Footage of 9/11 played over and over again on multiple screens, and this footage is now easily accessible on the internet. The horror of the terrorist attacks was broadcast on television, another piece of technology deeply woven into Western consciousness. 9/11 was a symbolic act engaged with politics and aesthetics, but which also placed the base suffering of the human body and mind at its heart.

People jumped from the windows of the World Trade Center to escape fire, and this fire was sustained by the artefacts of early 21st-century technological progress: jet fuel, paper, people, and photocopiers. On September 11, 2001, human bodies fell from some of the tallest buildings in the world and shattered on the pavement below. As a result, Mazzucchelli’s artwork demonstrates a way in which the medium of comics can visually depict the complexities of identity. Accordingly, this presentation argues that Mazzucchelli both highlights and challenges limitations of the stereotypes through color. Shifts in the colors then show characters’ complexity beyond tropes, thereby emphasizing the distinctions between cultural experiences without limiting the possibility of transgression. Although the typification may appear reductive, the clear boundaries it outlines between characters highlight their different experiences as a result of their identities. Mazzucchelli reifies the rigidity of these stereotypes by confirming the contrasts between characters through the colors depicting them. Characters such as Asterios (a white male university professor who is not as smart as he thinks) and Hana (a shy Asian American woman who does not recognize her own brilliance) embody particular tropes, all of which depend on racial and gender identities. This presentation examines the relationship between the use of color and characters’ embodiment of stereotypes in David Mazzucchelli’s “Asterios Polyp.” As Randy Duncan notes in “Image Functions: Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in ‘Asterios Polyp,’” colors, and the transitions in their usage over the course of the comic, illustrate the main characters’ psychological evolutions.

Polyp comic