reviewed by Brian Flota, James Madison University
Daniel Stein’s third scholarly monograph offers a substantial contribution to Black Comics Studies. A German professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany, he builds on his earlier comics scholarship, most notably his second book Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre (2021, Ohio State UP), by delving into graphic narratives that, in part, grapple with the legacy of slavery and its aftermath in the United States, especially those that engage in the paradox, of artistically rendering these legacies, identified by Toni Morrison: “Forgetting [slavery] is unacceptable. Remembering is unacceptable” (7). Across five chapters, Stein examines comics with narratives that incorporate depictions of the Middle Passage, lynching, the Civil Rights Movement, “Afrodiasporic archives,” and the use of monsters and monstrosity as a means of confronting, revisiting, and reconfiguring these histories, histories often ignored or intentionally expunged from officially sanctioned “the archive.”
In the introduction, Stein points out one quality that unites each of the narratives he examines throughout the course of the book: they confront the “legacies of racial depiction” in US visual culture and seek to “overcome the creative and cultural limitations inscribed in racist visual culture by satirizing Black stereotypes” (7). Furthermore, this specific set of graphic texts “negotiate the tension between recovering archival traces of the past (remembering) and redressing the loss of Black life recorded in the archive as an alternative to willful forgetting” (10). Chapter One, “Middle Passage Epistemologies,” as such, hones in on three texts in particular: Tom Feelings’ The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (1995), Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner (2008), and Rebecca Hall, Hugo Martinez, and Sarula Bao’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021). Each of these works confronts centuries of racist textual and visual tropes by drawing from the archive, as well as its erasures, by, as Stein writes about Wake, “imagining alternative origin stories, both familial and communal, for their protagonists and their ancestors and descendants” (22). This is necessary, Stein argues, for the writers and artists of these narratives to take back ownership of experiences that have been deleted, misrepresented, or overdetermined by the cogs in the machinery of white supremacy. As a result, these three works necessarily take liberties with the source material, filling in gaps, imagining alternative histories, and challenging existing narratives, histories, and archives rooted in the events these artists and writers portray.
Chapter Two, “Legacies of Lynching,” revisits Baker’s Nat Turner while also turning to Jeremy Love and Patrick Morgan’s Bayou (2009-10). One of Stein’s central arguments in the chapter is drawn from Chris Gavaler’s important 2013 article “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero,” which argues that the early creators of superheroes would have been bombarded with popular cultural expressions of (racist) vigilantism, particularly Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman (1906), which served as the basis for D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), which is generally considered to be America’s first feature-length film. The hooded (in the case of the Ku Klux Klan) heroes of these works evolved into the masked protagonists soon populating pulp magazines, which would be supplanted by comic books and the popularity of vigilante superheroes not long after the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1 (1938). These heroes were given alter egos that served to protect their private identities from their very public form of “speech.” For example, Stein points out that Baker provides Nat Turner with a new “origin story” bearing some resemblance to Bruce Wayne’s as Batman (80). When discussing Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008), he observes Johnson and Pleece make a direct connection between the passing narrative ascribed to the light-skinned Black man Zane Pinchback and his assumed alter ego as Incognegro (82). As Stein argues, “A disparity certainly exists between the momentous history of American slavery and a popular serial genre like superhero comics, but this history is so formative for modern entertainment and its wake so expansive that genres that do not explicitly deal with this history–and even those that even ignore or deny it–cannot escape its specter” (79-80). He uses this ignored aspect of the origin of superheroes more broadly to inform his readings of Nat Turner and Bayou, which both, as he points out, slyly allude to this history in their depictions of lynching.
The next two chapters are not as scintillating as the first two, though they still pack quite a wallop. Chapter Three focuses on John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March (2013-2016) and Ho Che Anderson’s King (1993-2003) with particular attention to the text’s didactic qualities and the various ways they cleave to or subvert the male-dominated “master narratives” of the Civil Rights Movement. Despite arguing that March offers an (at times) conservative (with a lower-case “c”) perspective on the movement, he also claims that the three-volume graphic novel both manages to appeal to a much broader set of audiences than Anderson’s more experimental biography of Martin Luther King and does so with complex points of view that go beyond Lewis’. Chapter Four offers a discussion of the “Afrodiasporic archive,” and does so by examining the Black Panther series and affiliated titles that appeared during writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run on the character. While this section does return to themes brought up in earlier chapters, particularly as it relates to “the archive,” here, Stein focuses on the speculative politics of the archive when set in the fictional African nation Wakanda. Of particular note is Stein’s use of Abigail De Kosnik’s concept of the “rogue archive,” in which all the products of mass media culture become their users’ own archive to plunder. Stein also points out how Coates, Roxane Gay, and Nnedi Okorafor interact with the very real archive of Marvel back issues and how they plays with “memory management” and “corporate narrative memory” to “retroactively reshap[e] it, including Marvel’s decision to make its first Black superhero hail from Africa as a way of sidestepping racial tensions in mid-1960s America” (154).
Stein concludes the book with a chapter titled “Monstrous Pasts.” Here, Stein explains why the monster figure, or monstrosity more broadly, is an effective trope for the writers and artists of the graphic narratives he considers in the chapter, including Bayou, several projects featuring the involvement of John Jennings (Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road [2017], The Mighty Struggle: A Town Called Miracle [2022] with David Brame, and Box of Bones [2018-present], with Ayize Jama-Everett), David F. Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene’s Bitter Root (2018-2021), and Rob Guillory’s Farmhand (2018-2022). He explains, “All of these works approach the traumas of the past as well as the traumas of everyday life in the Black diaspora through monstrous figures or figurations of monstrousness, utilizing the expressive potential of graphic narrative to challenge culturally pervasive associations of blackness and monstrosity (and vice versa) that have for centuries plagued Black communities” (168-9). Stein also uses Jennings’ (and Stanford Carpenter’s) concept of the “ethnogothic” – which fuses elements historically associated with the gothic (ghosts, haunted houses, doppelgangers) with the cultural traumas associated with the Black experience in America – to frame his reading of these texts, particularly in his observation of “the South” as “both a cursed and an enchanted place” in the narratives he has singled out. Drawing from theories of monstrosity by scholars such as Jeffrey Cohen, Stein does an expert job teasing out the particular reasons that these comics creators are able to skillfully fuse Black history into the monsters, specters, and haunted spaces that populate the texts mentioned in the chapter.
Ultimately,
I highly recommend Strange Fruit and Bitter Roots to prospective readers
for several reasons. Stein is thoroughly knowledgeable about comics as well
African American literature, history, and theory. His breadth of knowledge
yields a book that, while loaded with dense and theoretical takes on similarly dense
and complex graphic novels, is never overwhelming when wielding these
theoretical tools. By offering careful readings of these works while balancing
the written word as well as their visual components, Stein offers a masterclass
in Comics Studies scholarship with his latest book.
Editor's note - I apologize to Brian Flota for the delay in publishing this; he submitted it in May, but it got lost in my email.
