Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Qiana Whitted ,  Qiana Whitted ,  Ian Gordon ,  Nicholas Sammond
Publisher:   Rutgers University Press
Imprint:   Rutgers University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.481kg
ISBN:  

9781978825024

ISBN 10:   1978825021
Pages:   368
Publication Date:   12 May 2023
Recommended Age:   From 16 to 99 years
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

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   

Reviews

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 ground-breaking 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

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. --Deborah Elizabeth Whaley author of Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime 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 ground-breaking 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

Author Information

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.

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