Kyle Baker Research Articles

Disallowed Truths: Race, Shadow Books, and Captain America

ABSTRACT: This article examines a series of Captain America stories by Black creators and locates these works in the tradition of "shadow books," as defined by Kevin Young in his study of Black culture and artistic expression, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Truth: Red, White, and Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker; The Crew , written by Christopher Priest and drawn by Joe Bennett; and Morales' truncated 2004 run on Marvel's flagship Captain America title are all examples of what Young calls "shadow books," works by Black creators that subvert conventional meanings and are in turn "disallowed, vanished": out of print for years, sometimes with plots that were cut short and never completed, their events only glancingly recognized (or retroactively altered) in Marvel's continuity. This article focuses, in particular, on the retroactive revision of a key plot point from Truth: Red, White, and Black , and the way in which this editorial revision functions as an act of erasure in a broader struggle over the representation of American history.

Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo

Review: <i>The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging</i>, by Rebecca Wanzo

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo

Reviewed by: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo Maite Urcaregui (bio) Wanzo, Rebecca. The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging. New York University Press, 2020. 256 pp, $89.00 HC/ $29.00 PB Click for larger view View full resolution In The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, Rebecca Wanzo explores how African American cartoonists reappropriate stereotypical caricatures of Blackness to question and reveal normative ideals of US citizenship. Taking up a long history of caricature in African American comic and cartoon art, the book provocatively asks, "Can the racist caricature be used in aesthetic practices of freedom?"1 By way of answering this question, Wanzo examines how African American artists formally exploit caricature's racial inheritance to point to the injury of racist images and the structures that produce them. Through their artistic reframing, they invite diverse and divergent affective responses to caricature that open alternative attachments to citizenship. The book explicates how comics, like other forms of popular media, create and uphold narratives of "good" and "bad" citizens. Comic narratives participate in these discourses of belonging through what Wanzo identifies as "citizenship genres": "often masculine categories of representation that the state's subjects are interpellated to inhabit."2 Each chapter interrogates a citizenship genre within comics and the subjects they herald—the revolutionary leader, the soldier, the child, and the countercultural subject. After identifying the normative ideals these genres uphold, Wanzo goes on to examine how African American artists, recognizing the "racialized ideological work of these typologies," strategically play with the formal affordances and limitations of the genre to highlight the grotesque realities of racism and articulate resistant representations of Black identity and national belonging. Chapter One lays the foundation for understanding "broad ranging articulations" of how comics artists utilize caricature across form and genre—including examples from [End Page 119] George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Sam Milai's Pittsburgh Courier editorial cartoons, and contemporary works, such as Jeremy Love's Bayou and Valentin De Landro's Bitch Planet—to critique and negotiate "how African Americans are marked by noncitizenship status."3 Chapter Two "explores the lasting legacy of black subjection in archetypes of heroism in the white popular imaginary" and looks to two graphic biographies, Kyle Baker's Nat Turner and Ho Che Anderson's King, that challenge the image of the frozen-in-time supplicating Black subject. Chapter Three takes up the superhero genre, putting Baker's Truth: Red, White, & Black in conversation with Jay Jackson's World War II editorial cartoons, to argue that Isaiah Bradley, the Black Captain America, simultaneously represents a desire for full citizenship and a recognition of that impoverished promise. Building on Anne Anlin Cheng's "racial melancholia," which explores the psychoanalytic consequences of racialization,4 Wanzo theorizes "melancholic patriotism" to describe African Americans' attachments to full citizenship "as a lost love object that both never was and is continually chased."5 In a powerful reading of Isaiah—who at the end of the arc has survived the war but has lost both his friends and his mind as a result of state-sanctioned medical violence, a fictional evocation of the Tuskegee experiments—in what is left of the Captain America uniform he was incarcerated for wearing, Wanzo says, "Truth constructs an African American love object, a black Captain America whose ambivalent figure represents a threadbare version of the American Dream to which not only African Americans but other Americans cling."6 Chapter Four engages with discourses of infantile citizenship and the aesthetics of cuteness to investigate how the nation pins its democratic hopes on the figure of the innocent White child and their futurity. In contrast, analyzing examples from Ollie Harrington's editorial cartoon Dark Laughter to Jennifer Cruté's life narrative Jennifer's Journal, Wanzo argues that African American cartoonists' use of "the black infantile citizen disrupts this representational regime" by challenging viewers to remember the nation's abuses and failures, "as opposed to the improbable white child ideals that encourage the nation to forget."7 The final chapter explores perhaps the most excessive or grotesque example of racist caricature...

Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies by Marc Singer

Reviewed by: Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies by Marc Singer Nhora Lucía Serrano (bio) Marc Singer. Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies. University of Texas Press, 2018. viii + 292 pp. $34.95. In Breaking the Frames, Marc Singer delineates with aplomb a war of cultures and approaches within comics scholarship that will inspire any comics scholar to rededicate themselves to a new type of engagement and scholarship. Rooted in a counterintuitive nature of binary oppositions, one in which mainstream populus has consistently pitted comics as disposable pop culture against comics as cultural objet d'art and study, this war of comics culture is inscribed beneath the surface of Singer's thought-provoking argument in order to argue for the need for more diverse critical approaches and methodological rigor across disciplinary lines in comics studies. Singer immediately points out that as a disciplinary field of study, often housed in either cultural studies or literary studies programs, comics studies has reached a peak fervor of teaching and research acceptance on most college campuses. Its authenticity as a scholarly pursuit is no longer based on the romantic [End Page 122] myth of the unsuccessful outsider seeking recognition and the academic spotlight. Assuredly and unquestionably, comics studies has proven its academic relevance and is no longer the new kid on the scholarly block and in scholarly productions (e.g., the variety and multitude of comics studies book series in academic scholarly presses). Thus, for Singer, comics studies is at a crucial crossroads because perceived canons in isolation (i.e., tension and division across so-called disciplinary lines) and unfortunate praise of scholarly affect over substantive criticism have stunted comics studies' rigor, true in-depth analysis, and potential areas of new focus. Moreover, with varied university structures of disciplines and departments buttressing singular approaches and divisive comics criticism on display at comics conferences, online, and in print, Singer proposes that comics scholars adopt best practices for scholarly rigor in which true critical discourses must include critical and oppositional work. In a nutshell, Singer's rhetorical plea is, there ought to be greater communication, community, and championing of the very comics that the vox populi study and admire. Throughout six chapters that range from a fresh analytical consideration of Umberto Eco's 1962 seminal text on "The Myth of Superman" to in-depth analyses of popular works by Marjane Satrapi, Alan Moore, Kyle Baker, and Chris Ware, Singer advocates for and demonstrates the scholarly rigor that should invite dialogue and not further discord. Put simply, Singer advocates for the dismantling of canonical frameworks that have stymied comics studies scholarship as well as signaling the need for inclusionary tactics in higher education that accept and welcome seemingly oppositional viewpoints so as to engage with comics once more in new and rigorous scholarly conversations. The Introduction to Breaking the Frames is a primer for any novice comics scholar first entering the discipline of comics studies or even a recommitted scholar taking up Singer's rhetorical call to arms for new critical scholarly productions. At the outset Singer carefully suggests that some of the reasons why the discipline of comics studies, which runs the gamut from the popular to the philosophical, is at a crossroads include the fact that there has been a subtle lack of commitment and respect for it as an academic discipline from within the scholarly community: "It's time to take the chip off our collective shoulder and focus on producing the same high quality of work that would be expected in any other field" (35). Likewise, Singer attributes the crossroads to a breakdown of communication, an estrangement and tension among those figures from different yet related fields who could very well serve as a team of beacons for comics studies and its newfound age of maturity and intellectual rigor. Among the many recent examples that Singer introduces to demonstrate the divisive and counterproductive disputes taking place on a national stage: the 2015 Jill Lepore and G. Willow Wilson hyperbole debate over feminism and A-Force #1 in the New Yorker and on Wilson's webpage, and the 2014 Comics & Media, a special issue of Critical Inquiry...

