Designing Long Covid Superheroes | At Our Pace

By Olivia Niro and Clara Murphy - Project Participants and LCK Members

Long Covid Superheroes

A year-long Arts Council England funded project led by Louise at Alchemise Theatre. 

A theatre and comic book project that celebrates the resilience of young people with Long Covid, asking them, “What’s your Superpower?”

Participants will create their own superhero alter-ego, and work with our designer to co-create a costume. Using drama techniques, they will then collectively create a story that will be handed over to one of our award winning illustrators and turned into a comic book.

See their website for the full project overview.

Learn More

Introduction

As part of our At Our Pace series Olivia and Clara, two of the projects participants, worked with Chloe and Cristina, OT Students from the University of Northampton, to develop their skill in writing blog posts to share their experiences.

This week the two groups of participants had their final events where they got to see their costumes and celebrate the final comic. Alchemise and LCK will be jointly hosting a broader sharing event for members towards the end of September and copies of the finished comic will also be available to buy. Come back in September and keep an eye on our socials to find out more about when the event will take place and book your space.

In the meantime Olivia and Clara give you an idea of how they found the process.

Olivia

Introduction

Long Covid has affected a lot of us but often people with Long Covid are few and far between, making our experiences unique compared to others.

Since Long Covid has massively affected my energy, it’s really cut down on the amount of time I can spend socially with friends or other people my own age. Even making it to non-online groups somewhat nearby is so difficult I can only do it every once in a while.

Even though they let me attend the groups online, it has never really been the same for me as in person. It’s another reason the Long Covid groups mean so much to me. Since it’s all online, it is incredibly inclusive and I can worry a lot less about the amount of energy I’m spending when I’m taking part from my own home. In all honesty, it likely makes up a high percent of all my social interactions for a week.

Our Long Covid Superheroes

At Long Covid Superheroes we have been working on creating, well, superheroes to tell a story involving Long Covid. 

For example, a superhero called The Imaginer can imagine doing an action or activity or being at a place and can teleport to actually do it immediately without using or wasting energy on the other steps of it otherwise. While a superhero called Kenji can fight the actual physical symptoms of Long Covid with a superpowered boxing glove to reenergise.

Each character reflects to some extent that individual’s experience with Long Covid, the struggles we face, everybody’s different attitude towards it and in creating these superheroes we also process the drastic difference Long Covid has made in all of our lives. As well as forgetting about that to have fun and take part as much as our energy allows.

The Joy Explorer can search for joy and find it in the small things with a pair of goggles she has as well as helping others to see it too. Like the warm, knitted blanket during a violent storm, finding the good and happy in the mundane or depressing.

Hope is a superhero who can fly around and, when she does so, suffers no symptoms although she will end up crashing later on as a repercussion. Another superhero called The Caker can create magical cakes to make people happy and uses the catchphrase “I am strong, I am brave, I am cake-able!”

Our superheroes powers were created by noting traits each person possessed and imagining how it would act as a power: Resilience and Positivity, just to name two. This then directly affected our characters to mirror our own experience with Long Covid. And I believe it is very much helping us process it as well. At the very least we have been given another experience that has connected us with people that understand already without having to explain and that means a lot in itself.

My Superhero - Starling

Starling - Design by Olivia Niro

My own superhero Starling focuses more so on the mental impact that having Long Covid can cause in terms of the stress and burnout to do too much and overcompensate. Something that I am still learning how to handle even today years after originally catching it, like so many others.

Her ability is to create bubble-shields that vary in size and duration based on her energy but inside the bubble time freezes, for an advantage or disadvantage depending on situation.  

Difficulties and Enjoyments

During the session we also take part in a number of fun activities and games as well as calming exercises in between working together to establish characters and the world. My favourite is a game where you mime an action of say, watering flowers, someone else asks “What are you doing?” and you give them a response along the lines of something like “Rock climbing” and they act that out and then someone else asks them, in a fun loop.

Some days I’ll have a lot less energy than others but I still have enough to attend the group since it is online and I am just listening for the most part. It’s nice to know for certain that everyone already understands and won’t judge me as if I’m a quitter if I don’t offer many suggestions that day. This is a big part of why I can feel comfortable being at the group.

It is also difficult sometimes to talk about how Long Covid has affected our lives, painful even, but the fact that there are other people who are tired like you, I can’t stress enough how much that meant to me and how much it also must have meant for others. Finding out some of the other people there used wheelchairs like I do meant more to me than I could ever accurately describe. So, it is difficult to talk about, but it’s definitely been worth it for me.

