Four superheroes blast through a brick wall. One in the middle shouts,
”A little to the right, Blindman!” as his armored wheelchair veers toward the fleeing crowd. Another taps a motorized cane while he yanks a lunging seeing-eye hellhound. A third aims a flame-spewing crutch and bellows:
”Introducing the Infirmity 4. Blindman! Mr. Wheels! Deaf Girl! The Human Crutch! Fighting for their rightful place in society!”
Chicagoan Tom Roberts, 29, rolls away from his drawing board, where the comic-book cover depicting the above scene lies. He sets down his razor-tip pen, pausing from a new drawing, and grins. It isn`t easy. Since muscular dystrophy struck at age 15, he`s lost more than muscle. He can no longer live alone. Eventually he`ll need help to eat, to use the bathroom, ultimately even to breathe. What`s left but laughter?
”My first night in the chair,” remembers Roberts, ”I rolled into an Oak Park restaurant. I felt every eye on me. What else could I do? I started laughing.”
But when your life is about buses you can`t mount, bathrooms you can`t squeeze into and voting booths you can`t get near, the laughter is angry. So in 1982, artist and cartoon animator Roberts began publishing a series of vitriolic, scatological underground comics named ”Anti-Social, a Helpless Anger Production” that trashed everything from televangelists to pollution to gay-bashers.
With his seventh and latest comic book, though, ”Anti-Social for the Disabled” ($1.85 at Barbara`s Bookstore and Guild Books, Chicago, or by special order from comic book stores), Roberts has given ”outrageous” new meaning. Coauthored by disabled Chicago activist pals Mike Ervin and Sue Nussbaum and able-bodied collaborator Ken Roberts (no relation), ”Anti-Social for the Disabled” spares no one, not even the disabled themselves.
There are party jokes like ”Why don`t blind people skydive? It scares hell out of their dog.” There are myth-busters like ”Wilbur, the Little Wheelchair that Could,” who ends up as scrap metal in a car`s brakes; and
”Freaky Franky,” about a paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt so mortified that he refuses to use a wheelchair, ordering his Secret Service men to prop him up and propel him from behind.
A Mr. Kenneth`s Fashion Statement page hawks ”Blind Dude” solid gold-framed glasses with retractable eyeballs, rhinestone-encrusted crutches with leather and satin armpit pads, and a domed racing wheelchair tagged ”The Dominator.” A paraplegic woman simpers to a telethon audience, ”I`ll never walk again, but with your help, I could own a Jacuzzi-make that the marble-trimmed one-a VCR, a new blender. . . .”
If you`re tough enough to keep reading, you`ll probably find the images sharp, the words biting and the jokes hilarious.
Defending bad taste
Roberts would rather poke fun, preferably in bad taste, than face paddywagons and minicams as do activist coauthors Ervin and Nussbaum, whose weapons of choice include street demonstrations and Transit Board meeting invasions to protest inaccessible public transportation.
But bad taste also has its drawbacks. ”Trashy, not worth finishing,”
says Jim Todd, shipping and receiving clerk at Last Gasp Comics in San Francisco, which has distributed the entire Anti-Social series. Frank Mangiaracina, of Friendly Frank`s comic-book store in Gary, doesn`t openly display ”Disabled” because he considers it adult material. Catalogue reviewers don`t know what to make of the book. One blurb says it reads like
”a cruel joke that will make a lot of readers feel guilty for laughing,”
while another calls it simultaneously ”heavy-handed, funny, touching, and ridiculous.”
Others line up behind it. ”Sure, it`s raw and outrageous,” says Terry Hamilton of Barbara`s Bookstore, ”but our clients are theater people, New Wavers, punkers, Near North Side Yuppies-and that`s who likes adult comics. They deal with serious matters through outrageous drawings and shock.”
Says Jim Gallo, of Guild Books, ”People come in and leaf through it, ordinary housewives, students. Their eyes bug out. They sort of gasp, and then they buy it.”
At least disability is no longer a dirty word, in a climate that openly confronts AIDS, abortion and homosexuality. Disabled writer and cartoonist John Callahan, of Portland, Ore., (author of ”Don`t Worry, He Won`t Get Far on Foot”) is selling well; both Marvel and D.C. Comics now feature disabled teenage mutant heroes (one teen uses sign language, another turns his wheelchair into a rocket); and CBS television recently aired a program about a wheelchair-bound teen. So while not exactly a best-seller at mainstream stores, ”Anti-Social for the Disabled” at least fits in.
Still, direct bookstore sales have accounted for less than 10 percent of the nearly 1,000 copies marketed nationally (only 1,000 were originally printed, though Roberts plans a run of 200 more). The rest have been from national catalogue companies which supply individual stores who, in turn, order on demand.
It`s hard to market such a specialized comic book, says Andrew Kreegier of North Shore Comics. Fans tend to favor either fantasy, vigilante superheroes like Batman or mutants, horror/violence stories, or prurient
”adult” underground comics often kept in the back room.
Laugh instead of cry
One place ”Anti-Social for the Disabled” is popular, though, is in the disabled community itself. Charlotte DesJardins of the Coordinating Council for Handicapped Children, a Chicago parent training and referral center, calls it ”appropriately outrageous-it`s got to bite in order to get the message across,” and is so impressed with the book she plans to market it to other advocacy groups.
Marca Bristow of Access Living, a Chicago support organization for the adult disabled, says, ”It finds ways to laugh at things we`d otherwise cry about.” And University of Illinois social work professor Ord Matek said,
”This is not helpless anger. It`s a creative use of the anger. It`s an extraordinarily affirming action. . . . People really do these things. Why not a sense of humor about it all, to show there`s life even if you`re in a wheelchair?”
Meanwhile, says Roberts, though printing the comic has cost him plenty
($1,000 for the four-color cover alone, plus $1,400 for the complete books), he is still in the red; and the real-life Infirmity Four aren`t finished. ”Anti-Social for the Disabled No. 2” is coming, and the sequel`s cover has been planned: Mr. Wheels can`t get up the curb to rescue a citizen screaming for help, so Deaf Girl, using a sonar beam, pulverizes the curb into an instant ramp.
”If `Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles` could make it,” Roberts says, laughing, ”why not this?”
