Today’s scholarly excerpt comes from All New, All Different? A History of Race and the American Superhero by Allan W. Austin and Patrick l. Hamilton (U Texas Austin, 2019), a book that broadly discusses race and ethnicity across the history of comics, particularly Asian villains and nonwhite sidekicks but also focusing on the way mixed ethnic heroic groups were both collections of stereotypes and also attempts at being liberatory/inclusive/diverse in a particularly American way.
While studies that isolate a particular ethnic or racial group make important contributions, this book takes a different but complementary approach: charting the largely unexplored terrain of a more broadly inclusive history of race and the American superhero, with all its complexity and contradictions. In this, we strive to present the patterns of racial and ethnic representation more generally in comics and superhero popular culture, the attitudes from which they emanate, and those they seek to cultivate.
Scholars’ still somewhat qualified understanding of superhero popular culture and race is especially ironic given that racial and ethnic representations were inherent, both figuratively and literally, within early comics and comic strips. As David Hajdu has pointed out, the Yellow Kid, the late nineteenth- century trailblazer for newspaper comic strips, spoke in a clichéd ethnic hodgepodge and hung out with others who were nothing more than gross stereotypes of Italian, African American, and Middle Eastern cultures. But though stereotypes ruled the strip (and in many ways the art form) from the start, these early newspaper entertainments also came to belong to ethnic immigrants. As Hajdu importantly notes, the “early newspaper comics spoke to and of the swelling immigrant populations in New York and other cities where comics spread, primarily through syndication (although locally made cartoons appeared in papers everywhere). The funnies were theirs, made for them and about them.”
As the earliest strips revolved around immigrants and outsiders, so too did the early comic book industry. In 1937, when the studio run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger opened, it employed writers and artists who felt like outsiders: immigrants, women, native-born Americans of every ethnic stripe, and others on the margins of society. Of course, these outsiders wanted in, and, Hajdu argues, Superman represented their assimilation. Whereas the Yellow Kid, in at least one sense, celebrated ethnic immigrants, Superman embodied their casting off their cultures for a more mainstream “American” identity. Aldo J. Regalado echoes Hajdu, describing comics as the way in which immigrant (largely Jewish) creators “negotiated their way into the cultural mainstream” via not only their characters but, ultimately, the industry they helped create.10 Such a development was hardly surprising, and is actually fairly typical of the immigrant experience writ large. Given how comics in general and their first superhero in particular base themselves in patterns of immigrant history and experience, scholars ought to pay even greater attention to both because they provide a unique window into evolving attitudes about race and inclusion in the United States.