Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels

Carolene Ayaka, Ian Hague, Carolene Ayaka, Ian Hague

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317687153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Multiculturalism, and its representation, has long presented challenges for the medium of comics. This book presents a wide ranging survey of the ways in which comics have dealt with the diversity of creators and characters and the (lack of) visibility for characters who don't conform to particular cultural stereotypes. Contributors engage with ethnicity and other cultural forms from Israel, Romania, North America, South Africa, Germany, Spain, U.S. Latino and Canada and consider the ways in which comics are able to represent multiculturalism through a focus on the formal elements of the medium. Discussion themes include education, countercultures, monstrosity, the quotidian, the notion of the 'other, " anthropomorphism, and colonialism. Taking a truly international perspective, the book brings into dialogue a broad range of comics traditions.

Part I Histories and Contexts

1 Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture

Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb's Underground Comix

Corey K. Creekmur

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775340-2

Race remains a blind spot in critical discussions of underground comix, despite a few isolated essays that have addressed the otherwise neglected (if not actively dodged) topic.¹ Even recent, welcome attention in comics studies to multicultural, ethnic, and racial representations, especially of African Americans, tends to neglect the important historical example provided by underground comix, which pointedly addressed many of the controversial topics that were then impossible to depict in mainstream comics produced and distributed under the strict restrictions of the self-imposed Comics Code.² However, whereas most historical and critical accounts of underground comix celebrate their bold flouting of cultural taboos (in addition to their circumventing of established publication and distribution venues), race remains virtually expunged as a major critical concern in work such as Patrick Rosenkranz’s Rebel Visions (2002), an extensive oral history of underground comix between 1963 and 1975. Indeed, an inadvertent whitewash of the topic is announced when, in providing “the setting” for the historical and cultural emergence of underground comix, Rosenkranz mistakenly relocates “Martin Luther King speaking his dream at the Washington Monument” rather than on the actual and symbolically more appropriate steps of the Lincoln Memorial; it’s then unsurprising that King and the era’s prominent racial politics defined initially by the nonviolent Civil Rights movement and later extended into revolutionary expressions of Black Power, never resurfaces in this otherwise valuable documentation of the key period that produced underground comix.³

