Reviewed by Michael Kobre
Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden
Age of American Comics, edited by Qiana Whitted. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2023. 358 pp. ISBN: 9781978825017.
U.S. $34.95. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/desegregating-comics/9781978825017
Taken together, the critical essays
in Desgregating Comics: Debating
Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics tell a history of American
comics that many of us don’t know or, at best, only know in part. As the
collection’s editor Qiana Whitted points out in her introduction, “the earliest
and most prolific decades of the comics industry also correspond with the Jim
Crow era” (6). Consequently, like pretty much everything else in American life,
comics pages too were places where borders (both literal and figurative) were
regularly policed and sometimes subverted, where equal opportunity was
constricted and mostly denied, and where struggles were fought all the time
over representation and images of blackness. As Whitted goes on to say, our
understanding of this convergence between comics history and Jim Crow America
raises important questions “about access, ideology, and the politics of
interracial contact, both in the panels and in the production of comics” (6).
In exploring this history and taking
on these questions, Desegregating Comics ranges
widely. Some chapters examine the work of well-known creators like George
Herriman, Will Eisner, and Matt Baker. Some discuss the early comics work of
Black painters and muralists like Romare Bearden and Al Hollingsworth, whose achievements
in the visual arts were, as the authors here argue, shaped at least in part by
their work as cartoonists at the beginning of their careers. Many chapters highlight
the importance of the Black press, notably the comics section of The Pittsburgh Courier and the paper’s
vibrant print culture. Other chapters examine characters who are obscure to us
now, such as Neil Knight, a Buck Rogers-like space adventurer fighting
colonialism on other planets in The
Courier’s comics section; Lobo, a Black cowboy in a typically short-lived
series (for titles with Black characters, that is) published by Dell in 1965;
and The Voodoo Man, a Fox Feature Syndicate series in which the villainous
title character was invested with a rare sense of agency for Black characters
in the 1940s in stories created by whites. Whitted’s chapter details both the
rare achievement of All-Negro Comics #1,
published in 1947, “the first comic book to be to be written, illustrated, and
published by and about African Americans in the United States” (182), and the
all-too-familiar disappointment of its lost second issue, in the face of
resistance to the title from white vendors, distributors, and retailers —a fate
reprised in another chapter on the truncated run of Fawcett’s Negro Romance comic in 1950, which
lasted for only three issues of original content. Still other chapters focus on
Black readers, trying to imagine their responses to comics and their reading
habits, in one instance detailing how a group of students from Harlem went to
the offices of Fawcett Comics to protest Captain Marvel’s minstrel show
sidekick, Steamboat. “This is not the Negro race, but your one-and-a-half
million readers will think it so,” they told Fawcett’s executive editor (214).
That issue of representation opens
some of the first chapters of Desegregating
Comics. Ian Gordon and Andrew Kunka respectively look at the use of racist
stereotypes in the cartoons of Rosie O’Neil, one of the first women cartoonists
whose work was published regularly in the humor magazine Puck from 1897-1905, and in Will Eisner’s character Ebony White,
the minstrel show sidekick to the title character in The Spirit. Gordon’s chapter, which describes O’Neil’s use of “the
sort of typographies found in minstrelsy, the bumpkins Tambo and Bones, the
dandy Zip Coon, and so on” (27), effectively begins the collection by pointing
to the long history of the kind of stereotypes that would routinely appear
later in works of white cartoonists like Eisner, who, at the height of his
acclaim, would struggle again and again to explain or justify his creation of
Ebony. Kunka’s essay scours Eisner’s varied and often defensive responses to
criticism of Ebony. Of Eisner’s claim that he was just following the popular
conventions of his time—a defense repeated by many other white creators—Kunka
argues that “such defenses stand in curious contrast to Eisner’s claim to an
important historical role as an innovator and experimenter in the comics form:
on the one hand, he actively pushes against many comics traditions and
connections; on the other hand, he stands helpless in the face of another”
(63).
