ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a range of comic book narratives that center on the formation of teen of color protagonists. The chapter demonstrates how the visual-verbal shaping devices of comics across a range of genres—horror, realist, and superhero—create absorbing and expansive teen storyworlds that can and do tell us much about the struggles and triumphs of core identity formation for those violently pushed to the racial, sexual, and gender margins. In its analysis of the way creators construct the ethnoracial pause, the chapter explores how the visual-verbal distillations and reconstructions of real-world experiences can and do dishabituate and make new readers’ perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and worldviews about the world teens of color inhabit.
