Aging & Comics

Comics can be a helpful storytelling medium through which to study the representations and portrayals of older adults and later life. Contributing to the slow but steady acceptance and visibility of comics, this chapter examines five comics in conversation with emerging ideas about queering ageing futures, drawing on Sandberg and Marshall’s (2017) article that critiques successful ageing discourse. The analysis reveals that these comics, in their exploration of the fullness and the complexities and contradictions of later life, assume a liminal quality. The older characters’ bodies, behaviours, and relationships occupy and weave through multiple, concurrent narratives associated with later life (biological decline, an imperative to age successfully, and our proposed third narrative of the queering of ageing futures). In allowing these three narratives to co-exist, the analysed comics interrogate the narrow binaries of success and failure in dominant successful ageing discourse. This interrogation provides a space to queer ageing futures and ultimately recognizes recognises a different kind of diversity in ageing futures.