Co-led by College Fellow, Dr Joe Sutliff Sanders, a new University of Cambridge-led project explores the uniquely powerful connection between autism and comics.
College Fellow and University Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, Dr Joe Sutliff Sanders, works primarily in Children’s Literature, with past books on classic girls’ novels, the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, children’s nonfiction and critical engagement, and children’s animation.
We spoke with Dr Sanders to learn more about a study he is currently co-leading, which will lead to new guidance encouraging both the comics industry and enthusiasts to make comics communities better places for neurodivergent fans and artists.
The project is called ‘The Collaboration for Comics and Autism’. As well as the Comics Cultural Impact Collective (CCIC), Joe and co-lead Professor Jenny Gibson will be working with the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, Dekko Comics (a specialist publisher supporting neurodivergent learners), the Association of Illustrators, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration and autistic cartoonists Bex Ollerton and Eliza Fricker.
What sparked your interest in exploring the connection between autism and comics?
I’m an expert in comics and have loved them my whole life. A few years ago, I read an interview with an adult autistic person who runs a comics shop talking about how there were things about comics that fit his needs as an autistic person and helped him thrive. I was so enthralled with the idea of someone else loving the thing that I loved for reasons that had never occurred to me that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Can you tell us about your involvement in the project and its goals?
My colleague Prof Jenny Gibson and I are co-investigators on the project. We will host two workshops in the first half of 2025, bringing together autistic and allistic academics, comics professionals, exhibit/museum organisers, fan/cultural event organisers, and other stakeholders to reflect on how to make comics a more inclusive place for autistic people. Our output will be a set of best practices that we will turn into a comic book that is published online, helping eager folks around the world who want to improve the experiences of autistic people in our community.
What motivates you to advocate for greater inclusion and accessibility within the comics community?
There’s nothing deep or especially surprising about my answer here: I like it when people get to enjoy things that they love, and if what they love is something I also love, all the better. Also, the comics community is my community, and if there’s a way to make my community better, I have an obligation (in this case, a joyful one) to do so.
Why do you think comics hold such strong appeal for many autistic people?
This isn’t something I’m prepared to answer yet, but Jenny and I are really excited about pursuing exactly this question in later projects. One of the ideas that we’ve seen suggested (but we haven’t tested any of them, so I’m not exactly endorsing it) is that comics rely on a set of facial expressions that is finite, meaning that emotional subtexts of stories in comics can be understood easily by any reader. That’s not the reality for how most art presents itself to autistic people, so maybe comics have a leg up here. Another possible explanation is that comics, because they are historically serial fiction with generations of backstory, lend themselves to people with the skill of deep fixation, which many autistic people have; if you are the kind of person who likes to learn more and more and more about things you’re interested in and you have the mental capacity to store all that information, comics are an incredible medium for you. But as Jenny likes to say, “If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person,” so I know better than to try to generalise about autistic people. What I can say is that there is a disproportionate percentage of autistic people who love comics as opposed to allistic people who love comics, so something interesting is afoot. I am beside myself that I have this chance to connect better with other people who agree with me about how great the medium is.
How can comics empower them and contribute to their wellbeing?
I don’t think I have any foundation on which to answer this as specific to autistic people now, and I might never have that foundation. But I can say that comics empower and contribute to the wellbeing of anyone who enjoys them. First, they are a mode of communication, and modes of communication empower people and contribute to their wellbeing: nonfiction, superhero stories, romance, humour…comics can work in any genre, so if you like consuming content, you can be empowered by and feel better about yourself after reading comics, just as you can after watching a film, playing a game, or reading a poem. Second, comics do have some rare qualities that might be said to empower people who read them. For example, as opposed to most visual media, comics convey their information at a speed that is controlled entirely by the reader; a television show hurtles along at its own pace without time for reflection, but comics move at the speed you want them to, so in comics the reader has power that they don’t in many other media. Also, because comics are often presented in grids, there’s something about them that enables and supports comparison between moments in the text. With a prose detective novel, for example, if you want to compare what two suspects told a detective at different parts of the story, it can be really hard to flip back and forth and find those two moments. Comics, however, present information in ways that make that information’s location easy to remember and locate. So comics are empowering to all readers and contribute to our wellbeing because they are enjoyable and foster critical engagement.
In what ways can the comics community become more welcoming and inclusive?
That’s the question, isn’t it! We have launched a survey asking autistic people what they think, and we’re going to start our conversation there. We have had no trouble at all getting buy-in from museum and exhibit curators, festival organisers, publishers, and professionals. The comics community is eager to find the answer to this question, and as soon as we have it, we’ll deploy it throughout the comics world.