Seeing Color: Representing Race in CMYK and Digital Coloring

The 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association will be held virtually, May 29 – June 1, 2025. I’m delighted to be on the “How It’s Made: Image-texts, Identity, Interpretation, Intersections” panel organized by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins and Adrienne Resha. The two-part panel features seven papers:

My paper draws from a chapter of my forthcoming book, The Color of Paper: Representing Race and the Comics Medium. When I read the panel’s call-for-papers, I was startled by how directly it spoke to my recent work:

“This seminar will explore how print and digital conditions of publication inform the legibility, translation, and circulation of ethnic, racial, gender, and other identity markers. How do visual media produce categories of similarity and difference, and how–in turn–are these media produced and reproduced through technology?

“Rather than take the stability of these categories for granted, we follow the exhortation by Dr. Lorna Roth’s Colour Balance Project to “challenge the cultural innocence of common products and visual technologies” by critically analyzing the capabilities, constraints, and cultural techniques of visual media. Participants will draw from and build on the work of scholars like Dr. Roth and Zoë Smith, who reminds us in “4 Colorism: The Ashiness of It All” that in the case of comic books, “letterpress printing on newsprint reinforced a certain blankness and normality of whiteness, while overdetermining brown skin with a hypervisible—and yet inadequate—quantity of ink.” We welcome papers that consider the intersections of media and materiality in the visual construction of identity. Roth and Smith both caution against assumptions regarding the realism or authenticity of imagery. Although photography is taken as a reflection of the world, and illustrations may be understood as fictional images, these designations depend on attitudes toward technologies, forms, and genres that are historically and culturally determined. How are visual economies of recognition and difference made (and unmade) through pigments, pixels, and film? 

“While our call arises from a growing movement in the study of comics and graphic narratives to account for the technological basis of racial representation, we invite projects from across media fields and theoretical interests. We are seeking papers that examine visual media through the intersection of material and virtual conditions of production/reproduction and the cultural, social, and literary discourses that correlate to racialization and identity formation.

What might scanlation, Blue Age comics, color guides, offset printing, rasterization, perspective theory, colorization, Shirley cards, tinted filters, Ben-Day dots, and so on, reveal about the expectations informing our reading and interpretation of identity in image-texts? How do the processes of producing and reproducing images affirm, challenge, or complicate these expectations? How do we understand the authenticity of images and image-texts concerned with representing those like and unlike ourselves?How do border-crossings, cultural exchanges, trans- and remediations offer new apertures through which to critically consider how we consume visions of identity, likeness, and otherness?How do differences in ability shape the consumption of visual representation?What does it mean to translate image-texts across languages, cultures, material substrates, print conditions, and screens?”

I responded with this paper abstract:

“Four-plate coloring, the twentieth-century comics norm, is additive, hue-restricted, line-based, internally uniform, and relationally designed. While technologically dissimilar, digital color reproduces four-plate qualities with two central differences: it is hue-unrestricted and internally graded. While a greater choice of hues is significant, naturalistic gradations within line-defined color shapes foster the illusion of directly observing story-world subjects rather than decoding flat marks on page surfaces. The difference is critical for the visual representation of racial categories, which in four-plate coloring was typically linguistic but in digital coloring is typically spatiotemporal. While skin colors vary between members of any racial group, linguistic skin colors are non-naturalistically monolithic, literalizing a false belief in absolute and visually consistent racial differences. Even when selected colors are impossible (such as Black-denoting taupe, Asian-denoting yellow, and Indigenous-denoting pink), they still signify racial categories while revealing paradoxically little about a character’s skin. Digital coloring, by creating an illusion of surfaces with light and shadow variations observed from a specific perspective at a specific moment, reduces linguistic racial effects. Even an unrealistic hue may appear to be the actual color of a character’s skin, allowing viewers to draw racial inferences based on social conditioning learned outside the medium.”

My presentation includes 66 slides, which I’ve condensed and combined to share here. As usual, I won’t type in my voiceover, but I think the visuals give a decent sense of the ideas. The Q&A will have to be by email though.