As this essay will argue, Rosenkranz is not alone in maintaining rather than closing the gap between the explicit racial tensions and countercultural aesthetics of the era: his implicit hesitation seemingly replicates the limited and ambivalent engagement with race found within most underground comix themselves, with few exceptions. Still, one might expect that any retrospective glance would now identify and reasonably criticize the limitations evident in the cultural politics of underground comix that went unrecognized in their historical moment. Although the 1960s counterculture often remains idealized, from the distance of over half a century we might now be able to temper residual nostalgia for the period with critical recognition of the movement’s blind spots or missteps. In other words, we might be in a position to not simply decry but to better understand the ways in which, as significant forms of cultural expression, underground comix often embodied the larger counterculture’s limited engagement with the promotion and celebration of racial and ethnic diversity commonly (if contentiously) summarized as multiculturalism. However, another retrospective survey, Dez Skinn’s Comix: The Underground Revolution (2004), also significantly downplays discussions of race alongside its more familiar focus on the staple topics of sex, drugs, and gender politics (in the form of the women’s and early gay liberation movements, which of course were also crucial to some articulations of multiculturalism): Skinn only quickly notes that Robert Crumb, the most prominent underground cartoonist, “… created a swathe of bizarre characters who, being way out racist and sexist, would have great difficulty being accepted were they created today.”⁴ Of all Crumb’s “bizarre characters” listed by Skinn—Angelfood McSpade, Honeybunch Kaminski, Mr. Natural, Shuman the Human, Whiteman and the Snoid—only the first, surprisingly absent from the text’s extensive illustrations, seems obviously open to the charge of being “way out racist,” and Skinn’s passing comment resists clarifying whether our current perspective, which would likely now find such characters unacceptable, stems from our enlightened progress or retrograde repression, or perhaps derives from that complex balance of social advance and intolerant prudishness we call “political correctness.” In fact, the only image in Skinn’s fully illustrated book that suggests any attention to racial difference in underground comix as a whole is Crumb’s cover (signed R. Scrum) for Snatch Comics #2 (1969), which depicts a large-lip-smacking black woman (stylistically similar to the Angelfood McSpade character) with prominent nipples protruding beneath her clothing (a frequent Crumb detail): the image is drawn in Crumb’s then-familiar rounded, or bulbous “big foot” style that echoes earlier comic illustration and cartoon animation modes and that was typical of Crumb’s work throughout the late 1960s.⁵ As Leonard Rifas notes, while the earliest underground comix “sparked an exceptionally innovative movement… the accomplishments of the comix were nourished by comix artists’ antiquarian love for the works of earlier generations of comics.”⁶ That visibly antiquated style was in many cases steeped in the once-common images of African Americans produced in the context of explicit racial segregation and inequality, from slavery to at least the early 1960s: we now tend to immediately recognize such images, through their exaggeration, as offensively stereotypical, grotesque rather than amusing in their caricature of a limited and repeated set of physical characteristics (pitch black skin, large lips, kinky hair) serving to effectively reduce African Americans to an undifferentiated group rather than rendering their individuality through realistic detail.⁷ In comic strips like Crumb’s “Whiteman” from Zap #1 (1967), for example, the sort of details (including hair, glasses, and precise facial features) that differentiate the title character (although designed to parody normative white American masculinity) from all others in the strip aren’t employed to individualize the members of a “parade” of African American characters who arrive by the end of the narrative, who can only be distinguished by their clothing, and are even in one panel reduced entirely to five equivalent large-lipped mouths and button noses (with minstrel-style white-gloved hands) floating in a sea of pure blackness. Included in his book’s obligatory and fully illustrated chapter on sex—there is no equivalent chapter on race—Skinn deems the similarly styled cover to Snatch #2 “outrageous,” the result of “Crumb set[ting] out to offend everybody.”⁸ In the context in which Skinn places it, the outrageousness of the cover would seem to stem from its sexual transgression, but except for the innuendo of the cover’s timely declaration (“Hello ’69!”) and the character’s obvious lack of a bra—a detail perhaps associated with the myth of bra burning that plagued the women’s liberation movement—the cover hardly represents the extremely explicit sexual imagery (or sexism) to be found inside one of the most notorious of all underground titles. Skinn seems to be, instead, indicating—without naming it directly—the arguably far more “outrageous” racism of the image, which, again, draws directly upon the comic tradition of visual stereotypes for African Americans once common to earlier newspaper comic strips, comic books, advertisements, animated cartoons, toys, and other forms of popular culture.⁹

It’s worth at least noting that the “problem” of race in underground comix, while largely missing from recent accounts, was in fact noted earlier, if briefly, more or less at the time of their appearance: Mark James Estren’s pioneering A History of Underground Comics, first published in 1974, noted in a few admonishing (but seemingly ignored) paragraphs that “there is [a…] real absence of social awareness in the cartoonists’ general lack of sensitivity to the problems of blacks and other minority groups in the United States.”¹⁰ Writing in the midst of the underground era, Estren added that the rare “black characters who do appear in the underground comics are not given the sort of treatment one might expect from socially conscious young artists….”¹¹ On the whole, as I’ve emphasized, the decades following Estren’s brief but pointed criticism haven’t produced an adequate explanation of or convincing challenge to his serious claims. As Estren suggests, the problem doesn’t entirely lie with the critics and historians of underground comics who seem to have avoided the controversial subject of race in more recent, retrospective accounts: while the body of underground cartoonists included figures from a range of diverse social backgrounds, the most prominent creators in the movement, at least as it began, were almost exclusively male, straight, and, like the much larger counterculture in which they were embedded, white. (Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, of Spanish descent, and the less prominent African American Richard Eugene “Grass” Green were perhaps the most notable exceptions, and as such their work perhaps deserves more focused attention than I offer here.)

