Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives ed. by Monica Chiu (review)

Monica Chiu's Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives is a welcome contribution to the small but growing body of scholarship on Asian American graphic narratives and comics creators. Despite the increasing visibility of Asian Americans in comics—an article in the December 2011 issue of KoreAm was titled "Why Are There So Many Good Asian American Cartoonists?"—there has not yet been an entire book devoted to the subject. As Chiu notes in her introduction though, this collection is not intended to "fill a gap" in comics studies scholarship, nor is it meant as "a catalog of new Asian American graphic narratives and their scholarly interpretations" (13). Drawing New Color Lines, which originated in a Fulbright award at the University of Hong Kong and an international seminar on Asian American graphic narratives, situates itself within the "transnational turn" in Asian American studies. The fifteen essays of the work, accompanied by nineteen black-and-white figures and twenty-one beautifully reproduced color plates, are divided into three parts, each with a distinct focus. The first section, "Comics, Caricatures, and Race in North America," offers essays written by scholars based in the United States about the politics of representation in works by critically acclaimed North American comics creators. The second section, "North American Representations of Race across the Pacific," takes up transnationalism in many different forms, including the institutional affiliations of the included scholars, reception contexts, and the content of the graphic narratives themselves. The essays of the third section, "Manga Goes West and Returns," consider manga's established conventions and global popularity as a point of departure for discussions of original English language (OEL) manga and North American graphic novels.

Drawing New Color Lines demonstrates how established lines of inquiry in Asian American studies can be both extended and challenged in the study of graphic narratives. Asian American studies scholars will find many familiar topics analyzed in relation to perhaps unfamiliar texts. Lan Dong considers the model minority myth in Gene Luen Yang's and Thien Pham's Level Up. Catherine Ceniza Choy shows how Jenifer K Wofford humanizes Filipino immigrant nurses in her public art project Flor de Manila y San Francisco. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials examines representations of the American war in Vietnam and its effects upon U.S. soldiers in two issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. However, as Chiu suggests in her introduction, graphic narratives can also present challenges to familiar ways of imaging and imagining race (3). Ralph E. Rodriguez uses Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings to argue for what he calls a "surface reading of race" (87), while Jaqueline Berndt persuasively demonstrates how a use-related analysis that is attentive to surrounding mediascapes can highlight the cultural specificity of racial signifiers. The third section of the book in particular, which includes Berndt's essay, questions common assumptions about the visualization of racial and ethnic identity. For example, Angela Moreno Acosta traces the complex constructions of "Japaneseness" and authenticity in North American translations of manga and, consequently, in OEL manga. In a separate contribution, one of the most original in the collection, Acosta redraws a sequence from Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese using elements of manga style. The accompanying text by Berndt highlights how much Yang's narrative is transformed in the process.

Drawing New Color Lines also suggests how much Asian American studies can enrich comics studies, which has only recently begun to grapple with questions of race and representation. Chiu's introduction thoughtfully situates the collection in relation to comics studies scholarship, and although only this introduction, her essay on Tamaki's and Tamaki's Skim, and Berndt's contribution engage deeply with contemporary comics theory, the collection broadens comics studies through both the works it examines as well as the questions it asks. Familiar names such as Gene Luen Yang, Derek Kirk Kim, and Adrian Tomine...