The New Negro As Comic Book Artist

African American Classics is the twenty-second volume of Graphic Classics, an independently-published series that has previously featured comics adaptations of works by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and O. Henry. The earlier selections indicate a predilection for suspense, fantasy, and adventure – genres that traditionally have had a strained relationship with the high literary establishment, but whose vivid narratives are particularly well suited for the comics form.

Nevertheless, the series takes part in a different kind of conversation when the term “classics” is applied to the poetry and prose of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other African American writers. Too often dismissed outright as provincial and derivative, African American literature has struggled with questions of legitimacy since Phillis Wheatley published her book of poems in 1773. “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry,” Thomas Jefferson wrote eight years later. “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately but it could not produce a poet.”

The Harlem Renaissance coalesced around a determination to prove Jefferson wrong through the shrewd circulation and celebration of black cultural production (not only in Harlem, but Washington, DC and Chicago too). Anthologies like Alain Locke’s seminal 1925 collection, The New Negro, as well as awards, collaborative journals, and art exhibitions brought together the most promising African American talent, with black writers like James Weldon Johnson making explicit the stakes of their work: “The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”

The creative appeals of this late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century racial uplift ideology are widely reflected in the literature chosen for African American Classics. A representative selection is Florence Lewis Bentley’s story, “Two Americans” (1921), illustrated by Trevor Von Eeden and adapted by Alex Simmons, in which a black WWI soldier in France rescues an injured white soldier who led the lynch mob that killed his brother, Joe, back in Georgia. Initially the outraged black soldier leaves the white man on the battlefield to die, but then Joe’s spirit appears: “He made me know that all men are brothers, black, white, yellow and brown… and that if I killed in hatred, I would be killing Joe again… just as that white mob did” (21). The comics anthology draws heavily upon stories like these, finely-crafted works aimed at educating readers about the far-reaching costs of racial injustice, often against a backdrop of African American moral exceptionalism, class consciousness, and a deep engagement with the past that is at turns admiring and uncertain.

One might suspect that these parables of racial uplift would not signify in the same way that they did in the 1890s or 1920s. That racial injustice persists is without question, but the way we talk about, evaluate, and respond to race and racism has changed. With the most egregious forms of discrimination now criminalized, our society is more attentive to the systemic effects of institutional inequalities, more attuned to the stings of racial micro-aggressions. But African American Classics remains deeply invested in the canonizing demonstration of intellectual parity, not only in terms of content but also in its presentation and marketing. Six decades after Orrin C. Evans opened the first (and last!) issue of All-Negro Comics with the claim that “every brush stroke and pen line in the drawings on these pages are by Negro artists,” African American Classics makes a similar rhetorical appeal, showcasing contemporary African American artists such as volume co-editor Lance Tooks (Narcissa), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), Jeremy Love (Bayou), Afua Richardson (Genius), John Jennings (The Hole), and writers Christopher Priest (Black Panther, 1998-2003), Mat Johnson (Incognegro), and Alex Simmons (Blackjack). This is not a group of artists and writers that needs to prove their collective self worth. And if we are living in an era that is becoming increasingly more receptive to the “dynamic hyper-creative beauty of modern individualistic Blackness,” should they have to?

What makes African American Classics valuable for me is how the artists and writers adapt the material; the collection’s most provocative selections make formal and aesthetic choices that deepen and complicate my understanding of each work’s potential. Ironically enough, these “graphic” adaptations elevate the visual field of representation in ways that should remind us that literary expressions of African American experience have always been deeply entrenched in the realm of social perception, spectacle, and visibility. The works were originally written to counter claims that the entire character of a people could be arbitrarily determined by what is seen, from skin color to physiognomy to a so-called drop of Negro-stained blood. African American Classics, then, returns the counter-argument of its featured stories to their visual origins and exposes the absurdity of race prejudice in a way that only a comic can.

The medium allows Kyle Baker to explore multiple forms of signification in W.E.B. DuBois’s 1907 story “On Being Crazy” in which an upper-class African American man, in a tailored suit and top hat, looks with wry exasperation upon the white people who refuse his business and scramble out of his way. In each instance, empirical logic (and common sense) undermine racial constructs of the period. When a clerk points out, “this is a white hotel,” the main character looks around and responds, “Such a color scheme requires a great deal of cleaning, but I don’t know that I object.” Baker underscores the visual and verbal contradictions that are critical to DuBois’s anti-racist agenda by illustrating how the main character’s unwanted racial presence intrudes again and again into prohibited spaces, even as his body and speech reflect the more palatable codes of education and privilege.

