Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics

By Qiana Whitted, Ian Gordon, Nicholas Sammond and 13 more

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978825031

Ian Gordon

Ian Gordon has taught history and media studies for many years at the National University of Singapore. His publications include Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon, Ben Katchor: Conversations, Film and Comic Books, and The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life, the latter three published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

Introduction

An Apt Cartoon

QIANA WHITTED

The Colored American, a national newspaper based in Washington, DC, announced in the April 20, 1901, issue that a cartoonist had been hired to create each week an original cartoon, illustrating some feature of the race prejudice which exists in this country.¹ The decision was followed by enthusiastic praise from Black newspaper editors across the United States, and a few months later, The Colored American reprinted a notice from an Arkansas paper calling for a cartoon syndicate. The piece urged the Black press to use its collective resources to commission editorial comics that would help to shape opinions among its readers and counter the misrepresentations of African American life that circulated in popular media. Under the headline The Power of Cartoons, the editor observed, "Cartoons in journalism are far more powerful than many of our journalists seem to think. We wish the Negro press of the country could form a cartoon syndicate and thus be easily able for all Negro papers to furnish an apt cartoon once or twice a month—or once a week—on live questions. These cartoons would serve as eye opener not only to the race, but they would attract the reading public in spite of prejudice and set the whole American people to thinking more deeply than Puck or Judge or Truth."²

A conversation was being brokered in The Colored American about how comics and cartoon art communicated through image and text and who should be authorized to take the reins of such a distinct visual rhetoric where race was concerned. The dominant narrative, prompted in this instance by the illustrated satire of white-owned magazines such as Puck, would be summed up in another April 1901 piece written by the cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper titled Caricature Country and Its Inhabitants. In Opper’s essay for The Independent, the creator of the Happy Hooligan comic strip detailed a raucous terrain that was populated with well-known character types. He began by describing gullible farmers, blundering old men, and squabbling spouses alongside policemen that batter and club from morning till night and babies that all cry with their mouths open to enormous widths.³ Attributes of Chinese, Italian, Hebrew, Irish, German, and Colored inhabitants followed, establishing nonwhite racial and ethnic difference as one of the clearest coordinates in a shared cultural imaginary—the same climate in which The Colored American would announce its own cartoon feature two weeks later."⁴

Opper’s essay is an important reminder that the crude exaggerations and distortions of racial caricature that may make us wince today were an exceedingly common mode of entertainment and social currency that was foundational to the early years of the comics form. The writer Jeet Heer has devoted a significant measure of his critical work on comics to contextualizing taxonomies like Opper’s within the popular attitudes and power dynamics of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century society. Heer explains, It is not just that cartoonists lived in a racist time, but also that the affinity of comics for caricature meant that the early comic strips took the existing racism of society and gave it vicious and virulent visual life. Form and content came together in an especially unfortunate way. He reminds us that with each decade, Jewish-American and Irish-American groups were becoming increasingly vocal in criticizing ethnic stereotypes that targeted them, leading to declining numbers of these representations in comics.⁵ It would take much longer for the concerns of African Americans to be heard by people in positions of authority. The roots of blackface minstrelsy ran deep in all forms of popular culture and shaped the ways that people of African descent were dehumanized in comics well into the twentieth century, hemmed in by the entrenched white supremacy of Caricature Country.

Yet when confronted by what the cultural studies scholar Rebecca Wanzo refers to as racist visual imperialism, African American voices have also used comics to demand something different.⁶ In the decades following the announcement in The Colored American, newspapers that served African Americans in cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, Baltimore, and Tulsa would continue to hire their own cartoonists to produce original work. During the Great Depression and World War II, fledgling comic book production shops that employed artists from immigrant communities were occasionally willing to hire Black artists, including Elmer C. Stoner and Matt Baker.⁷ The period also saw the formation of the Black-owned Continental Features Syndicate, operated by Lajoyeaux H. Stanton to distribute comic strips by cartoonists such as Ollie Harrington.⁸ Still, in describing the powerful role that comic art could play, the charge issued by the Black press at the turn of the century emphasized more than retaining creative talent. Comics were valued as a platform for larger conversations about the pressing concerns of the day—clarifying, complicating, and reacting to live questions that too often reduced the opinions of African Americans to easy punch lines. Comics served as an important way to enter these debates and to complicate the so-called race problem in the public square.

