That might be true for the Marvel comics (to be honest: I read only one single Marvel comic and that was an issue of Spiderman).

To come full circle: Disney's Hercules was nowhere close to the original, but a bunch of their usual stereotypes, flavoured with something they though to be greek.

re comic heroes & ancient myhtology: Look how well hercules and thor fit into the marvel universe. Granted, they are altered somewhat from their mythological versions, but not all that much.

Robert E. Howard loved to mix history with his stories. Also, the original Conan is a viking, not the semi-nude guy which I think is actually was created by Frazetta.

Also Middle Earth is, basically, the first world war on the nordic sagas stories. It's the story of a war which, thanks to technology, reaches such proportions that have not been seen since mythical ages. Also it takes things from the Volsung saga and the Nibelungenlied, like the cursed ring and the broken sword, and probably from other myths.

Superheroes on the other hand are very pulp. Some more like others. Batman for example is yet another copy of the mysterious millionaire vigilante, like the Shadow, the Spider or Green Hornet. After all, these comics started in the thirties. It was people like Jack Kirby or Stan Lee which, on the sixties, created the superhero kind we know.

Jack Kirby, who couldn't write well if his life depended on it even thought he had great ideas, for example thought that superheroes was an attempt at creating a modern mythology, and so he mixed gods archetypes with his characters. I think that's why some of his characters, like Darkseid, are still memorable.

Well you live and learn... and I will never look at water melons the same way again. Also notice the many modern day examples posted in that blog. Quite stupid actually.


I think this goes back even further, to ancient (especially Greek and Norse) mythology. Just think of all the superpowers most gods and heros have, and how one-dimensional most of them are. Did you read (the original) Conan? Robert E. Howard even went so far as to write an extensive background story that tried to connect the myths of the old days with his hyberian pulp stories. Not to forget Tolkien, though I wouldn't call his Middle Earth actual pulp.

Surprisingly, this comic from 1942 (when racism was still rapmant) is NOT racist. It depicts the little black boy as just any boy. He doesn't have balloon lips, he doesn't talk like an idiot, and the only remotely racist thing he does is eat a slice of watermelon at the end (but his animal friends are sitting there eating it too).

http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=7798&page=1

I'm not sure about manga origins, but the mainstream american comics, which are superheroes, was a derivative product from pulp stories. So superhero comics, at it's core, try to copy a genre full of stereotypes, which is one of the problems I see from it.

On the other hand, the huge production of manga makes them to have lots of stereotyped plots, just to recycle and create easier.

Still, some of the best comics are japanese, such as Nausicaä, Blame!, Junji Ito's comics or GUNNM.



Or the weird alter-ego of the count of Montecristo speaking french on Gankutsuoh, or the use of Spanish guild titles in Last Exile (they say maestro, though maestre would be more correct, and actually genderless...). After all Europe is exotic for them.

But their germanophile background is a bit worrying sometimes, because it's clearly anchored on the WW2, and their view about nazism or the SS, due to the distance, tends to be very different and lack any of our taboos.



Talking about bizarre body positions, I can't find any good image but JoJo's bizarre adventure is the boss of it. And most of the times they are males. Actually, I think there is some weirdly manly vibe there, but I suppose all fighting series, filled with big muscle men, have that vibe in a way or another.

But I think this is derailing a bit the post.

Watermelons & fried chicken are very stereotyped "black" food. I don't know how or why watermelon became a stereotype food, I just know that it is.

Hmmm... Actually what's racist about eating water melons?


300! Boy that's quite a feat! My meagre 10 or so are no match for that... What I especially like about mangas is, how different they are to the US mainstream mishmash. Especially the stereotypes and in particular the foreign ones are refreshingly absurd. And they show an very odd fascination with german culture. One of my favorites scenes in an anime (I know not manga, but closely related) is Asuak speaking 'German' in Neon Genesis Evangelion... very weird.


