Lynching Iconography: Looking in Graphic Narrative

I argue that Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby and Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece's Incognegro showcase comics' formal challenge to dominant modes of looking. Both graphic novels feature iconographic representations of lynching in the context of complex page layouts and visual-verbal narrative techniques. In so doing, they recall photographic and hand-drawn images of lynching from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The visibility of human pain, the physical marking of racial difference, and cultural blindness to black vulnerability are all coded in the iconography of lynching. Taken together, the two graphic novels reveal the active roles of group spectatorship and individual identification in the American cultural imagination of lynching. In addition to highlighting problematic practices of looking, comics are capable of altering their readers' viewing habits, because they present images in narrative and physical contexts. Incognegro and Stuck Rubber Baby encourage this transformation by featuring protagonists who "fail" to look fully at lynching early in each book, before they see their own vulnerability reflected in victims close to them, thereby compelling readers to identify with the characters' increasingly empathetic visual awareness.