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The Patron Saint of Superheroes

“Chris Gavaler Explores the Multiverse of Comics, Pop Culture, and Politics”

April 29, 2024 Paper is Skin

In an interview with Hilary Chute, Allison Bechdel said “paper is skin” (Chute 2011: 112). Since she also said ink is blood, the metaphor doesn’t seem to be intended racially. Bechdel’s not saying white paper is White skin. However, her approach to color in her 2021 The Secret to Superhuman Strength both literalizes the “paper is skin” metaphor and illustrates its racial complexities.

Bechdel’s first memoir, Fun Home, includes shades of blue added to her black line art, creating gradations without denoting hues. The effect is similar to grayscale art, since everything colored blue isn’t meant to be actually blue in the story world.

Her second memoir, Are You My Mother?, combines grayscale and shades of red, again leaving actual hues unknown, while emphasizing thematic connotations: the previous blues for her father are replaced by pinks in her mother’s story.

For her third memoir, Holly Rae Taylor, Bechdel’s personal and artistic partner, painted Bechdel’s line art in a range of mostly primary colors that appear to directly represent the colors of their subject: Bechdel’s red shirt, for example, is both discursively and diegetically red.

The same is not true of skin.

Taylor uses a light blue for facial shadows but otherwise leaves skin areas the unmarked color of paper. Because she applies the norm to all characters regardless of race, page whiteness represents all skin colors. While that’s a norm in black-and-white comics, the approach is unusual in color art, giving page whiteness the ability to represent multiple diegetic colors only when representing skin. Other instances of unmarked negative spaces within images represent only white or lightly colored objects.

Bechdel’s cast of characters is predominantly White, so the representational tension is rare and occurs only when depicting potentially dark-skinned characters.

At roughly the midpoint of the narrative, Bechdel’s narrator describes feeling “a hand grope my butt” in a subway entrance, later describing the “young man” as someone who “had clearly been [fighting] all of his life” after he returns Bechdel’s ineffective punch with a literally colorful “SOCK!” (109-110).

Setting aside the potentially racialized assumption about a life of violence, the two-page sequence includes six recurrent images of the “young man” whose features contrast Bechdel’s style of representation for herself and Taylor.

Where Bechdel typically draws mouths as single straight lines and sometimes dots, the man’s mouth consists of three lines, each conveying more realistic shapes of his lips. Rather than a variation on Bechdel’s simplified two-sided nose triangle, the curving lines of his nose also suggest nostrils, and his hair is tightly curling black lines in contrast to Bechdel’s solid black hair shape. Bechdel represents his Afrocentric features naturalistically and so in visual opposition to her slightly more simplified and exaggerated cartoon style.

That contrast is contradicted by the figure’s non-naturalistically paper-white skin, which viewers presumably interpret as representing a different color than Bechdel’s and Taylor’s paper-white skin.

Before his entrance, page whiteness could be understood to represent only light colors, including not only White skin but Taylor’s indeterminate but apparently light hair color, which, like her skin, she leaves uncolored.

The rule is violated during the two-page scene if his skin is understood to be some darker shade of brown, which Bechdel’s rendering of Black phenotype suggests. Understanding his skin to be a beige similar to Bechdel’s disrupts that phenotype, making his character not only racially ambiguous but contradictory.

Whether or not Bechdel and Taylor intend that effect, it’s produced by the white paper.

After drafting this post as a chapter subsection for my work-in-progress, The Color of Paper, I noticed a further complication of the color art:

Taylor visually casts the “young man” as the protagonist.

For almost all other scenes, Taylor paints Bechdel in red and blue, beginning with the opening pages. But in the subway sequence, Bechdel enters in a very light pink, and the “young man” in her standard colors.

Keeping in mind that the memoir is titled The Secret to Superhuman Strength, this is standard superhero differentiation. Stan Goldberg, Marvel’s primary colorist during the 1960s, told an interviewer:

“I always used red, yellow, and blue for the super-heroes. Green, browns, shades of red, and purples were the colors I saved for the villains. It was a formula, and it worked. The colors I picked for the villains made for a better contrast with the heroes. I certainly didn’t want to use the same colors for the villains that I used for the heroes, because when they came in contact with each other, it’d have been harder to visually separate them” (16-17).

Taylor doesn’t paint Bechdel as a green or purple villain, but her colors do disrupt the usual dichotomies during the center scene of the memoir. The literally white-skinned Black man who groped and then punched Bechdel’s White and literally white-skinned character is visually separated by the same Superman-evoking red-and-blue color design previously assigned only to Bechdel.

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