“A night already devoid of stars”: Illuminating the Violent Darkness in Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner

In my essay I argue Kyle Baker’s 2008 graphic novel Nat Turner delivers a complex reimaging of history, which positions readers to confront an Antebellum past that produced few undamaged heroes. Recent criticism surrounding Baker’s work has split on how to understand Turner’s actions, but I argue Baker neither wholly celebrates nor condemns the rebellion. Instead, he focuses on the overwhelming violence that characterized Turner’s nineteenth century environment. The insurrection then becomes a natural part of a devastating cycle of violence caused by enslavement, and Turner himself is cast as a man who is simply acting rationally within a deeply troubled reality. Therefore, while Baker’s characterization of Turner and his rebellion does not leave readers with clear answers or heroes, it does offer a deeper understanding of slavery’s all-consuming violence and continuing impact on the nation.

Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel by Michael A. Chaney

Reviewed by: Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel by Michael A. Chaney Brian Cremins (bio) Michael A. Chaney, Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 216pp, $65. Like the protagonist of an early Stephen King story, or like artist George Marcoux’s Golden Age character Supersnipe, the central figure of Michael Chaney’s new book Reading Lessons in Seeing is a fearless child with a boundless imagination. In a series of sophisticated, often striking readings of a variety of texts—from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and David B.’s Epileptic to Joe Sacco’s Palestine and John Lewis’s March—Chaney returns again and again to the precocious children who fill the pages of autobiographical graphic narratives. In the opening of Chapter two, for example, he asks, “What does the face of American comics look like?” (57). The answer to this question provides a map for the rest of the book, in which Chaney explores the formal and metaphysical qualities of these real-life stories: “Regardless of the graphic novel’s pretentions,” he argues, “the child or youth remains an emblem of the comics and an archetype of its mediation” (57). If studied carefully, that “emblem” opens a new realm for comics scholarship, one in which the child draws our attention to a “philosophical reflection on the complicated nature of temporality” (57). In learning how to read a comic book, Chaney suggests, we might also learn to understand the personal, often unspoken narratives that have shaped us as scholars or as comic book fans. Maybe Marcoux’s 1940s kid hero Supersnipe—“The Boy with the Most Comic Books in America”—was onto something after all.1 Chaney’s new book might be read as a sequel to the arguments he offered in his 2011 edited collection Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, an anthology that collects a number of essential readings on the form. If you are teaching a course on memoir comics, selections from Reading Lessons will complement any syllabus that includes Joseph Witek, Charles Hatfield, Hillary Chute, Elisabeth El Refaie, and Tahneer Oksman, to name just a few scholars whose work on these narratives has been illuminating and influential. Throughout the book, however, the iconic, almost mythic figure of the cartoon child continually reminds us of the issues these narratives raise for readers: “comics promote adolescence and its rejection; they encompass both the view of (or as) the child and the child’s view under verbal erasure” (59). This “paradox,” Chaney [End Page 403] continues, might explain “the comics’ formal preoccupations with the child” (59), but I suspect that it also calls attention to the phenomenological conditions in which we experience these texts. There can be no escape from the mirrors and the labyrinths that fill autobiographical comics, Chaney implies, until we readers find something of ourselves in these empty, often lonely spaces. Like the “prophetic child” that Chaney describes in Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner (76–81), what we see in the mirror, or find at the center of the maze, always reflects what we brought with us in the first place. Throughout the book, Chaney echoes an argument from his introduction to Graphic Subjects, the notion that the “tension between objective and subjective truths in creating realistic fictions of the self prod us to reconsider what is at stake in telling our life stories in pictures”2—and also, I would add, what might be at stake for those of us who study these intimate and sometimes joyous narratives. In Chapter three, “Picture Games in Story Frames and the Play Spaces of Autography,” Chaney describes the playfulness of Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, which, in its closing pages, invites us to paint our own pictures. Although they take a different form, the games and quizzes in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan or in Epileptic, Chaney adds, also serve as puzzles that “point optimistically and perhaps nostalgically to a notion of the human (and of the humanities) in tandem with a transformative, progressive model of learning, which sees reading as a site of participation already...