Writer Mat Johnson and artist Randy DuBurke’s adaptation of Jean Toomer’s short story, “Becky” deftly conveys the haunting refrains of his 1922 collection, Cane. The draining light and decay in the long, repetitious panels mark the passage of time in the title character’s life as an outcast in the South. Milton Knight makes very perceptive stylistic choices in Zora Neale Hurston’s play, “Filling Station” (1930), adapted by co-editor Tom Pomplun, by crowding each panel with vibrant hues, elastic bodies, and fierce expressions to make visible Hurston’s outrageous wordplay and folk humor. Also worthy of note is a little-known mystery by Robert W. Bagnall called “Lex Talionis” (1922), adapted by Christopher Priest and illustrate by Jim Webb, in which the design and storyline about an angry white racist injected with a skin-darkening chemical unfold like an issue of Al Feldstein’s Weird Science from 1950.

Most surprising, though, is the adaptation of Charles Chesnutt’s story, “The Goophered Grapevine” in which writer Alex Simmons and artist Shepherd Hendrix make a seemingly minor modification that results in a significant reinterpretation. The 1899 collection from which the post-Emancipation tale is drawn, The Conjure Woman, features an elderly black man named Uncle Julius McAdoo who lives on a former plantation in North Carolina where he once worked as a slave. He narrates each tale for the benefit of the land’s new owners, only recently arrived from the North: a white physician named John, and his wife, Ann. While Chesnutt worked within the popular local color format of Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus Tales,” the stories Uncle Julius shares emphasize the cruelties enslaved blacks suffered and their desperate attempts to improve their situation. John and Ann are often so moved by the story’s telling that the clever Uncle Julius ultimately ends up enjoying a number of surprising benefits: a new job as their coachman, unrestricted use of the land’s vineyard, and ownership of a nearby church.

But in Hendrix’s illustration, John and Ann appear to be an African American couple. The dress, diction, and demeanor of the doctor and his wife remain in tact, but their position in Chesnutt’s story as gullible listeners shifts across race, class, and regional lines. What are the implications of Uncle Julius’s role as a trickster figure when the wealthy carpetbaggers are black? Certainly there were African Americans who owned property in the South during Reconstruction, but how to describe the looks of pleasure of the black laborers in the vineyard when overseen by the comforting embrace of these new landowners? What is at stake in this utopian reimagining and its potentially troubling subtext of mutual exploitation? Whether purposeful or in error, the visual modification has produced an altogether new and fascinating version of “The Goophered Grapevine.”

In 1963, James Baldwin observed that, “when the country speaks of a ‘new’ Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease.” A collection like African American Classics may not be able to do for black comics what the New Negro did for black literature. But I do hope, at the very least, that readers who come across these comics on a bookstore display, a classroom syllabus, or a Black History Month reading list will seek out more than classic reassurances on its pages.

Qiana Whitted is co-editor of the book, Comics and the U.S. South. She also blogs at Pencil, Panel, Page.

11 thoughts on “The New Negro As Comic Book Artist

  1. I’d totally forgotten that Jefferson quote. It made (and makes) me wish I liked Whately more than I do. 18th century poetry is a hard sell…

    Also, anthologies like this always make me wish that our copyright system weren’t so thoroughly fucked up. Many of these stories are from 1922 it looks like, because that’s the last year that works are in the public domain. Which is insane. If there were a more reasonable 50 year copyright term, anthologies like this would have access to, for example, Langston Hughes’ stories, probably to some early Richard Wright, most of Hurston’s work….even some James Baldwin, probably. There’s some great stuff from the 20s, but especially in terms of the black writing available, the amount available just increases exponentially as you move through the 20th century. Who benefits by interdicting that stuff? Not Hurston and Hughes, that’s for sure.

  2. I definitely thought about the copyright issues being a limiting factor (the most recent story is one of Hurston’s from 1931). It’s nice to fantasize about what the collection could have been if given free rein: a story by Wright would be awesome, maybe some Black Arts poets! But some of these later choices would do more than add variety, they would also change the narrative thread significantly and lead to a riskier (less classic?) message maybe. One poet from late 1920s/1930s whose work I think would translate well to the comics form is Sterling Brown. His pieces often departed from the rhetoric of racial uplift and leaned more towards blues and folk forms. But he died in 1989… so I guess we would add 80 years to that until his poetry is in the public domain? Ugh.

    I know what you mean about Wheatley! Katherine Clay Bassard has an analysis of her poem “On Being Brought From Africa to America” that made me appreciate her writing as a Middle Passage survivor a lot more.

  3. It’s not necessarily the case that it’ll be 80 years from his death, actually…I think for work before 1975 (or so?) it’s actually the date of publication plus 95 years.

