The Revolution Will be Four-colored American Comics and the Critique of Power

This dissertation, The Revolution Will Be Four-Colored: American Comics and the Critique of Power, is about how mainstream American comics speak (back) to power, particularly where questions of the comics industry and its representation of capitalist crisis; whiteness, white supremacy, and racism; and homophobia and queerness are concerned. The chapters are organized around the three thematics of capital, race, and queerness, though each recognizes the intersections of these forms of power. The comics I discuss open themselves to both symptomatic readings of structures of power, and also reparative and critical ones, emphasizing how comics not only represent the forms of oppression present in American society in the postwar period, but also how they critique and, in the best cases, offer powerful responses to and solutions for the social and political crises of the last several decades. The Revolution Will Be Four-Colored demonstrates how comics enter the discourse of power struggles in the larger field of American popular culture production-demonstrating that a lowbrow medium is indeed capable of revolutionary critique, of complex and sensitive engagement with the politics of liberation. Unsurprisingly, this dissertation is fundamentally concerned with the politics of comics production, circulation, and narratives. Each chapter addresses how these layers of political storytelling and comics worldmaking interact and are indeed inextricable from one another, rendering mainstream comics of the last several decades a field for comics creators to respond to the political pressures of contemporary life.