In what follows I want to revisit some of these images, emphasizing what other commentary on underground comix has often neglected, in order to try to recover the historical circumstances that may have determined the apparent mismatch between the popular representation of the counterculture in comix and the simultaneous emergence of a perspective that increasingly accepted and even celebrated the United States as multicultural, in a direct challenge to the dominant ideology of assimilation or the common myth of America as a “melting pot.” While previous scholars such as William H. Foster III and especially Leonard Rifas have gathered a range of relevant examples of African American representation in underground comix by various artists, I will limit my focus to the work of Robert Crumb, who remains the most visible and controversial underground cartoonist. My aim, however, is not to treat Crumb as entirely unique in this regard, but to view him as a (perhaps the) representative figure of the underground comix movement, a task made somewhat difficult by his distinctive personality and notorious eccentricities, some of which (like his disdain for rock music) often made him an odd figurehead for the counterculture. However, Crumb’s regular recourse to earlier, antiquated visual modes for representing African Americans was shared by a number of his colleagues, and given his massive influence, may have even motivated many of them to explore this sensitive topic in a similar way, drawing upon a shared cultural iconography. Most significantly, for reasons I will address below, I do not believe we can unhesitatingly treat the apparent “racism” of Crumb’s images as a clear index of his own, personal (even pathological) views on race. My perspective is primarily historical, and thus my goal is to try to understand these images in their cultural context rather than in individual terms, even if the strongly autobiographical element of many underground comics (such as Crumb’s) clearly tempts us to do so. I should emphasize that such an approach to better understanding controversial and even offensive images should by no means be taken as an attempt to simply “excuse” or “defend” images that remain understandably and perhaps irredeemably hurtful, especially to those they ostensibly represent. In my own experience, I have seen that many of Crumb’s images deeply offend African Americans, and that response is hardly naïve or inexplicable, and certainly cannot be casually dismissed.

In many ways, the value of Crumb’s outrageous and confrontational images may be found precisely in the debates they generate: while their status has often been taken as self-evident, the accumulated response to them demonstrates that they in fact demand interpretation, and may not yield single, secure meanings. This point is most strikingly demonstrated within the pages of Fredrik Strömberg’s book Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History, which considers Crumb’s Angelfood McSpade with careful critical neutrality: “Angelfood was one of Crumb’s recurring characters, and he has used several other Black characters—often with extremely stereotypical features. Some critics [unnamed] have seen this as evidence that he is a racist, but the truth of the matter is probably that he uses these charged images to provoke a reaction from the reader, and force them to make up their own minds about their attitudes toward racism.”¹² This is cautious in the extreme, even qualifying the “truth of the matter” as “probable” before resting the issue in the individual minds of readers rather than attempting to assess Crumb’s intentions: most significantly, Strömberg does not directly ground Crumb’s images of Angelfood McSpade in their social and historical context, the source of the “charge” the images carry that typically informs even the most free-thinking reader’s “attitudes towards racism.” However, in the foreword to the same volume, the African American novelist and cartoonist Charles Johnson has clearly made up his own mind and requires no such equivocation: “[…] I cannot believe that Robert Crumb’s grotesque and pornographic character ‘Angelfood McSpade’ in the underground comics of the 1960s is avant-garde or provocative in any positive way.”¹³ Crumb’s images are thus included within the larger history of derogatory images in comics that Johnson calls “a testament to the failure of the imagination (and often of empathy too),” images that are now “unacceptable, hugely embarrassing for citizens of a democratic republic.”¹⁴ Should we be surprised that Johnson’s “black view” is countered most often—perhaps even exclusively—by white defenders? For instance, the Reverend Ivan Stang (Douglass St. Clair Smith) insists that “Crumb’s depictions of blacks and women… were understood by us (fellow white male artists) for what they were—far beyond racism and sexism, and in fact, violent reactions against both, using irony and horror as stylistic tools.”¹⁵ Underground cartoonist and editor Jay Kinney, without noting race specifically, similarly claims that “Crumb is fully capable of taking the worst stereo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels
• PART I Histories and Contexts
• PART II Depicting Difference
• PART III Monstrosity and Otherness
• PART IV Challenging Assumptions
• PART V Case Studies
• Contributors
• Index