Tag Archives: Qiana Whitted

How Does What’s In Print Affect Comics Studies?

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I have been thinking about access in comics studies lately, about the way the availability of resources can be used to steer critical interests in the field. Publishing houses and archivists, collectors and copyright holders, even cultural guardians – there are a lot of people and institutions involved in making decisions about which titles to seek out, preserve, and keep in print. Of course, anyone who works among the ephemera of popular culture faces similar challenges, but my question focuses on the implications for comics scholarship: How does access to materials shape the choices you make about the comics you study, teach, or review?

Last week, I visited the comic book archives at the Library of Congress in DC and at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library in Richmond. Although I arrived with a list of rare comics and fanzines that I wanted to read, the best part of spending time in archives was getting the chance to talk with the reference librarians who maintain the collections and know where to look for hidden gems. Thanks to Cindy Jackson at VCU, I got to turn the pages of The Adventures of Black Eldridge: The Panther, a newly-acquired underground comic produced by Ovid P. Adams in 1970. Megan Halsband at the Library of Congress introduced me to Joel Christian Gill’s recent series of Strange Fruit Comics that uses satire and comics culture to dramatize obscure black historical figures (along with great bonus features like “Lil’ Nino Brown in Slumland”).

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You may have to travel to Richmond to see Black Eldridge wield his machete against the villains of white supremacy, but Gill blogs about his work online and his Strange Fruit Comics are being collected in a new edition out this June. And it’s a good thing too, because quite a few of the titles I regularly teach in my class on race and comics are now sadly out of print and I don’t know how long I can keep asking students to hunt down used copies.

Questions of access must also take into account the way comics as a form continues to be disparaged ideologically by those in positions of power. Complaints that the College of Charleston forced last year’s incoming students to endure lesbian “pornography” in Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home, also prompted South Carolina State Representative Tommy Stringer to tweet: “Is the instructional ability of CofC teachers so low that they have to use comic books to teach freshman?” The material consequences of this kind of thinking are extremely serious; the state ultimately voted to slash the first-year reading program’s dollars from the college’s budget.

One wonders if Rep. Stringer would level the same accusations of teacher incompetency if the College of Charleston had selected March: Book One for their freshmen reading selection, as Michigan State and Marquette University are doing this fall. U.S. Congressman John Lewis has been signing copies of his graphic novel memoir to standing-room only crowds across the country. In interviews, Lewis along with his co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell have often praised the ability of comics to inspire social change and reviews celebrate the novel’s success as a teaching tool. Furthermore, the 1958 comic book, Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story, is available for purchase again due, in part, to a reference in Lewis’s graphic novel and the publicity surrounding distribution of the comic book’s translated Arabic edition during the Arab Spring in 2011. I suspect that high schools and colleges will keep these comics in print for a long time.

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The research that I’m doing now on EC Comics greatly benefits from the initiatives of fans that have worked hard to keep reprints in circulation. The same can’t be said, though, for comics like Fawcett’s Jackie Robinson series, also from the 1950s. Last week, I had the chance to read three issues (three!) from the series, along with one about Joe Louis and Willie Mays, all incredibly fragile and rare. I’m eager to write about these comics, to try to make some kind of meaningful connections with other titles produced during this period. (Who knew that Robinson apprehended cat burglars in his spare time?) But now I’m realizing how important it is that we also work with publishers to make these comics more readily available. If readers can’t get better access to titles like Jackie Robinson or The Adventures of Black Eldridge, how can they become a part of larger critical conversations in comics studies?

Can a Comic Book Make M.F. Grimm Walk?

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In the comics memoir, Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm, Percy Carey tells of his experiences growing up in New York, finding success as an emcee in the early 90s, and getting caught up in the drug trade and gang shootings that would eventually leave him paralyzed from the waist down. Artist Ron Wimberly sketches Carey on the graphic novel’s cover in a wheelchair as he is now, rather than surrounded by fans or performing on the stage he once shared with names like Snoop Dogg and Tupac. The choice is fitting, given Carey’s interest in conveying the social and economic realities of his life behind these scenes and after spending time in prison.

But in the epilogue subtitled “Standing Ovation,” Carey grasps the wheelchair’s arms and pushes himself up. A microphone dangles in the air above him. With his arms stretched out, chin raised, he steps forward and says: “Damn! Feels good to do that! Fuck it, I figure if I can’t do it in real life…yet…might as well do it in my book!”
 