    The frustrating thing is that it really is of no benefit to anyone, not even the people who shoved this down our throats. What does Disney care if Langston Hughes’ work is in the public domain? If Congress were just willing to own to being the bootlickers they are, they could have just passed a law exempting Disney in particular, and left the rest of the stuff alone. But no, they can’t own their obsequiousness, and so we must all suffer….

    I didn’t know (or had forgotten) that Whately was a middle-passage survivor! Maybe I should try her again….

  4. I’ve really enjoyed the varied offerings from Graphic Classics over the years! (See http://www.graphicclassics.com/ ) The authors frequently from the 19th century, though an H. P. Lovecraft can squeak by the copyright strictures: http://www.graphicclassics.com/pgs/hpl.htm .

    In the case of this fascinating-sounding volume — thanks for the article, Qiana Whitted — it’s unfortunate more recent writings could not be available, as Noah noted. A Volume II of African American Classics would be great…

    A look at the work of Phillis Wheatley — http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-funeral-poem-on-the-death-of-c-e-an-infant-of-twelve-months/ , with a downloadable PDF attached — shows them skilled and able though hardly great poetry; almost Victorian in their sentimentality and approach.

    More about Wheatley: http://www.enotes.com/phillis-wheatley-criticism/wheatley-peters-phillis .

  5. I would give almost anything to see Kyle Baker adapt an Ishmael Reed novel. Baker’s exaggerated style would be a perfect match for Reed’s outlandish satire.

    One thing worth noting is that the recent Graphic Classics volumes are in color, which has greatly improved their overall quality. In particular, what Trevor von Eeden does with his color choices in his story adds layers of depth and complexity to the narrative.

    Good to see more comics by Christopher Priest. I consider him to be one of the top mainstream comics writers, but his comics were never very popular. His Black Panther series was fiendishly clever.

  6. Rob: wow, I’d love to see a Baker adaptation of Ishmael Reed. I agree that his style would be perfect for that kind of satire; Reed has a more complex, sharper edge than whatever was going on with McGruder/Hudlin’s “Birth of a Nation.”

    Thanks for those link, Mike!

  7. Where i can understand the concern of the copyright, if you think about it, this book was created by a cast of African American Artist who did so as an Homage and not ( strictly) a money making factor. one doesn’t make as much as you’d think in comics. Its certainly a labor of love. Think about songs that are public domain now. Classics like My funny valentine or any Gershwin tune. Its revitalized every time someone covers it ( hopefully) I would think this is a way to remix and reintroduce the classic masters to a new generation ;]

    Sadly however, those times were not friendly to them and the artist might have made more perpage than they did selling an entire book. The times were not kind…

  8. Hi Afua, thanks for weighing in on this post and for your impressive contributions to African American Classics. I definitely see the classics as being revitalized in the collection, due to the talents of the writers and artists, but also by virtue of the form itself. I wrote this review also wondering to what extent does the ideology and motive behind the 1920-1930s selections get remixed and revitalized as well.

    Now, I’m very curious (!!!)- how much control did you have over the image that you chose to accompany the Hughes poem (or on the cover)? What was the process that you went through in visually adapting the work?

  9. Cheers Qiana!

    I think as any reintroductions of classic material, one can only take the art and its meanings thru their personal lens. No one can walk in the other’s shoes, but we have information and art to give us a picture. For me in choosing the image of the cover, I thought of a few things.

    One – i adore the music of that era. I’m a musician myself, so in reading the stories of musicians who performed then and their hardships let me know something about the state of the times. I’d be listening to Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, Davis, Duke, Ella, it goes on n on. Music is transitive like a auditory time machine ;]

    Two – I thought of the personal journeys of the writers.And how, like what we’d think of an airport, they must have thought of a train station. No one is from there, everyone is going somewhere else. But for the time we read their work, we walk in their shoes. Sit in their seat and watch the wiz buy in their words ;]

    Control? let let me do what i wanted. I asked what they wanted to see. They sent a few images of harlem Langston at a writing desk. Suggested a Theatre. I thought I’d do something a little less….mmm…expected?

    Thank you for sharing you thoughts!

  10. I really like your thoughts on the decision to use the train station. It’s definitely an evocative image with the three of them in conversation in that transitional space. And I’m definitely going to save this exchange to share with my students. I’ll be using African American Classics in either my AfAm literature or comics class next year (or both), so thank you! I’m glad you stumbled on this post!

  11. Fantastic! Its always in my hopes that my work reaches people beyond the platform of entertainment. I appreciate your innovation in using modern media as educational tools!! Im really glad I found this post as well!! If you’re so inclined please keep in touch. I’d be happy to pass along any questions to the publishers or other artist ( that i’m in contact with) such as Arie Monroe and John Jennings. Be well!

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