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Part memoir, part medical cautionary tale, Dumb tells the story of how an urban twentysomething copes with the everyday challenges that come with voicelessness. Webber adroitly uses the comics medium to convey the practical hurdles she faced as well as the fear and dread that accompanied her increasingly lonely journey to regain her life. Her raw cartooning style, occasionally devolving into chaotic scribbles, splotches of ink, and overlapping montages, perfectly captures her frustration and anxiety. But her ordeal ultimately becomes a hopeful story. Throughout, she learns to lean on the support of her close friends, finds self-expression in creating comics, and comes to understand and appreciate how deeply her voice and identity are intertwined.
In late 2004, Vivian Chong’s life was changed forever when a rare skin disease, TEN (Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis), left her with scar tissue that would eventually blind her. As she was losing her sight, she put down as many drawings on paper as she could to document the experience. In Dancing After TEN, Chong teams up with cartoonist Georgia Webber ― whose graphic autobiography, Dumb, chronicled her own disability ― to trace her journey out of the darkness and into the spotlight. Chong now expresses her art through singing, stand-up, drumming, running, and dancing. This graphic novel is an inspirational tale and a powerful work of graphic medicine.
Dumb is a true comic series about Georgia Webber's voicelessness due to injury in 2012, and the subsequent months of recovery. It is also acollection of audio pieces, an interview project, a video collage, a documentation experiment, and a filter through which to examine identity, physiology, spirituality, intimacy, sociology, privilege, justice, and more. The first two parts of Dumb are included in this compilation and introduce Georgia in her natural vocally abundant state: working, socializing, volunteering at a bike co-op, going out, all as the pain (represented by stars) interferes more and more. A diagnosis is given, but she is left with little more. Then the aftermath of diagnosis is shown, the gathering of information, and the trauma of change. An internal battle is waged in images on the page. Includes introductions written by Madeleine Palmer, Georgia's voice coach, and by Natalie Zina Walschots, a music writer specializing in metal, as well as "Aftermath" and "Splitting."
In Show Me Where It Hurts, Monica Chiu argues that graphic pathography—long-form comics by and about subjects who suffer from disease or are impaired—re-vitalizes and re-visions various negatively affected corporeal states through hand-drawn images. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, and it stands in contradistinction to clinical accounts of illness that tend to disembody or objectify the subject. Employing affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism, and approaches from race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and comics studies, Chiu provides readings of recently published graphic pathography. Chiu argues that these...
DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains is an edgy and erotic investigation of comic book bad boys. These poems employ a language that is highly technical and dense, but it becomes witty, intimate and even tender in its specificity. These poems address the results of abuses of power and taken together present a case study in the pathology of villainy. Praise for Thumbscrews: "Natalie Zina Walschots [is] a writer who engages with the aesthetics of sadomasochism in order to generate elegant, sensual poetry that writhes inside the shackles of its own linguistic constraint... [she] treats each poem as a miniature, theatrical tableau--a 'passion play, ' in which she forces language to submit to her will, beating its grammar into a stupor of ecstatic nonsense."--Christian Bok, The Poetry Foundation
Reading the Contemporary Author brings together leading scholars in cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, narratology, comparative literature, and autobiography studies to interrogate how we read the contemporary author in public and cultural life, in life writing, and in literature.
When Carolyn Weber set out to study Romantic literature at Oxford University, she didn't give much thought to God or spiritual matters—but over the course of her studies she encountered the Jesus of the Bible and her world turned upside down. Surprised by Oxford chronicles her conversion experience with wit, humor, and insight into how becoming a Christian changed her. Carolyn Weber arrives at Oxford a feminist from a loving but broken family, suspicious of men and intellectually hostile to all things religious. As she grapples with her God-shaped void alongside the friends, classmates, and professors she meets, she tackles big questions in search of truth, love, and a life that matters. F...
Jandy Nelson meets Friday Night Lights in this sweeping, warm, arrestingly original novel about family, poverty, and hope. Wing Jones, like everyone else in her town, has worshipped her older brother, Marcus, for as long as she can remember. Good-looking, popular, and the star of the football team, Marcus is everything his sister is not. Until the night everything changes when Marcus, drunk at the wheel after a party, kills two people and barely survives himself. With Marcus now in a coma, Wing is crushed, confused, and angry. She is tormented at school for Marcus’s mistake, haunted at home by her mother and grandmothers’ grief. In addition to all this, Wing is scared that the bank is go...
“Reluctant readers and fans of the Wimpy Kid series and its ilk will appreciate the book’s dynamic type, graphics galore, cartoonish illustrations, and ironic footnotes.”—Kirkus Don’t call him scaredy-cat Sam, because Sam Wu IS NOT AFRAID of ghosts! Except . . . he totally is. Can he conquer his fear by facing the ghost that lives in the walls of his house? After an unfortunate (and very embarrassing) incident in the Space Museum, Sam goes on a mission to prove to the school bully, and all his friends, that he’s not afraid of anything—just like the heroes on his favorite show, Space Blasters. And when it looks like his house is haunted, Sam gets the chance to prove how brave he can be. A funny, touching, and charming story of ghost hunting, escaped pet snakes, and cats with attitude!
When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd’s boardroom allies. In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway’s to shine a light on labor’s most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under cons...