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When we are asked to consider what makes comics unique, I think that our conversation should include scenes like this one. We know that the distinguishing features of comics can extend beyond formal elements to include stylistic practices that develop and advance whenever a sequence of words and pictures tell a story. In this case, Sentences provides an opportunity to talk about what happens when genre conventions refuse to stay put in graphic narratives that are based on actual events.

I’m curious about what Carey’s story accomplishes here by stepping away from what he can’t do “in real life.” Reviews of the comic are unequivocal when it comes to praising his honesty, his unwillingness to glamorize hip hop culture or the drug trade. What, if anything, changes when Carey (in collaboration with Wimberly) frees himself from the wheelchair and in the process, releases his story from the constrictions of nonfiction? By bracketing off the moment in an epilogue, the comic arguably reaches the only kind of happy ending possible without threatening the story’s credibility. At the same time, the utter joy and pleasure that he takes in the visual representation of his body makes the fact that we are dealing with a comic particularly important. Is it enough to say that Carey wishes for the ability to stand or that he imagines what it might be like to walk again when on the concluding pages of his book, he actually does?

Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby provides a second example. The semi-autobiographical narrative is anchored to the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960s, but the comic also breaks away from the “real” in its closing pages. The protagonist, Toland Polk, opens a patio door in the snowy, urban setting of his present and with the sounds of a jazz record curling around the panel, he ushers the viewer into a summer day from his bittersweet Alabama past. As with Percy Carey’s comic book persona, Toland steps out of the story to prepare the reader for this moment. (“There’s something I wanna show you!” he says prior to this page.) The image fills our entire field of vision, maintaining the style and aesthetic features of the rest of the comic in a way that doesn’t merely depict what Toland imagines, but communicates deeper sensations that the viewer experiences within the primary narrative frame.

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In both examples, dialogue is deployed strategically and in a metafictional way to shape our encounter with realistically-pictured conjecture. But what happens when there are no words to guide us? In my last example from The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell, a Civil Rights demonstration ends the graphic novel which focuses on the story of a black and white family involved in the events surrounding a police shooting at Texas Southern University in 1968. The comic is based on the experiences of Long and his father who worked as a television reporter in Houston during this time.

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Powell closes the story with a procession of silent marching figures to accompany the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that serves as the book’s title. The shoes shuffle slowly from panel to panel until they lift without warning and begin to float up. Their flight could be said to signify the protestors’ courage or suggest a longing for social and spiritual transcendence in honor of King’s assassination that year. It could even allude to elements of African myth. Whatever it accomplishes, it does so with no clear verbal signposts, shifting seamlessly into the speculative realm through illustration.

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Where do these strange endings leave us? How does this resistance to more realistic representation alter the way we encounter the real in nonfiction comics? Could it indicate an unwillingness to truly face hard, unresolved suffering and social conflict? Or are we so accustomed to comic book flights of fancy that using the tropes more commonly associated with superheroes just feels damn good, to paraphrase Percy Carey, in any type of comic?
 

What is an African American Comic?

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When Philadelphia journalist Orrin C. Evans published what would become the first and only issue of All-Negro Comics in 1947, he boasted that the comic book showcased original stories about black life and adventure with African and African American characters in positions of authority, strength, and trendy style. The comic’s commitment to wholesome, affirming images of black people was underscored by the fact that its artists, too, were African American. Evans even included a photograph of himself inside the cover, thereby confirming the extent to which the comic earned the “all” Negro distinction.

By the mid-1950s, readers of black-owned newspapers had become accustomed to seeing the work of black comics creators like Chester Commodore and Jackie Ormes included among the reprints of syndicated comics. When the daily edition of the Chicago Defender failed to include black comic strips, readers wrote to complain:

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This question, posed in March 1956, may sound all too familiar. Nevertheless, much has changed since the 1950s. So much so that “African American Comics” could easily constitute a category of its own (and not just as a display during Black History Month). But exactly what kinds of comics would fall under this designation? Would it only include publications that follow the All-Negro Comics model where black writers, artists, and editors can claim “every brush stroke and pen line” of the final product, or should the term be expanded to any comic about African Americans? Should the stories reflect particular ideological investments? Be recognized by a specialized community of readers and critics?

