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August 7, 2023 What Color is Jaime Hernandez’s Skin?

Panel presentations at the Comics Studies Society conference in Denton, Texas were a disciplined twelve minutes. I presented “Black and White and Color: Reprinting Race in Jaime Hernandez’s Mechanics” at 9:00 the first morning. I had initially planned for twenty, paired down to a happy fifteen the night before, and then snipped another three minutes on the fly. That means some slides never made it to the screen. Those include an epilogue presenting some preliminary results of the quantitative study I started earlier this summer (and posted about here and here).

The study includes three black-and-white images from Jaine Hernandez’s “Mechanics” as they originally appeared in Love & Rockets #2 (1983) and then as they appeared in the mini-series Mechanics as colored by Paul Rivoche in 1985. So far I’ve asked about a hundred people to identify the race/ethnicity of the drawn characters. I got very different results for two versions of Maggie:

When skin color was unknown (ie, the color of the paper), the most popular answer was white (43%). Rivoche’s addition of brown skin eliminated that impression almost entirely (1%).

The second biggest change was the more than doubling of Latina impressions from 28% to 67%. As I discussed last week, the actual Latina range is from Type I to Type IV on the Fitzpatrick chart:

Rivoche’s Maggie looks closest to Type IV to me, though perhaps edging toward Type V:

The change from unknown skin color to brown also increased the impression of Maggie being Black from 1% to 12%. This surprised me since Hernandez draws a nose (implied only by two small ink shapes suggesting nostrils and no other marks) that would be atypical for a Black woman. I’m guessing that 12% of respondents read brown skin as the equivalent of a linguistic sign for designating Blackness (which was still the norm in comics in 1985). The drop from 43% to 1% for impressions of whiteness follows the same logic. Even though some actual white people have Type IV skin (ie, brown), in comics brown means Black.

Brown skin also eliminated impressions of Maggie being Asian. That initial response (12%) surprised me because I didn’t see any of Hernandez’s drawn elements as implying Asian facial features. That I’m surprised is not especially relevant though, since one of my goals for this study was to avoid my own (white) subjectivity. But keep in mind that two-thirds of the respondents were white. I need to run the study again to see whether the numbers change if respondents are, for instance, all Black or all Latino.

The study includes two other Hernandez characters. Doctor Numura Mumura appears in only one image:

When Maggie falls ill with a dangerous fever, a doctor is called. Hernandez’s dialogue evokes witch doctor tropes (“You don’t suppose he might put a curse on us …?”), but Hernandez instead draws him in a business suit that the dialogue identifies as mafia-esque (“What’s he gonna do, tommy gun it out of her?”). Hernandez’s text is further ambiguous since the name “Doctor Numura Mumura” evokes both the Japanese surname “Nomura” and “murmura,” an Asian puffed rice dish.

Despite the ambiguous range of possibilities, Rivoche had to select a single race/ethnic-suggesting color. Adding brown skin significantly increased impressions of Blackness, from slightly over half (52%) to near unanimity (96%). Again, brown means Black.

The third character is Tse Tse:

She is the only person able to translate the Zimbodian’s “complex” language, and Hernandez draws her with a bicycle, a conservative dress, and black hair and facial features that could also suggest Blackness. Yet in her final panel in the final chapter of “Mechanics,” Tse Tse reveals that her “real name” is Rosa Colores Arriaga Banuelos.

The vast majority of respondents saw both the black-and-white and the colored versions of Tse Tse as Black. At first I interpreted the 9% white as evidence that when given an opportunity some white people will see white people (the black-and-white doctor’s 32% white and black-and-white Maggie’s 43% white support that too). Though I suspect that’s still the case, I also wonder if Hernandez was intentionally manipulating racial and ethnic expectations. His coloring of Maggie on the cover of Love & Rockets #2 suggests whiteness, making Maggie white Hispanic. Did he intend Tse Tse to be Black Hispanic?

That possibility reveals a flaw in my categorizations. Following the U.S. census, I originally had two questions, one on race and then one on ethnicity. I feared the division would block Latino impressions, so I combined race/ethnicity. For quantitative analysis reasons, I couldn’t offer a “choose any” option, which placed “Latino” into its own category distinct from both “White” and “Black.”

I think the far deeper problem is that racial and ethnic categories are scientific nonsense, exasperated by the notion that they can be identified by appearance. And yet, viewers of comics (like viewers of actual people) experience impressions of race and ethnicity all the time. The key phrase may be “impressions of.” Even though race and ethnicity are not legitimate biological categories, we are still enculturated to experience them, especially by appearance. That’s what I’m trying to study.

Lots more to follow.

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