Identity and Representation in US Comics

Abstract

In April 2017, Marvel Comics vice president of sales David Gabriel told an interviewer that the company’s recent slump was due to its move toward a more diverse roster of characters over the preceding year: What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales. We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked. (Griepp 2017)After a quick backlash, Gabriel issued a correction. Even so, his framing and phrasing are enlightening; when he says “people didn’t want any more diversity,” he is staking a claim to having a monocultural audience. When he calls the situation “difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked,” he is suggesting that bringing diversity to comics is an innovation and one that has not worked out for his company financially.The assumption embedded in Gabriel’s statement, that the audience for comics is limited to straight white men who want the same kind of superhero story with characters from their childhood handed to them year after year, is common to both the popular discourse about comics and certain strains of academic discourse on the subject. With the growth in academic comics studies over the last decade, however, there has been a shift in the latter. Recent comics scholarship has emerged from many different kinds of academic departments—the traditional liberal arts disciplines, the fine arts, art history, communications studies, and information science—as well as from interdisciplinary scholars working primarily in ethnic studies, black studies, American studies, and women’s and gender studies, among others. With important work coming out of a variety of discourses, one of the most exciting aspects of recent developments in the field is its necessary interdisciplinarity. While it has taken more than a century of academic scholarship to arrive at the idea that text, paratext, context, audience, and reception are all necessary components for understanding cultural production, comics studies is in a position to grow as a discipline in which scholars are and have always been able to close read a text itself and then discuss the way that text was produced, disseminated, and circulated. Scholarship within the field, like Ramzi Fawaz’s The New Mutants (2016), Jeffrey Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (2001), and Tahneer Oksman’s How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses? (2016), has taken extraordinary advantage of this possibility. One of the important consequences of this interdisciplinary method is that it becomes impossible to imagine an ideal audience for comics in the way that Gabriel does. Instead, this mode has enabled scholars to establish that comics, far from being only a popular cultural form that circulates among a particular audience and in particular ways, have been used and enjoyed by a variety of audiences through a variety of different but related forms (comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, webcomics, and so on).Comics studies, therefore, is a discipline in which good work requires the acknowledgment of the multiplicity of audiences that comics reach. In particular, it demands acknowledgment that fans with many different kinds of intersectional identities exist and have always existed. In this context, it is easy to see that Marvel’s strategy, which maintained a narrow view of the demographics of its audience, was always doomed to fail. Half-hearted, ahistorical gestures toward diversity are not enough to remediate the comics industry, the comics underground, or the academic comics discourse’s mutual long-standing issues with the representation of women, people of color, and LGBTQ characters. Recent studies of comics and identity elucidate the obstacles that make it difficult for the voices of women, people of color, and LGBTQ cartoonists to make headway. What the following books show is that, against those obstacles, diverse voices have emerged anyway.We can see this, for example, in José Alaniz’s monograph Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. Although the discourse on ability has clear and important political valences, the notion of disability as a kind of identity is often left out of conversations about diversity, both within the academy and outside of it, that focus on gender, race, and sexual orientation. One of the major tasks of Death, Disability, and the Superhero is to show that the scholarship on disability and disability activism is important to defining the intersectional frameworks that construe identity as a matrix rather than a data point.In Death, Disability, and the Superhero, disability emerges as a particularly compelling lens through which to view superhero narratives because considering it means reconsidering the important but facile understanding of superhero narratives as adolescent male power fantasies. Instead, the book places the vulnerability of the body at the center of its understanding of the superhero. Focusing on the period of comics history beginning in the late 1950s, which comics fans know as the silver age, Alaniz demonstrates how the “anxieties and desires of the [post–World War II] age” (20) begin in this moment to assault the previously nigh-invulnerable superhero body. A comparison between the superhero and the “inspirational” figure of the supercrip, whose disability should elicit pity but instead provides an obstacle that, once overcome, renders the