Winner, 2023 Comics Studies Society Edited Book Prize

While most US-based comics studies anthologies tend to neglect race, Beyond the Icon brings it to the foreground through an analysis of the vibrant and growing body of graphic narratives by Asian North American creators in the twenty-first century. By demonstrating how the forms and styles of the comics genre help depict Asian Americans as nuanced individuals in ways that words alone may not, Beyond the Icon makes the case for comics as a crucial artistic form in Asian American cultural production––one used to counter misrepresentations and myths, rewrite official history, and de-exoticize the Asian American experience.

An interdisciplinary team of contributors offers exciting new readings of key texts, including Ms. Marvel, George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero, works by Adrian Tomine and Jillian Tamaki, and more, to uncover the ways in which Asian American comics authors employ graphic narratives to provide full and complex depictions of Asian diasporic subjects and intervene in the wider North American consciousness. Beyond the Icon initiates vital conversations between Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and comics.

Contributors:
Monica Chiu, Shilpa Davé, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Lan Dong, Jin Lee, erin Khuê Ninh, Stella Oh, Jeanette Roan, Eleanor Ty

Eleanor Ty, FRSC, is a Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author and editor of books on Asian North American literature and eighteenth-century British fiction, including Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority.

Introduction    Asian American Literature and Asian American Graphic Novels

Part 1   Retelling History

Chapter 1        Countervisualizing Barbed Wire, Guard Towers, and Latrines in George Takei and Harmony Becker’s They Called Us Enemy

Chapter 2        Ethics of Storytelling: Teaching Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do

Part 2   Subverting Stereotypes

Chapter 3        Bitch Planet’s Meiko Maki Is Down for Justice!

Chapter 4        Anachronistic Figures and Counternarratives: Comics as a Subversive Form in American Born Chinese and Johnny Hiro

Chapter 5        “A Storm of a Girl Silently Gathering Force”: Peminist Girlhoods in the Comics of Trinidad Escobar and Malaka Gharib

Part 3   Superheroes and Race

Chapter 6        Questioning the “Look” of Normalcy and the Borders of South/Asian Americans: Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, and the Comic Superhero

Chapter 7        (Un)Masking a Chinese American Superhero: Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero

Part 4   Ecology, Otherness, and Inclusivity

Chapter 8        Posthumanist Critique in Jillian Tamaki’s Boundless

Chapter 9        Drawing Disease and Disability: Ethical Optics and Space in Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying