Book Review: From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics

 reviewed by Brian Flota, Humanities Librarian and Associate Professor, James Madison University Libraries

Neale Barnholden. From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2024. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/F/From-Gum-Wrappers-to-Richie-Rich

 I was immediately drawn to the title of Barnholden’s book because of my role as an academic (comics) librarian. Librarians, particularly those working in or with Special Collections, are especially attuned to the materiality of comics, and often juxtapose them with materials more commonly associated with rare book reading rooms–such as illuminated manuscripts, illustrated hard-bound books, broadsides, serialized novels, early comic strips in newspapers, and dime novels, for example–to demonstrate for students the evolution of the form and its continuity with these earlier material forms. In a recent book chapter, Michael C. Weisenburg, the Director of Rare Books & Special Collections at the University of South Carolina, discusses how, in 1977, Pizza Hut restaurants gave away six DC Comics that reprinted Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman issues from the 1950s as part of a promotion. Despite the claim, on the back cover of these books, that “these comics are identical to the originals with the exception of the paid advertising,” Weisbenburg notes, “the format, cover, and other elements beyond the ads were also changed due to basic differences in production and distribution of the issues” (116). He concludes his discussion by arguing, “The point is not to scrutinize the historic claims of either DC or Pizza Hut but to show how diffuse comic books were during this period and to illustrate how being mindful of the bibliographic elements of any given copy might teach us unsuspected things about comic books and their history” (116).

This is a roundabout way of demonstrating the affinities between a librarian working with comics and Barnholden’s thesis in his book. In the introduction, he rightly acknowledges the slow turn towards the materiality of comics in Comics Studies. He is also correct when he observes, “although book history methods are present in comics scholarship, auteurism is still the predominant mode of comics criticism, and stories rather than editions are the common units of study” (17). As such, Barnholden selects four case studies to show how a cultural materialist approach to Comics Studies can deeply enhance and contribute to the interpretation and analysis of comics. The book’s four main chapters focus on the Uncle Scrooge story “Back to the Klondike,” which first appeared in Four Color #456 (March 1953, Dell Comics), the DC Comics series Watchmen (1986-87), the comic books associated with Harvey Comics character Richie Rich, and Dubble Bubble Funnies, the free, tiny comics given away with individually-wrapped pieces of Dubble Bubble Bubblegum. With each example, Barnholden provides rich material analyses, unraveling how meaning can and is changed in these properties over the course of time.

His first two examples, “Back to the Klondike” and Watchmen, pierce through the auteurist approaches that have been broadly applied to these works in Comics Studies scholarship. Barnholden traces the printing history of the notable Uncle Scrooge story over time from its first appearance in 1953 in a comic book that cost 10 cents to its inclusion in Vol. 12 of hardcover series of books published by Fantagraphics titled The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library in 2012 with a cover price of $35. When it first appeared in 1953, its artist and writer, Carl Barks, was unknown to all, recognized by Walt Disney comics obsessives as ‘the good duck artist.’ He is not credited at all in Four Color #456. The credit goes to the Walt Disney brand instead. In subsequent 1966 and 1977 reprints, Barks is again uncredited. These two reprints come in slightly different sizes, have different stories packaged with them, are colored differently, and have different advertisements. After Barks’ identity becomes known, the nature of subsequent appearances of “Back to the Klondike” changes drastically. Barks claimed pages were cut from the original issue, and since the original art for the issue no longer exists, it was recreated by Barks in the early 1980s and added to later reprints of the story. Barnholden discusses in great detail the changes made to this story, its recontextualization over the decades, and how contemporary readings of Barks’ work remove the “lowbrow” context which they were originally part of and replace it with the prestige afforded to the “graphic novel.” This first section is a great example of Barnholden’s approach, one in which materialist approaches successfully blend with close readings, and one he will repeat, with different emphases, in the chapters that follow.

In his chapter on Watchmen, the emphasis shifts, because, unlike the Barks story from 1953, the twelve-issue DC Comics series, written by Alan Moore with art by Dave Gibbons, was “an instant classic,” immediately recognized as a significant work upon its publication in 1986 and 1987. Commonly considered part of the highlights of 1986 which led to the popularization and codification of the “graphic novel” trade paperback–which in time would become the primary printed means of reading comics–along with Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight, Watchmen did not appear as a bound single-volume collection until late 1987. Due to the popularity of the series in this format, and writer Alan Moore’s unwillingness to participate in its subsequent rebranding and corporate canonization by DC Comics, Barnholden argues that reprints of the series that follow, containing added material, commentary, and pricier “prestige” editions, impose a highly-manicured edifice around this instant classic. In one interesting aside, he notes that the first trade paperback printing adds the Juvenal quotation “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“Who watches the watchmen”) after the text, which did not appear in the original twelve-issue series. The quote is added in the context of the long-forgotten Tower Commission report on the Iran-Contra scandal, which is referenced nowhere else in the series. Barnholden argues, “The citation places Watchmen in conversation with the world around it in an unusually direct manner, part of the trade paperback’s agenda of positioning Watchmen as a weighty graphic novel with something to say about ‘real life’ using the debased genre of superheroes” (55). In these ever-evolving attempts by DC to shape the continuing sales of Moore and Gibbons’ comic, Barnholden writes, “Watchmen has come to exemplify a certain kind of prestige comic book, one that transcends its genre subject matter and context through the use of realism and becomes timeless rather than remaining dated” (80). I think this gets to the core of his project: using cultural materialism to unmoor the perceived and/or received timelessness affixed to canonized works by the cultural and corporate monoliths who have ascribed those values, by pointing out the (possibly contrary) systemic values in place at the time of their original production.

