By Prateeti Chowdhury, University of Hyderabad
Wiebe, Reginald, and Dorothy Woodman. The Cancer Plot: Terminal Immortality in Marvel’s Moral Universe. University of Alberta Press, 2023.
Reginald Weibe and Dorothy Woodman’s The Cancer Plot: Terminal Immortality in Marvel’s Moral Universe (2023) discusses how Marvel comics negotiate narratives of cancer. If graphic medicine is a well-established area in the medical humanities whose focus is more academically “serious,” then juxtaposing a somber human condition such as cancer next to the popular superhero comic might appear “fantastical and ridiculous” (Weibe and Woodman xi). Using the medical humanities to closely read and analyze how superhero comics tackle cancer works as an interesting intervention as it shifts the focus from larger socio-political questions of power to asking more humane questions of health and mortality otherwise typically antithetical to the superhero’s super body. While the representation of cancer in comics has gained increasing popularity (Williams 2012; Holmes 2014; McMullin 2016), a study of cancer’s representation in superhero comics, especially those published by Marvel or DC Comics, awaits more exploration. It is at these research gaps that Weibe and Woodman situate their monograph.
A quick internet search on the presence of cancer in superhero comics shows that superheroes’ encounters with cancer are not uncommon. For instance, the website Pop Mythology provides a reading list of some of the most popular superhero comics series/volumes dealing with cancer in its article, “10 comic book superheroes who battled cancer”. David A. Lewis’s work on cancer and comics identifies different trends in the ways cancer is represented in comics. In his poster titled “Cancer and Comic Books: Distinguishing the Subgenre”, he identifies four categories (fictive, experiential, familial, and clinical) under which “cancer comics” can be classified (Lewis 2018). While Lewis’s categorization comprises both superhero and non-superhero comics, his work marks one of the earliest forays into representations of cancer in superhero comic books. One example he discusses in his poster is the 2007 Dr. Strange comic book limited series titled, Dr. Strange: The Oath.
In the Introduction, Weibe and Woodman justify their rationale for reading cancer alongside superhero narratives. They claim that the superhero figure can be read and compared with the cancer patient, as the identities of these disparate figures are forged in terms of their “battle” with cancer or adversity (xv, xviii). Combined with questions of power and responsibility–the two tenets that govern superhero morals–cancer works as a narrative foil that generates what the authors have termed as “terminal immortality”–a “paradoxical condition” where the real-life “physiological and psychological” implications of cancer “complicate[s] the superhero figure without dismantling it” (xxii). In terms of the justification of the corpus of texts, their decision to focus on Marvel over DC comics is purely chronological. Marvel, they argue, has shown interest in representing cancer in their comics since the 1980s (xxvii). However, they substantiate this claim with statistics to show the frequency of cancer in Marvel’s superhero stories: “more than 70 characters who have been diagnosed with some form of the disease: 17 percent have been superheroes, 31 percent have been supervillains, and 52 percent have been supporting characters” (xxi). When it comes to the range of books selected in this study, one can see that Weibe and Goodman do not discriminate the “non-cancer” themed works like The Ultimate Spider-Man 1 from the more typical graphic medicine texts like The Death of Captain Marvel.
The strength of this book lies in its readability. Right from the Introduction, the book reads like a beginner-friendly book on comics. Researchers and casual readers unfamiliar with Marvel comics will find this book easy to follow. There is substantial summarized information about the characters and the plotlines of the comics scattered throughout the book that helps the reader focus on the authors’ observations and arguments. The book’s structure is also very reader-friendly, with it being divided into two major sections. The first section, which covers the study’s theoretical underpinnings, can be read as an extensive overview of the area and can be helpful to new researchers who are more interested in learning where cancer and comics intersect. The second section, which includes case studies from Marvel Comicverse, contains an elaborate analysis of the comics themselves. Despite the author’s thorough summaries, I personally feel that a prior reading and/or awareness of the comic books in question will provide a better footing while reading Weibe and Woodman’s chapters.
The book also contains Editor’s Notes, single-page length pieces written à la comic book style, that work as a preface for the following chapters. In the first section, the Editor’s Note merely justifies why these notes exist, along with a summary of the two chapters in the section. In the second section, each note charts a basic story-based summary of the superhero whose analysis follows in the succeeding chapter. In terms of language, the notes are quite dramatic, smattered with delightful alliterative phrases like “In the perilous pantheons of powered pugilists” (Weibe and Woodman 157). The authors admit to taking inspiration from “Stan Lee’s carnival barker persona” (3), and this reflects in their use of the mock-heroic language found in older comic books. Addressed to “Dear Readers” (3), Weibe and Woodman’s use of whimsical tactics, I feel, humorously eases the reader into and piques their interest in the more academically bent analyses that follow in the succeeding chapters. The book also contains two appendices, listing characters in Marvel and DC comicverse who encounter cancer. The appendices are pretty exhaustive, spanning over 17 pages (pages 199-210 for Appendix 1 and 211-216 for Appendix 2) and are quite a valuable tool for further research.