supercrip beyond pity, establishes the superability of the superbody as an important site for the examination of postwar anxieties and desires. What the superbody can and cannot do and how it arrives at a position outside of the bodily norm reveal for Alaniz exactly how postwar Americans, and in particular postwar American men, were afraid of what might become of their bodies in a changing world.Death, Disability, and the Superhero includes an extraordinary wealth of images and takes a broad range of examples from the last half century of mainstream superhero comic books, but its most compelling cases are drawn from the Marvel comics of the 1960s and 1970s. Alaniz considers, among others, the Thing (whose exposure to galactic radiation turned him into living stone), Daredevil (an acrobatic hero who, as a boy, suffered an industrial accident that led to both blindness and supersenses that compensate for that blindness), and Dr. Doom (a supervillainous scientist who hides the disfiguring results of a lab accident behind a metal mask). Alaniz combines acute visual and textual observation with insights from the analysis of fan reactions that caused the early ending of storylines and the abandonment of characters like the She-Thing (a striking athlete and superhero who is cast as the Thing’s love interest and is eventually turned into living rock herself) to understand the way that the “supercrip” archetype is reinscribed within the superheroic body. This archetype forces characters with disabilities to either paper over their experience of the world by attempting to pass as able-bodied or go into isolation on the fringes of culture and society, situations that mirror many of the challenges that disabled people face. In each chapter, Alaniz is particularly attentive to how disability reads in ways that are gendered and racialized, stressing that it appears above all as an assault on the typical white male body. Extending a perspective on how the undesirably racialized and feminized disabled come to be represented either as deserving of hatred and fear or as inspirational—rather than as individuals with important perspectives on the world, not all of which are informed by their bodies—Death, Disability, and the Superhero clarifies important issues in the study of the early twenty-first century’s most important genre.Situated in the context of a significant and growing scholarship, Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González’s anthology Graphic Borders: Latino Comics Past, Present, and Future is an important intervention that recognizes that the category of Latina/o comics represents a range of output that is as broad as the medium itself. In their introduction, Aldama and González run through examples of common genres of Latina/o graphic narrative—science fiction, noir, erotica, superheroes, and autobiography, among others—to demonstrate that identifying a comic as Latina/o, either because the cartoonist is or the characters are, will explain little about the work in question. In this way, they resist the notion, common among both academic and popular discussions of ethnic literature, that in literary terms race and ethnicity represent a kind of genre with identifiable forms and tropes. Instead, they write that “Latino comic book creators” use the form to “open the reader’s eyes to different ways of being in the world—ways typified by the respective Latino (Chicano, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban) experience” (16). Common to the creators and characters discussed in the collection, then, is an alienation caused by their identity, which is perceived by the culture at large as being outside the national mainstream. The essays in Graphic Borders largely deal with the specifics of this alienation, which takes not only the national forms of Aldama and González’s list but also those that intersect with culture, race, gender, sexuality, and class.Graphic Borders is an entry in the University of Texas Press’s World Comics and Graphic Novels and Nonfiction series, of which Aldama and González are also the editors. Given the laudatory transnational goals of that series, the essays’ focus on comics artists from the United States and Mexico and on works produced for those markets presents an opportunity for further work on comics and creators with ties to other parts of Latin America. Similarly, although it is difficult to overstate the importance of Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez (fondly known to comics fans as “Los Bros”) and their 1980s comics anthology series Love and Rockets on both Latina/o comics and US alternative comics more generally, their presence here is overwhelming. Essays and an interview about their work make up the whole of the book’s first section, and another deals in part with some of Gilbert’s stories. Four out of the volume’s fourteen pieces are explicitly about Los Bros. Essays on cartoonists like Roberta Gregory, Graciela Rodriguez, and Liz Mayorga, who are mentioned in the introduction, would have been a welcome addition.Given the nearly impossible task of capturing the whole of the Latina/o experience in just one volume, however, Graphic Borders is admirably capacious. Importantly, it emphasizes intersections that make up Latina/o experience, with standout essays on blatinos in US popular culture, by Adilifu Nama and Maya Haddad, and gay Latina/o superheroes, by Richard T. Rodríguez. It also thinks across types