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The Patron Saint of Superheroes

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

June 26, 2023 My Extremely Preliminary and Unpublishable Research Results

I asked my son to pilot test my research survey. Twice. I technically owe him $5, despite having just covered the security deposit on his Brooklyn apartment (he starts a Math Ph.D. program in NYC late August).

As I detailed in a previous post, the survey asks participants to identify the race, ethnicity, and gender of people from a range of ambiguous drawings I’ve come across while drafting what I hope will become my future book “The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium. “

The target length time is fifteen minutes. Cameron took over twenty but warned that he always takes longer than an estimated time — plus when uncertain of an answer, he played a chess puzzle on his other computer screen. He said afterward that he often felt unsure, but he only yelled, “You should really include ‘unsure,’” when he hit this image:

Ignoring my fingers (which I cropped on the actual survey), that’s Mike Grell’s Science Police Officer SPXX342-Dvron from a black and white reprint of Superboy Starring the Legion of Super-Heroes #207 (March 1975). Grell explains:

“I drew him as a black guy. And when I turned it in, [my editor] says, ‘You can’t do that. The guy’s black.’ … Reluctantly, I did change the character… ever so slightly, leaving enough characteristics that it was obvious to the readers that he had been intended to be black.”

Obvious? Not exactly. Deeply ambiguous? Cameron thought so. I think there’s something especially strange happening around the redrawn mouth, but I already knew the history and so don’t have an unbiased first impression. Since “unsure” wasn’t an option, Cameron went with White, but then suggested adding a degree of certainty question (which would be great but the survey is already too long). When he looked at the original color version, he went with a more certain White:

And yet Grell claimed that the miscoloring didn’t obscure the intended race: “Sure enough, we got mail from black readers who spotted it and knew it had been a black man colored pink.” I would love to read that mail (in part to find out how many Black people were reading Superboy in 1975), but after I have amassed enough real data, the surveys should tell me whether Grell was right.

Unlike Cameron, official respondents won’t see both versions, since impressions of the first could influence impressions of the second. Cameron wanted to know which ones he got “right,” but sometimes the second image increased ambiguity. He thought this image was a racist caricature of a Black man:

Then he saw the original version colored with White skin:

He stuck with Black, the same way he stuck with White after seeing green skin.

Maybe that’s an anchoring bias: “people’s tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information they receive on a topic. Regardless of the accuracy of that information, people use it as a reference point, or anchor, to make subsequent judgments.” Or maybe the addition of color (which comes last in the comics art production) really is a secondary quality and characters should be understood primarily as black-and-white art. If so, facial features are defining.

Similarly, hatching lines intended to convey race through implied skin color can be ambiguous. Cameron identified these two Black 1940s characters as White.

I also learned that gray-tone art may create the impression of color in memory. When Cameron saw an image from a color version of Yes, Roya, he remembered having already seen it in the first survey. He hadn’t:

Rather than mentally filling in white spaces, viewers may respond to varying shades of gray as they would when looking at black-and-white photography. Or at least that’s my hypothesis based on intuition and a lone data point. I’ll have to develop a different survey if I want to confirm it.

Meanwhile, I did tentatively confirm the importance of hair. Cameron’s loudest complaint was: “This is a skeleton!”

But he still assigned it White in both versions, due to the long straight hair (which I projected to be blonde in the black and white version).

Hair may also trump skin:

After debating longest for the character on the left, he went with White, though only “because White people have blonde hair.”

Cropping the hair on this one obscured the character’s intended Blackness:

As with the skeleton example, skin color reveals nothing for this zombie, but Cameron went with Black because of the hair:

I would have gone with Latino. Which brings up an unexpected result: Cameron always answered the second question the same, “Not Hispanic or Latino.” He said it was probably because he hadn’t seen that many Latino characters in comics (which, thinking about my childhood box of 70s Marvel comics I pulled down from our attic when he was a kid, is sadly true), but I’m wondering if placing race first influences perceptions of ethnicity. I’m following U.S. Census categories and order, which means Latino is a subcategory of race, which must be selected first.

When Cameron saw an image of a Latina character from Love & Rockets (not a comic in my attic box), he categorized the black-and-white version as Asian and the color version as Black:

Would Black, Asian, or Latino respondents answer differently? That’s a question I hope my full survey results will answer in detail.

More often, Cameron’s responses matched my intuitions. I suspect the following image was intended to represent a Black man, before a color artist assigned White skin and light brown hair. Cameron accordingly identified the black-and-white version as Black and the color as White:

Also like me, he identified the black-and-white version of this character as White, before switching to Black for the color version:

One final surprise though, he identified both of my two recent cartoon characters as Black, with or without gray shading:

Which gets at another core point of the study: these are not people; these are drawings of people. In the above case, they are drawings of imaginary people with no real-world counterparts. I made them up. While it’s likely that viewers use some of the same strategies for assessing race when looking at representations of people as when looking at actual people, drawings participate in learned drawing norms that are distinct from any actual human qualities.

Prying those complexities apart would require lots more research. This is step one.

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