Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives

Chris Foss is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, USA, where he specializes in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, with a secondary expertise in disability studies. He is the author of over 20 scholarly publications and over 35 academic conference papers. Jonathan W. Gray is Associate Professor of English, John Jay College, CUNY, USA. He is editor of the Journal of Comics and Culture and author of Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination (2013). He is currently working on Illustrating the Race: Representing Blackness in American Comics.Zach Whalen is Associate Professor of English, University of Mary Washington, USA, where he researches video games, comics, and electronic literature. He is the co-editor of Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games (2008).

“This collection of essays can undoubtedly serve as a useful entry into both the fields of disability studies in general and disability in comic books in particular. … the essays manage to provide a variety of insights into genres ranging from personal memoir to superhero comics. … the collection shows the wide applicability of disability studies that could be useful not only to scholars of comics books, but also to experts of children’s literature and visual arts.” (Nikola Novaković, Libri & Liberi, Vol. 10 (1), 2021)“Foss (Mary Washington), Gray (CUNY), and Whalen (Mary Washington) offer an ambitious cross-disciplinary collection bringing disability studies theories to bear on the burgeoning genre of graphic literature. … The work is useful for several disciplines including disability studies, graphic literature, psychology, and popular culture. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division Undergraduates through faculty.” (M. F. McClure, Choice, Vol. 54 (6), February, 2017) “Foss, Gray, and Whalen provide comics scholars, as well as those located in such related fields as children’s literature and visual rhetoric, the opportunity to think critically about key issues in disability studies and their particular representation in hybrid visual-verbal texts. … This collection captures the urgency of the intersection of comics and disability, and the absence of non-American comics texts suggests an opportunity for the discussion to continue developing further through various national and cultural perspectives.” (Charles Acheson, The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 41 (1), January, 2017)

• Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Foreword; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson1. Introduction: From Feats of Clay to Narrative Prose/thesis; Zach Whalen, Chris Foss, and Jonathan W. Gray2. Mutable Articulations: Disability Rhetorics and the Comics Medium; Jay Dolmage and Dale Jacobs3. 'when you have no voice, you don't exist'? Envisioning Disability in David Small's Stitches; Christina Maria Koch4. The Hidden Architecture of Disability: Chris Ware's Building Stories; Todd A. Comer5. Standing Orders: Oracle, Disability, and Retconning; José Alaniz6. Drawing Disability: Superman, Huntington's, and the Comic Form in It's a Bird…; Mariah Crilley7. Reading in Pictures: Re-Visioning Autism and Literature through the Medium of Manga; Chris Foss8. Graphic Violence in Word and Image: Re-Imagining Closure in The Ride Together; Shannon Walters9. 'Why Couldn't You Let Me Die?': Cyborg, Social Death, and Narratives of Disability; Jonathan W. Gray10. 'You Only Need Three Senses for This': The Disruptive Potentiality of Cyborg Helen Keller; Laurie Ann Carlson11. Cripping the Bat: Troubling Images of Batman; Daniel Preston12. Breaking Up [at/with] Illness Narratives; Kristen Gay13. Thinking through Thea: Alison Bechdel's Representations of Disability; Margaret GalvanIndex