Reimagining Terror in the Graphic Novel: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and the Cultural Imagination

Reimagining Terror in the Graphic Novel: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and the Cultural Imagination

Nat Turner after 9/11: Kyle Baker's Nat Turner

Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US “blackness” from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory.

Contemporary African American literature: the living canon

Foreword Mat Johnson, University of Houston Acknowledgments Introduction Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner, Penn State University I. Politics of Publishing, Pedagogy, and Readership 1. The Point of Entanglement: Modernism, Diaspora, and Toni Morrison's Love Houston A. Baker, Jr., Vanderbilt University 2. The Historical Burden that Only Oprah Can Bear: African American Satirists and the State of the Literature Darryl Dickson-Carr, Southern Methodist University 3. Black is Gold: African American Literature, Literacy, and Pedagogical Legacies Maryemma Graham, University of Kansas 4. Hip Hop Fiction (feat. Women Writers) or, Other Things Hip Hop Music Has Taught Black Fiction Eve Dunbar, Vassar College 5. Street Literature and the Mode of Spectacular Writing: Popular Fiction between Sensationalism, Education, Politics and Entertainment Kristina Graaff, Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technical University of Berlin II. Alternative Genealogies 6. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slave: Visual Artistry as Agency in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery Evie Shockley, Rutgers University 7. Variations on the Theme: Black Family, Nationhood, Lesbianism and Sadomasochistic Desire in Marci Blackman's Po Man's Child Carmen Phelps, University of Toledo 8. Bad-Brother-Man: Black Folk Figure Narratives in Comics James Braxton Peterson, Bucknell University III. Beyond Authenticity 9. Sampling the Sonics of Sex (Funk) in Paul Beatty's Slumberland L. H. Stallings, Indiana University 10. Urkel No More? Black Geeks in Contemporary Black Literature Alexander Weheliye, Northwestern University 11. The Crisis of Authenticity in Contemporary African American Literature Richard Schur, Drury University 12. Someday We'll All Be Free: Contemporary Fiction and the Post-Oppression Narrative Martha Southgate, Brooklyn Novelist IV. Pedagogical Approaches and Implications 13. Untangling History, Dismantling Fear: Teaching Tayari Jones's Leaving Atlanta Trudier Harris, UNC-Chapel Hill, Emerita 14. Reading Kyle Baker's Nat Turner with a Group of Collegiate Black Men Howard Rambsy II, Southern Illinois University 15. Toward the Theoretical Practice of Conceptual Liberation: Using An Africana Studies Approach to Reading African American Literary Texts Greg Carr, Howard University and Dana Williams, Howard University Afterword Alice Randall, Vanderbilt Novelist Annotated Bibliography Pia Deas, Lincoln University and David Green, St. Johns University Index

‘And the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics’: comics, visual metonymy, and the spectacle of blackness

This essay examines how comics grapple with transnational racial discourses that have historically marked and muted blackness, and identifies a series of visual and verbal strategies in recent texts that seek to restore the agency of a black speaking, seeing subject. Using as examples the American graphic novel Nat Turner by Kyle Baker (2008, Abrams) and the first volume of the West African francophone comic series Aya by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie (2007, Drawn & Quarterly), my analysis demonstrates how these comics incorporate metonymy and its contiguous associations to experiment with subversive acts of black speech and spectatorship. Metonyms of books and other written material allow Baker to (re)assemble the US slave leader from the 1831 Virginia rebellion as an embodied visual text. In the Cote d’Ivoire comic, Abouet and Oubrerie juxtapose the metonymic deployment of post-colonial media advertisements with the inscrutable messages of the pagne cloth patterns that Aya wears. Both comics destabilize the meanings that blackness has traditionally signified in the comics form and develop new sequential frames of reference between the self and the racial other.

