This chapter contextualizes narrative drawing, first identifying the types of drawing that are specific to comics. It proposes that the comics medium intervenes in the long history of drawing, by introducing polygraphy as a recurrent feature of comics. Referring to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony (or multiple voices) in the novel, polygraphy accounts for the techniques of accumulating diverse graphic indices of the labor and ideas of drafters and comics producers and distributors. The chapter shows how polygraphy produces comics, considering the work of William Hogarth, Katsushika Hokusai, Rodolphe Töpffer, Marie Duval, George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Osamu Tezuka. Through this cast of creators, the chapter also foregrounds important moments in comics history such as the boom in periodical print in the nineteenth century, the influence of acting and performance practices, and, later, movie. This chapter equips readers with the necessary tools to understand the fundamental means of visualizing stories in comics – drawing – and offers a comics history contextualized through relevant developments in popular visual and print culture.

Cultural identities are developed through new critical frameworks for Asian American aesthetics. The shifting demographic changes in Asian America as well as the growth of new literary forms such as graphic narratives shape our critical investments and produce alternative subject formations. Arguing for plurality and flexibility, this chapter looks at the productive ways that experimental forms of literature such as graphic narratives can resist the totalization and commodification of Asian American identity. Rejecting reductive stereotypical representations of Asian Americans and emphasizing the need for a reconceptualization of how we discuss race, graphic narratives challenge existing caricatures and stereotypes, problematize the narratives of race, and offer experimental forms of representation.