Desegregating Comics
Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics
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.
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
Index