Yet most of Desegregating Comics focuses on the work of Black creators pushing
back against these stereotypes and the racist power structure of American life
that they helped to sustain and justify. In Nicholas Sammond’s chapter on Krazy Kat and in Chris Gavaler and
Monalisa Earle’s formal analysis of Matt Baker’s art on Fox Feature Syndicate’s
Phantom Lady, for instance, the authors
examine ways that Black cartoonists slyly challenged and subverted that power
structure. As Sammond suggests, Herriman in Krazy
Kat—particularly in the strip’s “playful, polysemous, and allusive”
language (45)—appropriates tropes and techniques from the tradition of
minstrelsy. Yet like such Black minstrel show performers as Bert Williams who
used their blackface masks for their own subversive art, Herriman, a Black man
passing as white for most of his life, “borrowed freely from, and reimagined,
white fantasies of Black speech to deform and destabilize language and meaning
in Coconino County” (48). In so doing, Sammond argues, Herriman also used the
unstable landscape of Coconino County and Krazy’s ever-shifting gender
formations as “a useful metaphor for a life lived in passing,” creating in his
pages a world that rejected the rigid racial binary his society was built around
(41). In a comparable fashion, Gavaler and Earle suggest that Matt Baker, “the
most successful Black artist in midcentury U.S. Comics” (95), used what Joseph
Witek has called a “high baroque” layout style with complicated designs that
disrupt the reader’s movement across the page to subtly express Baker’s own
“protest against his racial relationship to the midcentury comics industry”
(98). In particular, they note the subversive quality of the way Baker’s
layouts routinely broke panel borders in order to extend a character’s
body—notably the long legs of The Phantom Lady—into another panel. These page
designs would offer the white boys or young men reading the comic an
opportunity to let their eyes linger over the legs or torso of The Phantom Lady
in a way that would be dangerous for a Black man like Baker, hiding behind the
pseudonym of the strip’s supposed creator Gregory Page and complicating the
operation of the male gaze even more by his own sexuality as a gay man. As
Gavaler and Earle note, the very act of seeming to look at a white woman with
desire was enough to get Emmett Till murdered in the very same year that
Baker’s “good girl” art was condemned on the Senate floor during a hearing on
comics and juvenile delinquency.
Many chapters though discuss the
more explicit resistance to the Jim Crow era in the comics, columns, and
editorial cartoons in the Black press. As Julian Chambliss writes in his
chapter on the Neil Knight comic
strip, “Black newspapers offered an essential space for extending the visual
language around blackness and the vision provided to African Americans about
their place in the visual culture of the United States. In particular, the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest
Black newspapers, which claimed over a million coast-to-coast readers by the
1940s, was a crucial space for offering an alternative vision of blackness”
(284). So Neil Knight, introduced in
the Courier’s new color comics
section in 1950, evolved from the adventures of Black air ace in its first four
years into a science fiction strip with Knight as a space explorer, who in one
signature storyline defends a helpless planet of aliens whose skin “is
presented in green and brown hues” against the colonialist aggression of
another alien empire (290). This “intersection of speculative practice and
liberation” (290) helps define Neil
Knight, Chambliss argues, “as the earliest example of Afrofuturism in
newspaper comic strips” (293). In other strips too, like the single-panel gag
strip Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger and the
romance strip Torchy in Heartbeats,
both by Jackie Ormes, the first Black woman cartoonist, Eli Boonin-Vail finds
not only politically-tinged jokes and storylines, but “a complex and playful
relationship with Black middle-class ideas of gender and respectability” that
also extends into Ormes’ own early column writing and other women’s columns in
the Courier (152). Examining the
editorial cartoons in the Courier and
other Black newspapers, Rebecca Wanzo analyzes the early work of Black artists
like Romare Bearden to show how their mature styles reflect their work in
comics—as Bearden’s cartoons, for instance, manifest “representational
practices that gesture to the universal and an embrace of nonrealist aesthetics”
in his later work (82). Delineating these connections, for Wanzo, is a way “to
push against artistic silos that limit the frameworks through which we
interpret Black liberatory aesthetic practice” (82). Yet the commitment of a
newspaper like the Courier to promote
a kind of respectability politics within the Black community could be
problematic too. As Mona Beauchamp-Byrd shows in her chapter, Kandy, a romance strip created in 1955
by Al Hollingsworth, featured a protagonist whose “racially indeterminate
[features and skin tone] and/or white-passing ‘Good Girl’ figure” reflected “a
colorism that was actively present in African American media” (229).
