Book Review by Kevin Wolf If I had to give a one word description to this graphic work it would be “Loud” or if two words: “Brilliantly Loud.” Dumb: Living without a Voice, a Graphic Memoir by Georgia Webber is brilliant because it’s a very smart work and because it’s visually stunning. This work is in black and white, with the loudness coming from the orange/red portrayal of the author/artist’s and everyone else’s voice. This graphic work shows the changes, often wordlessly, that Ms. Webber goes through to recover from the loss of one of her essential characteristics: her voice…. Read More
The Cage
Guest review by John Swogger. For the full post, visit his blog. The Cage is (Rinko Endo’s) second complete comic work, and shares the same innovative approach as her Aggression Management Manga. Sub-titled “My Orthodontic Memoir”, it recounts her childhood diagnosis of malocclusion and the subsequent trials and tribulations of living with an orthodontic chin cap. I had a number of friends when I was a kid with various orthodontic retainers, braces and headgear. Beyond these, there’s a whole grim panoply of orthodontic appliances – power chains, coil springs, twin blocks, plates or retainers, facemasks, cervical headgear, headgear helmets, lip bumpers, palate expanders, elastics,… Read More
Autography as Autotherapy: Psychic Pain and the Graphic Memoir
Autography as Autotherapy: Psychic Pain and the Graphic Memoir Ian Williams Journal of Medical Humanities. 2011 Dec;32(4):353-66 Abstract: Over the last three decades, the graphic novel has developed both in sophistication and cultural importance, now being widely accepted as a unique form of literature (Versaci 2007). Autobiography has proved to be a successful genre within comics (the word is used in the plural to denote both the medium and the philosophy of the graphic form) and within this area a sub-genre, the memoir of the artist’s own disease or suffering, sometimes known as the graphic pathology, has arisen (Green and Myers 2010). Storytelling and… Read More
No Life Lessons Here: Comics, Autism, and Empathetic Scholarship
No Life Lessons Here: Comics, Autism, and Empathetic Scholarship Sara Birge, Pennsylvania State University Disability Studies Quarterly Abstract: Comics, a relatively understudied medium for representations of disability, have enormous potential for providing important critical perspectives in disability studies. This article examines two recent comics that portray individuals with autism: The Ride Together by Paul and Judy Karasik and Circling Normal, a compilation of the comic strip Clear Blue Water by Karen Montague-Reyes. I argue that these comics’ unique narrative geometries make them ideally suited for depicting cognitive disabilities in the nuanced context of embodied life. Through their reworking of stereotypes and their unique portrayals of autism, Circling… Read More