Images of Objectification: Othello as Prop in Kill Shakespeare

Chapter 1 turns to the comic series Kill Shakespeare (2010–14) to demonstrate how modern Othellos still succumb to the most obvious and perhaps long-standing method for shaping antiblack narratives: stereotyping Black masculinity. The chapter reads Othello’s caricatured depiction through comic books’ vexed history of representing Blackness, Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of “controlling images,” and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s theorization of “the dark fantastic” to argue that the controlling images in Kill Shakespeare are both metaphoric and literal, working together to depict a minimized, pathologized, and therefore particularly colorblind version of Othello. A combination of textual and visual close reading thus illustrates how flattening Othello through stereotyped representation normalizes his supposed pathologies while ultimately positioning him as a prop for the white protagonists’ self-actualization.