Disability has long had a presence in visual culture, but all too often it has been represented as something monstrous and non-normative. Scars and other disfigurements have been used as an easy way to signal a character’s moral depravity, how they deal with painful trauma, or how they’ve been deified into inspirational figures (as Stella…
Monstress and the Problem of Women in Pain
Please note this post contains discussion of violence against women. Also, spoiler alert for Monstress. Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress has—justifiably—been on fire lately. It won heaps of accolades at the 2018 Eisner Awards and major love and respect from readers. Liu was the first woman to win the Best Writer award (about time),…
Cookies & Christ in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints
When I started writing about religion and literature for my dissertation, I never dreamed that I’d also get to write about comics. I loved comics and knew that they were finally being taken seriously at an academic level, but I still couldn’t connect them to religious studies. That is, until I came across the work…