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This chapter addresses the relative paucity of comics work done, until recently, on and by First Peoples. It focuses especially on conics work by First Peoples artists, arguing that a key reason First Peoples authors might be attracted to the comics form is that it can be seen to complement traditional oral literature. The chapter argues that we can understand these First Peoples graphic novels as writing back to misrepresentations of themselves throughout the long tradition of the comic and cartoon. In their own graphic novels, First Peoples are disrupting, rejecting, or even reclaiming and revisioning these previous images and tropes.

This chapter examines how Asian American young girls are represented in male-authored and female-authored graphic texts. Although the two Asian American male-authored texts discussed in this chapter, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and Derek Kirk Kim’s Good as Lily, counter the white male dominance of the graphic fiction genre, these two texts rely on a romance sub-plot that objectifies young Asian American girls and offer them conflicting messages about their gender roles. However, two Asian American female graphic fiction creators, anthologized in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, Kripa Joshi in “Girl Power” and Lynn Chen in “You Are What You Eat” move beyond the restrictive romance plot to draw attention to issues that young Asian American girls encounter in society, such as female hyper-sexualization and low self-esteem due to poor body image.

Berndt, in her “Skim as Girl: Reading a Japanese North American Graphic Novel through Manga Lenses,” interprets the reception of Tamaki and Tamaki’s Skim within a Japanese manga audience once it was translated into Japanese. But the translated version suffers from aesthetic losses and misunderstandings, argues Berndt. She carefully investigates how manga conventions and Japanese readers’ expectations, including standard responses to a subject who is deemed “other,” stymied the book’s success abroad as the audience struggled to decipher Tamaki and Tamaki’s graphic reading cues uniting and separating Skim from her peers, that heavily influence interpretation.

This chapter applies Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field of literary production, as well as critical evaluations of contemporary graphic novels and comic books (McCloud, Hatfield), in order to consider the trajectory of Ray Fawkes, a Canadian comics artist and writer. Through analyzing the aesthetic presentation and material qualities of Fawkes’ works One Soul (2011),The Spectral Engine (2013), The People Inside (2014), and Intersect (2015), as well as industry standards and practices and their subsequent impact on the reader, this chapter contends that the creator’s adoption of a particular visual style in any given comic book or graphic novel can serve as a signal to readers as to the genre and subfield of literature to which their publication belongs. Through marked shifts in visual style and formal experimentation, Ray Fawkes subtly innovates from within both the mainstream and alternative subfields of the field of comics publishing.

Ralph Rodriguez’s essay on Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings advocates for readings that are mindful of the systems, conventions, and expectations that affect our (Western) reading of texts. Rodriguez’s “surface reading” cautions against immediately seeking and finding race and/or racism in Asian American literature or using the snap judgments about race that Tomine’s characters consistently reference. Rodriguez proposes that we de-naturalize this now-naturalized reading impulse.

While Gene Luen Yang is well known for his Printz Award-winning graphic narrative American Born Chinese, Lan Dong examines his lesser-known work in “The Model Minority between Medical School and Nintendo: Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham’s Level Up.” She first calls attention to the nuances and impact of the model minority myth on Asian Americans and then demonstrates how Level Up re-visions Asian American representation through interactive racialization in video games. Level Up’s discursive and visual elements provide multiple opportunities for protagonist Dennis Ouyang to conform to, play with, or challenge the rules of his status as a model minority, haunted by his deceased father’s wish that his son become a doctor. The novel also demands that readers confront their discomfort with racial stereotypes when these types appear in varied recognizable forms (the model minority, for example). The reader’s and Dennis’s position of mediating among troubling ethnic identities presents a gamification of social and cultural life.

Chapter 1 avers that Skim’s visual conventions are non-prose, textual interventions into social heteronormativity and race. The narrative’s strategically engineered visual interruptions demand that the reader stop at key textual moments, moments outside of diegetic time, to appreciate homosexual encounters or subtle forms of racial discrimination that are present in the illustrations but absent in the novel’s prose. Images “speak” more loudly than prose, driving a narrative in which homosexual encounters become fantastic, meaning both potentially fictional and irrepressible, and race emerges as Skim’s salient, but textually silent, difference in stark contrast to her blonde-haired, blue-eyed peers.

In chapter 8, Tim Gruenewald uses Yang’s earlier graphic narratives, such as American Born Chinese and Level Up, to explore the conflict among cultural inheritance, imagined racial categories, and identity formation. Using the casting controversy surrounding The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan’s filmic adaption of the TV series Avatar: The Last Air Bender, Gruenewald explains that because Yang and other Avatar fans regarded the cultures they viewed in the graphic TV series as Asian and Inuit, their protests against Shyamalan’s casting of non-Asian actors suggests an uncomfortable one-to-one-correspondence between culture and race. However, Gruenewald’s careful readings of Yang’s graphic narrative oeuvre argue that Yang’s creative work is more sophisticated than the simplifications of the (political) fan protest movement. Bloodline or race is hardly inherent in Yang’s comics work, but rather taught or adopted, and thus Gruenewald explores the thorny relationship between culture and race to reveal Yang’s own ambivalence about their tight correspondence.

BenoîteGroult’s caustic yet humorous essay Ainsisoit-elle was published in 1975, the same year as the innovative feminist text Les Femmes s’entêtent, and, just as the collective volumedemanded a radical refusal of women’s oppression, so Groult’s text is also a call to arms. Espousing views too moderate for the most radical tendenciesof French feminism, Groult is often depicted as an ‘equality feminist’; this chapter firstly puts Groult’s polemical and popular Ainsisoit-elle in conversation with Les Femmes s’entêtent and, in so doing, provides a fuller picture of the heterogeneous nature of French feminism in the mid-1970s. Secondly, it assesses Groult’s legacy some forty years on by analysing Catel Muller’s representation of Groult in the biographical graphic novel AinsisoitBenoîteGroult (2014), which, as its title suggests, engages with Groult’s original essay.

