September 13, 2014 - 15:12
The image I chose to use was a frame from an Archie Comic focusing on the character of Moose (or “Big Moose,” as he is often called). From the inception of Archie Comics, in the early 1940s, Moose was portrayed as large, dumb, and essentially good for nothing except for beating up anyone who came within a few feet of his girlfriend, Midge. I remember beginning to read Archie Comics when I was around 10, and not thinking much of the character. It wasn’t until several years after that when I read somewhere that the authors of the comics had chosen to attribute his intellectual difficulties to dyslexia. Even at a young age, I knew there was something deeply wrong with the association these authors were drawing between dyslexia and Moose’s catchphrase, “d-uh.” I knew kids in my classes all throughout school who were dyslexic, and they certainly were not stupid like Moose, lacking in social skills like Moose, or requiring of condescending speeches from his friends who clearly understood the world much better than he did. I wondered what the reading experience would have been for kids who either did not know the realities of dyslexia (from an outsider’s perspective, of course), or who simply had no idea that their peers had dyslexia. For me, Archie Comics were a window into the world of teenagers, and although I was smart enough not to take the characters at face value and assume all high schoolers were just like them, this is very often the subconscious consequence of such supposedly-life-mirroring cartoons.
Big Moose was in no way a “wondrous” representation of disability—any feats he accomplished were purely physical and were not displayed as overcoming his learning disability; he was good at sports because he was enormous and strong. Nor was he really a “sentimental” representation; Moose was often portrayed as a very sweet boyfriend who loved Midge unconditionally—but at the same time he was someone to be feared, someone to run away from when you did so much as look at Midge. At times, yes, he was something of a charity case when the rest of the gang took it upon themselves to help him study—but too often this was because he had threatened to beat them up for interacting with Midge.
If anything, Big Moose was an example of an “exotic” representation of disability. Rosemarie Garland-Thomas describes the visual rhetoric of exotic as one that “presents disabled figures as alien, distant, often sensationalized, eroticized, or entertaining in their difference” (Garland-Thomas 65). Moose was always entertaining—this was the pure significance of his appearance in the comics. In fact, the “humor” created by the extreme exaggeration of his disability was often the very basis for an entire story line, as demonstrated in the image I included. His difference is emphasized further by his extreme size and strength, which make him visually stand out, even while his disability is an invisible one.