of comics publishing, from mainstream superhero comics (Isabel Millán’s essay on Marvel’s Mexican–Puerto Rican Spider-Girl, Anya Sofía Corazón, and Brian Montes’s essay on the blatino Miles Morales, otherwise known as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man) to less covered but equally important forms like indie publishing (the essays on Los Bros), the comic strip (Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste’s essay on Baldo), and the political cartoon (Juan Poblete’s essay on the cartoons of Lalo Alcaraz). The picture of Latina/o comics that appears in Graphic Borders is a bright one, with recent growth in production and audience showing no signs of stopping. Even while celebrating these developments, however, Aldama and González are realistic about the importance of Latina/o creators to keeping the trend moving. “Simply put,” they write, “mainstream DC and Marvel publishers are not interested in innovation—unless it sells. . . . For working Latino creators, maintaining control over their product is essential” (15).Frances Gateward and John Jennings’s edited collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, while similar in construction to Graphic Borders, in some ways takes the opposite tack. While Graphic Borders is built around the idea that it is important to separate the identity of the creator from the genre of the work, Gateward and Jennings make “an attempt to start constructing ideas around ‘Blackness’ as a type of medium,” later clarifying, “Blackness is a medium that Black people of the world have inherited and have added on to as the story has unfolded throughout history” (4). Interestingly, the volume puts forth a notion of the construction of blackness as an identity that resembles the collaboration common to the production of mainstream US comic books, which often feature contributions from separate writers, pencillers, inkers, colorists, and letterers, all of whom provide essential input. Gateward and Jennings make a compelling argument for the long-standing and continued relevance of sequential art as a method of understanding African and diasporic African identities, which sometimes speak with “one voice” and sometimes “ha[ve] a collection of many voices” (3). In this way, Gateward and Jennings suggest, there are both fundamental and contingent qualities of blackness that are essential to understanding black experience, and both of these can be seen by examining the history and form of black comics.The essays in this volume generally deal with comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels and range across a wide swath of time periods and contexts. Although the collection is mostly focused on production in the United States, it notably features an essay by Sally McWilliams on Aya, a series of French graphic albums written by the Ivorian author Marguerite Abouet. More essays on international black creators and characters would have made a welcome addition. In other ways, though, the volume deals with many varieties of black identity, strains of black thought, and ways that black bodies have been represented in comics, including a piece by Patrick F. Walter on the intersection of postcoloniality and queer theory in the Vertigo series Unknown Soldier and another by Rebecca Wanzo on humor, citizenship, and the challenge to the cultural illegibility of black heroism in the comic strip The Boondocks and the superhero comic Icon. Importantly, although Gateward and Jennings begin and end their introduction by discussing Power Man, the urban superhero who has recently entered the broader cultural conversation as the subject of the Netflix / Marvel Studios television series Luke Cage, only a few of the essays deal with well-known mainstream superhero characters; for Gateward and Jennings, the crucial work on blackness being done in comics comes from other directions.Although individual essays in both Graphic Borders and The Blacker the Ink deal with female characters or creators, they do so in the context of other categories. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s strikingly designed Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime is one of the first book-length works to deal specifically with the construction and experience of black women in sequential art rather than treating that experience as a subset of broader black or women’s experiences. Although there is a distinct paucity of African American female characters and creators in mainstream and independent American comics,1 it is simply untrue to say that they are not present. Indeed, Black Women in Sequence takes us beyond well-known characters like the X-Men’s mutant weather goddess Storm to characters like Nubia (Wonder Woman’s black sister) and the Butterfly (a character from a series of 1970s exploitation comics that Whaley identifies as the first black superheroine). Similarly, it is in the book’s first and last chapters, in which Whaley considers the creation and consumption of sequential media by black women, often erased from conversations about fan culture, where Black Women in Sequence makes its most important contribution. There she acknowledges innovators in the field like Jackie Ormes, who drew comic strips for the Pittsburgh Courier in the context of early twentieth-century cultural-front leftism; Barbara Brandon-Croft, whose comic strip, Where I’m Coming From, was the first syndicated comic strip by a black female cartoonist; and