I also struggle with these questions in my research and teaching in African American literature, where the relationship between naming, visibility, and power is much more pronounced and deeply connected to the exclusionary politics of literary canons. In the classroom, I’ve had to step away from the anthologies that track a narrow, reactionary path from the New Negro to the Black Arts aesthetic. I try to emphasize instead how each successive wave of redefinition attracts new possibilities along with new intersectional silences and contradictions, or as the late Amiri Baraka put it in his 1966 poem, “Black Art”: “Fuck poems/and they are useful.”

The history of African Americans in comics reflects many of these same cultural tensions, but the narrative unfolds much differently. I recently taught a course on “African American Comics” that began with examples of 19th century racial caricature. We studied George Herriman’s comics, discussed All-Negro Comics, as well as genre comics from the 1950s-1970s before moving to more recent graphic novels. I did not begin each new comic identifying the racial identity of its creators, unless one of them made it an issue, for instance, as Christopher Priest did in his terrific introduction to the trade paperback of Black Panther Vol 1. The Client (reprinted here.) The class went very well, but by the end I knew that my title had been inadequate – if not inaccurate, since I also included Aya: Life in Yop City (African, but not American).

So I’m genuinely interested in what people think. What is an African American comic? Is there a way that this term might be useful? Is it too reductive or so broad that it loses all meaning? With Milestone Comics recently celebrating its 20th anniversary, these concerns seem more relevant than ever. We could even extend the question to other social groups – women’s comics? LGBT comics? And remember, Black History Month is upon us. So refusing the question doesn’t mean that someone else won’t try to define it for you.

How does anthropomorphism represent race in Krazy Kat?

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In their essay collection, Thinking about Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, editors Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman assert that “humans, past and present, hither and yon, think they know how animals think, and they habitually use animals to help them do their own thinking about themselves.” Prompted by the ubiquitous manifestations of anthropomorphism in the arts and sciences, religion and folklore, advertising, and nature documentary filmmaking, the collection’s introduction charts the various psychological, religious, and ethic orientations toward ascribing human behaviors and characteristics to animals and asks: “Has the animal become, like that of the taxidermist’s craft, little more than a human-sculpted object in which the animal’s glass eye merely reflects our own projections?”

The question provides us with an opportunity to linger on the cat and mouse game at the center of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. We might consider what the comic strip’s premise has inherited from Anansi, Aesop, Brer Rabbit, and other tales of talking animals in its serial run from the First World War to the Second, through Women’s Suffrage, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Segregation Era. Or we can reflect on how the strengths and weaknesses of Krazy Kat shape our interpretation of animal characters in the comic art and animation that followed Herriman’s lead. Felix, Mickey, Woody, and Fritz come to mind, but anthropomorphic animals as a trope touch a remarkable number of genres and styles, including titles such as Fables, Mouse Guard, Beasts of Burden, Pride of Bagdad, Bayou, Blacksad, and We3. And of course, given the subject of recent conversations on HU, we might even wonder: if it wasn’t for Krazy Kat, would we even have Art Spiegelman’s Maus?

While the animals of Coconino County engage a range of social identities and historical contexts against the love triangle between Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup, I’m particularly interested in the way anthropomorphism externalizes race in the comic strip. Daston and Mitman go on to make the point that animals are not merely “a blank screen” in anthropomorphic representation; their own actions and behaviors as animals bring “added value” to human projections. And so Herriman’s decision to undermine the well-known antagonisms between mice, cats, and dogs is meaningful, and not just because of the way the cartoonist endeavored to conceal his own mixed-race identity.

In Krazy Kat, the cat that chases the mouse isn’t driven by food or deadly sport, but by the kind of desire and affinity that is undeterred by species. In order to take part in this desire as readers, we have to accept what Jeet Heer characterizes as “the strange internal logic of the world Herriman created: we never ask why a cat should love a mouse, or a dog love a cat, since it seems natural. And this, perhaps, is where race becomes relevant.” Indeed, the comic strip’s defiance of the “natural order” brings to mind the discredited scientific theories used to superimpose racial categories onto a Great Chain of Being. Herriman’s anthropomorphism may dramatize difference, but not incompatibility and in the process, the comic affirms Krazy as America’s quintessential stray.