 The next two chapters are not quite as engaging, but that is mainly the result of Barnholden choosing subjects–the character Richie Rich and Dubble Bubble Funnies comics–which lack the fan and critical apparatus afforded to the works of Carl Barks and Alan Moore. Barnholden is not trying to “rehabilitate” or canonize these two comics series, but rather illustrate how these two different cultural artifacts have been relegated to figurative and literal dustbins of (comics) history. In the case of Richie Rich, a “glut” of product in the 1970s and 1980s–at one point over thirty different Richie Rich titles were in production at Harvey Comics simultaneously–led to the company’s demise. Barnholden cites how subsequent rehabilitations of the character (such as the 1994 live action movie, directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Macauley Culkin as the titular character) failed to resonate, culminating in the contemporary use of “Richie Rich” as an insult. His analysis shows how this is at odds with the ways the character is portrayed in the comics, suggesting a complex and strategically misremembered cultural memory regarding the character.

 In his analysis of the Dubble Bubble Funnies, he differentiates them from Bazooka Joe, another tiny comic given away with pieces of Bazooka bubblegum, because comics and art world luminaries such as Art Spiegelman and Wesley Morse were, at times, involved in their production. He discusses these comics in terms of “trash”: “While Bazooka Joe made a return from the trash through the operations of nostalgia and the association of several famous creators, Pud [the main character in Dubble Bubble Funnies] remains in the cultural sphere of garbage” (125). The role of trash is important for his discussion. He astutely observes:

 The rhetoric of trash also existed for comics creators. The attitude that, in the words of historian David Hajdu, comics were “a diversion that may serve a purpose for a time but is best considered abandoned before too long,” could also be expressed with the same rhetoric of rubbish put forth by [comics historian Les] Daniels, [historians George] Perry and [Alan] Aldridge, the Senate [S]ubcommittee [on Juvenile Delinquency], and [Helen] Meyer [the longtime president of Dell Comics]. Of course, this rhetoric also reflects the material fact that as ephemera, the majority of comics and comic books were literally trashed [...] [T]he evaluative words used here indicate a midcentury conversation in which people with a variety of relationships to comics, from fans to politicians, could agree that there was something trashy (and not booky) about comics, a move that eventually had to be undone by salvage. (127, ellipses added)

 By commenting on the trashy and disposable nature of most comics throughout history, Barnholden’s project also seeks to highlight how many Comics Studies scholars have been guilty of positioning the subjects and objects of their study as prestigious and exclusive ones, and, in the process, reinforce the notion that all comics are trash save for a select certain few. The deliberate erasure of the history of comics as lowbrow cultural objects and transformation from cultural product to literal trash from these analyses obfuscates the trashy roots of comics, and that is something Barnholden has no patience for!

Because of the lack of a critical apparatus around either Richie Rich or Dubble Bubble Funnies, Barnholden employs some novel techniques for reading them. In the case of Richie Rich, he painstakingly attempts to capture every variation (he counts 43) in the drawing of Richie Rich’s face on the 1,723 covers he appeared on. His distant reading of the covers, which prove that Richie Rich’s appearance on the covers of his comics show him “luxuriat[ing in his wealth] in a way that the Richie of the stories seldom does” contributes to the fact that “Richie Rich” is now a term of derision for those with inherited wealth (104, 110). Sadly, it is a fairly laborious read to have him arrive at this rather anodyne conclusion. To assemble the collection of 175 Dubble Bubble Funnies he analyzes in the final chapter, he describes buying a one-kilogram bucket of Dubble Bubble gum to get a large and representative sample of the comics (134). (In the Acknowledgements, he writes, “thanks to everyone who has, over the years, helped me eat the bubble gum”! [ix]) This approach, random distribution, yields better results, though these one- and two-panel comics do not offer much to actually analyze, but Barnholden does his darnedest. While he was quick to point out Richie Rich’s renovated signification as a specific contemporary popular slur, he misses the fact that the name of the protagonist of Dubble Bubble Funnies, Pud, although created in the 1930s, has  slipped into the vernacular as a slang term for “penis” and “loser” in the 21^st century. I feel this is ripe for commentary as well. These criticisms are fairly minor though.