the community of black creators and consumers of sequential media Whaley calls “Afrofans” (xi).Black Women in Sequence is an extraordinarily ambitious work that draws on a range of discourses and methodologies to examine the way that black women are figured as what Whaley calls “sequential subjects” (8) across a broad range of time periods and media. In order to explore this topic, however, Whaley draws a rigid distinction between comics studies—which she says is narrowly focused on comic books, comic strips, and so on—and what she calls “sequential art studies” (13), which includes adjacent forms like animation and comics adapted into film. Approaching the topic in this way allows Whaley to include a significant number of examples from media outside of comics and graphic novels, but it also elides crucial differences among related forms and among disparate temporal and spatial contexts. Even so, Black Women in Sequence is an important addition to the literature on identity within comics, as it suggests possibilities for further research on a subject with very little coverage and in particular on figures like Ormes and Brandon-Croft. Whaley’s work serves as an admonition to the field at large, a reminder of the vast variety of experiences contained within the matrices of intersectional identity and of the importance of specific attention to those experiences.Although not primarily a book on comics, André M. Carrington’s work in Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction is focused on an adjacent paraliterary field. Speculative fiction, as a genre, encompasses many of the subgenres—superheroes, science fiction, utopia, fantasy, horror, paranormal romance—common in mainstream comics publishing, and the book’s argumentative through-line is applicable to understandings of blackness within the medium of comics. As in The Blacker the Ink, which includes an essay by Carrington, Speculative Blackness is interested in teasing out blackness as a kind of mode. It is important, Carrington argues, that we consider a plurality of audiences when we talk about genre: “Whole segments of society experience genre traditions in different ways according to their sense of how these mediations pertain to their lives and the lives of others” (15). In order to make these arguments, Carrington draws on a long history of black speculative fiction fandom, providing a counterpoint to fan studies scholarship, which largely considers examples contemporaneous to its writing. His historical study of black fandom, which reaches the present in a consideration of the participatory practice of fan fiction, both honors the fact that black fans (who in debates about diversity within comics and genre fiction are often assumed to be newcomers) have been around for as long as there has been speculative fiction and clarifies the fact that fandom is historically contingent, responding to the differing needs of black audiences at different points in time. In order to work this point through, Carrington reads popular science fiction reparatively. Rather than focusing on the variety of ways that speculative genres are racist, already well-trod ground, he seeks out examples of the genre that have something to say about what a black future or a different version of a black past might mean for black identity in the present. In the encounter between blackness and speculative fiction, Carrington argues, we can see both the overwhelming whiteness of the genre, usually hidden from view, and the ways in which black people have found in speculative fiction a way to imagine otherwise.In making his case, Carrington situates himself not only in the context of fan studies but also within the history of feminist science fiction critique, seeking to apply arguments made by writers and scholars on the role of women in speculative fiction to race. He honors this legacy by centering two chapters on black women—Nichelle Nichols’s Lieutenant Uhura from the original Star Trek series and Storm. He has an additional chapter that focuses on the African American–driven publisher Milestone Comics’s comic book Icon, which features the titular African American superhero. His focus on cultural production that is outside of much of the scholarship on speculative fiction, like television and comics, is also notable for what he chooses to leave out; even as he acknowledges the importance of black writers of science fiction like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler, he seeks to move the study of black speculative fiction beyond the scholarship on those two authors.Indeed, books like Carrington’s mark an important point of maturation for the study of comics within academic literature, that is, their use as evidence in scholarship outside the specific field of comics studies. As the field grows and as the academic study of comics gains acceptance, critiques of this sort will become more common, and not all of them will be as receptive as Carrington’s is. Even so, the five books in this review suggest a capacious future for the field, one that takes it away from narrow understandings of the medium like Gabriel’s and toward broader and more inclusive histories and methodologies of comics.Joshua Abraham Kopin is a PhD student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He serves on the executive committee of the International Comics Art Forum and is the president of the Graduate Student Caucus of the Comics Studies Society.