You lot will believe anything.

While trying to make a point today about how the expectations a reader brings to a work structure his or her experience of it, I brought up this image from the black and white Scott Pilgrim comic as an example:

SEK: What color is Knives Chau in this panel?

CLASS: ...?

SEK: This isn't a 'What's in my back pocket?' question.  I just want to know what color you think she is.

CLASS: ...?

SEK: (archly) ...?

CLASS: (demurely) Chinese?

It took them a little while to figure out where they'd lost the rails, but eventually they realized that the dots and lines above only looks "Chinese" because O'Malley told the reader that Knives Chau is Chinese.  If he had said she were South American, the reader would have brought a whole different set of cultural baggage.  In fact, if he had said the above was a boy from Los Angeles County, the reader would have believed that too.   

Comments

[J.S. Nelson]

I would've said "Black and white".

[justinslot]

Sort of like how they "color" the Canadians on South Park. Or "colour." Terrence and Philip are just animated differently, and Parker and Stone call it Canadian.

(Obviously saying "color" and not "race" threw the kids off. But that would have made it a little too easy.)

[SEK]

J.S., since I set it up as a discussion of the color of black and white items, that option wasn't really available to them.

Justin, teaching them manga conventions has been difficult, to say the least. Despite the fact that some them have read more of it than I have, none of them have done so critically, so while their intuitions are often correctly, it's not easy to get them to articulate them. It's been an odd three weeks, to say the least.

[SeanH]

You know, I had always thought that Wallace Wells was Asian, but now you've confused me.

[SEK]

Sean, you're not alone.

[SeanH]

In thinking Wells was Asian, or in being confused?

Looking back, Wells' eyes do seem to be drawn slightly more narrowly - more like Knives' than Scott's - but I'm no longer as sure as I was.

[alesum]

Keep up the good job.
Alesum:summarizing the world.

[Jens Fiederer]

I at first thought that maybe the answer was "pink" because the stroke marks were supposed to indicate a blush. Didn't think of ethnicity until I heard the "Chinese".

[Ahistoricality]

Is this the comic book version of a koan? Or just another version of McCloud's interpanel murder? Seems like a rather annoying way to make a very basic point.