Growing up, my dad and his brothers all read comic books. This was in the ’70s and ’80s when comics were not seen as “cool” and there was not a basic cultural knowledge of the characters outside of the big ones. My dad had a treasure trove of comics from his youth that my siblings, cousins, and I got to enjoy. Because these comics were always around, I thought it was just dorky.
The X-Men comic book series is about people called mutants who have superpowers due to genetic mutations, and explores themes of inequality and segregation, pulling from rights movements. When the first X-Men movies came out in the early 2000s, my dad went to the midnight showings. He would tell me how cool it was because people dressed up in character. I was so embarrassed. I teased him, “Why would you even do that?!”
Shortly after the movies, the video game X-Men Legends came out during my peak middle school energy, which I begrudgingly played with my dad and brother because we didn’t get to see my dad often.
What got me interested, and then hooked on X-Men specifically, was that I started to see so much of my experience reflected. I carry the diagnosis of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a genetic disease inherited from my dad. Conflicts that play out within the X-Men universe among humans and mutants relate to the experience of having a genetic kidney disease. I strongly identified with the character Rogue as a young teen. She absorbs people’s energy and mutants’ powers through touch, but often she feels like her power is something to be fixed even though she is so badass.
After we finished the game, I wanted the story to keep going, so I started reading my dad’s X-Men comic books and then buying my own once I had devoured all of his.
From 2007 to 2018, my dad was on dialysis. His stamina went down to the point where walking around the block was pushing himself, pain due to his enlarged kidney was constant, and he was generally lethargic. He talked about how it was hard adjusting because of how quickly his body changed. As a way to spend time together, we would watch comic book movies and talk about them. It became a shared ritual for us to connect, and we looked forward to comic book movies coming out. In 2018, the movie Avengers Infinity War came out in theaters while my dad was in the hospital, and we never got to see it together.
When I think about my grief of being diagnosed with a “chronic disease,” a condition where there is no “cure,” I think about the dynamics in the X-Men universe. I apply Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief to myself as someone with a genetic kidney condition. While I continually process what it means to have that diagnosis, I flip through the stages as new symptoms in my own body arise. I think about how in the comics, they show how young mutants process the new knowledge of their diagnosis.
As I grow older, I find myself reflecting on Storm and Wolverine and their relationship to their bodies and powers. Storm views her powers as a part of her, that her powers shape her lived experience and that there is nothing to “cure.” Whereas Wolverine was defined by how other people view their own power, and the struggle Wolverine faces is to be able to define who they are outside of people medicalizing their body for personal gain. Wolverine both embraces their body and powers as a part of their experience and tries to forge ahead with defining what being a mutant means to them.
When I think about my grief of watching my dad through his life/death journey with his kidneys, I apply Worden’s four tasks of mourning. Worden’s tasks were crafted for people grieving the death of a person, not their own death, like Kubler-Ross. The X-Men franchise, in book and media forms, gives me a way to maintain the connection to my dad as I continue on with life, which is task number four.
I don’t think my dad meant to have the X-Men play such a role model figure in my life. Through this fiction, the X-Men gave me words and language about alternative ways of seeing myself and body than either the medical model or charity model of disability would have people think about my experience.
Lea la versión en español de este ensayo aquí.
Listen to the audio version of From Comic Books to Coping, read by the author Sea Krob:
Sea Krob (they/them) is a photographically rooted artist based in Los Angeles. Their work ungulates between the personal and the societal as they take in new perspectives and question how the other side shifts. Focusing specifically on the body at the intersections of the medical industrial complex/disability/gender/race/class. The art is a direct conversation with the viewer shifting them from a witness to an active participant in dialogue.
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