Snooping
Cartooning is a funny thing. Eunsuk once asked me why all of my characters are Asian. They aren’t, I told her. She didn’t believe me. You know, both of us majored in English literature and I can now say definitively that there is such a thing as too much postmodernism for a single household.
Still, I think this demonstrates something important about the nature of cartooning. Cartoons are able to evoke the archetypes of the Self and the Other. Most cartoon characters are fairly simple beings with only one or two defining characteristics. These characteristics define how the character is different from its fellows; in other words, they distinguish a particular character as an Other.
Without characteristics, a cartoon character is seen as a reflection of the Self. The more characteristics a character has, the more it becomes an Other. I believe that Scott McCloud called this phenomenon the masking effect but I’d have to check my copy of Understanding Comics to be sure.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work, but in practice the default cartoon character doesn’t always match the self-image of the reader. In general the default cartoon character is male and matches the dominant ethnicity of the local area. How many times have you seen a cartoon in which the male animal is drawn asexually but the female animal has a signifier of her femininity, such as pouty lips or a bow in her hair? There’s no need to indicate the male as masculine because that’s the default assumption of the culture.
I’m bringing this whole thing up now because the character Tama, pictured above, is meant to look Asian. That’s the way I see her, but it’s not the way her concept drawings were interpreted by all of the guest artists. Her basic design doesn’t have any characteristics signifying her as Asian, so I would imagine that most people who look at them would imagine her as belonging to their own ethnicity. I probably should have said something at the beginning, but, well, this way I get to have an experiment.
September 9th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Whenever you draw something, anything, you are in fact drawing yourself…
It’s difficult to suggest ethnicity rather than creating a blatant stereotype… I think you pulled it off nicely.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
WOW!! (re: post)
I’m completely culturaly-shocked at the idea Tama was meant to look asian! What with the blond sketch and all!!! And to further support your theory - as the guest artist mainly dealing with her as the default character - she does look horribly stereotypical for south-eastern europe, as far as our blond-ish teenage female part of population goes!!!