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Heer points out that Krazy’s blackness becomes more pronounced over time, particularly with the appearance of his blues singing “Uncle Tom” cat. Added to this are several comic strips in which racism and white supremacy serve as the primary target of comedic reversals and impersonations. In one story, Ignatz falls for Krazy after the cat has been drenched in whitewash and the mouse longs for the “beautiful nymph” who is “white as a lily, pure as the driven snow.” Once Krazy washes off the paint, Ignatz’s outrage returns. In another instance, Ignatz tans in the sun and throws a brick at a confused Krazy who angrily responds in kind, saying “Dunt think I’m no ‘Desdamonia’ you Otello.” Krazy’s uncharacteristic behavior seems especially odd in this strip until one considers that he is not actually upset because a black mouse has thrown the brick, but because the brick-thrower is someone other than Ignatz. Certainly the Shakespearean allusion speaks to this tragic tangle of racial and gendered constructs.

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Yet while the racial politics in examples like these are more explicit, I find them to be less compelling and somewhat disconnected from the “strange internal logic of the world Herriman created.” (Having discussed Herriman’s Musical Mose elsewhere, I would argue that this comic strip manipulates the concept of racial and ethnic “impussanation” much more effectively in the way that it sets caricatures against one another.) I believe that it is through the anthropomorphic structures of Krazy Kat and not through buckets of whitewash that Herriman achieves his most complex and multi-dimensional engagement with race and other “human-sculpted” realities. What is your take on how race is shaped by the anthropomorphic tropes in Krazy Kat?

Race and the Risks of ‘Kiddie Garbage’ Cartooning

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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“Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.” – From General Standards Part C of the 1954 Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America

One of the consequences of the CMAA “Comics Code” of 1954 was that industry artists, writers, publishers, and distributors stopped taking risks when it came to race. At least, for a while. The slippery language of the “religion” section of General Standards Part C was broad enough that even the most tentative efforts to find an audience for increasingly complex, multi-dimensional images of blackness were scaled back. For several years, as the Civil Rights Movement transformed the social and political landscape of America, the mainstream comic book industry erred on the side of caution. (And I’m not just talking about those infamous beads of sweat.)

We know, of course, that the anxieties surrounding the Comics Code Authority’s strict guidelines opened up a space that mid-1960s underground comix would seek to fill. As Leonard Rifas states, “comix artists often tried to outdo each other in violating the hated Code’s restrictions,” deploying irony, satire, and caricature – notably, “extreme racial stereotypes” – to assert their freedom of expression.

In an interview from Ron Mann’s 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential, R. Crumb explains:

We didn’t have anybody standing over us saying, “No, you can’t draw this. You can’t show this, you can’t make fun of Catholics… you can’t make fun of this or that.” We just drew whatever we wanted in the process. Of course we had to break every taboo first and get that over with, you know: drawing racist images, any sexual perversion that came to your mind, making fun of authority figures, all that. We had to get past all that and really get down to business.

Small press and indie comics creators continue to adhere to this countercultural checklist nearly sixty years later, gleefully undermining each new generation’s standards of good taste and decency with new artistic infractions. But Crumb’s approach to what he refers to as “absolute freedom” in the above quote does not adequately account for the risks taken by many African American artists and writers for whom the constraints, the taboos, and the violations differ. For me, then, examining indie comics and cartoonists in a larger contextual way means recognizing that there is more than just one Comics Code when it comes to race. And it means taking seriously the complex social and aesthetic tensions that black creators must navigate in order to exercise their own rights to free expression, even when they can’t get over or get past all that.

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Cartoonist Barry Caldwell’s semi-autobiographical character Gilbert Nash is reprimanded in the 1970s strip above for making “kiddie garbage.” The regulating body standing over him in this instance belongs to an acquaintance that doubles as the physical manifestation of the cartoonist’s self-doubts. Her pointing fingers and exclamations intrude furiously into his drawing: “You should be out on the streets making great art about the black experience!”

