I just read this post on images of disability in the recently released remake of "The Witches"
https://themighty.com/2020/12/the-witches-ectrodactyly-disability/and it expresses something I've been feeling lately.
Alexx has been reading me a relatively recent issue of Hellboy, and this particular story is set in approximately 1950s Appalachia, and involves Hellboy taking on a group of witches.
Most of the witches are portrayed as old and extremely ugly and possessing disabled bodies, except for the one sexy one who, of course, is totally to blame for one of the male characters having made a pact with the devil.
I don't mean there is just one or two images of these witches and having disabled bodies: the images occur over and over again, the same way that Frank Miller's negative images of people of color, of queer people, of people with disabilities, repeat over and over.
One might say, these images occur so often as to be obsessive: the artists must have spent *days* drawing this many only slight variations of the same thing.
When I was a kid, and still sighted, I used to draw horses all the time. I had never ridden a horse, or even seen one close up, but I was still really good at drawing these horses in hte same two or three poses, and other kids (especially girls--what is it with girls and horses?) really liked them and were always asking me to draw more. Most of those kids had never seen a real horse, either.
So, this is my ultimate criticism of using one's creativity to reproduce cliches: it's not actually creative. Creative people thrive on the same things scientists do: new ideas, observation of the real world, and personal experience with the world.
The cliche of the ugly deformed witch that equates disability with evil isn't the least tiny bit creative: it's just a worn out placemarker that someone puts in that space instead of creating something they've actually thought about and are using to add further meaning to the story.
In other words, it's intellectually and creatively lazy, and it's often this laziness that bothers me more than the stereotype itself, because it expresses a certain disdain, or condensation, of the creator toward their audience. It says, Oh, I can skive off here, no one will be able to tell the difference, no one will notice that I didn't really think a lot about what I put here.
Images used in creative works are supposd to *mean* something, to work with the rest of the story in saying something of significance, and there are many artists who have taken a cliche, an empty skin, as it were, and invested it with new life, new meaning.
This is one of the reasons I love Alan Moore's Swamp Thing: I don't just love the character, I love the fact that Moore took what was basically a rubber suit-type monster and transformed it into a Green Man. Then Moore went even further and used that first transformation to create a complicated narrative about how we all have the potential to transform ourselves, whether it is into heroes or into monsters, and how we can transform the world around us into fertile places full of life and joy, or hellish barren landscapes that reflect our own inner barrenness.
Think about the things you create before you send them out into the world: do you want them to be empty skins, mere "bags of bones," or do you want them to be something unique, something of significance?
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