Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Just a small sampling of Stan Lee's work. Indisputably, he was the creator or co-creator of some of the most iconic comic book characters of all time (credit: Marvel Comics)

From Wonder Woman to Watchmen, it's not easy to envision what pop culture would be like today without the impact of superheroes. It's also not easy to comprehend how any comic book about a flying alien, or a furious green monster, or a super-soldier who defeats a whole army by himself has anything to do with the worlds of technology and science. But as we all know, appearances can be deceiving.

Although the influence of superheroes on modern culture is undeniable, the influence of modern culture on many superheroes remains hazy to this day. Comic creators, perhaps often wanting to maintain a little mystique, have historically been hesitant to get explicit about their inspirations. But when thinking through 80-plus-years-and-counting of our favorite caped crusaders changing slightly with the times, their real world analogues become clearer and clearer.

Science and science fiction

One of comics’ most iconic heroes might also be the perfect example of this. Since his first appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938, Superman has adapted to the times. The "Man of Steel" we saw in 2017's Justice League didn't just happen overnight, after all. Superman’s long term evolution is the result of many transformations and technological advancements throughout the decades.

Enlarge

Science has had issues with racism from its very beginning. At best, many of the early scientists had ideas that typified the racist societies of their times. At worst, they actively participated in providing justification for that racism, a habit that reached its peak in the eugenics movement of the first half of last century. But World War II made the end point of eugenics painfully obvious, causing mainstream science to re-evaluate and reject many of its racist ideas.

But as racists have become increasingly public in the early years of this century, they've once again turned to science for support—and found some scientists ready to provide it. How in the world did this happen?

Angela Saini's new book Superior provides not one but multiple answers to that question. They range from tracking how a rich segregationist helped keep race-focused biology on life support to a view into how naive scientists are still accepting society's ideas on race despite their lack of a biological basis. The book makes for a compelling read, but it's an especially important caution for the science-inclined, who can benefit from being forced to step back and re-examine their assumptions on race and where they came from.

Enlarge (credit: Anca Gabriela Rafan / EyeEm / Getty)

The operators of the popular GirlsDoPorn website owe nearly $13 million to 22 young women who were tricked and coerced into shooting pornographic videos, a California judge ruled on Thursday. It took Judge Kevin Enright 187 pages to enumerate the many ways owner Michael Pratt and two co-conspirators mistreated the women.

"Plaintiffs have suffered and continue to suffer far-reaching and often tragic consequences," the judge wrote. "Collectively, they have experienced severe harassment, emotional and psychological trauma, and reputational harm." Damages include "lost jobs, academic and professional opportunities, and family and personal relationships." Their lives were "derailed and uprooted," with several plaintiffs contemplating suicide.

The group behind GirlsDoPorn recruited women by advertising clothed modeling gigs on Craigslist and elsewhere. When a woman responded to an ad, they were told that the job was actually shooting porn. However, the women were told that they could make $5,000—sometimes even more—in a single day of shooting. And these women were then assured that their videos would never appear on the Internet. Instead, footage would be burned to DVD and sold to private collectors in Australia and New Zealand. All of this turned out to be lies. Within weeks of shooting, the women's videos appeared on GirlsDoPorn and various free pornographic "tube sites."

Enlarge / Martinique-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon explored the bioethics of studying and treating trauma in his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth. An academic paper written in comic form examines one case study in particular from a modern perspective. (credit: tupungato/Getty Images)

Is it possible to ethically treat someone with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) developed as a result of inflicting torture on others? That's the question posed in a paper published last summer in AJOB Neuroscience, but there's a twist. The paper is written and illustrated as a comic book by Lehigh University artist and neuroscientist Ann E. Fink.

Fink is part of a growing movement called "graphic medicine," a term coined back in 2007 by physician and comics artist Ian Williams to describe the use of comics to enhance both professional and general public discourse on healthcare issues. Comics may be a form of visual rhetoric ideal for medical education and patient care, and proponents include M.K. Czerwiec, aka "Comic Nurse," who worked in an HIV hospice at the height of the AIDS epidemic. When the clinic closed in 2000, she struggled to find an outlet to express the bittersweet emotions she was feeling, but she found the comic format was perfect.

"I realized that the combination of image and text in sequential fashion really helped me organize my thoughts," Czerwiec told the University of Chicago News last year. "It just worked." Now an artist in residence at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, she published a graphic nonfiction memoir/oral history, Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371, in 2017. Czerwiec and Williams, along with Penn State University's Michael Green, were among the first attendees in 2010 of what is now an annual international graphic medicine conference. They published The Graphic Medicine Manifesto, a collection of scholarly essays with visual narratives, in 2015.