• • •

Desegregating 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 grinning minstrels, devious witch doctors, and vicious criminals, yet the chapters in this volume 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. Alongside the recycled plots that relied on stereotypes to add humor and suspense, there were comics about sports, crime, romance, science fiction, and adventure that took significant creative and financial risks by developing more inclusive stories. Large mainstream and small-press publishers expressed an interest in multiracial audiences, and on occasion, artists and writers experimented with new ways to portray Black lives in a medium deeply connected to legacies of racist objectification. Studying these experimental arbitrations and aspirations is the primary goal of the chapters in this book.

This collection builds on a growing body of academic scholarship about African American representations in comics and the major role that race plays in the history of media and popular culture.⁹ While publications such as The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (2015) and Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (2013) address a wide range of texts, much of the academic study in this area has been devoted to comics published in the past fifty years, with an emphasis on superhero comics and historical graphic novels. Few linger very long on how race operated in the industry’s pioneering decades beyond the most egregious stereotypes. As a result, the writer and cartoonist Charles Johnson is not alone in the revulsion and profound sadness that he expresses in his introduction to Fredrik Strömberg’s 2003 book Black Images in the Comics, a compilation of cartoons featuring Black characters around the world from the 1840s through the 1940s. Johnson condemns the myopic vision of the overworked caricatures that are referenced in Strömberg’s collection and notes, "We should remember that the pictures we are looking at, these Ur-images of blacks, are a testament to the failure of the imagination (and often of empathy, too), and tell us nothing about black people but everything about what white audiences approved and felt comfortable with in pop culture until the 1950s."¹⁰ Readers could easily come away from historical retrospectives such as these with the presumption that, outside of a handful of newspaper strips, African Americans had little meaningful impact on what appeared on the pages of comics during the first half of the twentieth century or that it was only the interests of white readers that mattered to comics publishers.

Nevertheless, the deliberate and consequential debates over blackness in comics started early in the medium’s development. In focusing on the Golden Age, the title of this volume adopts a widely used periodization model, first established by comic book collectors, that divides the growth of comics into ages, including Platinum, Golden, Atomic, Silver, Bronze, and Modern, with later variations such as the Dark Age and the Renaissance. The Golden Age of comics is commonly defined as launching before World War II with the advent of superhero comic books in 1938 and covers the industry’s most prosperous and celebrated years until the mid-1950s, when changing trends in popular media and the implementation of the Comics Magazine Association of America’s Comics Code Authority in 1954 led to a noticeable decline in publishing and sales.¹¹ Looking back, however, the sense of nostalgia that buffers traditional understandings of the Golden Age’s successes often diminishes the obstacles that African Americans encountered in the industry and downplays the persistence of racism that was manifest in some of the era’s most cherished titles. In short, the halcyon vision of a Golden Age in American comics is also subject to debate. A few chapters in the book demonstrate that ongoing questions about racial representation surfaced early during the Platinum Age (1897–1938), when comic strips printed in newspapers and other periodicals dominated the industry. And as the final chapter on Lobo suggests, these concerns persisted into the Silver Age resurgence (1956–1970) and beyond.

Archives reveal that there is still much to learn about what comics have to say about race and how the images, characters, and plots were received within specific contexts over time. Two recent collections, by Tim Jackson and Ken Quattro, provide a sense of the breadth of African American representation and talent throughout comics history. Jackson’s Pioneering Cartoonists of Color (2016) offers descriptive summaries from decades of comic strips and comic books, starting with one of the first Black newspapers to include illustrations, The Black Republican and Office Holders Journal in 1865. Quattro’s Invisible Men: Black Artists of the Golden Age of Comics (2020) focuses on male creators and gathers interviews, newspaper clippings, and pages of original art along with narrative biographies. These volumes join magazines such as Hogan’s Alley and websites such as the Digital Comic Museum and the Stripper’s Guide blog in making rare materials accessible to the public.¹²

