Suddenly, I realized that I actually had done those horrible racist caricatures, and that I wasn't even aware of it.
-- cartoonist Chris Ware (1997)

This presentation will probe the relationship between visual stereotyping and the cartoon arts, in particular comic strips and comic books. It can be (and has been) argued that the graphic language of cartooning, hence of comics, is rooted in the habit of stereotyping, and that therefore comics always imply ideologies of difference and relations of power. The goal of this presentation is to begin the process of testing and, as necessary, qualifying this important claim.

If, as many say, the modern comic or graphic novel begins with the "picture-stories" of Swiss author Rodolphe Topffer (a view implicitly upheld by this symposium's Call for Papers, with its invocation of Mr Vieux Bois), then what are we to make of Topffer's still under-read "Essay on Physiognomy" (1845), which links the art of cartooning to the recognizing of difference? This essay connects comics to the practice of codifying human facial features as signs of "character" and "intelligence"; as such it seems to demand a fresh response. Are the stereotypes in comics, as Will Eisner has argued, a "necessary evil"? Do the origins of comics, as Chris Ware suggests, point to racism?

Above all, how can comics simultaneously exploit and undercut powerful stereotypes based on race, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic class?

Starting with Topffer and other nineteenth-century studies of physiognomy and expression, we will look at the question of stereotyping as a visual language. In particular, we will consider the prevalence of ethnic humor in early American comic strips (circa 1900) and the development of the urban strip as a register of difference. Then we'll examine attempts to question or humanize cartoon stereotypes, including recent examples such as Art Spiegelman's Maus. Overall, we'll explore how comics can turn stereotypes in on themselves - and how stereotypic imagery, though deracinated and mystified, has become part of the basic language of comics and, more broadly, of popular visual culture.