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In life, every individual is faced at one point or another with a

struggle for identity. It is inevitable for not a single person who

has ever roamed this earth has fully been able to accept who he or she

is without a certain amount of difficulty. Faced with the ideals of

the world at large, most feel at some point a sense of alienation or a

need to conform. However, for most, such feelings or notions are

nothing more than fleeting worries, their sense of self vastly

outweighing any passing fears that their identity, as it stands, is

not adequate enough. Yet, it goes without saying that there are those

individuals that find it exceedingly more complicated to accept who

they are than most - whether their issues with identity arise from a

different cultural identity, a feeling of alienation or an inability

to accept the family from which they come. These are the issues that

plague the characters from Gene Yang's American Born Chinese, Daniel

Clowe's Ghost World, and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan. Each brilliant

graphic novel contains a character that must grapple to grasp who he

or she is in a world that doesn't exactly embrace diversity with open

arms, all to differing results.

In Yang's National Book Award nominee American Born Chinese, pride of

identity is the theme at the core of each of the three storylines.

Though the story of Jin Wang focuses on the struggle to assimilate in

a mostly white town, his tale is interweaved with two others, the

legend of the Monkey King, a Chinese folk hero, and a sitcom called

Everybody Ruvs Chin-Kee staring an exaggerated Chinese stereotype with

buck teeth and slurred speech. All three of these storylines cleverly

play off one another as they examine the clash between gaining social

acceptance and preserving personal identity: the Monkey King, after

being trapped under a mountain for five hundred years, must relinquish

his pride and reassess his true identity in order to find his place

among the divine, Chin-Kee exists as a caricature draw so

fantastically that one can only shake their head at the knowledge that

this was once the perceived identity of Asian Americans and Jin must

face classmates who believe he eats dog while simply trying to adapt

to life as a child of Chinese immigrants.

The message at the core of Yang's piece is clear, embracing the

identity of a Chinese born American is a task that is far from easy.

With these three storylines, Jin somehow comes to term with two

prevalent expressions of Chinese heritage, the folkloric

representation of Chinese culture and the cultural stereotypes held by

most Americans, all while slowly embracing his own mixed identity. The

book's final image of Jin and Wei-Chen, in the midst of their boy band

performance, is reminiscent of the square stamps often seen in Chinese

art, a symbolic reference to the hybrid identity that Jin finally

accepts.

In a similar vein, Daniel Clowe's Ghost World follows the journey of

Enid and Rebecca as they struggle with their identities as outsiders

thrust into the real world upon graduation from high school. In ways

similar to Jin in American Born Chinese, Rebecca and Enid are

individuals dealing with the expectations of society that they

themselves do not conform to completely, though theirs is not one of

cultural differences but mental ones. In a ghost of a world, the pair

search for their identities, constantly grappling for a place in a

society that they simply do not feel a part of. Through all of their

myriads of disappointments, the girls remain steadfast in their quest

for meaningful identities, for lives of purpose, all the while holding

on their nostalgic vision of the past. Only further adding to this

theme, Clowe's blue toned, monochromatic panels feature an array of