Depression and the Devil of Hell's Kitchen: Exploring How Mental Illness Is Depicted in Daredevil Comic Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This MRP explores how depression is depicted in Marvel’s Daredevil comic books through multimodal metaphors. It seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) How do the visual, textual, and spatial elements in Daredevil comic books work together to communicate depression? 2) What role does depression play within each Daredevil comic book narrative? A close reading was conducted to analyze how depression was communicated in two Daredevil comic books that explicitly discuss depression. This project found that characters discussed their mental illness experience through chaos and quest illness narratives, using a combination of visual and textual metaphors. Their accounts resembled medical representations of depression symptoms. The depiction of mental illness within the two Daredevil comics suggests that mainstream American superhero comics can both depict mental illnesses in a medically accurate manner and present them as authentic character experiences. This MRP provides a meaningful foundation for future research that explores how mainstream American superhero comics can play a larger role in graphic medicine and mental health communication. Keywords: comics, depression, mental illness, graphic medicine, illness narratives, superhero
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".