Caldwell illustrates how an entrenched politics of racial respectability intersects with ongoing debates within black communities over the social function of art. Comics are derided by the woman in the strip as a frivolous medium through which white cartoonists are afforded the luxury of feelings, but a treacherous, irresponsible choice for a black artist with a greater obligation to his people. This is what is at stake when the chastising voice says, in other words: “No, you can’t draw this.” And yet four panels into exposing what is presumably a private exchange, Gilbert has already claimed his existence as a comic artist during the Black Arts Movement, rebuffing the viewer’s objectifying gaze with a question of his own. Taboo is drawing one’s self into being as an indie black cartoonist.

This is the context that shapes my reading of the comics of Jennifer Cruté. The two collected volumes of her comic strip, Jennifer’s Journal: The Life of a SubUrban Girl, feature autobiographical sketches of her upbringing in New Jersey suburbs as well as her life as a freelance illustrator in New York. With round, expressive black and white cartoon figures, Cruté’s characters appear to come from a charmed world where “ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.” The wide faces tilt back and break easily into open-mouthed grins and scowls. Her freckled persona wears teddy bear overalls, while an older brother’s Afro parts on the side, Gary Coleman-style. Like the cursive “I” that is dotted with hearts on the title page, the comic adopts a style more closely associated with the playfulness of a schoolgirl’s junior high notebook. The title foregrounds the space of socio-economic privilege and gentrification that her family occupies during the 1980s complete with Cabbage Patch Dolls, family vacations to Disney World, and copies of Ebony and Life side by side on the coffee table.

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Race introduces a source of friction that impacts Cruté’s decision to represent her experience as a young black girl through caricature. There are plenty of comic strips that depict the lives of children, but much like Ollie Harrington, Jackie Ormes, or more recently, Aaron McGruder, Jennifer’s Journal uses children to explore the absurdity of racism and the means through which blackness is socially constructed. She traces her earliest affection for Kermit the Frog, for instance, to the episode of “The Muppet Show” when she mistook guest Harry Belafonte for puppeteer Jim Henson. And in scenes that take place down South, fears of lynching and racial violence dominate the story’s action, while the narrative turns to everyday micro-aggressions and more subtle humiliations to capture her own encounter with racism in the suburbs.

The first volume’s cover image further aligns Cruté’s work with the confessional mode of popular small press and indie comics; a young African American girl nervously pulls down the pants of a plush toy bunny, while surrounding her are other undressed stuffed animals posed in various sexual positions. The fact that young Jennifer’s inspiration comes from an art history book open to a painting of a nude Adam and Eve speaks to the notion that visual images have the power to confer an uninhibited sense of expressiveness and wicked curiosity. Likewise when her reflections turn to religion and sin, Cruté confesses her nightly struggle to abstain from masturbation. She portrays the temptation as she tries to go to sleep beneath a pictorial thought balloon that recalls the image from the book’s cover, although this time the nude Edenic bodies that entice her to “Come on, Jenn! Touch it!” are created in her own brown-skinned image.

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My point here is that the push and pull of creative freedom and self-regulation play out in Jennifer’s Journal on multiple registers. Though warnings mark the front and back cover to alert readers that the book is “NOT recommended for children,” the comic’s aesthetic choices incorporate cautionary measures that gesture toward the kind of “instructive and wholesome” entertainment that the Comics Code Authority sought to preserve. In an author’s note, she writes: “I draw simple characters with round figures to soften the complex and contradictory life situations I depict.” But despite this stated intention, I can’t help but see a rewarding motley of signifiers in the comic – some that soften, others that rankle and surprise. The comic playfully mocks both the demand for racial respectability and the longing for a vision of reality that treats frank discussions about racism and sexuality as inappropriate.

I have tried to be careful not to suggest that black artists and writers are the only ones entitled to complex images of blackness in comics, nor are they the final arbiters of how best to represent and confront racism. As Darryl Ayo points out in his post about Benjamin Marra’s Lincoln Washington: “People are going to do what they’re going to do.” But as Darryl goes on to suggest, there should be a more meaningful, substantive awareness of historical context in our interpretations of comics that explore racial conflict. I believe we should also ask tougher questions about how and why particular notions of absolute freedom are idealized in underground, indie, and small press comics. And why there isn’t more room in these discussions for the “kiddie garbage” of Jennifer Cruté and the other creative risks that black comics creators are taking right now.