Yet many important chapters of the
history that Desegregating Comics
brings to life are haunted by counterstories that attempt to fill gaps in
existing evidence or scholarship—as in Carol Tilley’s effort to imagine the
comics reading experiences of Black youth by analyzing three photographs,
including the photo of the bed with a handful of comics strewn across it that
Emmett Till was taken from on the night of his murder—and by what the poet
Kevin Young has called “shadow books.” In Young’s massive critical attempt at a
field theory of Black culture, The Grey
Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, he describes the concept of “a shadow
book”: “a book that we don’t have, but know of, a book that may haunt the very
book we have in our hands” (11). In The
Grey Album, Young identifies three kinds of shadow books: ones that were
never written or completed, like Ralph Ellison’s second novel; ones with
“removed” meanings, which gesture toward unspoken ideas, “the secret book just
behind the others, its meaning never to be fully revealed” (12); and a third
kind, the lost shadow book, “at once
the rarest and most common—written and now gone” (13), like Phillis Wheatley’s
second book of poetry and, as Whitted argues in her chapter of Desegregating Comics, the unpublished
second issue of All-Negro Comics. In characterizing All-Negro Comics #2 as a lost shadow book, Whitted cites comics
historian Tom Christopher’s assertion that the issue had been planned and that
at least some of its art had been completed; its fate, Whitted suggests,
“offers a disruptive counterhistory of the comic book industry’s Golden Age of
success” (184). Though All-Negro Comics #1
was filled with promises of future issues and further installments of individual
stories, its creator and publisher Orrin Cromwell Evans suddenly found that no
one would sell him the newsprint he needed to publish a second issue. As
Whitted writes, “its haunting absence echoes all the unrealized comic books of
the era that attempted to underscore Black lives, that became ensnared in the
power differentials behind comic book production, distribution, and sales”
(184). For that matter, other shadow books too, representing each kind that
Young conceptualizes, also haunt Desegregating
Comics. There are the unwritten and undrawn comics that might have been
produced if Negro Romance and Lobo hadn’t both been abruptly
cancelled, and there are the “removed” meanings that Sammond finds in Krazy Kat and that Gavaler and Earle see
in Matt Baker’s baroque page designs. As Young writes, in a passage quoted by
Whitted too, “In some crucial ways, the lost shadow book is the book that
blackness writes every day. The book that memory, time, accident, and the more
active forms of oppression prevent from being read” (14).
Ultimately, the counterhistory of
American comics that Desegregating Comics
presents is panoramic, with connections that abound across chapters. As
previously noted, for instance, multiple chapters detail the importance of the Pittsburgh Courier and other Black
newspapers. But lives and careers of important creators intersect across the
book as well, like the comics artist Al Hollingsworth, whose work is the
subject of two separate chapters. Hollingsworth worked alongside Matt Baker in
the comic book industry and may have been one of the artists on Negro Romance; his comic strip Kandy replaced Jackie Ormes’ Torchy in Heartbeats in the Courier; and later in his life, in his
career as a celebrated painter, he joined the Black art collective Spiral
co-founded by Romare Bearden. Yet the most difficult and heartbreaking
connections across chapters involve the murder of Emmett Till. In her effort to
imagine a counterstory inspired by the photo of Till’s bed on the night of his
murder, Carol Tilly cites a neighbor’s comment in a Chicago Defender article two weeks after Till’s murder that his
enjoyment of comics never included “any dirty ones or nasty pictures,” a
comment that was, in the context of popular condemnations of comics in the
1950s, a way of asserting Till’s fundamental innocence and good character in
the midst of what Tilley calls “the precarities of both comics and Black
boyhood” (172). Elsewhere in Desegregating
Comics, we witness the outrage that Till’s death inspired in the Black
community when Eli Boonin-Vail cites a Patty-Jo
‘n’ Ginger cartoon by Jackie Ormes that appeared “on a page where ten of
the twelve letters to the editor decry the acquittal of Emmett Till’s slayers
the previous week,” in which little Patty-Jo tells her sister angrily, “I don’t
want to seem touchy on the subject … but that new little white tea-kettle just
whistled at me!” (143). In Gavaler and Earl’s reading of Matt Baker’s art too,
we’re reminded of the potentially fatal consequences of a Black man sexualizing
a white woman in Jim Crow America. Citing Frederic Wertham’s and a Senate
subcommittee’s condemnation of one of Baker’s Phantom Lady covers, Gavaler and Earle ask, “How would Till’s
murderers respond to Baker’s cover image knowing that [in Wertham’s words] its
‘sexual stimulation by combining “headlights” with a sadist’s dream of tying up
a woman’ was a Black man’s?” (115).
Not every chapter of Desegregating Comics is equally revelatory
and powerful, and occasionally its authors get bogged down in what, to this
reader at least, felt like too much plot summary—although, to be fair, such
summary may be necessary to recreate a lost work like a story in Negro Romance. But the cumulative effect
of the collection’s panoramic perspective forces us to reconsider what comics
fans have sentimentally called the Golden Age of comics, not simply as a
halcyon period when a new form burst into popular culture, but as a site of
conflict—again, like so much else in American life—where the country’s racial
divide was enacted, reinforced, and challenged too. And this quality makes Desegregating Comics not only an
important book for any serious student of comics history, but a timely one as
well. At a moment in American life when political and cultural forces are
actively working to restrict what can and can’t be said about America’s racial
history—like the Oklahoma school superintendent who said of the 1921 Tulsa
massacre, "Let's not tie it
to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that" (Qtd. in
Khaled)—Desegregating Comics offers a
sweeping and nuanced exploration of how the country’s troubled racial history
played out on comics pages too.
References
Khaled, Fatma.
“Oklahoma Superintendent Denies Race Caused Tulsa Massacre.” Newsweek, July 7, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/oklahoma-superintendent-denies-race-caused-tulsa-massacre-1811608.
Young, Kevin. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of
Blackness. Graywolf Press, 2012.
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