When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and super-heroes. Inevitably, these images are of white men. It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes emerged. But as this new collection reveals, these superhero comics are only one small component in a wealth of representations of black characters within comic books and graphic novels over the past century.
Winner of the 2016 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Sweeter the Christmas

Panel I: Black Is a Dangerous Color
 

1   "No Sweat!:” EC Comics, Cold War Censorship, and the Troublesome Colors of “Judgment Day!”

2   Sex in Yop City: Ivorian Femininity and Masculinity in Abouet and Oubrerie’s Aya

3   A Postcolony in Pieces: Black Faces, White Masks and Queer Potentials in Unknown Soldier

Panel II: Black in Black and White and Color
 

4   Fashion in the Funny Papers: Cartoonist Jackie Ormes’s American Look

5   Graphic Remix: The Lateral Appropriation of Black Nationalism in Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks

Panel III: Black Tights
 

6   American Truths: Blackness and the American Superhero

7   Drawn into Dialogue: Comic Book Culture and the Scene of Controversy in Milestone Media’s Icon

8   Critical Afrofuturism: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, Sequential Art, and Post-Apocalyptic Black Identity

9   Bare Chests, Silver Tiaras and Removable Afros: The Visual Design of Black Comic Book Superheroes

Panel IV: Graphic Blackness
 

10   Daddy Cool: Donald Goines’s “Visual Novel”

11   The Blues Tragicomic: Constructing the Black Folk Subject in Stagger Lee

12   Provocation Through Polyphony: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner

13   Performance Geography: Making Space in Jeremy Love’s Bayou, Volume 1

14   A Secret History of Miscegenation: Jimmy Corrigan and the Columbian Exposition of 1893

15   It’s a Hero?: Black Comics and Satirizing Subjection

Notes on Contributors

Index