While these publications offer valuable resources for exploring racial representation, the absence of Black people in comics is instructive as well. In Leonard Rifas’s research on comic books about the Korean War, for instance, he notes a 1944 study by the communications and behavioral science scholars Bernard Berelson and Patricia Salter titled Comics Books and Anti-Minority Prejudice. Their research included an interview with one of the leaders in the comic book publication field, who commented on the decision to completely avoid the depiction of Black characters rather than risk controversy that could affect circulation. Among Berelson and Salter’s conclusions were that the villains must not be members of minority groups (1) because they ‘had some trouble’ in this connection and (2) because they could expect trouble from representatives of the groups affected. The rule now seems to be, according to this respondent, that Negroes never appear in a comic book (1) because it is difficult to draw them without stressing characteristic Negro features and (2) because it would be difficult to place them in any but comic roles.¹³ These observations raise a host of questions, not only about the nature of the trouble that publishers had been receiving but also about the long-term repercussions of such awareness on the stories and the images that made it to print, whether Black people were visibly present or not.¹⁴ How have comics been affected over time by a seemingly inextricable relationship between race and the broad visual and verbal typecasting associated with the roles that heroes and villains are allowed to play? We can learn a great deal from the industry leaders whose output was driven by the kind of cost-benefit analysis that Berelson and Salter describe during the 1940s. And ironically enough, as racial politics in the United States intensified during the civil rights movement, mainstream comics would become even more cautious, with publishers taking a Comics Code–approved approach that avoided difficult conversations about race altogether.¹⁵ That is all the more reason why this book recognizes comics writers, artists, and editors who found ways to contend with the realities of race and blackness, not as a source of trouble but as an opportunity for artistic innovation, a risk worth taking.

Given that the earliest and most prolific decades of the comics industry in the United States also correspond with the Jim Crow era, understanding how comics took part in the debates over blackness also means raising questions about access, ideology, and the politics of interracial contact, both in the panels and in the production of the comics. This period was marked by the advent of Black Codes, laws enacted after the Civil War to restrict the rights and behaviors of African Americans mostly in the South. These practices were expanded after Reconstruction to codify white supremacy across the country by disenfranchising Black voters and sanctioning acts of vigilante terrorism such as lynching to maintain social control. By the time the United States confronted the Great Depression and World War II, the racial divide had become enmeshed in the everyday routines of life, where restricted access to housing, transportation, medical care, and leisure was the norm. Not surprisingly, then, each stage in the process of creating, distributing, and purchasing comics was impacted to some degree by the laws and customs of racial segregation. Some of these moments are already widely known in the history of comics in this country: the turn-of-the-century cartoonist who chose to conceal his mixed-race background and pass for white in order to pitch his talents to newspaper editors; the African American publisher who debuted the first issue of a new comic book only to have wholesalers refuse to sell him the newsprint for a second; the Comics Code administrator who demanded that the image of a Black astronaut’s face be removed to meet industry-approved regulations.¹⁶

Despite setbacks, Black creators continued to grow in number. Rather than abandon the medium altogether, these enthusiasts found ways to adapt the form’s storytelling conventions and expand the capacity of comics to show and tell. Robert C. Harvey describes how King Features Syndicate discreetly kept photos of E. Simms Campbell out of its promotional material so that the editors of the 140 newspapers that carried his comic strip Cuties would not know that he was African American.¹⁷ Art shops were another avenue for Black artists to enter the industry starting in the late 1930s, as Ken Quattro explains in Invisible Men. The anonymity of the assembly-line-style production in studios owned by Jerry Iger, Bernard Baily, L. B. Cole, and others meant that the work of Black artists could be contracted by comic book editors who refused to hire them directly. This buffer probably contributed to the reason why Elmer C. Stoner was one of the first African Americans to join Harry A Chesler’s comic shop in 1939, and as Quattro notes, subsequent comic book Black artists, virtually without exception, worked through comic shops at some point in their careers.¹⁸ In turn, Black artists were among the many uncredited Golden Age pencilers, letterers, inkers, and colorists who created comic books.

