Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives ed. by Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen (review)

Although the representation of disability has long played a notable role in comics—in Marvel's Daredevil and Professor X, for example—the intersection of comics and disabilities studies is a relatively new area of scholarship. The recent publications of José Alaniz's Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (2014) and M.K. Czerwiec et al.'s Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015) attest to the growing interest and urgency of this intersection. In Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen endeavor to expand the critical discourse of comics and disability. To do so, they collect twelve essays that address a variety of disabilities in comics ranging from superhero narratives to memoir. Although the collection is not immediately concerned with children's literature, children's literature scholars who work with comics, graphic narratives, picture books, or visual media more generally may find the text useful as the collection parallels ongoing discussions of disability representation in children's literature. However, despite its potential contributions to the fields of visual rhetoric, disability studies, and children's literature, the collection is limited by its nearly exclusive focus on American comics.

The variety of narratives addressed in the collection, from canonized texts such as David Small's Stitches to the recent Dumb by Georgia Webber, position the collection for possible inclusion in college literature classrooms, ranging from American literature surveys to graduate-level seminars. Although Foss, Gray, and Whalen never position the collection as an explicitly pedagogical text—it forgoes questions of how to teach comics and disability—this diversity furnishes readers an entrance into the intersection regardless of their experience reading comics. For instance, Christina Maria Koch's essay "'When you have no voice, you don't exist'?: Envisioning Disability in David Small's Stitches" provides analysis of Small's critically acclaimed 2009 memoir that does not depend on an intensive knowledge of comics theory. Koch argues that Small's narrative of muteness and psychological trauma transcends "individual trauma narration toward the representation of the social context of disability" (31). Koch supports this thesis through an examination of Small's juxtaposition of images of himself as the observer and the observed of his own narrative, as well as the social implications of the medical gaze supplied by X-rays and other technology that mark Small as different. Koch's criticism relies often on single images and Small's repetition of self-representation rather than panel sequence. Thus, Koch's methodology provides strong analysis that is accessible to readers regardless of their familiarity with comics or disability criticism. Moreover, Koch's essay offers the clearest application to non-comics visual media.

Contrasting Koch's methodology, Jay Dolmage and Dale Jacobs examine Webber's Dumb, a serial and less studied text than Stitches, through a more intensive theoretical lens. Building on Thierry Groensteen's theoretical work of arthrology—the reading of panel transitions and other sequences on the comics page as units of meaning—Dolmage and Jacobs analyze how Webber engages visual codes to replace verbal language following her loss of voice and recovery. In "Mutable Articulations: Disability Rhetorics and the Comics Medium," Dolmage and Jacobs move beyond Groensteen's formulation of arthrology by integrating Gérard Genette's theory of transtextuality—a text's relationship with all other texts—and illuminate how Webber develops complex visual codes and spatially reconfigures the narrative as means of "communicating with and through disability" (26). Specifically, Dolmage and Jacobs draw attention to Webber's usage of lipstick as a code for whether she is not speaking and resting her voice (not wearing lipstick) or speaking (wearing lipstick) on any given day. Because this essay demands greater knowledge of comics theory, as well as an appreciation of Dumb's visual complexity, Dolmage and Jacobs offer a more rigorous approach to comics and disability that benefits classrooms that focus on visual rhetoric.

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