The 12 Good Fatty Archetypes is an educational webcomic I created in 2014, and it has become the piece of work I’m perhaps best known for. It builds on the “Good Fatty / Bad Fatty” dichotomy, a concept named by feminist and fat-acceptance writer Kate Harding, which describes how fat people are sorted into those who are deemed to be doing the “right” things and those who aren’t. Taking that idea as a starting point, my comic grew out of an ongoing conversation in fat activism about “bids for social legitimacy”, the small, often unconscious ways fat people try to earn social acceptance, and how those bids can backfire on the most marginalised people in our communities.

The comic develops the dichotomy into twelve recognisable “good fatty” archetypes (the Rad Fatty, the No Fault Fatty, the Fatlebrity, the Natural Fatty and more) and asks what cultural work each one does, and who gets thrown under the bus when we make pleas to exclusionary systems to be included on the basis of what we are and are not. It draws, loosely, on a Foucauldian approach: looking beneath everyday representations to ask what they actually reproduce.

I first published it on my own blog, and it spread quickly from there. It was reprinted with permission by Everyday Feminism, one of the largest feminist media platforms, and was requested so often as a teaching handout that I redesigned it into a free 31-page printable zine. More than a decade on, it’s still circulating, still being shared, taught and referenced.

What means the most to me is how the comic has travelled into education and scholarship. It’s used by Fat Studies and feminist educators as a teaching tool, and it has been cited in peer-reviewed academic work, including the journal article “Obstinate fatties: Fat activism, queer negativity, and the celebration of ‘obesity'” in Subjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The framework it set out has fed into a wider academic conversation about fat representation, including subsequent peer-reviewed work in the journal Fat Studies. For a comic that started as a blog post, watching it become part of how the subject is actually taught has been genuinely humbling.

It’s the clearest example of what I believe about this work: that an accessible piece of illustration, made with care, can carry a complex critical idea further than a dense essay ever could. That conviction runs through everything I make, including my Flying While Fat documentary animation, which grew from the same activism and community.

You can read the full comic on my blog.

If you’re a researcher, educator or organisation working on fat studies, body politics, social justice or stigma and you’d like to bring a complex idea to life through illustration or comics, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.