Sound and Silence in the Jim Crow South

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Early in Jeremy Love’s comic series, Bayou, the murder of a black child named Billy Glass awakens the supernatural southern landscape that surrounds the story’s young female protagonist, Lee Wagstaff. Lee is forced to swim into the bayou to retrieve Billy’s body and afterwards she describes the experience to her white friend, Lily. Stunned by Lee’s description of the bloated corpse, Lily blurts out, “My mama said Billy Glass deserved what he got. She said a n***** boy got no business whistlin’ at no white woman.” In the wordless panel that follows, Lee’s hands drop as a dismayed expression crosses her face. Beside her, Lily’s eyes lower, her shoulders slouch back, and she lets out a small whistle of her own.

Readers familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South know that this two-toned whistle once belonged to Emmett Till – the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.* What we hear, then, in Love’s visual rendering of Lily’s whistle interests me greatly, for those tiny eighth notes generate a tremendous sound. We hear echoes of anti-miscegenation panic, a fear that reverberates unease even as the conversation hastily resumes. We hear the sense of white privilege that attends Lily’s ability to whistle freely, carelessly one could argue, in spite of her naïveté as a child repeating her mother’s words. But I believe that what Love also wants us to hear in this sequence is the “wolf whistle” of a murdered black child, along with the memory of just how much that sound costs. Perhaps what resonates most deeply in the white girl’s whistle are the sounds that Billy (and Emmett) are no longer able to make, were never free to make at all.

Bayou is a blues comic through and through, filled with songs that shake juke joints and others that keep time on a prison chain gang. It may not be all that surprising to find that narrative drawings such as comics draw upon blues, jazz, soul, and other traditionally African American forms to picture racial trauma, given that these genres are already so well known for chronicling social struggle. Still it is worth noting that when it comes to the historical portrayal of racial discrimination and violence in comics, music often serves as a means through which characters process (and repudiate) the senseless and the unspeakable. The brief exchange between Lee and Lily is a powerful reminder that trauma creates its own kind of music in the visual convergence of sound and silence.

The interplay generates another compelling moment in Paolo Parisi’s comic biography, Coltrane. (Originally published in Italian, the English translation appears to only be available in the UK.) This scene focuses on the song that the jazz saxophonist created in memory of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, simply titled “Alabama.” The stirring eulogy that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered for the four girls killed in the bombing may have even inspired the song’s melody. Words transformed through song, now mediated once more through image:

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I read this two-page grid horizontally in rows of three. The first row acts as prelude with four tight shots of the musicians. Coltrane has not yet lifted the mouthpiece to his lips and the eyes of Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison, and McCoy Tyner are hidden or closed in a hush before they begin to play. The second sequence portrays school photographs of the four girls that were murdered. Above their still and smiling faces, the only printed text in each panel is a name and date to remind us how few years Cynthia, Carole, Denise, and Addie Mae lived before that Sunday morning in September. The date stamps cycle around to the year of each girl’s death while above them, it is as if the pictured musicians are keeping a steady beat: 1963. 1963. 1963. 1963. The children’s faces are further juxtaposed against panels that overflow with crowds of people in the third row — the Klansmen with Confederate flags, a photographed lynching, and Civil Rights demonstrators holding signs of protest.

Whether or not the reader has actually heard “Alabama,” the soundtrack to the Birmingham church bombing is here on Parisi’s page. Coltrane’s saxophone glides over the piano’s opening rumble and plunges into the percussive crescendo at the close. The scene facilitates an elegy of a different sort through stillness and motion, and in the pacing and symmetry of iconic images from the era. Its composition brings to mind a passage from the collection, Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs:

Anyone familiar with the musical characteristics of Negro folk style in spiritual and gospel singing, in blues and rock n’ roll, will know that these transcriptions represent only a bare skeleton of what is actually being sung. Good singers will subtly vary the tune – bending notes, delaying or anticipating the beat, and adding their own vocal decorations. (6)

Graphic narratives take an analogous approach with some comics choosing not to venture too far beyond transcription, while others vary, decorate, and bend. Indeed, Bayou and Coltrane are not the only texts that improvise among the sounds of the Jim Crow South. Examples appear throughout The Silence of Our Friends, written by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos, and illustrated by Nate Powell. The music of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave unfurl like plumes of smoke amid the racial turmoil of a segregated Texas town. The lyrics to “Soul Man,” in particular, acquire a rich significance as they are repeated at pivotal moments in the narrative. I’m very interested to see the sounds that will shape Powell’s art in March — a forthcoming comics trilogy co-written by Congressman John Lewis.

