NICK: There’s always a duality between superheroes and villains. They’re mirror images of each other. Instead of opposites. They’re more like part of each other because you can’t have a super villain without a super hero and you can’t have heroes without villains.

. We’re all interdependent but for most people it’s in the background. They don’t think about the millions of things that support their life. All the people that are involved in supporting their food, their income and their day to day life.

We’re all mutants. If you have a genetic disease. You’re definitely a mutant.
If you’re creative, then creativity itself is like a mutation in a way. A mutated way of looking at the world.

That’s how I coped. You’re kind of escaping things. You’re creating a parallel world. Because you can’t really move around your own world.

Nick was raised in Mobile, Alabama. He talks lovingly of the lush, jungle flora found at the border of Louisiana. He’s been on one form of life support or another since the age 9, when an infected surgical site irritated the mitochondrial disease he was born with, causing a ‘mito collapse’ and, in Nick’s words, “killed what little muscle tone” he had previously.

It was during this first collapse that Nick began to draw comics. He drew them for himself and his fellow patients. He created a whole, alternative world based around his character, Super Dude. He eventually lost control of his muscle functioning, confining him to a bed. Using the digital paint tool Corel, he began drawing web comics.

Nick beginning attending Spring Hill College’s Mobile campus at the age of 16. While there, he began a state-wide campaign to extend home-care funding past the age of 20.

Nick lives in lower Manhattan, with his girlfriend Alejandra Opsina, who is also a disabled activist. The two met on Second Life in 2007. A showing work based around this Life Support conversation he had with his friend, anthropologist Zoe Wool, is currently being shown at Bushwick art gallery Gordilloscudder.