Mr. Singh has made it his mission, in deeply felt and highly idiosyncratic ways, to address the ignorance and thus defang the hate. To understand the depth of his conviction, it helps to return to his childhood. Born in Washington, the son of a civil servant in the Indian Embassy, Mr. Singh moved back to Delhi with his family for his schooling. When he was in seventh grade, a wave of anti-Sikh violence engulfed the city — partly provoked by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two bodyguards who were Sikh, but also abetted by some members of the police and government.

As a boy of 13, Mr. Singh peered through the curtained windows of his family’s apartment at a Hindu gang trying to break into the building. Ultimately, a Hindu neighbor hid and sheltered the Singhs for several days until the worst violence abated. By then, several thousand Sikhs had been killed, many burned alive, and tens of thousands had fled their homes. To this day, Sikhs like Mr. Singh refer to the events as a pogrom rather than merely a riot.

The memory of human nature at its worst and its best, of marauding mobs and compassionate neighbors, stayed with Mr. Singh even as he returned to the United States for college, then earned a graduate degree and began a career in computer engineering. What did fall away in those years was his boyhood love of cartooning, which seemed like no way to make a living.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, Mr. Singh found himself compelled to resume drawing, to put his pleas for tolerance in the easily digestible form of comics. Techie that he was, he sketched with his index finger on a laptop’s touch pad and posted the resulting work online. By the end of 2002, he had produced enough cartoons to start a website, sikhtoons.com, which eventually attracted about 1,500 unique visitors a day.

Trying to promote his artwork, Mr. Singh attended the New York Comic Con in 2011. For the occasion, he drew up a poster of Captain America, the patriotic character originally created for World War II’s struggle against fascism, but with a Sikh’s turban and beard. A year later, after the mass shootings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Mr. Singh wrote an op-ed column for The Seattle Times, declaring, “It’s time for a new superhero to fight hate crimes.”

The blowback online from readers — “dumb column,” “race obsessed left,” “ ‘hate crimes’ is a political invention” — only fortified Mr. Singh’s commitment. He ordered a Captain America outfit and then found a tailor to do alterations for his alter ego, trimming its XL dimensions for his 5-foot-9, 125-pound frame.

Sometimes in his casual jeans, sometimes in his neon-bright outfit, always with his turban and beard, Mr. Singh has taken his message about Sikhs and tolerance to audiences from the University of Kansas to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to the satirical television show “Totally Biased.” At Alfred University, which runs a special program called “Drawn to Diversity,” he found an especially receptive audience for his speech, cartoon presentation and turban-tying workshop. His performance-art stroll through the campus became the occasion for many selfies, fist-bumps and iterations of “Awesome, dude!”

“People can think I’m not an American, they can tell me to go home to where I came from,” Mr. Singh told his student listeners at one point. “And I say: ‘O.K., I’ll go home tonight. I live here.’ ”