Yeah I think that's really the crux point. If one's medium is comics (and it's definitely, definitely Moore's) then how do you talk about the horrific portrayal of, god, any person of 'other-nessticity' within the history of comics?
It's important to remember these depictions. The strongest way to do it - and the hardest as an artist - would be to portray it as it was, in all of its ways, I think. However hard that is to see or read, I think making it would be harder. It's all the more an indictment - and I'm sure it was not lost on Moore - that they did print it.
well i think simply duplicating it, repeating it, is not only not enough, but very much problematic. especially for a medium whose audience consist largely of young, inexperienced, and impressionable minds.
honest question: how do you think "portraying it
as it was" functions? do you think it sparks debate? do you think it reminds kids of a past that they don't remember? or is it simply the manufacturing of yet more racist imagery? (here i sound like a soccer mom but whatever) what do you think a 14 year old will get out of this story? how might it influence his behavior next day at school, toward perhaps the 1 East Asian kid in his class, no doubt already being picked on?
if we are going to look at context, the publishing house ABC's most popular title, Tom Strong, is a campy, retro, all american superhero, not so much appropriating as
embodying the exact same kind of macho heroism of the 1950s or whatever era. there
IS NO critical subtext, there
IS NO apparent irony. other than perhaps a slight self consciousness in the writing style, the only twist is that he has a wife of Afro-Caribbean decent, and a half and half daughter.
(don't necessarily want to get into the political ramifications of the classic shots-calling white dude with "ethnic" bride thing... not to mention with non-human servants which can be readily argued as stand ins for non-white slaves.)
seems to me the entire ABC brand is not so much parodying anything, but
being that which Droid's camp would say it is parodying.
and the way i encountered this Chinky story was as a stand alone, self contained story within the giant sized ABC special, with no thematic relations to the stories which appear before or after it.
so this question:
Slothrop
Zhao - would you agree that the story is fundamentally a portrayal of racism rather than something where the racism is to be taken at face value?
of what I, a 35 year old man, who has taken a couple of Post Colonial Studies courses or at least read a few books on the subject, think is the ultimate aim of the story is almost entirely beside the point.
given the (lack of) context, what do you think the primary target audience of these books, probably something like age 9 - 18, would get from the story?
it is never black and white (no puns intended), but in my estimation, this is slipping into the area of perpetuating harmful stereotypes much more than any kind of shedding light on race relations.
