Skip to main content

In Terms of Race, do comics offer stereotypes?

In terms of race, I would say that comics do offer stereotypes. Before the 1960’s, most of the comic book characters were all white. Comic book creators rarely added any other races to their stories, not even in background images. Even so, there were still stereotypes used in comic books that weren’t always related to race. In Black is the Color of My Comic Book Character: An Examination of Ethnic Stereotypes, Davenport discusses how stereotypes are used in comic books to provide readers with something they can relate to. He goes into detail on how this applies to various kinds of stereotypes, one of the main ones being racial stereotyping. One great example of this is Luke Cage, the first black superhero that was given his own series. In the first issue, he was portrayed as an angry and aggressive black man who obtains his powers in jail. Right away, we see the stereotype used in this comic series. Cage was meant to represent the common African American during the Civil Rights movement. As a result of this movement, African Americans were seen as an angry race. Another reason that Luke Cage is a great example of racial stereotyping is the type of speech the characters used. In his work, Davenport discusses how Cage’s creators used “Black English” as the main form of speech. This term refers to African American inability to speak standard-English due to the stereotype of blacks as poor and uneducated. This clearly shows how that in terms of race, comics do offer stereotypes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why blame comics for societal failure?

Why blame comics for societal failure? Society blamed comics for the societal failures because it was a fairly new industry, and as things seemed to go “wrong” they figured it must be comic books. When a child grew up during the war, his father was probably killing people and the military and his mother was probably making things in factories to help kill the opposition. The only things kids had to “babysit” them was comic books, and they read many different kinds. So when kids starting acting differently in this new generation the figured it must be the comic books. Society didn’t want to believe it may have been the internal and external scars war causes on the soldiers and their families. Also the fact that young unattended children are reading these comics may not be able to differentiate between fantasy and reality. When society fails it always needs a scapegoat then it was comic books next it was rock and roll. Society naturally resist change.
2 comments
Read more

Mythology and Superheroes in Comics

Ohhh my goodness... When I decided on trying to analyze the mythological origins and references in superhero comics, I had no idea the can of worms I was opening up... On the one hand, it was awesome to see just how many connections there were between superheroes and psychology/mythology/philosophy, but all the information also made it terribly difficult to distinguish what I should be using and how to tie it all together. When I was talking to one of my sorority sisters about it she said, "Oh yeah, well, research essays are kind of like putting together puzzles..." and I think that really sums up what writing this paper was like for me. Fortunately, I was really interested throughout the whole process and I very much enjoyed writing the paper. Being a psychology major, I was especially interested in reading about the Jungian archetypes that had a lot of parallels with major modern comic books superheroes. I was also able to incorporate Joseph Campbell's "hero cycle...
2 comments
Read more

The 1950s are often portrayed as a period of social cohesion. Why is this misleading?

When we think of the 1950's, most people think of similar things such as "Leave it to Beaver", very conservative and cliched pop music, and high patriotism. Our view of that time is one of social conformity to conservative values, with a traditional nuclear family where the father worked and the mother stayed home, where a majority of people attended church, where crime was relatively low, where a majority of American citizens were extremely patriotic, and where entertainment media emphasized these same conservative values and were subjected to censorship if they did not conform. This is misleading because while these things were all true to a certain extent, the world was obviously not perfect and not everyone was conforming or upholding traditional values, even if it seemed like they were. The 1950's were actually a very tumultuous time period, with the end of World War II leaving Europe war torn and in debt, the outbreak of the Korean War and the clashes of opinion...
1 comment
Read more