This week’s webcomic is very simple, very funny, and that is also a big eye-opener about lives that maybe different from your own. Matt & Kay Daigle’s That Deaf Guy is a weekly newspaper style strip about a mixed deaf and hearing family. It’s sweet, funny, and heartwarming with straightforward and expressive art. The comic is semi-autobiographical about the Daigle’s own family. Hand signing and audible speech are portrayed the same way to help show the hearing that there is no difference in the complexity of communication available to ASL-Speakers. Since I don’t have any deaf people in my life, many of the situations or obstacles for the deaf in the comic have never occurred to me before. Such as how Snuggies take on a whole new level of usefulness when you need your hands to talk to your wife on a cold night, or not realizing how loud you are being while doing something that seems completely innocuous to you.

Desmond is a deaf stay-at-home dad and graphic designer and Helen is a professional ASL interpreter who is on-call 24/7. Their son, Cedric, is hearing and mischievous; much of the series’ humor comes from him being befuddled by other peoples wonderment and confusion at actions completely normal to him, or trying to explain to other hearing people his family’s day to day life. Cedric can often get away with a great deal of shenanigans since has no shame in using his father’s deafness and mother’s work schedule against them.

The Authors & their Other Works

Matt Daigle has always been profoundly deaf, so his reliance on visual communication has given him a gift for clear and concise logo design, such as for the International Breast Feeding Sign. He has been publishing cartoons online since 2008, although many of his earlier jokes were based in Deaf culture so they were hard for the hearing to understand. That Deaf Guy is co-written by Kay Daigle, an ASL interpreter, who helps interpret the day to day life of a deaf person for the hearing for the writing of the comic.