Desegregating Comics

Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics

EDITED BY QIANA WHITTED

“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.”

—Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage

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.

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

Desegregating Comics

DEBATING BLACKNESS IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN COMICS

EDITED BY EISNER AWARD WINNER QIANA WHITTED

326 pp 29 color and 37 b/w images

6 1/8 x 9 1/4

978-1-9788-2501-7 paper $34.95T

978-1-9788-2502-4 cloth $79.95SU

May 2023

Comics Studies • African American Studies

Table of Contents

Introduction by Qiana Whitted, “And Jim Crow—I do my own kicking!”

I. Iconographies of Race and Racism

1. Ian Gordon, Rose O’Neill and Visual Tropes of Blackness

2. Nicholas Sammond, The Passing Fancies of Krazy Kat

3. Andrew J. Kunka, “How else could I have created a black boy in that era?”: Racial Caricature and Will Eisner’s Legacy

II. Formal Innovation and Narratives Techniques

4. Rebecca Wanzo, Desegregating Black Art Genealogies: An Invitation

5. Chris Gavaler and Monalesia Earle, Misdirections in Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady

6. Blair Davis, The Art of Alvin Hollingsworth

7. Eli Boonin-Vail, “Hello Public!”: Jackie Ormes in the Print Culture of the Pittsburgh Courier

III. Comics Readership and Respectability

8. Carol L. Tilley, “Never any dirty ones”: Comics Readership Among African American Youth in the Mid-Twentieth Century

9. Qiana Whitted, All-Negro Comics and Counterhistories of Race in the Golden Age

10. Brian Cremins, “This business of white and black”: Captain Marvel’s Steamboat, The Youthbuilders, and Fawcett’s Roy Campanella, Baseball Hero

11. Mora Beauchamp-Byrd, Al Hollingsworth’s Kandy: Race, Colorism, and Romance in African American Newspaper Comics

IV. Race and Genre Comics

12. Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, Diabolical Master of Black Magic: Examining Agency through Villainy in The Voodoo Man

13. Jacque Nodell, Love in color: Fawcett’s Revolutionary Negro Romance

14. Julian C. Chambliss, An Afrofuturist Legacy: Neil Knight and Black Speculative Capital

15. Mike Lemon, “For they were there!”: Dell Comic’s Lobo and the Black Cowboy in American Comic Books

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors Bibliography