The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium (Studies in Comics and Cartoons) - Softcover

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Black-and-white images involve no color and no gradations. Because they tend to be black marks printed on white surfaces, they also highlight The Color of Paper’s second question: How does whiteness relate to Whiteness?

Though hatched and crosshatched areas produce various gray effects, the marks in black-and-white art are black ink spaced to optically combine with the white of a paper surface. Black ink (or less often a black surface) can represent skin (and has in the racist blackface minstrel tradition), but the dominant norm in and outside of the comics medium is for an unmarked and paradigmatically white surface to represent the skin of characters of all racial categories. That paradoxical range is possible because, rather than linguistically reading or spatiotemporally observing, viewers ignore paper color. They therefore typically treat the color of a page as meaningless when assessing the race of a drawn character.

The expectation that skin represented by white paper would be perceived as White skin highlights the illogic of racial categorizations. Viewers do not perceive white skin as White skin because White is not white. A more logical (though not necessarily accurate) assumption is that skin represented by beige paper would be perceived as White skin. The logical expectation is blocked and the illogical expectation is highlighted, because US racial categorizations are grounded in an ink-on-paper metaphor that produces false racial binaries through the double visual dichotomies of white/black and white/color.

Because race is not a coherent concept, racial thinking appropriates and misapplies the materiality of black-on-white print and colors-on-white art to construct the illusion of coherence. The whiteness of paper allows black and color marks to be legible, and since white marks would be illegible, the interiors of white objects are represented by the negative spaces of unmarked paper. Racial illogic extends and combines that dual quality of whiteness to Whiteness: it is both one race among multiple races (just as white is one color among multiple colors visible on a page), and it is also the ubiquitous background necessary to make the concept of race legible. Because white requires no addition of marks, it is the unmarked default state of the page, which metaphorically naturalizes Whiteness as the unmarked default state of humanity that other races mar or obscure.

Though viewers do not interpret white paper visible in areas representing skin as White skin, the conflations of whiteness and Whiteness reverberate through a medium developed and still partially dependent on white paper. While not required, the negative spaces between images are the most pervasive device for structuring image-text relationships in the comics medium and perhaps print culture generally. The white frames of gutters produced by the absence of marks evoke Whiteness as a larger social system framing and controlling all other cultural content. Because paper may be perceived as outside authorial choice and so paradoxically not a part of works that exist only when printed on its surface, the color of paper is perceptually neutral. It is as if works exist in an ideal state where ink is printed on invisible surfaces. Because neutrality and invisibility are connotatively aligned with Whiteness, these deeper structuring qualities of whiteness further structure racial thinking. Whiteness partitions and juxtaposes other cultural elements in relationship to itself and within its all-encompassing frame. By misapplying the norms of ink-on-paper visual works, US culture functions as a White page.

In addition to its role in gutters and margins, whiteness also extends to the materiality of paper, highlighting comics as physical objects held in viewers’ hands. The bodily relationship of a viewer and comic can produce a range of imaginative overlays, where artists, narrators, characters, and other viewers past and present project into the physical space occupied by an actual viewer. If the viewer is White, and since the majority of viewers have been White during the historical span of the comics medium, assumptions of Whiteness may expand beyond the paper that provides its defining metaphor.