The struggle to negotiate the era’s racial restrictions also made its way into the comics themselves. The Chicago Defender staff artist Garrett Whyte created a satirical comic strip called Mr. Jim Crow that was published in the newspaper’s national edition from 1946 to 1951 to capture what he called the ineptitude of segregation.¹⁹ The strip’s title character was a white politician from the South with the beak of a crow, whose insistence on the strict divide between the races led to absurd ends. Adorned in a suit with a pompadour haircut and a plantation string tie, his overbearing demeanor and southern drawl was reminiscent of the fictional Senator Beauregard Claghorn from The Fred Allen Show.²⁰ One installment follows Mr. Jim Crow as he gives away free sheets and pillow slips to men and children of different sizes and boasts in the final panel about the best way to use the linens, while behind him a parade of Ku Klux Klansmen walks by.²¹ In the strip’s later years, Whyte invited readers to win $5.00 cash by sending in accounts of their own personal experience or observation, showing the amusing side of segregation or discrimination. Subsequent comics noted the names of the weekly winners whose real-life encounters were dramatized in the strip. A California reader supplied the details of an August 27, 1949, strip about Mr. Jim Crow’s visit to a ranch (where he makes a point to note his dislike for black cattle). He demands that the African American ranch hand roll him a cigarette but stops him from finishing the job, saying, Cullud boy—Ah do mah own lickin’. The ranch hand’s retort—And Jim Crow—I do my own kicking!—appears in the final panel above a silhouette of the Black man’s fist and boot lifting the shocked Crow into the air (figure I.1).²²

FIGURE I.1 Mr. Jim Crow, by Garrett Whyte, Chicago Defender, August 27, 1949.

Whyte leverages the satire in Mr. Jim Crow against the invocation of actual events and readers whose experiences with racism are the subject of the strip. Fact meets fiction in the bizarre caricature of a man-sized crow who talks and squawks about the convoluted means through which the separation of races must be maintained. Since Mr. Jim Crow is not the only white man in the comic, Whyte’s visual depiction of the bird’s daily encounters with human beings creates a cognitive dissonance that brings unspoken anti-Black attitudes to the surface. Mr. Jim Crow gets the last laugh in most of the stories, but for his visit to the California ranch, Whyte uses the final panel to stage an additional ending with the kind of punch line that most African Americans would not have been able to execute in 1949 without serious consequences. The cullud boy kicks back and provides a cathartic reward for the comic strip’s weekly winner and all those who have experienced a similar humiliation. Perhaps then, as the historian Stephen A. Berrey argues, the routines of segregation were not always so fixed. He notes, If routines suggested predictability, they could also be revised. To put it another way, on a daily basis, Jim Crow and the meanings of whiteness and blackness were ever in the process of being made, unmade, and remade in the racial interactions between blacks and whites.²³ The Chicago Defender comic provided a space not only to critique larger power structures but also to creatively resist and revise the seemingly small racial interactions that readers faced every day.

• • •

Another important aspect that contributes to the narrow perception of race in Golden Age comics is the controversy surrounding the medium’s role in promoting juvenile delinquency. The mid-twentieth-century dispute over the effects of comics reading on children ran parallel to the growing political and legal battle to end racial segregation—that is, until a mental health clinic in Harlem began to make the case that the two conflicts were entwined. Dr. Fredric Wertham was a Jewish American social psychiatrist from Germany who, along with a small but dedicated team of volunteer clinicians, operated a free psychiatric clinic in the basement of St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Harlem from 1946 to 1958. The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic opened its doors for two evenings a week for the treatment of all kinds of nervous and mental disorders and behavior difficulties of adults and children.²⁴ During a time when such psychiatric services were often targeted to the needs of white people and elite, wealthy patients, the Lafargue Clinic was distinguished by the fact that it treated everyone without referrals, regardless of a patient’s race or ability to pay.²⁵ The medical historian Dennis Doyle notes that the clinic also stood apart through an antiracist therapeutic approach that emphasized the cumulative impact of everyday social circumstances and hardships on the lives of Harlem residents, rather than relying on older racialist assumptions that the African American psyche was innately different and inferior.²⁶

