Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime by Deborah Elizabeth Whaley (review)

As sequential art has moved to the forefront of popular culture, critical discourse on graphic narratives has increased in turn, opening up necessary conversations about diversity (or lack thereof) in comics and comix. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley's newest publication Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime aims to enter this debate with a frank discussion of black women's roles in sequential art. Opening with a claim to 'explain why women of African descent as sequential subjects should and do matter to the comic book world' (12), she hopes to 'reveal sequential art as a viable form for understanding how popular literature and visual culture reflects the real and imagined place of women of African descent in nation-making, politics, and cultural production' (8). Whaley's text serves as an important and necessary entry point into the vital discussion of representation and diversity in comics.

Black Women in Sequence is a five-chapter dive into the history of black women in comics, both as creators and as characters. It all began, Whaley argues, with Jackie Ormes – cited as the origin of black women in comics and the first established creator of long-running black female characters. This opening chapter takes its time in describing Ormes's history and graphic contributions, providing readers with a plethora of visual examples. With a structured focus, each of Ormes's four major works – Candy, Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger, Torchy Brown and Torchy Brown: Heartbeats – are discussed in great depth and detail, providing historical and cultural contexts as well as visual analyses of multiple strips.

From Ormes, Whaley transitions to Catwoman, drawing from her multiple iterations for 'interrogating the cultural politics of race, given the racialisation, reracialisation, and sexual representation of the character in comic books, graphic novels, television, video games, and film' (70). She argues that Catwoman, across various forms of media and in the hands of widely different creators, is a unique figure in comics because she 'reconstituted narrative spaces for readers along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality' (70). Her analysis of Eartha Kitt's televised portrayal of the femme fatale is rich with analysis of text, visuals, behind-the-scenes interviews and sociopolitical contexts, crafting a strong argument for the importance of a black Catwoman in the early years of Batman. Kitt's portrayal is offset by a discussion of Halle Berry's 2004 Catwoman film after decades of white representations of the character. The author also leaves ample room in this chapter for deconstructing the role of Catwoman as a female agent within the Batman comic books, noting how different portrayals have afforded her different levels of sexual and political agency.

Catwoman then leads on to three DC/Marvel heroines – Nubia, Storm and Vixen – and how they represent 'cultural work and cultural morass of comic writers' ideological engagement with Africa and the Black female body' (97). Chapter three breaks up into three sections, each character given space for noting their first appearances in comics, their origin stories, and their relation to a fictionalised and generalised Africa. And, as with Catwoman, Whaley traces the evolution of these female characters as they travel between creators' hands and as the demands of the comic book community change over time.

From African-American imaginings and relations, the book then moves on to global fictionalisations of Africa with the 1990s Japanese anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (Japan 1990–1). Whaley notes immediately that this particular anime was chosen because Nadia was the first black woman in anime. Nadia is positioned as being in conversation with American portrayals of Africa, suggesting that it 'allow[s] for the forming of a psychologically layered and transcultural identity where characters contemplate and negotiate multinational identities. Yet, in so doing, Africa serves as little more than a mystical and marginal global signifier' (123). The chapter moves through analysing Nadia as a...