[EMAIL PROTECTED] Of intense interest! Coloring the Comic Books By Randy Dotinga
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59683,00.html 02:00 AM Jul. 19, 2003 PT Open a mainstream comic book today, and you'll find a virtual rainbow of diversity. Many of the most vivid characters come in just about every shape and color. And it's no wonder: They're aliens. People are a different matter. With some notable exceptions, superheroes still tend to be lily white -- and male -- under those tights and capes. "We can tolerate inhuman diversity but not human diversity," said Kim De Vries, a writing lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the small number of Asian main characters in comic books. Even so, comic books are making huge strides toward representing minorities in their pages, De Vries said this week. Other academic experts agreed as they explored diversity issues at Comic-Con International, the world's largest comic book convention, in San Diego. The convention lasts through Sunday. Before World War II, minority ethnic groups made few appearances in comic books or newspaper comic strips. When they did show up, black characters, for example, tended to be grammatically challenged and rough around the edges. Mandrake the Magician's sidekick Lothar, for example, initially appeared with big lips and a Tarzan-style outfit. Black characters "had names like Sunshine, Snowflake, Sunny Boy Sam, Whitewash Jones and Ebony White. Those were acceptable terms," said William H. Foster III, an associate professor of English at Connecticut's Naugatuck Valley Community College and a specialist in images of blacks. "They were comic foils, ignorant natives or brutal savages or cannibals." In one Mickey Mouse strip, the black cannibals wore earrings in their noses and ears, and bones were woven in their hair. But World War II changed the comics landscape, said Swedish author Fredrik Stromberg, who's written a book about the history of black images in cartoons and comics. "The stereotypical characters disappeared, but so did the black characters. The cartoonist didn't know how to treat them. It took up until the 1960s and the adult comics movement before the black characters returned." Women, meanwhile, ran the gamut from the masochistic 1940s-era Wonder Woman (who spent way too much time being tied up) to the vapid Invisible Girl of the Fantastic Four in the 1960s. In one early comic book, she chirped: "I can't wait to surprise Reed with the new miniskirt costume I've been designing!" But Invisible Girl later morphed into Invisible Woman, a sharp character who now runs the Fantastic Four corporation, said Connie Regan, a graduate student who is studying women in comics at Pennsylvania's West Chester University. "Her powers have increased, and she's found different uses for them," she said. Wonder Woman has evolved too, losing her S&M obsession but continuing to fight for truth and honesty. No surprise there -- she was created by a psychologist who invented an early lie detector. On the minority front, the '60s and '70s brought a series of diverse superheroes like The Black Panther. Today, the popular comics character Blade (played by Wesley Snipes in the movie) is black. So is Spawn, although his race isn't a huge part of his personality. Modern comic books also feature Latino and gay superheroes, especially in series created by independent publishing houses and online cartoonists. But the comics still barely represent the diversity of American society, and academics worry that the long history of simplistic characterization isn't over. Consider Franklin, the black kid in Peanuts. Despite criticism, cartoonist Charles Schulz courageously added Franklin to the strip in 1968 and kept him there, Foster said. But it took years for Schulz to turn him into anything more than window dressing. Creators of female characters face similar challenges, Regan said, and sometimes fail to move them beyond stereotypes of "hypersexualized" and "top-heavy" objects of desire. "Some of these women, I don't know how they stand up," she said. In addition to testing the creative skills of their cartoonists and writers, minority characters in comic books and strips must bear the burden of representing their entire ethnic groups, comics experts said. The same goes for women, who traditionally were only allowed to make up one member of each superhero team. "If you've got just one (minority) character, it's almost impossible to avoid stereotypes," said De Vries, the expert on Asians in comics. "He's doomed to be a token." Many comic strips and comic books fill their casts with many members of one particular minority, spotlighting the diversity within the group. But their creators face their own brand of reverse affirmative action when they try to branch out beyond alternative publications or publishers. Look at newspapers, for instance. "Black comic creators are increasingly told by white editors that 'we have our black strip already,'" Foster said. "And then we have only one strip representing the entire spectrum of black identity." At many newspapers, that strip is Robb Armstrong's upbeat, mild and non-controversial Jump Start, not Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, a bitingly satirical look at politics and race. "I mean, I love Jump Start," Foster said, "but it's not me." End of story [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scifinoir2/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
