Accordingly, this presentation argues that Mazzucchelli both highlights and challenges limitations of the stereotypes through color. Shifts in the colors then show characters’ complexity beyond tropes, thereby emphasizing the distinctions between cultural experiences without limiting the possibility of transgression. Although the typification may appear reductive, the clear boundaries it outlines between characters highlight their different experiences as a result of their identities. Mazzucchelli reifies the rigidity of these stereotypes by confirming the contrasts between characters through the colors depicting them. Characters such as Asterios (a white male university professor who is not as smart as he thinks) and Hana (a shy Asian American woman who does not recognize her own brilliance) embody particular tropes, all of which depend on racial and gender identities. This presentation examines the relationship between the use of color and characters’ embodiment of stereotypes in David Mazzucchelli’s “Asterios Polyp.” As Randy Duncan notes in “Image Functions: Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in ‘Asterios Polyp,’” colors, and the transitions in their usage over the course of the comic, illustrate the main characters’ psychological evolutions.
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