Wertham’s expertise was in forensic psychiatry and child psychopathology. His experience as chief psychiatrist at Queens General Hospital, as well as previously at Bellevue Hospital in New York and Johns Hopkins’s Phipps Clinic in Maryland, led him to be particularly disturbed by the racial discrimination that African Americans faced in the mental health system. He was joined in this concern by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and other prominent African American progressives in Harlem. With their support, Wertham recruited an interracial group of psychiatrists and partnered with a bishop whose church was actively involved with addressing the social needs of the local community for what was considered a radical idea in psychiatric care.

In the early 1950s, the Lafargue Clinic attracted even more attention when Wertham provided clinical testimony in Gebhart v. Belton, one of the five cases that would be considered before the Supreme Court as part of Brown v. Board of Education and the only case that had succeeded in declaring public school segregation unlawful at the state level before the federal appeal. A month after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in the Brown case in May 1954, Wertham published an opinion piece in the Nation praising the court for its courage in using the law as an instrument of social change. He also hoped that the judicial victory would embolden U.S. citizens and their representatives to act against what he believed were the increasingly insidious dangers that awaited children outside the classroom in comic books: More race hatred has been instilled in American children through comic books in the past ten years than in the preceding hundred years. As Constance Curtis writes in her Harlem Diary: ‘From the time they can hold a book and look at a picture—long before they can read—the children are learning the most vicious stereotypes of the white superman and the dark degenerate.’ If race prejudice is outlawed in children’s school hours, should not its instigation be outlawed in their time of leisure?²⁷

The study of comic books for which Wertham is most well-known today began at Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic as part of his examination into the causes of youth behavioral problems. Intake forms routinely asked children what they were reading, and counseling sessions made observations about how the young people related the stories to their daily lives. By 1954, the time of the publication of Wertham’s infamous polemic Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, the Lafargue Clinic proudly boasted of its role in bringing yet another public health problem to the attention of the nation.²⁸ Wertham occasionally applied the rhetoric that he and his staff used to discuss the impact of racism to strengthen his claims about the long-term impact of comics. For instance, a clinician at Lafargue drafted a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier in May 1953 noting, "The fact that many Negroes in the U.S. have attended or are attending segregated schools without apparent harmful influences is no argument. By the same token many children are exposed to the polio virus and escape crippling injury. This fact, however, does not prevent the mobilization of every available scientific resource to conquer the disease."²⁹ In Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham writes, It is true that many children read comic books and few become delinquent. But that proves nothing. Innumerable poor people never commit a crime and yet poverty is one of the causes of crime. Many children are exposed to the polio virus; few come down with the disease. Is that supposed to prove that the polio virus is innocuous and the children at fault?³⁰

This connection would have been most evident to the clinic’s supporters, who received a succession of holiday cards and brochures that shifted from photographs of children to images of Wertham scouring the pages of comic books.³¹ Letters requesting funding for Lafargue noted both the Delaware segregation case and the anticomics study as the two notable achievements of the clinic. Once articles by and about Wertham began appearing in Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Time, the Lafargue Clinic became inundated with speaking requests from librarians, parent-teacher associations, and civic and religious organizations from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. If Wertham could not answer their requests himself, he sent his colleague Dr. Hilde Mosse or another clinician to give a standard lecture. Suggested speaking fees were $25, but in many instances, Wertham and Mosse requested that donations be given to the Lafargue Clinic in lieu of any fees.³² In other words, the fight against comics directly helped to fund the free clinic’s operations.

