Sterotype: American Born Chinese

This week we discussed the importance the role of stereotypes play in comics.  It was an interesting discussion and very relevant because the importance is quite obvious in many situations. For example,  the idea of recognized symbols which readers can quickly pick up help to better convey the situation and context for specific characters.  A perfect example of this would be the physical manifestation of super heroes, who generally have an alpha-male physique and the standard heroic proportions.  This also applies to a number of other characters we can quickly recognize: the nerd, the dork, the jock, the mom, etc.


Another important component of comic book stereotypes includes more than the characters appearance, but the characters actions and mannerisms, whether that be speech, gestures etc. Often times African American representations are a perfect negative example to help illustrate this concept. For some reason the artists chose to change the speech bubbles to blathering, almost incomprehensible dialect which indicated sounds that were more likely to come from an animal rather than a human being. However, this helps to illustrate the idea of stereotyping in comics, because it is a powerful means of communication that can quickly be understood by the masses.

For this weeks reading I chose to look at: American Born Chinese.  This work is a great example of the use of Stereotypes in comics, and explores a much more literal approach to the subject. The novel follows three separate Chinese tales, which all come together in the books climax. Danny is the Chinese boy born in America, who is visited by his traditional Chinese cousin named Chin Kee.  I also found this novel to be a great representation of ethical and moral obligations to a culture or stereotype, which provided an interesting format to address these issues and explore the intellectual concepts that make stereotypes important in the comic book medium.