Neuroqueering comics

Researcher and zine-maker Lea Cooper considers how comic-zines use the distinctive qualities of zines, such as their modes of production and distribution, to explore some of the complex connections between memory, autobiography, disability and neuroqueerness. Neuroqueering brings neurodivergence and queering together and is a way of subverting and disrupting norms around both how human minds work, and gender and sexuality.

Words by Lilith (Lea) Cooper 24 October 2023

In pictures

A double page spread of a comic showing, over 7 panels, a young man with thick square glasses looking down onto a river and landscape from a balcony, then jumping off the balcony to fall and land in a mass of multi-coloured pills. — 1 of 11
Many of Steven Fraser’s comic-zines focus on his experiences as a queer, autistic person. In ‘Misremembering Sarah Kane Through my Own Suicide Attempts’, Fraser explores his relationship to the work of playwright Sarah Kane. In doing so, he unpacks some of how he experiences his memories as entangled with performances he has watched. In this wordless spread, we too experience some of the disorientation of the comic’s protagonist, who jumps from a bridge towards a river, but lands instead in a pile of brightly coloured pills.

Four panels of a comic with abstract shapes and patterns in black ink. Text across the panels reads "This is great... No for real this is so fucking great. I thought about my future last night and for the first time, you were not there. (You just gotta let it go... let it go...) — 2 of 11
Aki Hassan’s ‘Sleep Paralysis’ doesn’t look like a conventional comic book with character, settings and speech bubbles. Instead, their work is more abstracted and expressive: shapes, textures, lines and text interact on the page to evoke sensations, feelings and moods. The condition of sleep paralysis is a feeling of being conscious or awake but unable to move, which happens between stages of waking and sleeping. Hassan’s work is written as if the comic is speaking to someone far away. The visuals and freeform text give it a dreamlike quality, sometimes sparse, sometimes overwhelming, and capture the state of in-betweenness indicative of sleep paralysis.

Double page spread from the comic-zine Uncharted Side Roads by Mike Nicholson. On the left page is an Image of a hand with several close-ups of a small cuts oozing bright red blood on the fingers. Accompanying text explains it is an unexplained condition of painful splits and tears in the skin. The righthand page has two annonymous figures standing side by side in a cube, which is floating above the clouds. A poem below the image is about "Disorientation. Disjointedness. Dislocation." — 3 of 11
‘Uncharted Side Roads’ is the 33rd in Michael Nicholson’s longer running series titled ’bio auto graphic’. Autobiography is often expected to be in the form of a singular narrative, but for many people this doesn’t match the experience of actually living. Comic perzines can explore episodic forms of autobiography that focus on the in-the-moment experience of being in the world. In this spread, Nicholson combines poetic, rhythmic text with three non-sequential sets of images that focus more on evoking a feeling or sensation than telling a story. The bright red on the first page evokes the sharp pain of the splitting skin on his hands, with the irregular arrangement of the panels giving a sense of disconnection. This disconnection feeds through to the following page, where two figures float in a clear box, dislocated from the city skyline below them.

A double page spread from a long, narrow comic consisting of 6 panels. The panels show the experiences of a blind person, shopping in a supermarket and buying a latte in a coffee shop. — 4 of 11
In this horizontal comic-zine, M Sabine Rear contrasts a classroom exercise involving putting on a blindfold, with her lived experience as a blind person. Some panels directly offer us a sense of how she experiences the world, from the stack of unlabelled jars towering over her in a supermarket, to the spotlight around the word *latte* on a coffee-shop menu. Rear challenges the assumptions that her experiences as a blind person can be reduced to the experience of being blindfolded, while also offering something of her experience to the reader. The zine’s title ’Empathy Exercise’ references both the classroom exercise and the ways that the zine itself invites readers into an exercise in empathy.

A double page spread from the comic-zine Cool Schmool #4 by Holly Casio. It shows two four-panel comics, one per page. The page on left is called VE Day, the one on the left is caled Tik Tock and shows a couple relaxing on a sofa, showing each other videos from Tik Tock, which the other has already seen. In the final panel they decide to make a cup of tea. — 5 of 11
‘Cool Schmool’ collects the weekly diary comics that Holly Casio created during the first four months of Covid lockdown in the UK. Whereas a four-panel comic typically drives you to a punchline, Casio’s comic subverts this, instead emphasising a feeling of stasis or disrupted time. Across the panels, Casio and their partner change position on the couch showing each other ‘TikToks’ that the other has already seen – the punchline is simply Casio observing that it is probably time to make tea. The title ‘Tik Tok’ refers both to the social media platform they are exchanging videos on, and the passing of time. In her zines, Casio brings together both comics she created and shared on social media, and others that didn’t end up online, suggesting the ways that comic-zines invite a different, more intimate audience.