Content-wise, the book’s first section includes two chapters, both of which explore cancer in Marvel comics along the theoretical frameworks of death and the body. In the first chapter, the authors examine the role death plays in Marvel comics. In the second chapter, the authors explore how cancer works in Marvel comics, “by parsing the superhero figure as part of Marvel’s reflection of contemporary interests” (27). Particularly interesting in this chapter is the authors’ focus on several minor characters’ encounters with cancer, which illustrates how caring for these characters affects the Marvel superheroes. The theoretical underpinnings set in the first two chapters are then demonstrated in the second section, whose four chapters are dedicated to exploring the different ways the trope of cancer is used in Marvel Comics. In the third chapter, Weibe and Goodman examine Jim Starlin’s The Death of Captain Marvel (1982) to demonstrate how Captain Marvel, from his origin to his end, was a product of Marvel’s branding and marketing and how his death enabled Marvel to approach the tropes of death and resurrection more maturely. The fourth chapter on Spider-Man looks at the representations of cancer to study how tropes of power and responsibility work across all Marvel characters. It also examines how adolescence and race intervene in Spiderman’s and Venom’s negotiations of power and responsibility. The fifth chapter complicates these negotiations of the superhero with power and responsibility by examining the concept of worthiness. The authors argue that by introducing a cancer-ridden Jane Foster as Thor, the comics can challenge the divide between divinity and mortality, as well as the gendered expectations of Thor. Finally, in the sixth chapter, the authors look at Deadpool to argue that Deadpool does not just have cancer, but he is cancer. Apart from embodying the disease in its most potent form, the authors establish how Deadpool becomes a metonym for cancer by being an antihero whose selfish mercenarism destroys his heroic deeds as well as everyone else around him. Throughout the book, the authors continually contend with how the tenets of power and responsibility shape/are shaped by Marvel’s representations of cancer. The authors reinforce this stance by establishing the superhero as a vulnerable figure whose tryst with cancer renders them bodily vulnerable. The superhero body in cancer narratives both lends the superhero their superpowers and brings them closer to mortality, thereby complicating the concept of the imperishable body.
It is interesting to note how, with each successive chapter, the corpus of texts analyzed by the authors also continues to expand. Echoing David Lewis’s idea of a cancer climax, these increasing numbers of texts vouch for the changing landscape of cancer representation in comics. David Lewis’s definition of a cancer climax refers to “the building culmination of the illness to a narrative point at which either the ill or the illness finally succumbs; the cancer climax is not necessarily synonymous with the overall narrative climax or peak of the story” (Lewis 2022). He also observes how there has been a gradual shift “over the past forty years” in depicting the cancer climax, leading to comics that talk of “more events following either a demise or a remission fill the stories, suggesting more to life after cancer” (Lewis 2022). The various texts selected in this book demonstrate that the cancer climax is no longer limited to just the novel’s denouement; instead, it is placed at different points in the narrative, showcasing a different kind of life after cancer. As shown in the Thor series and the Deadpool comics, cancer works more like a pivotal point in the character’s identity that spurns more narratives for the characters.
In conclusion, this book demonstrates how comic books, especially Marvel comic books, depict cancer and how cancer complicates the superhero’s straightforward physical and moral character arc. As one of the first books in this area, Weibe and Woodman fulfil the aims they set out to achieve and leave enough scope for further research in this area. Perhaps in the coming future, we can see studies that focus on DC characters’ explorations with cancer, or a transmedial study of cancer representations in the Marvel or DC universe, or even a study on gendered cancer depictions in superhero comics. One can optimistically wait for more promising and exciting ‘adventures’ to come.
Works Cited
Holmes, Martha Stoddard. “Cancer Comics: Narrating Cancer through Sequential Art.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 32/33, no. 2/1, 2013, pp. 147-162. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43653281.
Lewis, A. David. “Cancer and Comic Books: Distinguishing the Subgenre”, Ninth Annual Faculty Scholarship Showcase, April 30, 2019, MCPHS University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Poster Presentation. Knowledge Commons, http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/8g4b-6335.
—. “Comics after Cancer”, Health Humanities Consortium, 24-26 March, 2022, online. Knowledge Commons, https://doi.org/10.17613/5fw5-ca57.
—. “Distinguishing the Comic Book Subgenre of Cancer Narratives”, Comics & Medicine: The Ways We Work, Graphic Medicine and the Center for Cartoon Studies, August 16-18, 2018. White River Junction, Vermont. Conference Paper. ASEES Commons, http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6445HB9P.
McMullin, Juliet. “Cancer and the Comics: Graphic Narratives and Biolegitimate Lives.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 149-167, https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12172.
Mythologist, The Pop. “10 comic book superheroes who battled cancer”, Pop Mythology, 10 December, 2016. www.popmythology.com/superheroes-who-battled-cancer/. Accessed 20 April 2024.
Williams, Ian CM. “Graphic Medicine: Comics as medical narrative.” Medical Humanities, vol. 38, no.1, 2012, pp. 21-27, https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2011-010093.
Footnote
- In The Ultimate Spider-Man, cancer, or rather its purported cure, remains a spectral presence that motivates the characters’ actions while complicating questions of moral integrity and power and responsibility.↺