Barnholden’s first book is a fascinating, intriguing, well-researched and -theorized read that rises near the top of the heap of Comics Studies monographs. My only other criticism is that I wish it was longer! To return to Weisenburg’s example at the beginning of this review, I would love to read Barnholden’s take on those Pizza Hut giveaways from 1977, for example. I think even Barnholden would agree, as he writes, “Comics offered as ‘premiums’--inducements to consumers to purchase items–are an undertheorized material form of comics, where the cultural values associated with the materiality of ‘the book’ or ‘the magazine’ are replaced by the visibility of consumer culture in such marketing schemes, and by the related concept of trash” (113-4). Another example that comes to mind is the IDW-produced mini-comic that comes with Anchor Bay’s 2004 4-DVD “Ultimate Edition” of George A. Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. I would love to read Barnholden’s analysis of this packaging, the synergies between movies and comics, and the history of film adaptations. But now I am just giving him more work to do, work that I or any other Comics Studies scholar could (or should) take up. That this book is inspiring such ideas as I write this is a testament to the quality and originality of the slim but dense volume From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich.

Works Cited

Weisenburg, Michael C. “Bibliography, Print Culture, and What to Do with Comics in a Rare Book Library.” Comic Books, Special Collections, and the Academic Library, edited by Brian Flota and Kate Morris, ACRL, 2023, pp. 103-119.

Research Prompt: What is the most panels ever used on a comics page?

 by Mike Rhode (updated 10/14/2024 with additional suggestions as an addendum)

I was at a talk by Jonathan Roth this weekend, who was asking children how many panels a comics page should have. He usually defaulted to 3 or 4 in his Rover and Speck graphic novels. He asked me what the largest number ever used was... so I reached out to some comics scholar friends.

Here's some pages they came up with...

Going back to Jim Starlin's 1970's Warlock with 33 panels...

 

 

This Milo Manara page from Giuseppe Bergman has about 38 panels...

 

 

Longshot Comics by Shane Simmons has 40 panels...

 

 

 A page from Spinoza #3 with 53 panels...

 

 

 Lewis Trondheim's Mr. O has 60 panels... and Darko Macan notes, "Mister O and Shane Simmons differ from the others because their *every* page has the same busy grid."

 

  

 

Possibly 81 panels in Gaiman’s Miracle Man depending on how you define a panel... (I personally would consider this to be 13, based just on dialogue balloons).

 

Joe Matt's "Hell to Pay" from Peepshow has 96 panels...

There’s a page from Paul Chadwick's Concrete where he’s swimming across the Atlantic Ocean with 150 panels...

 

 

 

The What Were Comics? project has this example of 236 panels in Marvel Graphic Novel #6, aka Star Slammers by Walt Simonson... (Andrei Molotiu noted, and I agree: Some of those are a bit iffy, like the Simonson --it may have a grid superimposed on it, but absolutely no one would read the majority of those squares as individual panels.)

 

 

 

Flood, by Eric Drooker has a 16x16 grid for 256 panels, but half are blank...

 

 

Andreas's Rork had 300, according to Will Quinn on Twitter in 2018...

... and that appears to be the winner at the moment, although something by Chris Ware could dethrone it, I suppose. Leave a note in comments if you have other suggestions.

So why use this many panels on a single page? What effect are these cartoonists attempting to show? Does it work? 

Addendum

Paul Gravett linked to this on Facebook, and I posted it to two comics studies lists, and here's some more suggestions.

from Andrei Molotiu: The second page of Bill Griffith's "The Plot Thickens" from Raw no. 2? (60 or 61 depending on how you count "End"- MR)

from Box Brown: There's a Chris Ware page that has 177 panels...

 from Alex Fitch: Apparently Absolute Batman 1 has quite a few; a couple of Liam Sharp’s Hulk issues were pretty packed with panels, and Woodrow Phoenix’s She Lives has 64 panel pages…

from JL Mast: A page I did for one of my webcomics 20 years ago! 400 small panels.

 

from Harry Demetrious (and Nicolas Verstappen agreed and provided an image from the book): Frank Quitely draws panels descending into infinity in Multiversity, thousands if not millions. The "what shall I watch tonight?" page, endless thumbnail choices wiping out narrative immersion....