A three-panel comic consisting of a long strip of paper folded in three. The title and first panel is "Things I tell people happened to my arms". Panels two and three are illustrations of two possibilities: "a terrible lion taming incident" and assistant to a knife thrower who "didn't have very good aim". — 6 of 11
Rachel Rowan Olive’s ‘Things I tell people happened to my arms’ folds out like a concertina to offer a humorous look at responses she offers to people who ask what happened to her arms. It is part of her wider work using humour and satire as a form of critique and political engagement. The comic-zine is also a series of jokes that may not be obvious to people outside mad, survivor and service-user communities. Olive doesn’t use the zine to explain what did happen to her arms or give context to why people might be asking. The zine is funny, if you are in the know, and enacts Olive’s final statement, that it is “none of your damn business”.

A double page spread from a comic-zine titled "Graphic Medicine and Anthropology..." The panels of the comic depict a conversation between a young woman and her mother, who has alzheimer's disease. The mother asks why her daughter makes comics about medicine and why she includes her mother in them. The daughter says it's because she wants to tell the story of how graphic stories helped her mum remember what she read and because of the rule-breaking tradition of comics, which could challenge the biomedical view of alzheimer's disease. — 7 of 11
In the comic-zine ‘Graphic Medicine and Medical Anthropology’, the characters of Dana, the comic’s creator, and her mother Alice are in conversation. The persistent questioning by Alice (whose experience of Alzheimer’s disease is a central thread in Dana’s work) in this spread relates to the graphic medicine – the academic study of the relationships between comics and medicine. This zine turns the tables and use comics to explore the nature of the field of graphic medicine itself. Dana Walrath blends her own lived experiences of health and illness with reflections on the creation of comics. Through her conversation with Alice, she attempts to unpack the multi-layered reasons she makes comics.

A brightly coloured pink and blue double page spread from the comic-zine 'Aftercare...'. The page on the left illustrates a 'scene' in BDSM sexual practice. The page on the right describes the phenomenon of 'sub drop' which is an emotional 'low' that can occur after a BDSM 'scene'. Behind the text is an image of a naked figure falling from a cloud and being caught in the arms of another figure lower down the page. — 8 of 11
This risoprinted zine offers a guide to aftercare in BDSM sexual practices. Risoprinters create a stencil called a master, and then push ink through this master to create a colour layer. In this zine, pink, teal and blue layers have been combined to create the brightly coloured pages. In the page on the right, one of the layers hasn’t perfectly lined up with the others. Rather than detracting from the meaning of the page, about the emotional state of ‘subdrop‘, it emphasises feelings of dislocation and disconnection that one partner might experience after a ‘scene’. Although not intentional (though the page was intentionally included in the zine), it demonstrates how material qualities play a part in how we read a thing.

A large sheet of paper folded into four pages, each containing detailed text and comic panels from the zine ‘Red Hanky Panky 9’. The top left page is an introduction to the zine by the zine-maker and the other three pages each contain a different comic strip, with the titles: ‘My zine’s a failure’, ‘and every day’ and ‘This depression I carry’. — 9 of 11
In ‘Red Hanky Panky 9’, Rachael House brings together some of the strips ‘from her long running autobiographical comic-zine ‘Red Hanky Panky’ (1991–2001) with some newer strips. House reflects on how it feels to return to older comics and reconnect with her younger self. She finds that many of her concerns are the same, but some have changed (“more concerned with menopause than periods now”). House assembled this zine after spending time in the Queer Zine Archive Project and writes: “Queer zines save lives, you know” – a reference to the importance not just of the zines she read there, but of her own zines which are, in a way, archived in this issue.

A double page spread from a comic-zine called Anxiety Comics Vol. 1. The left page shows a young woman's head with a speech bubble saying "What are you?" as she looks at an anxious looking fish-like creature. Two other speech bubbles on the page have been crossed out so the text is unreadable. Text below the image says "The first anxiety comic, which I never finished." The righthand page has text at the top saying "Original anxiety creature concepts". Below it are three illustrations of the 'fish' creature still, swimming and curled up asleep. — 10 of 11
Zine researcher Jessie Lymn has described zines as the “traces of practices that create them” – shifting our attention from the material object to the process of making. This page from Stacey Bru’s anxiety comics shows how comic-zines are closer to a visual diary of the practice of comics creation rather than the comic as a polished story or narrative. For many zine-makers, the process of making is as important as the outcome, and Bru describes their creations as “comics as therapy”.

Front cover of a per-zine called Autism and Burnout. The zine consists of a long narrow strip of paper folded into pages. The cover has an orange background with black flames dancing below the title. In the black area is written "A personal comic by Brian Tyrrell" in orange. — 11 of 11
The elongated form of this comic-zine is unusual, even for a zine. It is almost as long as a length of A3 paper, but very narrow. Inside, Brian explores his experiences of burnout as an autistic person. The unusual shape adds to the zine’s content – everything feels a bit stretched and out of shape. The format also narrows the amount that can go onto each page, turning them into vertical strips and shifting how we read the comic as a whole.

About the author

Black and white photograph of the head and shoulders of a young white person with short blonde hair and glasses. They are smiling and looking straight at the camera.