Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986

Yellow Claw #1 (Atlas Comics, 1956) [taken from here]

Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986
The William F. Wu Collection at NYU Fales Library & Special Collections

I recently had the chance to visit this unique exhibit of comics at NYU's Fales Library. The stuff was culled from the collection of William F. Wu, whom I knew as the author of The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940. Wu noticed – and then began collecting – representations of Asian Americans in popular comics while growing up in 1950s Missouri. According to the exhibit's introduction, comic books were a phenomenally powerful medium from the 1930s into the 1950s: they were the number one printed medium in the United States, even outranking newspapers (70 million Americans read comic books vs. 50 million who read newspapers); a 1945 survey by the Market Research Company of America found that 95% of boys and 91% of girls read them. By all means, their content can no longer be considered marginal.

As Jeff Yang, the curator of the exhibit, explained in an NPR interview, the period covered in Wu's collection is particularly important because it spans the decades when the United States engaged in wars with Asian nations -- "from World War II, the war in the Pacific, through the Korean War, Vietnam War, and then the economic and political battles with Japan and China that followed. And so comic books, in a lot of ways, pick up a lot of this resonant energy around how Americans were thinking of Asians in ways that virtually no other medium does."

This "resonant energy" is something I've been thinking about too. How did the various wars affect the ways in which Americans understood Asians and Asian Americans, and how did it manifest itself in American culture? (Specifically, I've been working on this in the novels of Thomas Pynchon and in some women's writing from the 1950s and early 1960s.) Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 offers a theory of mythic exchange and reciprocity, best embodied in the song "Getting to Know You" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 The King and I. "Getting to know you/ Getting to know all about you/ Getting to like you/ Getting to hope you like me": a discourse that allowed Americans to believe that their political and economic imperialism was actually a point of equal exchange and consent. Also interesting is Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, which examines how white women achieved certain forms of socio-political power through their co-option of Asian materials or tropes.

"Marvels and Monsters" adds another layer to the Asian/Asian American presence in postwar popular culture. The exhibit includes some of America's most popular comic books: the ones I recognized included Spiderman and Wonder Woman, but I know pitifully little about comics. The stereotypes recurring here are the ones you'd expect, like as the Brain, the Lotus Blossom, the mysterious, seedy Chinatown, etc. The exhibit does a pretty good job of contextualizing how each of these stereotypes morphed over the course of Asian immigration, but I kept wonderfully specifically why comics proved to be a good medium for these kinds of racial anxieties. As Wu remarks in the video interview that is part of the exhibit, comic books are an already exaggerated genre, and Asians in America have always been marked as "aliens," the perpetual Other. This trope of inscrutability perhaps lent itself well to stories replete with villains and frightful superpowers that needed to be subdued. More explication on why specifically this genre was so potent would have been helpful. (As would have been more on the context of these Asian characters/plotlines in comic books in general. How common was this? What other kinds of villains appeared regularly? What about "girls' comics"? Or were they reading the same ones as boys? Who were the people creating these characters and storylines? The exhibit mentions briefly that they were fellow immigrants, primarily Italians and Jews. How did that influence the portrayal of Asians in comics?) Despite these gaps, the exhibit opens up a huge field for exploring the connection between the wars and the presence of Asians/Asia in the American imagination.

I found Wu's book The Yellow Peril helpful while working on my paper about Asians in the writing of Thomas Pynchon. Sadly (or not so sadly, really), Wu gave up his academic career to become a writer of speculative fiction. Finding this exhibit has helped me clarify some hunches I've had about Pynchon, and I'm itching to start re-reading his novels with comic books and these images in mind.