1Although race has been crucial to the study of complex graphic narratives since the publication of Pulitzer prize-winning Maus (1986) by Art Spiegelman, the critical examination of Asian Americans in comics has been a more recent phenomenon. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (2010), edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, is an example of an early academic study featuring comics about Asian Americans along with Latinx, African Americans, and Native Americans created by diverse authors. A further instance of a more in-depth consideration of how both Asian Americans and Asians as subjects and creators of comics and manga have been depicted in comics is offered by Monica Chiu’s study Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives (2014). Eleanor Ty’s recent edited collection of essays, Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (2022), focusing specifically on various, nuanced portrayals of Asian North Americans constitutes a perceptive and informative contribution to the growing field of comics studies as well as Asian American and Asian Canadian studies. While her previous book Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (2017), which won the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award, explored how powerful stereotypes of this ethnic group have been contested in literature and culture, her latest edited volume, Beyond the Icon, examines how works created exclusively in the medium of comics have been instrumental in challenging and transforming the widespread, racialized representations of Asian North Americans. Importantly, the volume was published in the major academic series Studies in Comics and Cartoons of The Ohio State University Press, and it is the winner of 2023 Comics Studies Society Prize, which also shows that it has been recognized as an important consideration in the interdisciplinary studies of multicultural graphic narratives.

2The collection is divided into four sections focusing on twenty-first century Asian American cartoonists whose works endeavour “to rewrite official history; re-present the everyday, unexoticized experiences of Asian Americans; to intervene in collective fantasies about American heroes and superheroes; and to participate in debates about environment, technology, and disability” (Ty 2). These themes are explored in nine chapters contributed by the prominent, interdisciplinary scholars including Monica Chiu, Shilpa Davé, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Lan Dong, Jin Lee, Erin Khuê Ninh, Stella Oh, Jeanette Roan as well as the editor. Despite a minor drawback of a missing, individual chapter on the imaginative Filipina American cartoonist, Lynda Barry, the essays in Beyond the Icon analyze major cartoonists and texts in the field, and together they constitute a comprehensive compendium of the ways in which the stereotypical depictions of Asian Americans have been challenged in graphic narratives. In addition, each chapter comprises lists of up-to-date references helpful for both research scholars and prospective students.

3The study opens with Ty’s insightful introduction, which provides the overview of historical and cultural contexts useful to understand the deeply ingrained stereotypes of Asians as “aliens” and iconic representations of “model minority” reduced to discipline, compliance, and educational attainment. She demonstrates that their satirical caricatures and other Orientalized media representations have proliferated in American visual culture for over a century, but the recent outburst of COVID-19 pandemic associated with China further reinforced old and perpetuated new negative stereotypes of this marginalized community, which resulted in the increase in anti-Asian hate and crime. Yet, Ty argues persuasively that accessibility and appeal of images and words in the graphic narrative have also made this form particularly suited to subverting racist stereotypes of Asian Diaspora, filling in the silenced stories, educating the public about discrimination affecting Asian North Americans, and arousing empathetic identification with Asian characters (3). Her introductory chapter also contains a useful survey of the key texts of Asian American graphic novels published between 2000 and 2010, and it features intersectional analyses of the works not covered in the individual chapters, such as Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Adrian Tomine Shortcomings, and Mariko Tamaki and Gillian Tamaki’s Skim.

4The first part “Retelling History” comprises two essays which present two important historical events—the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II and the Vietnam War—from auto/biographical Asian American perspectives. Monica Chiu shows in the first chapter how George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy visualizes the oppressive prison-like elements, such as barbed wire and sentry towers, which have been omitted in official American visual records and historical accounts. Significantly, Stella Oh and Erin Khuê Ninh, authors of the second essay in this part of the book, focus on ethical issues in teaching Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, narrating her family’s migration from war-devastated Vietnam, which reframes American film and media depictions of the Vietnam War and can be also used to address more recent refugee stories in academic research and courses.

5Three essays by Jeanette Roan, Jin Lee, and Melinda Luisa de Jesús in the second part of the book, titled “Subverting Stereotypes,” counter the visualizations of racialized gender, model Chinese Americans, and mixed-race Filipina American feminists consecutively in three essays on Bitch Planet, American Born Chinese and Johnny Hiro as well as in the comics of Trinidad Escobar and Malaka Gharib. In the next, third section of the collection, “Superheroes and Race,” the sixth chapter by Shilpa Davé complicates the influential, long-established mainstream comics usually featuring white, male heroes endowed with superpowers by focusing on Ms. Marvel as the Pakistani Muslim superwoman. In the following chapter, Lan Dong considers Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero as the example of superhero comics which plays with humour and hyperbolic images to reframe Chinese American cultural narratives. The final part, “Ecology, Otherness, and Inclusivity,” consists of two essays by Eleanor Ty and Stella Oh discussing the works by Asian North Americans who move beyond a purely ethnic identification and explore other types of difference—of human and nonhuman species in Jillian Tamaki’s Boundless as well as disease and disability in Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying.

6Although adding a chapter on Lynda Barry might strengthen future editions of this well-argued collection, it provides a wide-ranging survey of diverse strategies used to represent Asian Americans in more complex and nuanced ways in recent mainstream and independent comics. Beyond the Icon can be recommended for researchers, teachers, and students of comics and visual arts studies, North American Asian studies, American literature and cultural studies as well as studies of gender and sexuality. Non-academic readers might also find this volume a captivating read as different subgenres of recent graphic narratives are explored in imaginative ways and the study includes numerous illustrations, which go beyond the stereotypical depictions of Asian Americans.