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: “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
