368 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
37 bw, 29 color
Hardcover
Release Date:12 May 2023
ISBN:9781978825024
Desegregating Comics
Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics
Edited by Qiana Whitted; By Qiana Whitted
Rutgers University Press
Some comics fans view the industry’s Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era when the few Black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the true portrait is more complex and reveals that even as caricatures predominated, some Golden Age comics creators offered more progressive and nuanced depictions of Black people.
Desegregating Comics assembles a team of leading scholars to explore how debates about the representation of Blackness shaped both the production and reception of Golden Age comics. Some essays showcase rare titles like Negro Romance and consider the formal innovations introduced by Black comics creators like Matt Baker and Alvin Hollingsworth, while others examine the treatment of race in the work of such canonical cartoonists as George Herriman and Will Eisner. The collection also investigates how Black fans read and loved comics, but implored publishers to stop including hurtful stereotypes. As this book shows, Golden Age comics artists, writers, editors, distributors, and readers engaged in heated negotiations over how Blackness should be portrayed, and the outcomes of those debates continue to shape popular culture today.
Desegregating Comics assembles a team of leading scholars to explore how debates about the representation of Blackness shaped both the production and reception of Golden Age comics. Some essays showcase rare titles like Negro Romance and consider the formal innovations introduced by Black comics creators like Matt Baker and Alvin Hollingsworth, while others examine the treatment of race in the work of such canonical cartoonists as George Herriman and Will Eisner. The collection also investigates how Black fans read and loved comics, but implored publishers to stop including hurtful stereotypes. As this book shows, Golden Age comics artists, writers, editors, distributors, and readers engaged in heated negotiations over how Blackness should be portrayed, and the outcomes of those debates continue to shape popular culture today.
Only someone living in a cave wouldn't see how thoroughly comics permeate American culture. But even those knowledgeable about graphic arts may not be aware of how comics mirror this nation's often tortured racial history. And even fewer people know about the pioneering Black artists who worked to challenge and change racist stereotypes. What that means is that the groundbreaking essays in Desegregating Comics are essential contributions to an exciting, relatively new field of long-overdue scholarship.
Desegregating Comics is essential reading for those seeking a more complex and revisionist history of the Black image in comics in the first half of the twentieth century. It includes leading voices in media, literature, gender, and Black studies who unearth the collaborative efforts in the industry to reshape visual and narrative renderings of spectacular blackness and speculations of blackness.
QIANA WHITTED is a professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Her books include A God of Justice?: The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature and the Eisner Award–winning EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest. She has also served as chair of the International Comic Arts Forum and is the editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society.
Introduction: “An Apt Cartoon”
QIANA WHITTED
Part I Iconographies of Race and Racism
1 Rose O’Neill and Visual Tropes of Blackness
IAN GORDON
2 The Passing Fancies of Krazy Kat
NICHOLAS SAMMOND
3 “How Else Could I Have Created a Black Boy in That Era?”: Racial Caricature and Will Eisner’s Legacy 61
ANDREW J. KUNKA
Part II Formal Innovation and Aesthetic Range
4 Desegregating Black Art Genealogies: An Invitation
REBECCA WANZO
5 Misdirections in Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady
CHRIS GAVALER AND MONALESIA EARLE
6 The Art of Alvin Hollingsworth
BLAIR DAVIS
7 “Hello Public!”: Jackie Ormes in the Print Culture of the Pittsburgh Courier
ELI BOONIN-VAIL
Part III Comics Readership and Respectability Politics
8 “Never Any Dirty Ones”: Comics Readership among African American Youth in the Mid-Twentieth Century
CAROL L. TILLEY
9 All-Negro Comics and Counterhistories of Race in the Golden Age
QIANA WHITTED
10 “This Business of White and Black”: Captain Marvel’s Steamboat, the Youthbuilders, and Fawcett’s Roy Campanella, Baseball Hero
BRIAN CREMINS
11 Al Hollingsworth’s Kandy: Race, Colorism, and Romance in African American Newspaper Comics
MORA J. BEAUCHAMP-BYRD
Part IV Disrupting Genre, Character, and Convention
12 Diabolical Master of Black Magic: Examining Agency through Villainy in “The Voodoo Man”
PHILLIP LAMARR CUNNINGHAM
13 Love in Color: Fawcett’s Revolutionary Negro Romance
JACQUE NODELL
14 An Afrofuturist Legacy: Neil Knight and Black Speculative Capital
JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS
15 “For They Were There!”: Dell Comics’ Lobo and the Black Cowboy in American Comic Books
MIKE LEMON
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
QIANA WHITTED
Part I Iconographies of Race and Racism
1 Rose O’Neill and Visual Tropes of Blackness
IAN GORDON
2 The Passing Fancies of Krazy Kat
NICHOLAS SAMMOND
3 “How Else Could I Have Created a Black Boy in That Era?”: Racial Caricature and Will Eisner’s Legacy 61
ANDREW J. KUNKA
Part II Formal Innovation and Aesthetic Range
4 Desegregating Black Art Genealogies: An Invitation
REBECCA WANZO
5 Misdirections in Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady
CHRIS GAVALER AND MONALESIA EARLE
6 The Art of Alvin Hollingsworth
BLAIR DAVIS
7 “Hello Public!”: Jackie Ormes in the Print Culture of the Pittsburgh Courier
ELI BOONIN-VAIL
Part III Comics Readership and Respectability Politics
8 “Never Any Dirty Ones”: Comics Readership among African American Youth in the Mid-Twentieth Century
CAROL L. TILLEY
9 All-Negro Comics and Counterhistories of Race in the Golden Age
QIANA WHITTED
10 “This Business of White and Black”: Captain Marvel’s Steamboat, the Youthbuilders, and Fawcett’s Roy Campanella, Baseball Hero
BRIAN CREMINS
11 Al Hollingsworth’s Kandy: Race, Colorism, and Romance in African American Newspaper Comics
MORA J. BEAUCHAMP-BYRD
Part IV Disrupting Genre, Character, and Convention
12 Diabolical Master of Black Magic: Examining Agency through Villainy in “The Voodoo Man”
PHILLIP LAMARR CUNNINGHAM
13 Love in Color: Fawcett’s Revolutionary Negro Romance
JACQUE NODELL
14 An Afrofuturist Legacy: Neil Knight and Black Speculative Capital
JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS
15 “For They Were There!”: Dell Comics’ Lobo and the Black Cowboy in American Comic Books
MIKE LEMON
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
