Colouring superheroes: Hue, saturation, and value in Ms.Marvel: Kamala Khan #1 and DC’s Detective Comics Annual #12 and Batman Annual #28

ABSTRACT

Cultural representations of second-generation Muslim immigrants in North America and Western Europe often grapple with themes of conflicted identity and cultural dislocation. However, what is distinctive about reading a comic as opposed to, say, watching a television show or attending a play featuring a second-generation Muslim immigrant? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question by focusing on the role of colour in the construction of two comic book characters that made their debut three years apart: Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel in 2014 and the Nightrunner (a.ka. Bilal Asselah) in 2011. Specifically, I examine how recurring and contrasting levels of hue, saturation, and value can visually represent different forms of alienation and belonging in Ms. Marvel: Kamala Khan #1 and DC’s Detective Comics Annual #12 and Batman Annual #28. Ian Herring and Andre Szymanowicz’s colouring respectively signals connections between signifiers of alienation and belonging that may not be apparent by focusing on the verbal elements and drawing alone. For obtaining precise hue, saturation, and value figures of colours, I work with an app called Color Grab designed by a company named Loomatix. Considering the role of colourists allows us to talk about diversity in mainstream American comics in sophisticated ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Ms. Marvel: Kamala Khan
• the Nightrunner
• Muslim Superheroes
• colouring
• multicultural comics

Acknowledgments

This paper wouldn’t have been possible without the many excellent video tutorials of my “virtual” teachers Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou of Strip Panel Naked and the founders of the YouTube channels “Color With Kurt,” and “Sycra” who share their passion for comics with the world. I thank the Global Intercultural Research Center at UCCS (GLINT) for supporting the research for this paper. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 25^th European Conference on South Asian Studies in Paris (July 2018), the GLINT Talk series at UCCS (May 2019), and the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics Conference in Vancouver (June 2019). I appreciated the many thoughtful comments at these events. My colleagues at UCCS, Ann Amicucci, David Diamond, Laura Collins, Michelle Neely, and Rhonda Goodman-Gaghan gave excellent feedback on one of the earlier drafts of the paper. I first learned about the app Color Grab from Katherine Gesmundo. Jennifer Kremyar, Kayla Lenker, and Reegan Matters provided extremely valuable input at various stages of the drafting process. Finally, I wish to express sincere thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for their critical and incisive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jamillah Karim borrows the idea of ‘out-of-placeness’ from Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke UP, 1999).

2. The illustrations of hue, saturation, and value have been created using a colour calculator available online at the Sessions College For Professional Design (www.sessions.edu/colour-calculator).

3. For instance, see https://www.lifewire.com/the-10-best-colours-apps-of-2018-4178722

4. I mention three diverse studies to highlight the richness of this field of inquiry. Patti Bellantoni’s study titled If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die examines the link between emotion, psychology, and colour in cinema. She identifies six distinctive attributes of various colours that shape viewers’ emotional reactions (2005, xxvi). Lisa Wilms and Daniel Oberfeld study the effects of colour’s hue, saturation, and value ‘independently’ and conclude that various HSV configurations elicit distinct emotional responses (2018, 897, 911). K.G. Bekker and A.Y. Bekker analyse the connection between Van Gogh’s ‘color palette’ and ‘his psychological and emotional life’ and demonstrate how his colouring is a reflection of his gradual cognitive decline (2009,).

5. Richard Reynolds lists seven characteristics of the superhero genre, and the first one is that ‘the hero is marked out from society’ (106).

6. Sarah Gibbons and Ernesto Priego also examine the intermeshing of Christianity and Islam on the splash page where Khan encounters the three superheroes (Gibbons 2017, 455; Priego 2016, 3).

7. Parkour is a sport originating in 1980s France wherein athletes ‘[traverse] obstacles in a man-made or natural environment through the use of running, vaulting, jumping, climbing, rolling, and other movements in order to travel from one point to another in the quickest and most efficient way possible without the use of equipment’ (Bauer n.d., n.p.).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UCCS Global Intercultural Research Center (GLINT) [1].

Notes on contributors

Suhaan Kiran Mehta

Suhaan Kiran Mehta is currently an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in the United States. His scholarly interests are in postcolonial literature and cinema with a particular focus on South Asia. He has published on Indian and Pakistani Anglophone print and visual texts. Previously, he has taught at Case Western Reserve University, the Ohio State University, and St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.