What draws comic artists to magic? Why do so many create tarot decks? How might graphic medicine inform, and be informed by, thinking about comics and tarot together? With a recent proliferation of tarot and comics in queer community and movement spaces, this paper considers how the formal elements and practices of reading both comics and tarot reflect their politico-therapeutic uses. Johanna Hedva theorizes divination as a deviant form of world-making, mapping alchemy to disability justice. I take up this reading of divination in an analysis of the tarot decks and comics of two queer artists of color, Trung Le Nguyen’s Star Spinner Tarot (2020) and The Magic Fish (2020) and Cristy C. Road's Next World Tarot (2017) and Spit and Passion (2012). Illustrating the queer crip worlding practices at work in each, I suggest that tarot and comics, though distinctly different media, may be leveraged via similar alchemical logics.
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