RACE AND ETHNICITY 499
Falcon, and Shard —also participate in ongoing conversations about unequal social
opportunities and skewed cultural representation.
Graphic novels that narrate real historical events often personalize the trauma
accumulated through disaster and deprivation by incorporating a narrator who experi-
ences the events fi rst-hand, or by considering the cultural mythologies that provide a
framework through which to interpret that history. Ethnic identity thus helps to shape
a book’s unique historical perspective. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991) is the best-
known example of the former approach, featuring the story of his parents’ suff erings
during the Holocaust alongside World War II historiography and autobiographical
ruminations on his identity as a second-generation survivor. All of the book’s characters
are historically real people, and all of the events he describes in the 1940s and 1980s
actually occurred; Spiegelman gestures toward fi ctionalization only in his decision to
represent ethnic groups as diff erent animals, rather than as humans with distinctive
facial features. Kyle Baker’s two-volume Nat Turner (2005, 2007) also narrates a story
of historical trauma, Turner’s leadership of one of the largest slave rebellions to occur in
the United States. Turner was captured just over two months after he and a small group
of allies killed more than 60 whites in Southampton Country, Virginia. Although there
is no observer character to put the events into a more personal perspective, Baker’s
decision to include almost no text (other than quotations from Th e Confessions of Nat
Tu r n e r ), and his smudged black-and-white drawings encourage readers to supply the
narrative thread themselves. Filmmaker and founder of Virgin Comics/ Virgin Anima-
tion, Shekhar Kapur, also created Devi , a graphic novel chronicling the adventures of
Tara Mehta, an Indian woman who becomes a heroine prevailing against the forces of
darkness in the fi ctional city of Sitapur. By invoking the mythology associated with Devi,
both the Sanskrit word for “goddess” and the female embodiment of the divine essence
in Hinduism, Kapur succeeded in carving out a space for Indian history and culture in
the world of graphic novels. His company’s other titles, which include Ramayan 3392 AD
and Th e Sadhu , suggest that Indian ethnic identity could become as dominant a pres-
ence in comics as it is in fi lm and music.
Many treatments of racial and ethnic identity in comics have also grown out of
autobiographical works that focus on a central character’s hesitation between fi delity
to his or her native culture and assimilation into mainstream cultural practices. Th e
rather astonishing proliferation of independent graphic novels since the early 1990s can
be attributed, at least in part, to renewed reader interest in the genre of autobiography
as well as a growing sense of transnational or global identity. In several instances, the nar-
rator seeks to regain a set of cultural traits that he or she perceives as lost, but along the
way various experiences result in a rejection or transformation of that sense of self. Th e
narrative often includes a series of moments in which the main character comes to terms
with what he or she perceives as an outsider or immigrant status as well, prompted by an
engagement with the social issues prominent in a particular historical moment. One key
example can be seen in Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996), which narrates the author’s encoun-
ters while living for two months in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Th e book centers
