IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.4 (2017) 67
Frederick Luis Aldama , Latinx
Superheroes in Mainstream Comics
Kin Wai Chu
Frederick Luis Aldama has been a key and forerunning scholar in Latino/a superhero comics scholarship, filling the gap of the understudied Latino/a superheroes in American superhero comic literature. Latinx
Superheroes in Mainstream Comics takes on a groundbreaking archival study not only in presenting a more
comprehensive picture of Latino/a superheroes, but also in delineating how they have been under-represented or often misrepresented within and beyond the realm of print comics. The reasons behind such a phenomenon, to his avail, can trace its roots in the longstanding racial issues in America as well as the practice of some comic creators who have “diminished will to geometrize and storyfy Latinos (6)”.
Aldama notes that the gender-neutral term Latinx is deliberately used in the title of the book as well as interchangeably with Latino/as to reflect the awareness of LGBTQ as well as the diversity of the Latin American community. In this review, I too will use the terms interchangeably. Though the willful distortion or use of oversimplified ethnic labels in Latinx superhero comics is evidenced, the empirical study also highlights innovative productions with complex narratives and characters over the recent decades. In fact, the –x may also make readers associate with the term comix, denoting the counter-cultural or experimental underground comics in American comics history. Thus the term Latinx can also imply the aspirations for more innovative Latinx superhero comics.
The book is structured in a powerfully progressive manner, which succinctly builds up the depth and breadth of its arguments. The flow of the three chapters firstly cultivates readers’ understanding of what Latino/a superheroes and their narratives are; then it progresses to the theorization of Latinx superheroes in comics; finally it expands the archival research to other audio-visual media. Such a progression provides readers enough factual knowledge before introducing more theory-specific and cultural issues. On top of this, this book provokes a wider discussion on the industrial practices and the cultural representations of different racial and ethnic communities in the mainstream media.
Based on the comics in print as the major territory of mainstream Latino superheroes and the “poor track records for representing people of colour in comic book storyworlds (p.3)”, using an archival approach in constructing an overarching narrative of Latinx superheroes seems pertinent. The first chapter draws
Frederick Luis Aldama
John Jennings (Foreword), Javier Hernandez (Afterword)
Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics
Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 232 pages ISBN: 9780816537082 Paperback ($22.95),
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.4 (2017) 68 systematic patterns of how Latino/a superheroes and supervillains have been constructed after their emergence in the 1940s from the massive archive. For the first few decades, there has been a tendency of pejoratively shaping Latino/a through hasty uses of stereotypes, for example, depicting Latino/as as “all body and no brain (27)” and “hypersexualizing women of colour in comics (73)”. Going in tide with the growing population of Latino/as in the US and the changing social cultural circumstances, there has been an improvement in both quantity and quality in Latinx superheroes comics though it is still far less proportionate to the actual Latino/a population in the US. Over the recent decades, some creative teams have rejected the homogenous characterization of Latinx superheroes and created more complex Latino/a superheroes and narratives in order to more realistically reflect the non-essentialist views and multiplicities of Latino/as at large. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the willful erasure and stereotypical portrayal of Latinx characters will fade out thanks to the multifarious approaches that are currently emerging. This chapter invites readers to reflect on how the fanciful Latino/a superhero comics can indeed play a role in shaping the way readers’ perception of the Latino/as cultural identity.
The second chapter discusses how “geometrizing the story and storyfying the geometry (41)”, which can be understood as visual and verbal shaping of story, workto form a “gestaltic whole (99)” in readers’ mind when they read Latinx superhero comics. In other words, both the visual elements such as the geometric shapes constituting the images and the verbal elements establishing the narratives can anchor the way readers construct a holistic story in their mind. Throughout the chapters, cognitive theories are applied to many cases with convincing results. According to him, “vigilantism and bildungsroman (122)” are the two common themes in which becoming superheroes for the Latino/a characters is usually painful. This echoes with the sociocultural demographics of Latino/as in reality.
In chapter three, Aldama compares the Latinx superhero storyworlds in animations, televisual and video forms. Although he finds that the superhero print comics more commonly provide the “original stories and protoworlds ” for other narrative media, he acknowledges the “cross-pollination of shaping devices” among them (124) and the co-constructed storyworlds in transmedial contexts. On the one hand, Aldama indicates a more extensive erasure or assimilation of Latino/as with Caucasian facial features on TV and movies. If this is not the case, many Latinx characters are prone to be “hypersexualized, criminalized, or re-racialized within a black/white paradigm” (167). On the other hand, there is a more promising trend to expand the presence as well as complexity of Latinx superheroes in the digital webisode platforms.
Apart from the content and structure, the rich full-color illustrations have provided immediate intertextual links, facilitating very effective communication as well as making the book an independent academic reference in itself. This is especially attractive to those readers who are interested in the topic but may not be ready to dig the archive themselves. Therefore, this book is more than an academic reference book. It also functions as a work trying to establish connection between different parties such as the readers, scholars in the relevant fields, and the industrial practitioners. The Foreword by comics scholar John Jennings and the Afterword by Latino comic artist Javier Hernandez make the above intention even more salient.
Following another monograph by the same author on a similar topic, Your Brain on Latino Comics: From
Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez (2009), Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics is a continuation of the
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.4 (2017) 69 itself as an example to other comics that have been excluded from the current comics scholarship. As Latinx superhero comics demonstrate, multicultural and multilingual comics will definitely create a better comic world and comics research scene.
Kin Wai Chu is PhD student at KU Leuven, where she works on Hong Kong comics culture. Email: Chukinwai.chu@student.kuleuven.be
