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

Abstract

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

Stories of a Healing Way: A Navajo Woman’s Media Production for Cultural Representation and Identification

“…Her comic strips are characteristic of alternative comics, those that are autobiographical, emotionally realistic, and experimental (Hatfield, 2005) and presented in multimodal visual, print, and digital forms. Although this genre of comics may contain characters of various cultures and ethnicities (Royal, 2007), neither Tatum nor Damon had been able to find commercial comic books written by Native Americans or locate comics with American Indians as characters in settings and plots reflecting modern times. Tatum’s single‐authored zines and the zine she coauthored with Damon, Spiral (a parody of a Japanese manga, Uzamaki ), which incorporate Navajo language and characters in settings such as coffee shops with a plot line of visiting a medicine man, advance Tatum’s and Damon’s agenda of representing contemporary Native Americans in graphic narratives authored by Native Americans (Guzzetti, 2019).…”

Arab World in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin: Making Visible the Idea of Terra Nullius

“…In graphic literature, there is always the all-too-real danger of negative stereotypes and caricatures of the unfamiliar of any unique identity. Such representations dehumanize the identity using reductive iconography—the bug noses, the bug eyes, the buck teeth, and generally deformed features that have historically composed our visual discourse on the “other” (Royal, 2007, p. 8). The negative stereotypes, in graphic literature in general, when they become an act of representing the non-European world by a twentieth-century European graphiateur, reflect colonial intention.…”

When ethnic humor goes digital

“…Constrained by relatively limited space, comics rely on stereotyping as a way to enhance narrative effectiveness. Prejudice is often highly evident in comics, since race and ethnicities are condensed into graphic language (Royal, 2007;Soper, 2005). 2 Both the association of ethnic humor with national borders and its examination through specific genres have been challenged in the digital age.…”