Introduction: "An Apt Cartoon" / Qiana Whitted -- Part I: Iconographies of Race and Racism: Rose O'Neill and Visual Tropes of Blackness / Ian Gordon -- The Passing Fancies of Krazy Kat / Nicholas Sammond -- "How Else Could I Have Created a Black Boy in That Era?": Racial Caricature and Will Eisner's Legacy / Andrew J. Kunka -- Part II: Formal Innovation and Aesthetic Range: Desegragating Black Genealogies: An Inviation / Rebecca Wanzo -- Misdirections in Matt Baker's Phantom Lady / Chris Gavaler and Monalesia Earle -- The Art of Alvin Hollingsworth / Blair Davis -- "Hello Public!": Jackie Ormes in the Print Culture of the Pittsburgh Courier / Eli Boonin-Vail -- Part III: Comics Readership and Respectability Politics: "Never Any Dirty Ones": Comics Readership among African American Youth in the Mid-Twentieth Century / Carol L. Tilley -- All Negro Comics and Counterhistories of Race in the Golden Age / Qiana Whitted -- "This Business of White and Black": Captain Marvel's Steamboat, the Youthbuilders, and Fawcett's Roy Campanella, Baseball Hero / Brian Cremins -- Al Hollingworth's Kandy: Race, Colorism, and Romance in African American Newspaper Comics / Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd -- Part IV: Disrupting Genre, Character, and Convention: Diabolical Master of Black Majic: Examining Agency through Villainy in "The Voodoo Man" / Phillip Lamarr Cunningham -- Love in Color: Fawcett's Revolutionary Negro Romance / Jacque Nodell -- An Afrofuturist Legacy: Neil Knight and Black Speculative Capital / Julian C. Chambliss -- "For They Were There!": Dell Comics' Lobo and the Black Cowboy in American Comic Books / Mike Lemon
Summary:
"Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics explores race and blackness in comic books, comic strips, and editorial cartoons in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century through the height of the industry's popularity in the 1950s. The historical perception of Black people in comic art has long been tied to caricatures of indecipherable minstrels, devious witch doctors, and brutal savages. Yet the chapters in this collection reveal a more complex narrative and aesthetic landscape, one that was enriched by the negotiations among comics artists, writers, editors, distributors, and readers over how blackness should be portrayed in popular culture. This book brings together an extraordinary group of scholars in comics studies to consider the lasting impact of the Jim Crow era's tumultuous racial politics on the most prolific decades of the American comics industry"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.