“It all started with that shield”: Chris Sotomayor, Digital Coloring, and the Performativity of Comic Book Production

Colorists play a crucial role in shaping the meaning of comic books, yet their contributions have long been marginalized within both industry and scholarship. While recent work has drawn attention to the relationship that coloring has with technology, race, and belonging, less attention has been paid to how minoritized artists’ specific aesthetic interventions influence the meaning of iconic signs in comic books. This essay addresses that gap by analyzing Chris Sotomayor’s digital recoloring of Captain America’s shield, focusing on his manipulation of saturation and use of special effects. I argue that Sotomayor’s coloring unsettles the shield as a straightforward emblem of nationalist power, instead revealing how its symbolic and material meaning is reshaped when foregrounding the industrial constraints, digital technologies, and lived experiences of a Puerto Rican artist. Framing comic book production as a performative practice, I draw on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model alongside theories of performativity in Latino performance studies to show how Sotomayor’s work recodes nationalist icons without intention. By reading digital coloring as a site where labor, technology, and colonialism converge, this essay demonstrates how minoritized artists contribute to the changing meaning of popular culture icons. More broadly, I argue for bridging media and communication studies with performance studies through an emphasis on touch, offering a framework that attends to the material and cultural entanglements of digital media and minoritized people.