Ethnic Stereotypes in Comics - Sociopolitical Impact of Comics

Sociopolitical Impact of Comics

Throughout history, comics have reflected the sociopolitical attitudes of their writers and readers. In America, early comics consisted primarily of short, humorous comic strips printed in newspapers. In the 1930s, comics evolved into longer, action-oriented storylines and transitioned into the comic medium format. It began addressing important contemporary political issues. For example, some have suggested that the Wonder Woman character and title evolved as a vehicle to communicate pro-American attitudes during World War II. X-Men creator, Stan Lee has frequently cited the African-American Civil Rights Movement as the inspiration for his mutant team of superheroes, and has translated many of the tensions of majority-minority race politics into the X-Men title.

Nonetheless, for many years, comic book characters noticeably lacked racial and ethnic diversity. Comics writer and artist Kevin Sutherland said "...when you look at the shelves and see half the titles on sale are characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man - dammit, these characters weren't even allowed to be Jewish like their creators, let alone be black." Recognizing the influence of comics on popular culture, some members of ethnic and racial communities have focused their attention on stereotypes within comics, and have begun lobbying to change them. This is accomplished in many ways, frequently by either writing new character of color or "trans-racializing" existing characters from Whites to racial or ethnic minorities (e.g. the changing of Karate Kid's race from White to Asian).

Given the recent popularity of injecting characters of color into popular comic titles, a new concern has arisen regarding possible tokenism, and many writers advocate not just the inclusion of characters of color into predominantly White casts of characters, but that these minority characters defy the racial and ethnic stereotypes so prevalent in the history of comics, as well as maintaining the high standard of comic book writing. Daley Osiyemi, creator of Brodie's Law and co-founder of Pulp Theatre Entertainment said, "...we don't just want black characters or superheroes in comics as mere tokens, they have to be strong characters in their own right and have strong stories built around them."

In 2007 the scholarly journal MELUS (publication of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) devoted an entire issue to the literary and sociological representations of race and ethnicity in comics. The issue was guest edited by Derek Parker Royal, and it included essays on older graphic narratives (such as Jackie Ormes's Torchy Brown and Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660), more recent graphic novels (Ho Che Anderson's King, Ben Katchor's The Jew of New York, and Mark Kalesniko's Mail Order Bride), as well as various comic book series (Dwayne McDuffie's Deathlok, Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve, and Los Bros Hernandez's Love and Rockets). Gilbert Hernandez illustrated the cover, and the issue included an interview with him as well.