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Harold Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby has an abundance of freedom songs and the story’s protagonist, Toland Polk, idolizes the story’s retired jazz vocalist, Anna Dellyne. Although Cruse’s depiction of music is somewhat less evocative that the previous examples, the subtext of haunting songs like Anna’s “Secret in the Air” resonate with Toland’s decision to break his silence about his homosexuality during the 1960s. Likewise, most of the music that appears in Ho Che Anderson’s King is used basically to establish tone and setting, but the song “Sweet Lorraine” from The Nat King Cole Trio stands apart, appearing at the start and finish of the comic to elicit deeper reflection of Martin Luther King’s prophetic role in the Movement.

Most of the songs from this era in American history are celebrated for their capacity to uplift, restore, and persuade on collective registers, but I believe that the comics featured here are most effective in highlighting the introspective qualities of music. The artists and writers go beyond the sounds of “We Shall Overcome,” to transform something as small as the tones of a whistle and as quiet as a photograph into critical instruments of contemplation and mourning.
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* The appendix to volume 1 of Bayou notes that Billy’s original name was “Emmet,” but the circumstances of Billy’s death differ slightly from Till’s in the comic which takes place in 1933, not during the 1950s.

Quentin Tarantino’s Slave on the Road; or, Josiah Henson Unchained

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The entire Django Unchained roundtable is here.
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Antebellum fugitive slaves were criminals according to the laws of their day. Their labor, their bodies, and any future that they might imagine belonged to the estates of the people who held the bill of sale. And so when enslaved black men and women wrote the stories of their escape in order to advocate for abolition, they took special care in persuading readers not only that the laws they had broken were unjust, but also that they had the moral strength to manage the freedom they had “stolen.” This is why when a Maryland slave named Josiah Henson, having been deceived by the master who vowed to manumit him, raised an axe above the head of his owner’s sleeping son, Henson stopped short of landing the fatal blow. In The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (1849), he explains:

It was self-defence, — it was preventing others from murdering me, — it was justifiable, it was even praiseworthy. But now, all at once, the truth burst upon me that it was a crime. […] I was about to lose the fruit of all my efforts at self-improvement, the character I had acquired, and the peace of mind which had never deserted me. […] I shrunk back, laid down the axe, crept up on deck again, and thanked God, as I have done every day since, that I had not committed murder. (42-43)

Scenes such as this constitute a fairly common trope in the slave narrative genre, one that literary critic Raymond Hedin described as the slave on the road. These moments, however accurately conveyed, were deployed in abolitionist narratives to refute the notion that without constant supervision, black people would succumb to so-called baser instincts that could turn “a pleasant-tempered fellow, into a savage, morose, dangerous slave” (Henson 41). Fugitive slaves responded by calling attention to the times in which they were out of the watchful eyes of their masters, or in a situation in which a white person was particularly vulnerable – in these instances, the enslaved would demonstrate their self-control and virtuous character by adhering to a higher standard of behavior. Henson, the man whom Harriet Beecher Stowe once tried to credit as one of the inspirations for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, presented himself as a man who held to an especially strict moral code. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Henson would have been able to free himself or his family if he hadn’t eventually broken the law.

I thought about Josiah Henson when I watched the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained. The white bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz, has forcibly purchased (rescued?) Django after a shoot out with the Speck brothers, the two slave traders transporting him. With one of the brothers killed and another trapped under his horse, Schultz turns to the small group of enslaved black men that had been chained to Django just minutes before and tosses them the keys to their leg irons:

SCHULTZ: “So as I see it, when it comes to the subject of what to do next, you gentlemen have two choices. One, once I’m gone, you lift that beast off the remaining Speck, then carry him to the nearest town. Which would be at least thirty-seven miles back the way you came. Or…two, you unshackle yourselves, take that rifle over there…put a bullet in his head, bury the two of them deep, and make your way to a more enlightened area of the country. The choice is yours.”

Hearing this, the slave trader under the horse curses the approaching group of newly freed men and then begs for his life as they stand over him in silence. When the rifle shot sounds, a sudden spray of blood and flesh explodes from his head and the scene ends.

