{"id":1489,"date":"2015-06-04T13:10:24","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T13:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=1489"},"modified":"2015-09-09T21:50:52","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T21:50:52","slug":"studying-race-and-gender-in-comic-books-with-hex-codes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2015\/06\/04\/studying-race-and-gender-in-comic-books-with-hex-codes\/","title":{"rendered":"Studying Race and Gender in Comic Books with Color Codes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lots of time and care consideration goes into the production of new superheroes and the revision of time-honored heroes. Subtle features of outfits aren\u2019t changed by accident and don\u2019t go unnoticed. Skin color also merits careful consideration to ensure that the racial depiction of characters is consistent with their back stories alongside other considerations. A colleague of mine recently shared an interesting analysis of racial depictions by a comic artist, Ronald Wimberly\u2014\u201cLighten Up<\/a>.\u201d*\u00a0 \u201cLighten Up\u201d is a cartoon essay that addresses some of the issues Wimberly struggled with in drawing for a major comic book publisher. NPR ran a story<\/a> on the essay as well. In short, Wimberly was asked by his editor to \u201clighten\u201d a characters\u2019 skin tone\u2014a character who is supposed to have a Mexican father and an African American mother.\u00a0 The essay is about Wimberly’s struggle with the request and his attempt to make sense of how the potentially innocuous-seeming request might be connected with racial inequality. \"SkinIn the panel of the cartoon reproduced here, you can see Wimberly\u2019s original color swatch for the character alongside the swatch he was instructed to use for the character.<\/p>\n

Digitally, colors are handled by what computer programmers refer to as hexadecimal IDs. Every color has a hexademical \u201ccolor code.\u201d It\u2019s an alphanumeric string of 6 letters and\/or numbers preceded by the pound symbol (#).\u00a0 For example, computers are able to understand the color white with the color code #FFFFFF and the color black with #000000. Hexadecimal IDs are based on binary digits\u2014they\u2019re basically a way of turning colors into code so that computers can understand them. Artists might tell you that there are an infinite number of possibilities for different colors. But on a computer, color combinations are not infinite: there are exactly 16,777,216 possible color combinations. Hexadecimal IDs are an interesting bit of data and I\u2019m not familiar with many social scientists making use of them.**<\/p>\n

There\u2019s probably more than one way of using color codes as data. But one thought I had was that they could be an interesting way of identifying racialized depictions of comic book characters in a reproducible manner\u2014borrowing from Wimberly\u2019s idea in \u201cLighten Up.\u201d Some questions might be: Are white characters depicted with the same hexadecimal variation as non-white characters? Or, are women depicted with more or less hexadecimal variation than men? Perhaps white characters are more likely to be depicted in more dramatic and dynamic lighting, causing their skin to be depicted with more variation than non-white characters. If that\u2019s true, it might also make an interesting data-based argument to suggest that white characters are featured in more dynamic ways in comic books than are non-white characters. The same could be true of men compared with women.<\/p>\n

Just to give this a try, I downloaded a free eye-dropper plug-in<\/a> that identifies hexadecimal IDs. I used the top 16 images in a Google Image search for Batman (white man), Amazing-man (black man), and Wonder Woman (white woman). Because many images alter skin tone with shadows and light, I tried to use the eye-dropper to select the pixel that appeared most representative of the skin tone of the face of each character depicted.<\/p>\n

Here are the images for Batman with a clean swatch of the hexadecimal IDs for the skin tone associated with each image below:<\/p>\n

\"Batman\"<\/p>\n

\"Batman<\/p>\n

Below are the images for Amazing-man with swatches of the skin tone color codes beneath:\"Amazing-Man\"<\/p>\n

\"Amazing-Man<\/p>\n

Finally, here are the images for Wonder Woman with pure samples of the color codes associated with her skin tone for each image below:<\/p>\n

\"Wonder<\/p>\n

\"WonderNow, perhaps it was unfair to use Batman as a comparison as his character is more often depicted at night than is Wonder Woman\u2014a fact which might mean he is more often depicted in dynamic lighting than she is. But it’s an interesting thought experiment.\u00a0 Based on this sample, two things that seem immediately apparent. Amazing-man is depicted much darker when his character is drawn angry. And Wonder Woman exhibits the least color variation of the three.\u00a0 Whether this is representative is beyond the scope of the post.\u00a0 But, it’s an interesting question.\u00a0 While we know that there are dramatically fewer women in comic books than men<\/a>, inequality is not only a matter of numbers.\u00a0 Portrayal matters a great deal as well<\/a>, and color codes might be one way of considering getting at this issue in a new and systematic way.<\/p>\n

While the hexadecimal ID of an individual pixel of an image is an objective measure of color, it\u2019s also true that color is in the eye of the beholder<\/a> and we perceive colors differently when they are situated alongside different colors. So, obviously, color alone tells us little about individual perception, and even less about the social and cultural meaning systems tied to different hexadecimal hues. Yet, as Wimberly writes<\/a>, \u201cIn art, this is very important. Art is where associations are made. Art is where we form the narratives of our identity.\u201d\u00a0 Beyond this, art is a powerful cultural arena in which we form narratives about the identities of others.<\/p>\n

At any rate, it\u2019s an interesting idea. And I hope someone smarter than me does something with it (or tells me that it\u2019s already been done and I simply wasn\u2019t aware).<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

*Thanks to Andrea Herrera for posting Ronald Wimberly\u2019s cartoon essay, \u201cLighten Up<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

**In writing this post, I was reminded that Philip Cohen<\/a> wrote a short post suggesting that we might do more research on gender and color by using color codes to analyze children\u2019s clothing. The post is here<\/a> if you\u2019re interested. After re-reading his post, I used the same site to collect pure samples of each hex code and I copied his display of the swatches.\u00a0 Thanks Philip!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lots of time and care consideration goes into the production of new superheroes and the revision of time-honored heroes. Subtle features of outfits aren\u2019t changed by accident and don\u2019t go unnoticed. Skin color also merits careful consideration to ensure that the racial depiction of characters is consistent with their back stories alongside other considerations. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":1498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5007,175],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-1489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","category-sociology","tag-race"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/files\/2015\/06\/Amazing-Man.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1489"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1517,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions\/1517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}