Kuilan Liu’s essay finds Yang’s image of the Monkey King in American Born Chinese offensive, given the rich history both in Chinese literature and media, of the revered Monkey King. Her essay examines the meanings appended to Yang’s decidedly ugly and dishonorable Monkey King, interpreted through Chinese reviews and her undergraduate students’ gut reactions to the text’s images. What does not get translated across nations becomes Liu’s focal point.

Jeffrey Santa Ana argues how the work of Australian-Chinese-Malay Shaun Tan figuratively illustrates how Australia has been slow to acknowledge its past discrimination against Chinese immigrants and Aboriginal people prior to and under White Australia Policy (from the 1850s to 1973). His images suggest that to forget this racist century is to be dislocated and alienated from history and from the land. In his essay “Emotions as Landscapes: Specters of Asian American Racialization in Shaun Tan’s Graphic Narratives,” Santa Ana makes further connections to the discrimination suffered by Chinese laborers to North America, referencing Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, to forge connections between two histories of Chinese immigration across two continents.

In chapter 10, Catherine Ceniza Choy offers a close reading of Jenifer K Wofford’s 2008 graphic novel and kiosk poster project Flor de Manila y San Francisco in the historical and contemporary context of international health worker migration and, specifically, the immigration of Filipino nurses to the United States. Flor de Manila y San Francisco imagines six years (1973–78) in the life of the fictional Flor Villanueva, a young woman who has emigrated from Manila to San Francisco. Wofford’s graphic novel was also exhibited as public art, as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s “Art on Market Street” in 2008. Choy argues that a significant contribution of Wofford’s Flor de Manila y San Francisco is its ability to humanize the Filipino immigrant nurse and by extension health worker migrants for a general public. Although such migrants are featured actors of globalization in public policy studies and scholarly books and articles, they are often barely visible to the general public except as stereotypes and sound bites.

While Asian American graphic artists often grapple with the politics of identity, as iterated throughout this collection, Acosta argues that OEL manga, an amalgamation of Asian American and Japanese popular print cultures that might provide a ready and authentic Japaneseness for Japanese American artists, is a visual style and not a politics. After thoroughly explaining manga’s conventions (reading practices, visual cues, page layout, and the driving influence of a strong fan base), and after mapping the rocky history of manga and OEL manga in the United States, Acosta’s argument revisits and revises how race and manga work, or how manga’s iteration of an “authentic Japaneseness” interrupts the American notion of an “ethnic” work created by an “ethnic” author. Rather, she concludes, OEL manga contributes to the changing parameters of American comics not by introducing a Japanese perspective and thus limning an artist’s so-called inherited Japanese sensibility, but by adhering to accepted manga conventions and referencing Asian media and pop culture material objects that find their way into OEL manga.

According to Laura Anh Williams’s “Queering Manga: Eating Queerly in 12 Days,” Asian Americanness is usually associated with heterosexuality while queerness is associated with whiteness. June Kim’s OEL manga 12 Days, however, queers manga tradition to valorize the same-sex love at the novel’s core. Its disorienting temporalities and often confusing visual style re-locate it within queer time and place.

This chapter describes a popular culture text based on Katrina survivors’ narratives: the non-fiction graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld. In the print version and an earlier webcomic of A.D., the rhetorical and artistic choices of the author reinforce stereotypes, especially of African Americans. In the comments feature of the webcomic, survivors are able to negotiate the terms of their stories’ production; because the webcomic is serial and public, audiences are privy to this dialogue, meaning narrators’ negotiations are built into the circulation and reception of the text. However, the print version does not include the web commentary. This chapter raises similar questions as those posed by Charles Briggs: “Why do some narratives become authoritative? Why are statements that challenge them erased from public discourse?” (2005:272). In A.D., Katrina survivors’ challenging statements are erased from the eventual print publication of the text.

The Epilogue makes a case that the tradition of Funny Girls calls for a reconsideration of the history of American comics both during the mid-twentieth century and during the opening decades of the new millennium.Remembering and recouping characters like Little Lulu, Nancy, Li'l Tomboy, Little Orphan Annie, and Little Audrey restores the important place and powerful status that young female protagonists had in early American comics.At the same time, an awareness of this cadre of female characters changes our perspective on the growing presence of girls in comics in the present day.Events taking place in American comics from the early twenty-first century can be connected to those from the early twentieth century.Far from embodying a radical shift in US comics, the rise of fun, feisty, and formidable female protagonists represent the continuation of a tradition.Accordingly, the Epilogue reveals that while the names of many of the characters profiled in these chapters include the diminutive "li'l" or "little," their cultural legacy has been big.

Chapter 15 looks at how raciality is made visible not only through the Asian American bodies of characters in four graphic narratives—Yang’s American Born Chinese, Kim’s Good as Lily, Fred Chao’s Johnny Hiro, and Tak Toyoshima’s Secret Asian Man—but also in practices, media, and material culture, specifically Asian-manufactured and Asian-themed items, that appear in the narratives. She argues that these narratives create new visual conventions and meanings of Asianness, moving them away from a rootedness in tradition and single-nation status to practices related to popular culture and transnationalism, forging identities for Asian Americans that are no longer based on mutually incompatible Asian and American frameworks.