Ok, so one might readily consider comic books an effective tool for helping fight pediatric diabetes. However, when Kamaal Washington, son of comic book magnate Alonso Washington, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, he found the material available to kids woefully lacking, and decided to create Omega Boy Vs Doctor Diabetes…
“When I was in the hospital, I didn’t have anything to read (about diabetes) that was for the kids so I made up a comic book because I love comics,” Kamaal Washington of Kansas City, Kansas, says in a recent phone interview. He and his family were in St. Louis in October 2003 when he first started feeling sick. “My stomach was hurting and I was thirsty all the time. I had to go to the bathroom a lot. It felt like something was gonna bust out of my stomach,” he says. At a children’s hospital, doctors shocked him and his family with a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, which no one else in their family had.
“I thought it was scary,” Kamaal says. “I didn’t know what could happen to me. There wasn’t a whole lot of kid things to show what diabetes was and we wanted to bring awareness so other kids could know what it was about and know the symptoms,” adds Malcolm, his younger brother and comic book co-creator. The two brothers, along with their three other brothers and one sister, have grown up around the industry since their father, Alonzo Washington, started a company featuring African American comic book and action figure superheroes. Kamaal and Malcolm “had been asking me for years to publish some of their characters,” their father says. After the shock of Kamaal’s diagnosis wore off, the boys began a project to explain diabetes by creating comic book characters around it.
While we’re not sure it’s the best choice to have the villain carry the title Doctor, it’s great to a kid stepping up to the plate when he sees something lacking. If only we all had the same initiative.
You can find Omega Boy Vs Doctor Diabetes here…
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