Truth Made Visible: Crises of Cultural Expression in Truth: Red, White, and Black

Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s 2004 graphic novel Truth: Red, White, and Black incorporates the visual vocabularies of social realism and a grotesque cartoon style in order to represent the devastating experiences of African Americans during World War II. The book’s revisionist version of the Captain America mythology depicts a black Captain, Isaiah Bradley, as not only the successful product of an experiment with super-soldier serum but also a would-be savior of Jewish concentration-camp inmates. The story both reveals the subversive potential of the Captain America story and challenges the traditions in which characters of color have been excluded from superheroic accounts of American culture by invoking some of the many real-world histories that shape accurate wartime accounts. Morales and Baker depict such histories through moments of cultural crisis, when racial identities visually oversignify the graphic boundaries that attempt to contain them, highlighting the interracial foundation of contemporary American literature.

Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed! , and: From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (review)

Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed!, by Arie Kaplan. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006. 263 pp. $18.95. From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books, by Arie Kaplan; forword by Harvey Pekar and J. T. Waldman. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2008. 225 pp. $25.00. The Jewish contribution to comics in its varied forms - the traditional superhero comic (e.g., Superman), the humor magazine (e.g., MAD Magazine), alternative comics (e.g., RAW), and the graphic novel (e.g., Maus) - is vast and remarkable. Jews have been front and center in all areas of the comics genre, and Arie Kaplan chronicles this fascinating history in From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. An earlier book, Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed!, composed of short biographies based heavily on Kaplan's interviews with prominent comics figures, does not focus exclusively on Jewish comic artists and writers. By virtue of the enormous Jewish presence in the comics industry, however, six of the eleven chronologically presented chapters feature Jews (Will Eisner, Jerry Robinson, Stan Lee, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman, and Neil Gaiman). Naturally, the first interview in Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed! looks at the creator of The Spirit, the head of a seminal cartooning studio, and the father of the graphic novel: Will Eisner. As Kaplan puts it in the reverent tone that permeates much of his book, What Ibsen was to modern drama, what Chaplin was to film, what Rodgers and Hart were to musical theater, Eisner was to comicdom (p. 3). Tb be sure, Kaplan's position as an avid comics fan is apparent throughout, but that does not prevent him from offering criticism when warranted; he correctly critiques Eisner's posthumously published graphic work The Plot, a portrayal of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy, for its under-attention to imagery and failure to follow the cardinal rule of comics, show, don't tell (p. 19), and he honestly describes the touchy subject of in-fighting over credit for comic creations between Bill Finger and Bob Kane (pp. 26-27), and Stan Lee with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, among others (pp. 68-71). Along with drawing out his interview subjects' biographical details, struggles in the field to gain recognition, and various comic influences, in the course of the interviews Kaplan sometimes elicits noteworthy anecdotes. Jerry Robinson, for instance, reveals that Batman's sidekick Robin was inspired by N. C. Wyeth's images of Robin Hood (pp. 29-30). Yet, while the book is anchored by interviews, Kaplan weaves a short history of the American comics industry, both Jewish and non-Jewish, throughout. For example, readers learn which comic makers created which characters, who worked with whom, and how comics were perceived at various times - including Frederick Wertham's infamous assertion in his 1954 study Seduction of the Innocent that comic books corrupted readers and caused juvenile delinquency. Some of the interviews with non-Jewish comic creators are worthy of note, especially Gilbert Hernandez, but it seems as if in a few instances Kaplan aimed for diversity rather than talking with the most influential masters of the universe; the five gentiles he profiles are Hernandez, a Latino; Kyle Baker, Dwayne McDuffie, and Ho Che Anderson, African Americans; and Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian. It is Satrapi whose inclusion feels the most forced. Certainly Persepolis is a graphic novel milestone, but this work, published in 2003 and followed by Persepolis 2 in 2004 and two other graphic novels before Kaplans book went to press (the movie version of Persepolis had not yet been picked up by a studio), does not a mistress of the universe yet make. Highly influential figures like R. Crumb and Alan Moore, non-Jews, are absent, but perhaps they did not agree to an interview. As for Jews, Aline Kominsky-Crumb would have been an interesting artist to include, as would the writers Chris Claremont and Harvey Pekar. …

Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels

[W]e should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past correspond to some preexistent body of raw facts. For we should recognize that what constitutes the facts themselves is the problem that the historian, like the artist, has tried to solve in the choice of the metaphor by which he orders his world, past, present, and future. --Hayden White, The Burden of History (47) Repetition with a signal difference (xxiv) is one way of understanding signifyin' as an African American figure of expression and, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the principle tropological framework for approaching African American cultural production. Although such definitions of the trope of tropes (52) emphasize its roots in the acoustic sphere of communication, signifyin' also takes vivid, if less examined, shape in the visual field. Rich examples may be found in graphic novels by African Americans where narrative drawings combine with strategies for revising the boundaries between and white, past and present, performance and history, and a range of other binary formulations central to the maintenance of Western culture. In a medium that presents inimitable possibilities for representing trauma through the expressive spatialization of time, graphic novels by Ho Che Anderson, Aaron McGruder, Kyle Baker, Lance Tooks, and others explicitly thematize what Hayden White locates as the burden of history within the particular registers of an African American context and milieu. Rather than reflect the putative facts of history from some transparent or bounded notion of a black perspective, these texts question institutions of recollection, such as documentary photography and Hollywood cinema, upon whose premises any such thing as the past is produced for scrutiny in the first place. This essay examines revisionist historicity as expressed in Ho Che Anderson's critically-acclaimed multi-volume biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. titled King (2005). Anderson draws on, redraws, and draws over the visual archive of experiences that have come to be associated with existence in the United States. King will play a central role in this essay, but I will also contextualize its aesthetic procedures by examining their operation in Lance Tooks's Narcissa (2002), an artsy melodrama of raceconsciousness, and later in the essay the slap-stick political spoof Birth of a Nation (2004), jointly created by Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker. However disparate in style, subject, and sentiment, these visual narratives by graphic novelists signify on and reconstitute the political past to intervene in the enduring legacies of slavery, minstrelsy, apartheid, and commodification that haunt the present. Informed by historical structures of spectacle, the display of bodies undergoes a process of media negotiation in graphic novels by authors and writers. Lance Tooks's Narcissa provides a case in point. While the main story is about a young avant-garde filmmaker who suddenly learns that she has only a few days to live and so sets off for Europe before completing a film project, there appears early on a set piece of racist Hollywood images against which the graphic novel establishes itself as a counter-narrative (fig. 1). (1) Diegetically we come to learn that these are the images that Narcissa, the title heroine, actively opposes in her own films, but their addition works non-diegetically as well, interrupting narrative coherence with a dream-like temporality that recontextualizes the graphic novel as a conscious revision of media constructions of embodiment. Political resistance to institutional configurations of visibility link character and author, since Narcissa's status in the film industry is doubly minoritized (being both and a woman); this marginalization is perhaps all too familiar to Tooks, a minority working in a predominantly white and male world of comics. …

Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel. Aaron McGruder and Reginald Hudlin (w); Kyle Baker (a). New York: Crown, 2004. 137 pages. $25.00 cloth. New York: Three Rivers P, 2005. $14.95 paper.

Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel. Aaron McGruder and Reginald Hudlin (w); Kyle Baker (a). New York: Crown, 2004. 137 pages. $25.00 cloth. New York: Three Rivers P, 2005. $14.95 paper.