I recently read about
Vizling, an app being developed by Professor Darren Defrain, who was awarded $100,000 from the National Endowment for Humanities, to help visually impaired people read comics. (The app is currently undergoing testing and is expected to launch in June.)
Some sighted people ask, "Why would a blind person care about comics?" and, since I have a personal history with comics, I thought I would write about some of my experiences.
I grew up with low vision in my left eye, and totally blind in my right eye, but I was both a bookworm and an art student, so I was a very visual person. I was that kid in the class that other kids would come to and ask to draw horses, unicorns, or monsters. As a teenager, I used to visit the local comics store. I even pre-ordered and waited in line to get my copy of Frank Miller's
The Dark Knight Returns.
Years after I went blind, I met a man who asked me out a couple of times, but I turned him down, until one day he offered to read me a comic he had told me about. A little over a year later, we got married. The graphic novel he read to me was
From Hell, and that's why I refer to Alan Moore as our Cupid. Alexx, my husband, is a serious comics geek. No, I mean, geekier than that. I mean, thanks to Alexx, I have the fact that Clancy Brown played the voice of Lex Luthor in the animated TV series of Superman embedded in my brain. When, in the original broadcast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander made a joke about red Kryptonite that fell flat with his female friends, I turned to my Alexander and said, "Tell me about the red Kryptonite," and he explained the reference. Now, "Tell me about the red Kryptonite" is our cue for geeking out about comics.
Thus, when I was taking a comics course with Henry Jenkins in the media studies program at MIT, Alexx was my reader and describer of comics. My personal favorite was David Mack's
Echo. Echo is a deaf Native American, and she is often dismissed as merely being one of Daredevil's ex-girlfriends. But she is so much more than that. You know she is seriously kickass when Wolverine shows up as her spirit guide. HER SPIRIT GUIDE. I love you, Echo!
As for other superheroes with disabilities, I also love Oracle. Formerly Batgirl, she took the name Oracle after she became disabled, and transformed herself into a superhacker.
It's these self-transformations in response to disability and trauma, the intentional creation of personae (from the Greek word for masks) and alter egos, that fascinate me. When I lost the last of my functional vision in my early twenties, I originally thought of myself in terms of relearning how to do all the things I already did, staying the same person, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of my old life.
Then it struck me how boring that would be.
That phoenix remains the same phoenix forever, never changing.
So I decided I would be a shapeshifter, a trickster, someone who, rather than feeling compelled to stay within the lines and do everything just like everyone else (i.e., sighted/"normal" people), I would instead invest all that time and energy trying new things.
Which is how I ended up going back to college to complete my undergraduate degree, becoming a disability advocate, and then attending MIT as one of Henry Jenkins's grad students.
The heavily drawn lines of borders or frames may seem to act as restrictive boundaries but, in the comics I love, they are more like thresholds, a liminal marker which the character might step, fall, fly, or explode out of at any moment. A character's persona might be "killed" figuratively or literally, through trauma, tragedy, or murder (often prompted by the hiring of a new writer and/or artist), but there is always the opportunity for some shapeshifting.
If you do a web search on the topic of comics and disability, you will find hundreds of posts by fans with disabilities, and also academic papers by scholars, some with disabilities, some not, writing about comics and people with disabilities. In recent years, however, creators of comics and movie studios have been compelled to listen to people with disabilities and frame these characters with more respect and realism. In the past few months, we've had the release of The Eternals with a deaf character, and the Disney+ series Hawkeye, which features both a main protagonist with hearing aids and Echo herself (it's rumored that Echo will also be getting her own series).
During the pandemic, Alexx and I have been reading one of my comfort comics, Squirrel Girl and, although the comic has ended, there were a couple of novels I hadn't read. It turns out that the novels feature a junior high Doreen Green before she becomes Squirrel Girl, and she meets a friend, Ana Sophia, who is deaf. At one point, Doreen says, "Someone once said with great power comes great accessibility -- no wait, that doesn't sound right." Trust me, it was a good phrase and, like, really inspiring. (
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: 2 Fuzzy, 2 Furious, Shannon Hale and Dean Hale [2018]).
In trying to locate the earliest occurrence of this phrase, I came across this post about Stan Lee's death:
With Great Power Comes Great Accessibility – How the Death of Stan Lee Affects the Disability Community - Rooted in Rights by Patrick Cokley, which discusses Stan Lee's creation of characters with disabilities, including his co-creation of the X-Men, which has become a major source of identification for many people with disabilities, and even more LGBT people.
Finally--and this is a connection with comics which I always carry with me, but which I often forget about--I have a pair of prosthetic eyes. About a decade ago, I needed to get a new pair and I decided to ask my ocularist (the technician who creates the prosthetic eyes) to make mine to look like Delirium's eyes in Neil Gaiman's
Sandman graphic novel. Delirium has one bright blue eye, and one bright green eye and, to follow up on my idea of shapeshifters, most of Delirium's appearance--her hair color, her hair length, her style of clothing--and she is the epitome of whimsy. What I really liked about this idea was that people with prosthetic eyes are always portrayed in media as having these absolutely obvious, ugly eye prosthetics but, in truth. prosthetic eyes are designed to match each individual person's original eyes (unless you're like me), and the the technicians who create them take hours, over a period of days, to make them. I loved the idea of having prosthetic eyes based on art. Also, I met Neil Gaiman at a convention some time later, and he pronounced them "Perfect."
In closing, I want to point out that comics are a major part of our culture, whether we experience them in graphic novels, movies, novels, toys, video games, T-shirts, tattoos, or a hundred other forms of media. Media is a shared source for how we communicate with one another, how we spend time with one another, how we form our ideas of heroes, and friends, and virtues, and a dozen other concepts.
Most of all, comics are built on the foundation of being able-bodied versus disabled. All we have to do is look at one of the ultimate comics heroes, Captain America, who started out as a disabled young man who used crutches. He used to get beat up by bullies, but he always got back up again, saying, "I can do this all day." And then he participated in a secret Army experiment and became the superhero Captain America, who is not only physically strong but morally the most virtuous of the Avengers (he can even wield Thor's hammer, Mjölnir). More than any other superhero, Captain America literally embodies the synthesis of physical and moral integrity, and even social integrity in his role of "Cap," the older, fatherly leader of the Avengers.
So, considering all the ways that comics present and represent images of people with disabilities, it's past time that we find ways to make comics more accessible to people with disabilities themselves. In the disability movement we have a saying, "Nothing about us without us," and, in creating a more inclusive conversation regarding the many intersections of disability and comics, projects such as Vizling need to be supported and encouraged both by academics and fans.
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