“The choice is yours.” With the bounty hunter’s words, Tarantino’s film enters into a larger conversation about race, representation, and the negotiations of moral responsibility that has as much to do with affirming Henson’s decision to set aside his axe as it does with celebrating a kind of vengeful catharsis that is without consequence. The film reminds us that in the slave’s narrative, honor was also a bounty to be hunted; the accounts of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and others were strategic and deliberative “fictions of factual representation,” as scholar William Andrews put it, even if they were not as brutally self-serving as Django.

In other words, Django Unchained may be a Blaxploitation Western film (by way of Oscar Michaeux as Brian persuasively argues), but it is also reimagines the slave on the road narrative in a way that favors a highly individualistic sense of honor and responsiveness over collective survival. “Each man to his own Canada,” to quote Raven Quickskill, Ishamel Reed’s fugitive slave-poet. I actually found the postmodern satire in Django Unchained to be as satisfyingly irreverent as Reed’s novels, yet Schultz’s “two choices” – made explicit here and implied repeatedly throughout the film – pose a more interesting question for me about exactly what need Tarantino’s revenge fantasy is meant to satisfy.

(Of this opening scene, it is worth noting that Vertigo’s comic book adaptation of Django Unchained does not end in the same fashion. It closes with the group of black men in deliberation, unlocked chains at their feet, while the Speck brother’s wide blue eyes await their decision. Much of the film’s bloodshed is minimized in the first issue of the serial that is based on Tarantino’s original screenplay with art by R.M. Guéra and Jason Latour. Whether or not the rest of the story will take the same visual risks as a comic like Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner remains to be seen.)

django_comic1

But we can only go so far with an apples-to-apples comparison of Django and Nat Turner, or Josiah Henson for that matter. Django expresses qualms during his work with Schultz about killing a man in front of his child, while in a different context he maintains his grim disguise when one of Calvin Candie’s “Mandingo” fighters is torn apart by dogs. In the early scenes if Django appears to act recklessly or in anger, his white partner’s arrest warrants are there to protect him from the repercussions of these emotions. Still Django never forgets that he is on the road – or that his humanity is commodified by the color of his skin – and in return for his resolve, he and Broomhilda live to see her master’s house burn to the ground.  Of course, it may sound too good to be true (and one of the more useful reviews of the film assures us that it is) and what happens after the credits roll is unclear to say the least. But as with the cultural analysis of texts like William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I am curious about what Django’s choices reveal about us and the moment in which we live.

I wonder, for instance, what to make of the fact that this controversial, and now Oscar-nominated, blockbuster film comes at the close of President Obama’s first term in office. Once praised for his even-tempered composure and open-mindedness, Barack Obama’s cool disposition has been relentlessly scrutinized for the past four years, notably during his intense presidential campaign in 2008, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill (“One time, go off!” pleaded Spike Lee), and more recently during his debates with Mitt Romney in 2012. Progressives cringe as members of Congress and the press pool cut him off or when an attention-seeking politician jabs a finger in his face – “Have you thought about getting angrier?” Keith Olbermann once asked. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates astutely notes,
 

 …Politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition. Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.

 
Every insult and public outrage is now accompanied by pleas for President Obama to get angrier, drop the Spock routine and act on his emotion; in other words, to make a different choice. Not to overstate the similarities (and I’m sure I’m not the only one to make this connection), but Tarantino’s film seems crafted to elicit the same urge from his audience as Django’s makes his labyrinthine journey into “Candieland.” When Broomhilda’s bill of sale has been transferred and Django stands at the brink of a precarious future that, however fragile, is his own – it is the bounty hunter who decides what comes next. Schultz, after repeatedly advising caution to keep Django in control, is the one who ultimately determines that the collective cost of allowing the slave master to live is too high. Authorized, then, by this impetuous act and driven by the fear of losing his wife, Django steps onto the road and becomes the “dangerous slave” whose Canada is a plantation house splattered with blood.

I enjoyed the film. Though as I watched, I must admit that I found myself wishing that Django had been the one to confront Candie first. None of the carnage that follows means much without his agency in that moment. The fact that he doesn’t pull the trigger says a lot, I think, about the choices that continue to guide our understanding of race, power, and moral responsibility on the road today.

Jamie Fox in Django Unchained