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5 Evil Chinamen Yellow Peril Comics and the Ideological Work of Popular Seriality “how long is a superman story?” “Probably twelve pages.” “i want a character and a twelve-page story by Monday.” “We’re going to need a lot more than that. . . . they got typically five to six characters in there. You know, a spy. A private eye. A shadowy avenger of the helpless. An evil Chinaman.” —michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) P erhaps no medium is better suited to the dispersal and dissemination of the serial figure than the comic. the 1930s brought the medium into its own, because new modes of production and distribution allowed for new narratives and new formats that were no longer conceived as mere sideshows or complementary add-ons but now constituted the main attraction. in its so-called Golden Age, between the 1930s and the 1940s, the comic strip went serial. At the same time, the comics fully appropriated the serialized narrative formulae, plot conventions , and character constellations of adventure fiction, which then transmuted into the formal and narrative parameters of the superhero comic. this structural and narrative refocusing or focalization was caused by a deep-going transformation of the conditions of comic production. As Jennifer hayward, among others, insists, the Golden Age’s professionalization of the comic market and standardization (and streamlining) of the production processes in the comics industry should not be seen primarily in terms of a loss (of “rawness,” diversity, or creative autonomy), but in terms of artistic sophistication and condensation: “Adventure strips of the 1930s and 1940s (later dubbed the ‘Golden Age’ of adventure comics ) mark highly imaginative narrative and artistic experimentation with comic-strip themes and techniques—experimentation made possible, it can be argued, by the collaboration enforced by the requirements of the 120 Chapter 5 daily strip as well as by the enormous influx of profits that followed the profits and publicity of national syndication” (hayward 1997: 93; see also Wright 2003: 1–29; Jenkins 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; Gardner 2012; Kelleter and stein 2012). hayward explains the boost that comic strips underwent in the course of their serialization and industrialization in terms of a more or less conventional logic of aesthetic distinction. For her, the perfectioning of the medium hinges on the brilliance and daring of the individual artists entering into collaborative units. now, they could concentrate full time on what most of them could pursue only on the side before. this convergence of professionalization, ingenuity, and innovation , then, seems to have brought on the brilliance of the Golden Age. But if one takes a historically informed look at the actual output of this period, it is not only newness that comes into view: What is perhaps more striking is the repetition of the familiar in a new guise. As hayward herself points out, the adventure and crime stories that now take center stage in the comic strips have been told for decades. in terms of plot conventions , story arcs, and their repertory of plots and figures, the comics are not really new—they obviously and explicitly take recourse in narrative formulae that have been established long before in literature and film. With this, i do not mean to endorse the popular reading of Golden Age comics as actualizations of mythical or archetypal patterns, although doubtlessly comics, especially superhero comics, do make use of transhistorical types and subjects (Ditschke and Anhut 2009; for an excellent refutal of a simplistic “archetypal reading,” see Packard 2010: 111–116). instead, i want to draw attention to the fact that in the course and wake of the Golden Age, comics reverberate with motifs, plots, and figurations stemming from a very concrete historical tradition with very troublesome ideological parameters—the tradition of turn-of-the-century imperialadventure fiction (Green 1979; J. thompson 1993; A. White 1993: 8–100; McClure 1994; Mayer 2002: 25–47). obviously, the mix includes new elements , with the superhero figure leading the way. Much has been written about the superhero’s relevance for reconceptualizations of nationality and masculinity in the course of twentieth-century popular culture (Bukatman 2003; Wright 2003; ndalianis 2009; Dittmer 2010), and in what follows, superhero narratives play an important role. But my focus is on the wider frame of comic series starting in the Golden Age. in line with my earlier investigations of the intersecting pulls of ideological and narrative serialization , i tease out the larger implications of the comics’ reengineering of the stock figures, settings, accessories...

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