Henry Kiyama’s semi-autobiographical bilingual comic strip, The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 (1931), follows four Japanese student immigrants in the early years of the twentieth century and depicts the hardships they face as they try to settle in California, find employment, and learn to navigate the modern American metropolis. The Manga takes on contemporaneous cultural representations of East Asian immigrants, simultaneously uncovering and giving form to the affective, social, and historical processes that underlie the production of racial stereotypes. At the same time, it traces the author’s artistic development and shows him working assiduously to master traditional Western painterly techniques in order to “create some masterpieces, fusing the best of East and West.” In this way, the comic strip represents and examines its own mode of production, typifying the modernist artwork’s self-conscious reflection on its own conditions of possibility. In setting up the parallel between Henry’s artistic labor and the other characters’ abortive attempts to secure jobs and make profitable investments, Kiyama’s work makes explicit the interdependence of the historically specific forms of aesthetic production at the turn of the century and the form of labor under capitalism. It gives expression to what Stewart Martin characterizes as the “antinomy of autonomous art in capitalist culture,” whereby the modernist work of art “obscures its constitution within commodity culture” by way of its formal abstraction, only to converge with the commodity form by virtue of the exchange-value it accrues, paradoxically, as a work of art. Following Frankfurt School theorists Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Martin locates this tension in the opposition between “high” art and mass culture, arguing that the illusion of art’s autonomy is dispelled as soon as an artwork is situated in a broader set of cultural and economic practices. Through its numerous references to other artistic media, including painting, poetry, and sculpture, the Manga juxtaposes these more traditional art forms with the comic strip, embodying the tension between the highbrow and the lowbrow. These references are typically embedded in panel backgrounds, as objects decorating an interior, or implicit in the setting of particular episodes, such as the four episodes that take place at the 1915 World’s Fair. In this way, the Manga invites its readers to focus on the context in which the highbrow work of art emerges as the highbrow work of art. It concretizes Adorno and Horkheimer’s theoretical account of the relationship between the lowbrow and the serious, whereby “[l]ight art has been the shadow of autonomous art” over the course of the modern culture industry’s development and functions as “the social bad conscience of serious art.” Light art is instrumental in generating the illusion of “the purity of bourgeois art,” allowing us to grasp high modernism as high modernism (Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 135). This dialectical approach to the relationship between aesthetic form and social reality allows us to make sense of the emergence of the early comic strip as well as its formal distinctiveness.