 

 

from John Bateman: Beyruth, Danilo (2012). Astronauta: Magnetar. São Paulo: Editora Panini. p. 41. I count 424 panels. Paul Gravett followed up on this and provided the image: An interesting example here from Brazil: 'The Astronaut' is a graphic novel from 2015, an adult version of a Maurício de Souza character, but real sci-fi, with lots of physics explaining astronomy. Here a full-page multiplies, first by 4 and then by more... (since it's just copying the same 9 panels multiple times, I think this has to have a qualifier - MR)

 

Lucio Luiz provides considerably more information for the above page's design: 

I’d like to show you a page with 1,224 panels. It’s from Astronauta: Magnetar of Danilo Beyruth (it was published in some countries, but I’m not sure if it was published in English).

To give you context about the narrative, [here's] five pages (38 to 42), but the page with a lot of panels is page 41. This character is stuck in space, alone. In page 38 he starts his “day 1” with his routine. In page 39, he starts “day 2” with the same routine. And this routine goes on with page 40 repeating the same 9 panels, each time smaller. In page 41, there is 136 repetitions (the routine has 9 panels, so 136 x 9 = 1,224  panels in this page). In page 42 the sequence finishes with a single panel with “Day 146”. And that was really the 146th day because the routine appeared exact 145 times in the 4 prior pages. This scan is not very good, but in the comic, all panels, even the smallest, are well defined. I believe it’s a great amount of panels and also a great way to show the loneliness of the character in all these days stuck in space (that was exactly Beyruth's intention, by the way).

 

 

Final update (10/25/24): 

Aaron Kashtan: How about this strip by Mark Newgarden from Raw #6?

This is the one where the one guy has a nosebleed, and he doesn't have a tissue to stop it. And the other guy says to use a rag instead, and the first guy says "The New York Post is considered a rag" and he stuffs the New York Post into his nose.
 

Mark Newgarden: Aaron Kashtan I was trying to outdo Subitzky, so I must have counted.

Book Review: Small Altars by Justin Gardiner

reviewed by Liz Brown, Outreach & Instruction Librarian, Kraemer Family Library, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Justin Gardiner. Small Altars. North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2024. US$22. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo221357365.html

Small Altars is an extended eulogy to Gardiner’s brother Aaron, who died of synovial sarcoma in 2019. The literary press publisher marketed it as linked to the world of comic books, blurbing it with “In Small Altars, Justin Gardiner delves into the world of comic books and superheroes as a means for coming to terms with the many struggles of his brother’s life, as well as his untimely death, offering a lyric and honest portrayal of the tolls of mental illness, the redemptive powers of art and familial love, and the complex workings of grief.” Aaron “was born with a borderline learning disability” and schizoaffective disorder. The book describes the time Gardiner spent with Aaron during their childhood, growing apart as they aged, then returning to his brother’s side as an occasional caregiver. Threaded throughout are reflections on the activities and fandoms Aaron enjoyed - sci fi novels, Star Wars movies, piano music, Marvel comics and the Cinematic Universe, board and tabletop role-playing games.

However, Gardiner remains aloof and dismissive of the hobbies that his brother enjoyed, viewing poetry as a more “evolved” literary form, more worthy of adult and scholarly attention. Comics and their related franchises are “predictable” and “claustrophobic.” The Gardiner brothers may have watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfold side by side, but it is clear that Justin did not probe deeply into what held Aaron’s attention within their stories. Instead, he is perpetually pathologizing his brother, and even random strangers around him, putting forth many suppositions but demonstrating only surface level research into his wayward diagnoses. A love of comics is an escapist route back to childhood, according to Justin- the only time his brother’s behaviors met society's expectations and the only time Justin was not bored, tired, embarrassed, embittered by being associated with his brother. Gardiner veers away from any attempts to more deeply and empathetically understand his brother’s enjoyment of the mediums in favor of describing his own feelings and how uncomfortable he was interacting with his brother. Panel gutters are a looming space where Gardiner is unwilling to venture forth and examine with any kind of serious contemplation.

His brother’s lifelong efforts at playing the piano is similarly deemed a waste of time because Aaron “never composed his own songs or made any money off of it.” Gardiner briefly describes what Aaron did make money off of- working as a janitor for the Pearl Buck Center, a preschool for students with cognitive disabilities and where many of Aaron’s coworkers also had mental health or cognitive disabilities. "I knew full well how important Pearl Buck was to my brother, yet I avoided any direct contact with it..." While those feelings are valid and probably relatable to many people who don't have disabilities, this work does nothing to change people's expectations or behaviors in a way that uplifts the people who share Aaron’s experiences.

Ultimately, this title illuminates a gap in literature for thoughtful investigations into the role fandoms play for adults with cognitive impairments and mental disabilities. The topic is well worth investigating but readers would be better off directing their attention towards more empathetic and well-researched titles, such as The THUD (Mikael Ross and Nika Knight (trans.).  Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001)

Book Review: Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, edited by Qiana Whitted

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.