The new graphic novel Erased: An Actor of Color's Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood, by writer Loo Hui Phang and artist Hugues Micol, is an inventive dissection of the history of Hollywood filmmaking and its role in shaping American racial stereotypes that have lingered into the present day. The book is focused on the fictional life and career of actor Maximus Ohanzee Wildhorse—renamed Maximus Wyld for the screen—a charismatic and polemical mixed-race character signed by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s. Handsome and captivating, Maximus is descended from freed slaves, Indigenous Americans, Mexican and Asian laborers, and other nonwhite cultural legacies, and can play any ethnic character his directors need. He’s a mythic composite that represents nonwhite actors left out of Hollywood movies or highlights the bigoted representations they were forced to portray when they were cast. The book weaves the fictional Maximus into the history of classic films—he’s in Gone with the Wind, The Maltese Falcon, The Shanghai Gesture, and Vertigo, among others—and into the lives of such figures as Cary Grant, Hattie McDaniels, Paul Robeson, and Lana Turner, as well as such events as the 1950s anti-communist blacklists. In this seven-page excerpt, Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick speaks directly to the reader about the film, while Maximus, cast as a house slave alongside McDaniels, debates with her about the Black stereotypes they’re cast to depict. Erased: An Actor of Color's Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood by Loo Hui Phang and Hugues Micol will be published by NBM in July.