‘Welcoming Different Voices’ Hosted by Disability Studies Program, Eastern Washington University May 17-18, 2019 EWU Spokane, Spokane Washington
Our goal is to provide scholars, researchers, advocates and other community members a platform to work together to improve opportunities available for disabled people as a matter of social justice.
“The Guilty!”, a lurid seven-page tale of miscarried justice by writer Al Feldstein and artist Wally Wood, appeared in Shock Suspenstories No. 3 (June/July, 1952). Part of publisher EC’s line of controversial horror and crime comics, stories like these would ultimately lead to congressional scrutiny of the comics industry and its subsequent self-censorship. “The Guilty!” recounts how an unspeaking, unresistant African-American man, Collins, is railroaded for the murder of a white woman and shot by a racist sheriff just as his innocence is proven. Making surveillance a major theme, “The Guilty!” persistently draws attention to and complicates the gaze, with several panels depicting Collins’ point of view; characters’ reflections; and the breaking of the “fourth wall.” But how to interpret Collins’ silence? Drawing on the work of Nirmala Erevelles, Douglas Baynton and other scholars, the proposed paper interprets “The Guilty!” – in particular Collins’ non-speaking role – as an intersectional race/disability narrative, seeking to go beyond the standard symbolic reading of the unspeaking black man as victim and sacrificial lamb to the mid-century USA’s racial dysfunction. Through a close reading text and imagery, the paper advances Collins as the story’s neurodiverse and mute protagonist who resists his fate through a condemning gaze.