Sure, there are more than enough cases, where the 'Test' doesn't make sense. Also there are actually films that fail the opposite test (men instead of women). Still it does have a point: When I first heard of the rule, I laughed about it and didn't take it serious, but once you start thinking about it and take a closer look, you will come to realise how often women just play a function but not a role in films. And to be honest: I think this is kind of boring, since I prefer my women with at least a little bit of spirit and personality.


Well some of the poses are downright impossible, and those that aren't seem to be very painful and irrational (especially in a fight scene). But I like this blog, because the pictures are so over the top, with artist's that not only lack in talent but also in taste.


A really interesting thought... unsurprisingly it's a lot more subtle this way, because almost no-one will identify with those characters in the first place.

Yeah, if they had used proper spelling (or even given him some other accent) and swapped out watermelon for some other food ("it's the land of pizza!") it wouldn't have been racist.

re tintin: I never read nor watched it. Tintin just felt like an even more boring ripoff of johnny quest than johnny quest himself. (Yes, I use the term ripoff, even though tintin came first, because he just feels like a cheap copy.)


Funny you should bring up japanese comics (manga, to be more accurate), since I'm a big fan of manga. In the past 5yrs or so, I've read about 300 manga series & am in the process of reading about 750.
Bodily proportions in manga can be extremely distorted, but they can also be extremely realistic. There are countless manga artists and each has their own style, plus each genre tends to favor certain styles.

While of course making a general point, my first run-in with this rule was in 2009 when someone seriously complained about the game I had just written violating that rule. I found this criticism to be completely pointless, because the story was about an extremely antisocial guy with severe psychological issues which basically prevent him to interacting with anyone (especially women) and the narrative was very intentionally narrowed down to his view on things. So there can be really good reasons where failing to comply with 'the rule' can have very good reasons. Which does not excuse the masses of sloppily written crud.

As for those images posted in that blog, same thing No, seriously: American superhero comicbooks are not a great example for this, in my opinion, because the males also look like complete aliens in those; seriously – who has body proportions like that? From what I've seen of Japanese comicbooks, things seem to be much more unbalanced there, indeed. I have to say, though, that some of the poses people complain about in the blog, are not impossible as they make it seem to be. Sure, the intention of showing a female character from the back with her upper torso twisted around is clearly a sexist one – but it's not physiologically impossible. I can twist as far as it's shown on most of these pictures without hurting my back! Not that any male reader would want to see me doing it

Anyway, this sort of sexist portrayal is definitely a sort of successor of the racism of the old days. That story Cypherswipe posted reminded me of another followup trend as well, though: funny (non-human) 'creatures' or robots! These 'funny, primitive sidekick' roles are still very much alive, but they are usually just taken by groups which cannot really complain. Or what do you think those robots in Star Wars were for? If that had been made just 20 years earlier, this would have been 'funny negroes'.

The strange thing about this particular comic is, that the story per se isn't racist. If you were to put in some other guy, with better grammar and spelling capabilities, it would be perfectly normal. Even the drawings aren't that offensive (though they do have too broad lips). Actually I like the small fellow, since I share his love for water melons.


Kind of reminds me of this: The Rule and the image of one special kind of alien in modern media:

Spot the mistakes and get ready for some weird sensations...

It's not like those later books are free of stereotypes, though. Every time you spot a Japanese person in a Tintin book, you can safely assume he will be evil (I don't believe there was ever a single Japanese woman in there). At least it doesn't seem to have a racist background, though, because at the same time, Chinese people are usually portrayed as cultured, polite and 'good'.

I don't think there has ever been a Tintin story actually set in Japan. So it's my hope that if that had happened, there would be have been less stereotyping; in those stories set in China, all the Japanese people appearing are either with the military, government or in the espionage business, after all.

Well, the first three Tintin stories (in the country of the Soviets, in the Congo and in America) are really awful. The series started as a copy of anti-soviet propaganda leaflets, and apparently Herge only decided to remove the stereotypes after making friends with an asian guy, who told him those things were stupid.

