective Guest Editors: Gesine Wegner (Leipzig University) and Dorothee Marx (Kiel University) At first glance, a wider public may find the connection between comics and disability rather counterintuitive, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson remarks: “Most of us assume that comics and disability exist in two completely different worlds. […] Comics are light; disability is heavy. Comics are inviting; disability is forbidding. Comics are cheerful; disability is dismal” (Garland-Thomson 2016: x). Yet, as a growing amount of scholarship in recent years has shown (Squier and Krüger-Fürhoff 2020; Foss et al. 2016), explorations… Read More
Spotlight on José Alaniz’s The Phantom Zone and Other Stories: Comics and Prose
The Phantom Zone and Other Stories: Comics and Prose collects the title story, which first appeared as a comic strip in the Daily Texan, the student newspaper of the University of Texas, Austin in the 1990s, along with more recent material. Alaniz, a comics scholar and professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has previously published Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) and with Scott T. Smith co-edited Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), among… Read More
Upgrade Soul
Book review by Kevin Wolf What if you were on the steep downward slope of life and were given the chance that you could live a lot longer than any actuarial life expectancy—perhaps to age 200—would you go through a risky experiment for such a long life? Personal ambition, quality/quantity of life desires, and experimental post-mortem ethical quandaries abound in the graphic science-fiction work by Ezra Clayton Daniels called Upgrade Soul (US). US could be a metaphor for humans struggling with their mortality, but it’s so much more. This is a wonderful, haunting tale presented from many perspectives: a brilliant… Read More
Call for papers – Enabling and Disability Comics for/about Young People: Within the Panels and Without. Amiens, 5th June 2020
From Lisa El Refaie: In 2020, Amiens will be the European Youth Capital (Amiens for Youth). On that occasion and for the year of Comics, the University of Picardy is organizing, in association with the universities of Artois, Lille and Brighton, and with the association “On a marché sur la bulle” a three-day interdisciplinary conference on “Comics and Youth” on 3rd, 4th and 5th June 2020. The research group CORPUS (Conflict, Representation and Dialogue in the English-speaking World, EA 4295) of the University of Picardy is planning an international study day on the representation of disability in comics about and/or… Read More
This Week in Graphic Medicine (9/13/2019)
‘This Week in Graphic Medicine’ highlights news about comics in medicine published during the week (Saturday – Friday). Links are typically presented without commentary, unless clarification of relevance is necessary. So without further ado… Matthew’s Pick of the Week… This week, I want to encourage you to follow along with the dotMD festival happening over the weekend in Galway, Ireland! Both Ian and MK (among many other familiar faces!) are in attendance, speaking, and taking part in a Graphic Medicine Exhibition curated by Ian! dotMD on Twitter and the 2019 hashtag (for Twitter and Instagram both) are great ways to… Read More
This Week in Graphic Medicine (2/23/18)
‘This Week in Graphic Medicine’ highlights relevant articles (and tweets) about comics in medicine published during the week (Saturday – Friday). Links are typically presented without commentary, unless clarification of relevance is necessary, with credit given to those who flagged them up where possible. So without further ado… Matthew’s Pick of the Week… This week I want to keep it short and sweet by highlighting Just Peachy Comics – a webcomic I just discovered this week on Facebook thanks to a friend’s share. Holly describes her comics as a way to journal as her therapist suggested – lucky for us, the… Read More
CALL FOR PAPERS Disability and Superheroes
We invite abstracts for essays to be published in a collection showcasing new work on the representation and conceptualization of disability in superhero comics. We encourage examinations of mainstream titles and characters (such as those published by Marvel and DC) as well as considerations of other texts that engage disability and the superhero genre in creative ways (such as Cece Bell’s El Deafo). We are especially interested in contributions that explore additional intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. The collection envisions a diverse selection of contributors (scholars from the humanities, comics studies, and disability studies; disability activists; comics creators; medical… Read More
