A/effective Bodies: A review of Eszter Szép’s Comics and The Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability (2020)

This review offers a critical overview of Eszter Szép’s Comics and The Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability (2020), a text that formulates a model of embodied interpretation and creation that establishes a dialogue between reader and artist based on their shared vulnerability. In this review the author explores Szép’s utilisation of the line and the materiality of the comic as an expression of and engagement with the body and vulnerability across comics dealing with trauma, illness, and war. Szép’s innovative consideration of the body of the reader is highlighted as an interpretive tool, a theory that comes from her own embodied reactions to these comics. In the second half of this review, the implications of Szép’s approach to vulnerability and the body are considered with regards to the Covid-19 pandemic, disability, and graphic medicine, drawing from the recent discourse of vulnerability by disabled people, the social model of disability and its limitations, and Thomas Couser’s critical work on the field and genre of graphic medicine. Rather than seeing this as a limitation of the text, the author asks whether Szép’s methodology could be adopted to answer these and similar questions and point to work she already appears to be doing is such a direction.

comics can come to be seen as embodied (Worth 2007: 14). to ask question such as 'Why is this such a challenge to bear? What is happening to my body whilst reading that book, that scene?' (Szép 2020: 1-2). What was happening to her body in this moment encapsulates the central thesis of this work, which is that non-fiction comics create a dialogue between artist and reader that is a transformative response to and exploration of vulnerability as a universal condition of human embodiment. Expanding on previous work that sees the line in comics as an embodied mark of the artist's hand (Gardner, 2011), Szép takes this unit of the page to be the primary expressive and interpretative tool when it comes to the body and vulnerability.
In chapter one Szép examines the use of the line in the pedagogical comics of Lynda Barry, noting that she approaches the line as a form of embodied thinking that needs to 1 Ian Hague's Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (2014) is a notable exception to this, although this focuses in the senses in isolation. be created in a relaxed dream-like state, something that is represented using elaborate spiral patterns and parallel lines of different sizes and textures. Despite this emphasis on relaxation, however, Szép notes that this bodily state is designed to create openness to an often-hidden vulnerability in order to work with and through it-a practice she refers to as 'unlearning' (Szép 2020: 62). Barry's autobiographical inserts into these comics use different anthropomorphic creatures to voice her own self-doubt during creative blocks, creatures that draw stylistic reference to her other comics dealing with childhood trauma. As such Szép shows that the line links the body to its emotions, mental processes, and experiences.
The potential for the line to transform the body and to critique certain bodily norms is explored in chapter two, with Szép providing an in-depth analysis of Ken Dahl's autobiographical comic about him contracting herpes, Monsters (Dahl 2009). For Szép, Dahl's constant drawing and redrawing of his body in various grotesque forms and states of transformation 'can be read as an articulation of not only monstrosity… but vulnerability' (Szép 2020: 80). Citing Margrit Shildrick's Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Shildrick 2002), she links Dahl's ever-changing approach to his own body to Shildrick's deconstruction of the binary between monstrous and normative bodies, and vulnerable and stable ones-reaffirming the emphasis on universal vulnerability in this text.  Miriam Katin's autobiographical accounts of escaping from the Nazis as a child and the legacy of that trauma, linking these reactions to theoretical work on embodied cognition. Drawing from Shaun Gallagher's work on embodied cognition and the 'body-schema' (Gallagher 2006: 32) system that orientates the body in its everyday movements, Szép notes that the body can both expand to be part of something else (such as when we experience the car as our body when driving), but that in our everyday lives our own body and its processes are invisible to us, including the automatic action of turning the comics page.

Szép suggests that Katin uses different expressive and visceral uses of line
(including scratchy almost completely black panels) and abject images of the body in pain or distress to make strange the automatic processes of reading and shock the reader back to their vulnerable bodies. In this way Szép's analysis recalls Drew Leder's theory of 'dys-apperance' (Leder 1990: 83), whereby the invisibility of the body is disrupted when the body ceases to function in its "normal" way, causing its radical and uncanny re-appearance. For Szép it is possible to experience this unusual interruption of "normal" embodiment because of elements on the page.     In a way Covid-19 can be seen to confirm this text's central thesis regarding our shared vulnerability rooted in embodiment, however, in reality the pandemic has revealed how certain bodies have been classed as more vulnerable than others and yet the response to this vulnerability has been mixed. For example, six out of ten people who have died because of Covid-19 have been disabled (Charlton-Dailey: 2021)), with the risk of death from Covid being six times higher for people with learning disabilities (Clegg: 2020). This vulnerability has been examined critically not as an inherent quality of the body but as a result of stark inequalities and prejudices made even more apparent because of Covid-19. For example, research into the significant risk and impact of Covid-19 on Black and South Asian communities in the UK has pointed to poor quality overcrowded housing, a greater likelihood of working in high risk professions, cultural barriers, and structural racism as contributing factors (Razai, Kankam, core Majeed, Esmail & Williams 2021). The greater risk for people with learning disabilities has also been attributed to higher numbers living in congregate care settings, but also prejudice (Courtenay & Cooper: 2021). An example of this prejudice at work was the reports of large numbers of people with learning disabilities and disabled people being sent do not resuscitate orders to sign in case they caught Covid and had to go into hospital (Tapper 2021). Whilst Szép does acknowledge this unequal balance of vulnerability, the question of how and why bodies become socially and politically marked is not the central concern of this work.

Comics and the Disabled Body
Szép's use of Diprose's conception of vulnerability being formed in dialogue with people and environments leads me to the social model of disability (Oliver & Sapey 1983), something that many disabled people evoked during the pandemic. The social model of disability rejects the medical view that disability is found in the physical impairment of a person, and instead it is inaccessible physical and ideological environments and prejudicial attitudes that are disabling-thus disabled people were not (or at least not only) vulnerable to Covid-19 because of their bodies but because of society. One disabled peer in the UK campaigned to remove the label of vulnerable from disabled people during the pandemic, arguing that 'vulnerability…simply serves to anonymise our humanity and human rights' (Pring 2020).
As Thomas Couser states in a critical paper he wrote on graphic medicine, the comics medium's ability to show the sick and disabled body repeatedly across the page 'might seem inconsistent with the aim of deflecting attention from supposedly defective bodies and highlighting disabling aspects of the environment' (Couser 2018: 350). At the same time, he reflects on a growing critical approach to the social model, particularly from those with chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia and ME, who say that the social model denies the embodied experience of disability including pain, fear, suffering, and other complex emotions.
On the back of this observation, he critiques several works of graphic medicine that he sees as being distanced from the actual living disabled body of the artist through visual simplification, bodily metaphors, and anthropomorphism, something that he argues sanitises illness and disability. Whilst the potential for comics to individualise, sanitise, and create distance is something I have discussed in my own work, I do not fully agree with Couser's statement here. Bodily metaphors in comics do have the power to comment on societal norms and lived experience, and there is also a risk that close attention to details of disabled bodies might encourage voyeurism and spectacle.
Similarly, I believe Szép's bodily focus can go someway to addressing the criticisms of the dogmatism of the social model.