“The Real Requires the Fantastic”: Teaching Comics, Race, and Disability in the Era of Black Lives Matter

The dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism bring into sharp relief the urgent need to integrate anti-racism into the study and praxis of graphic medicine. The article’s approach to “cripping graphic medicine” brings together Black feminist disability studies and comics studies, foregrounding Black comics theorists and creators. The focus is on Damian Duffy and John Jennings’s graphic adaptations of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Victor LaValle’s Destroyer , examining how they employ non-realist conventions of speculative fiction and horror to represent racial injustice and the body in effective ways for social justice-oriented conversations in health humanities’ classrooms and beyond. The article also shares experiences facilitating student-centered discussion of these texts in undergraduate courses and highlights student interpretations as evidence of the comics medium’s ability to foster reflective dialogue and collaborative learning around topics of racism, medicine, disability, and creative storytelling.