Along with Wertham’s warnings against explicit depictions of violence and sexuality in comics, the psychiatrist expressed concerns about how American readers were affected by racial stereotypes. As with his piece in the Nation, he often took note of superhero and jungle comics that associated virtue and heroism with white characters who battled dark-skinned villains.³³ Yet in the national profiles that took up Wertham’s crusade, the published features tended to steer away from this problematic racial imagery or its impact on Black urban youth. The illustrations and photographs that accompanied the articles in Reader’s Digest, the American Home, and other magazines during this period clearly demonstrate who was most at risk: white, middle-class American children. In the written text of the Collier’s piece from 1948, the children’s racial identities are not made explicit (though they could be inferred from the Lafargue Clinic’s location). Instead, the subjects are differentiated by socioeconomic class and intellectual ability.³⁴ Multiple clients from the Harlem clinic are quoted in the piece, including the opening anecdote from an eleven-year-old boy in which he pretends to be the crook who ties up the actress played by his sister.³⁵ On the pages, however, all the professional models reenacting the scenes are well-dressed white suburban children (figure I.2). Their menacing expressions perform the dangers hidden from view and reinforce the conclusions drawn by the Collier’s writer that not even the so-called upper classes are immune from the extreme and abnormal avidity of comics reading.³⁶

Comic book reading is portrayed in these articles as a deviant and harmful activity that first ensnares the poor, uneducated, and unsupervised urban youth whose circumstances have made them deeply susceptible to the power of the comic’s suggestions. But the real horror in the nursery was not the reading habits of Black adolescents in Harlem; it was the fears among some white parents that their children would be next. After a meeting in Meriden, Connecticut, a librarian told Dr. Mosse about one particularly rebellious comic book fan from a strict, upstanding family of five children. Of the boy’s behavior after reading comics, the librarian said, He is like from another race.³⁷ To what end do these perceptions serve? White comic book readers are perceived as impressionable consumers who nevertheless have a number of choices available to them when it comes to their reading material and leisure activity—they simply need the right guidance to help them make good decisions. Underprivileged Black youth are positioned as easy prey for the predatory comic book; they lack the resources to fend off the midcentury boom of cheap sensational fare. To be clear, Wertham’s study generally fails to account for discerning young readers of any race, as scholars such as Christopher Pizzino and Carol L. Tilley have demonstrated.³⁸ Yet the psychiatrist’s insistence on framing Black children as acutely vulnerable and passive in their encounter with a cultural pathogen, to borrow Pizzino’s phrasing, has significant repercussions for the way Wertham’s research about comics reading was received among parents, legislators, and comic book publishers.³⁹

FIGURE I.2 Photograph by Martin Harris for Judith Crist’s Horror in the Nursery, Collier’s, March 27, 1948.

• • •

Our critical understanding of this period changes, however, when we acknowledge that Black readers were not as defenseless as Wertham claimed. Many came to the five-and-dime spinner racks and sidewalk newsstands with their own set of reading practices and cultural decoding skills. At the close of my 2019 book EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, I place the company’s approach to visual narratives of race and social justice within the context of such a newsstand, one of many in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century that would have been packed with ten-cent comic books. An urban vendor that was "willing to stock an issue of Negro Romance, or a sports comic with Jackie Robinson on the cover, I wrote, would have also sold imperial titles like Jungle Comics that vilified people of color and newspapers featuring the final appearances of Ebony White’s buffoonish antics in The Spirit."⁴⁰ How did consumers during the Jim Crow era make meaning out of the competing codes of strength, justice, and power that these comics offered? And how do the dynamics of identification and participation play out in a medium that asks Black readers to invest in fantastic feats of imagination, some of which marginalize and denigrate their very existence?

Stuart Hall’s concept of negotiated decoding practices can inform this broader speculation about the ways that marginalized readers bring a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements to bear on their appraisal of the words and pictures in comics.⁴¹ Hall describes reading strategies that concede certain elements of the status quo while pushing back against racist and sexist assumptions that are relayed through components of the character and plot. Consider, then, the resistant readers prior to the 1960s who, rather than rejecting a comic altogether, enacted a multitude of story-world adjustments and situated logics with each turn of the page, until they found an interpretive path in which their reading could be rewarded. As Hall writes of this negotiated process, it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules—it operates with exceptions to the rule.⁴²

