Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative

Comics are a composite text made up of words and images that, taken together, can have an impact far different from that produced by more traditional modes of narrative such as the short story or the novel. Much like film, comics rely on a visual language that encourages a more immediate processing time within the reader and, on the level of interpretation, a more "efficient" exchange between author(s) and audience--at least when compared to purely language-based mediums. This is not to suggest that comics are a more passive means of narrative (as many of its detractors have historically argued), nor does it assume any lack of ambiguity of intent or indeterminacy of meaning in graphic narrative. The images that serve as referential icons fall prey to the same kind of semantic slippage found in linguistic codes (which themselves, in the form of letters and words, also function as icons of meaning). Nonetheless, there is something relatively "direct" about an image's ability to affect reader response. The figures that make up the comics rub up against reality in ways that words cannot, revealing the various assumptions, predispositions, and prejudices that author-illustrators may hold. This power underlying the comic image becomes all the more evident when placed within the context of race and ethnicity. As legendary writer/illustrator Will Eisner points out, comics are a heavily coded medium that rely on stereotyping as a way to concentrate narrative effectiveness. He argues that unlike film, where characters have more time to develop, graphic narrative, with its relatively limited temporal space, must condense identity along commonly accepted paradigms. Typing characters along physical, gestural, and even occupational assumptions "speeds the reader into the plot and gives the teller reader-acceptance for the action of his characters" (20). However, the "accursed necessity," as Eisner puts it (17), of narrating through stereotypes takes on critical resonance when filtered through an ideological prism. Authors may expose, either overtly or through tacit implication, certain recognized or even unconscious prejudices held by them and/or their readers. In comics and graphic art there is always the all-too-real danger of negative stereotype and caricature, which strips others of any unique identity and dehumanizes by means of reductive iconography--the big noses, the bug eyes, the buck teeth, and the generally deformed features that have historically composed our visual discourse on the Other. (1) Witness, for example, the depiction of Africans in Tintin in the Congo (1931), the second Tintin adventure story from Belgian writer Herge; sidekicks and antagonists such as The Spirit's Ebony White, Red Ryder's Little Beaver, and Wonder Woman's Egg Fu; Angelfood McSpade, the "lovable darkie" created by Robert Crumb for Zap Comix in 1968; the racially-tinged violence of Barry Blair's comic book mini-series, Ripper (1989-90); and, more recently, the twelve editorial cartoon depictions of Muhammad published in the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, in 2005, or even the Holocaust denial cartoon contest initiated as a reaction to the Muhammad editorials. (2) This special issue of MELUS addresses the possibilities, and even the potential liabilities, of comics when representing ethnoracial subject matter. In many ways, it is a response to what several critics of graphic narrative have seen as a defining mark of American popular culture: its problematic relationship to ethnic difference. Rebecca Zurier implies that scholarly studies of comics should focus less on the impact made by a few "exceptional talents" and more on how they have excluded a number of marginalized voices (102). Scott McCloud argues that in order to be taken seriously as a creative art form and stand alongside more traditional forms of literary narrative, contemporary comics should not only directly address the current state of race relations in the United States, but also reclaim the history of minority participation in the comic book industry (Reinventing Comics 109). …