Conclusion

To sum everything up, we have been having an amazing time creating our Long Covid Superheroes and in crafting them they reflect our own experiences of Long Covid, as does the world we have created for these characters in our story. While sometimes overwhelming for my emotions and most likely others’ emotions as well, I have enjoyed every session and continue to do so and it means so much for me to be there. In short, being a part of Long Covid Superheroes has been an amazing experience that I hope doesn’t end any time soon. 

Clara

Introduction

Taking part in the Long Covid Superheroes project has been a really exciting and creative experience.

Here is a look at how our ideas turned into superheroes, and how we are bringing them to life.

The Creative Process

Making the superheroes was so fun as we first talked about our superheroes and what their superpowers would or could be, then we started thinking about what the name of our superheroes could be for example mine is ‘The Imaginer’, some of the other superheroes are called ‘the Joy Explorer,’ another one is ‘The Caker’ and you also have others called ‘Starling,’ ‘Hope,’ and ‘Kenji.’ 

All the superheroes have something related to ‘Long Covid.’ For example my character, can imagine something in their mind and then get teleported to the place they are imagining, this links to my experience of when I can’t do the things that I would like to do and so using my imagination, it allows me to feel like I am there. Sometimes I make up little scenarios in my head about what I might do in a day and it makes me happy being in my imagination, so my character makes this happen and brings me happiness by doing this. 

My friend’s character is called ‘The Joy Explorer,’ her character struggles to look for the good, so she creates herself some goggles which highlight the good things in bright yellow and then she feels lots happier and lets others borrow the goggles so they can feel happy too. 

Once we had thought about the characters we wanted to design, we then began to draw the superhero characters and coloured in the templates of how we wanted the characters superhero suits to look. We also had some sessions on how to describe our characters and we began to talk about descriptive words that might relate to them and their powers. 

Some of the characters have a wheelchair or an aid that helps them in real life, for example my character uses a wheelchair but can also get out and walk small distances depending on their energy levels, which reflects my life with Long Covid. 

Character Design - The Imaginer

The Imaginer - designed by Clara Murphy

From Ideas to Superheroes

I really enjoyed seeing how the superheroes came from just an idea to what they are now. I loved seeing the superheroes evolve from something that we struggle with (Long Covid) to having a name and a full superhero outfit and also their full personality. Some of the characters even have a catchphrase, my character's catchphrase is ‘imagine and transport’. It has made something really positive out of something that causes daily challenges.

Bringing Everyone's Ideas Together

We are still working on the storyline for the final comic, at this stage we are focusing on storylines and the setting for the comic and the illustrations. At first we had a worksheet which had information about goals and challenges for our characters and who helps them, in the next session we covered whether we wanted to do individual stories or a collective story and we had a vote on this. We decided on a collective story which we would all work on together and we all came up with ideas and had space to discuss these and we talked about how we could make all the superhero characters work together in one whole story for the comic. We haven’t quite finalised this yet but it's going to be really exciting when the final comic is produced.

My Thoughts on the Project

I personally loved everything about this project. The main things that I found a bit challenging were probably just trying to think of an idea in the beginning and sometimes just trying to think of what I should write, but the group leaders helped us with this process and encouraged us in a positive way which helped us creatively explore our imaginations. I have loved the creative process of the project, and how we have slowly built up our superheroes over time from an idea of what they might be to what they are at the moment. I can’t wait to see the finished project. Doing this project has made me feel really happy and excited and I look forward to when it all comes together. Even though I have Long Covid I can still access things that are fun and exciting and things can be done with some adaptations for example in the sessions, we have rest breaks in between activities and if you need a rest you can just say, if you aren’t well enough to attend they send worksheets out with tasks on for you to do when you are feeling able to do it.

The project has been designed with Long Covid in mind and we do calm movements with our hands in the breaktimes or breathwork to support us.

Conclusion

Taking part in the Long Covid Superheroes project has shown me that even when things are difficult, we can still create, imagine and have fun. It has helped me turn my experiences into something positive and powerful, and I feel really proud to be part of it. I think this project shows that children with Long Covid can still do amazing things, especially when we are supported and given the space to be creative. I am really excited to see the final comic and to share our superheroes with others, because they all tell an important story.

As a charity representing children and young people that have been disabled by Long Covid we are aware of how the Superhero trope can be perceived within the disability community. We had really good discussions at the start of, and throughout the project, and our health lead Kirsty did share how the superhero trope can be used in an ableist way. The participants found this session thought provoking, but mostly they had been being kids having great fun designing their superheroes, and we fully support that too.

We are looking forward to seeing the final comic and all the costumes too and are so proud of all the participants for their engagement throughout the last year.