Resistant readers who went a step further can be found among the group of multiracial junior high school students from New York called the Youthbuilders. They visited Fawcett’s executive editor Will Lieberson in 1945 to make the case against Captain Marvel’s buffoonish sidekick, Steamboat. As Brian Cremins notes in chapter 10 in this volume, the group concluded by holding up an image of the character and declaring, This is not the Negro race, but your one-and-a-half million readers will think it so.⁴³ In another example, Heer’s research uncovered an exchange between an editor at King Features Syndicate and the cartoonist Roy Crane over the appearance of Black characters in two installments of the adventure comic strip Buz Sawyer. The editor cautioned Crane against including such images: Experience has shown us that we have to be awfully careful about any comics in which Negroes appear. The editor continued, The Association for the Advancement of Colored People protests every time they see anything which they consider ridicules the Negro no matter how faintly.⁴⁴ In 1947, a group of black schoolchildren wrote to the Dell Comics editor Oskar Lebeck about the racist caricature of a young Black boy from The New Funnies called Li’l Eightball, which was based on a Universal Studios cartoon. Soon after the complaints and added pressure from the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress, Lebeck discontinued the character.⁴⁵ Rather than accept the hegemonic readings encoded in these problematic representations, Black readers petitioned for changes and insisted that their enjoyment of titles such as Captain Marvel, Buz Sawyer, and The New Funnies should not come at the cost of their dignity. Undeterred by the customs of Caricature Country, they called into question the naming power of the industry and the role of all its creative professionals in shaping attitudes about blackness. Of course, not every comic featuring a racist character generated letter-writing campaigns and visits from civil rights organizations (or resulted in the hiring of more Black cartoonists). Without these examples, though, our picture of U.S. comics history is incomplete.

As a result, the chapters in Desegregating Comics focus on comics from the first half of the twentieth century, with most contributions targeting the apex of productivity during the 1930s–1950s. This volume is broader in scope than my monograph on EC Comics and demonstrates that while the social justice comics (called the preachies) that Bill Gaines published during the Atomic Age were exceptional, the company was not alone in its efforts. Most of the fifteen chapters are arranged chronologically, yet the scholarship abounds with rhizomatic connections between the comics under investigation, their historically situated logics, and the interpretive frameworks used to analyze them. Part 1, on iconographies of race and racism, introduces the disputes over caricature and the adaptation of blackface minstrelsy in comics as one of the collection’s recurring concerns. Contributors model different ways to grapple with the historical significance of racist imagery and the limits of symptomatic readings across the larger body of work produced by Rose O’Neill, George Herriman, and Will Eisner. Part 2, on formal innovation and aesthetic range, contextualizes the artistic choices of African American comics creators such as Matt Baker, Alvin Hollingsworth, Jackie Ormes, and Romare Bearden. Scholars place the debates within Black culture over art vs. propaganda in conjunction with questions about the low cultural status of comics relative to fine art and, in the case of Ormes, investigative journalism. The chapters also highlight elements of craft—the use of line and texture, disruptive layouts, and elements of misdirection—that exemplify the stylistic range of the cartoonists throughout the book.

Part 3, on comics readership and respectability politics, focuses on readers who purchased and shared comics, while also analyzing how these visual narratives influenced public opinion, particularly among Black audiences. Chapters recall the DC boys who put down their bikes to read comics in Gordon Parks’s 1942 photographs, the group of teenagers that visited Fawcett’s New York office, and the comic books left behind on Emmett Till’s bed in Mississippi. An analysis of the single issue of Orrin C. Evans’s All-Negro Comics is used to illustrate what was at stake for an independent African American comic book publisher who wanted to provide an alternative reading experience for Black youth. A closer look at Hollingsworth’s comic strip Kandy reveals how colorism and class conflict within Black communities informed the gendered visual dynamics of the romance-adventure serial. Part 4 scrutinizes key disruptions in genre comics and explores how different storytelling conventions influence the way blackness is conveyed on the page. The trajectory of Neil Knight in the Courier from military pilot to space adventurer expanded the Afrofuturist possibilities of comics, while the depiction of Black couples in Negro Romance encouraged Fawcett to make small but meaningful changes to its romance formula. Other chapters address how the tropes of jungle adventure and cowboy Westerns, in which racial hierarchies are already deeply embedded, become even more complicated when Black characters take on primary