Editor Nadia Shammas conceived the idea of Corpus: A Comic Anthology of Bodily Ailments amid “the debate about healthcare” that “dehumanized the ill” (back cover). The book is divided into three sections: physical, mental, and medical. Physical discusses illnesses and ailments such as diabetes and vision problems, using brief 2-5 page vignettes to convey the lived experience of those with these physical ailments. Mental covers such topics as depression, gender dysphoria, and obsessive-compulsive disorder following the same format. Medical details the state of the U.S. medical system, with special emphasis on the pre-Affordable Care Act days in which a person could go bankrupt due to a sudden illness over which they had no control, as well as other topics not easily quantifiable into the first two subjects, such as death and life after a transplant. The various authors and artists speak with an authenticity rarely seen in mainstream comics, but this project encourages them to open themselves up to their unseen audience and reach out.

While reading this volume, Republicans’ continued efforts to hurt Americans recently reached a fever pitch with Texas judge Reed O’Connor’s decision to attack the Affordable Care Act in order to promote the GOP’s assault on sick Americans through their evil agenda. In light of these events, Shammas’ work is more important than ever as it allows those with a variety of illnesses to describe the experience in their own words, using the comic book medium to convey something that often evades easy description, despite the seeming universality of the body. As Mary Douglass writes, “The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived.” This work, then, uses first-person narratives to restore the humanity to the ill and break down taboos of discussing illness, thereby healing the social body in the hopes that it will help society to care for the bodies of its members. ( )