De/facing race: towards a model for a universal World Comics

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, Kodansha, the largest publisher of manga in Japan, recruited foreign artists in an attempt to create ‘World Comics’ – ‘a comics style that would be universal, the style of the twenty-first century understood by all readers’. In respect of this failed concept, this article focuses on the depiction of race, examining how it might be treated in order to speak to, engage, and encapsulate a global readership. Specifically, the article examines the depiction of race in the manga aesthetic, and its failure to move beyond an ethnically ambiguous visage that is nevertheless a strictly Japanese self-image. By way of Rudolf Arnheim’s notion of abstraction, the article then proposes that the art of American cartoonist Paul Pope – one of the aforementioned foreign manga-kas – demonstrates how a transcendence of race can be achieved, in a manner that disturbs Terry Kawashima’s conception of the visual reading, and constructing, of race.