Visual Satire and Covid-19 in the Comics of Billingsley, Bell, and Obuobi.

Abstract

This essay tracks how elements of satire and seriality are used across select examples of comics by Black-identified author-artists-Ray Billingsley's Curtis, Darrin Bell's Candorville, and diary comics and social media posts by Shirlene Obuobi, MD-to process the potential traumas related to the Covid-19 pandemic, medical racism, and antiblackness at the hospital. Forwarding the scholarship of Tina Campt, Rebecca Wanzo, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Linda Villarosa, Christina Sharpe, and others, I argue that despite their kaleidoscopic differences, the comic authors discussed variously picture racial barriers to medical care while reimagining healing so as to re-center Black people not only as sufferers but as authoritative sources of care. All three utilize formal properties unique to comics to prompt viewers to practice looking elsewhere, beyond dominant conventions of presenting Blackness as singular, stereotypical, or optically reducible.