This also reminds me of Edjar p. Jacobs, the creator of Blake & Mortimer, as he worked with Herge painting backgrounds. That comic is such a mess of stereotypes that sometimes it's hard to believe it's serious, I love how the series starts with the evil chinese nuking the free world.

Heh – well, that's not much worse than the stereotyped Ebony White character in The Spirit

What do you guys think of Tintin in the Congo? It's about this Belgian reporter going to the African colony, hunting wild animals for their ivory, teaching the naive the children of a primitive native tribe and becoming the chief of said tribe later on. In fact, even Tintins dog Snowy becomes the chief of another tribe, because he's obviously superior (he's very white)!

What I find so sad about that one is that there isn't even a good adventure story in there. It's really just Tintin interacting with these 'funny' primitives, 'bringing them civilisation' with 'hilarious results'.

Mind you many other issues of that series are really very good, and I would definitely recommend reading them!

Have you guys ever seen the foxy fagan comics? A short lived series by joe barbera (of hanna/barbera fame, co-creator of the tom & jerry cartoons) and harvey eisenberg. They flopped & have fallen into the public domain. While most of the comic is as innocuous as a standard tom & jerry toon, one segment is the most blatantly racist material I've ever encountered.
As with the disney stuff mentioned in this thread, I don't think it was intended to be offensive, it was just a product of it's time.

http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=7702&page=45

In the end, too much thinking about these issues always ends like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_Gonzales#Censorship. How stupid is that?


I have almost all of them. The stupid thing is that those reprints are basically unbuyable. They have all been recoloured in an ugly way, sometimes even the text has been changed.

Well not really, since my collection only started when they went full colour (issue 119) and #3 isn't one of the few older issues I have. But generally speaking as far as I can remember the racial stereotypes weren't that severe, especially since most of the time strange cultures had reason to them and differences were respected. And whenever people like Scrooge tried to take advantage of "the savages", he always had to learn the hard lesson, that they were cleverer than he thought. Also (almost) no names or cultures from the real world where used.

And in my opinion it's a good sign that the comic above wouldn't be that gross if the majority of the Disney comics weren't comperatively tame. But it stands to reason, with the vast amount of strips published over the decades, that there are some which don't stand up to todays standards.

Well, of course! As long as one is aware of the context and the implications, though, I don't see a problem with any of the stories.

Do you remember "Der Gürtel aus dem Morgenland" in LTB #3, for example? That story has got adventure, fantasy, science fiction and humour all mixed into a nevertheless tight and coherent plot. It portrays the inhabitants of a fictional middle-eastern country as technologically backwards, superstitious, warmongering and generally uncivilised. I don't care, it's just fiction! And the gags are really not based on racial stereotypes, but human archetypes. (There is another funny story in the same book which is extremely racist by today's standards – much more racist than this Medicine Man story.)

Don't get me wrong: I also love(d) Disney Comics (especially "Lustige Taschenbücher") for their sense of wonder and simplicity, but the strip posted above walks a fine line between naivety and distastefulness.

For what it's worth, I think this is a perfect example of how our moral values are constantly changing: Back in the days when this was published, this strip probably wasn't anything special, but nowadays things have changed quite a bit. For the better (stereotypical 'Africa') and for the worse (hypocritical 'drug use').

No, no, no! You got it completely wrong! Mickey and Goofy liberated those poor people from the yoke of the evil, greedy medicine man! They are basically single-handedly introducing true civilisation to the dark continent!

In all seriousness, though, I do own a large number of Disney comics and many of my favourites could very well be called racist or at the very least politically incorrect. You know, those stories in which Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck would just take a short plane trip and suddenly be in an exotic world full of evil warlords, antique weaponry, dense jungles, uncharted deserts etc. Or a bit later, the same thing would happen with spaceships which would take them to planets which would be exactly like a twisted past earth.

I don't believe for one second that this makes me a racist or that deep down, I actually share any of the superstitions or prejudice used in these stories. The thing is just that they conjure up a great sense of adventure and also an innocence which is simply lost in our hand-wringing days when everything has to be triple-checked with the legal department before publication.