In IT’S LIFE AS I SEE IT: BLACK CARTOONISTS IN CHICAGO, 1940-1980 (New York Review Comics, 200 pp., $24.95), Charles Johnson’s opening essay alone is worth the price of admission. Johnson is best known as a philosopher and the author of novels including “Middle Passage” — but a cartoonist? That was news to me. In “My Life as a Cartoonist” — which introduces the anthology, edited by Dan Nadel, and which spotlights nine creators, including Johnson himself — he writes that the only serious disagreement he ever had with his father was when he announced at age 15 that he wanted to be an artist. “Chuck,” Johnson recounts his father explaining, after some seconds of silence, “they don’t let Black people do that. You need to think of something else.” Johnson declares that his father’s words have haunted him his entire life. “If I couldn’t draw or create,” he thought, “I didn’t want to live.”
Encouraged (improbably) by the teacher of his two-year cartooning correspondence course, Johnson rapidly became a prolific artist. His first paid illustrations appeared in a Chicago magic company catalog when he was 17, and all manner of comics, cartoons and drawings quickly followed in venues like The Chicago Tribune, Jet and Ebony. In his 20s, Johnson produced the book “Black Humor,” a compilation of single-panel gag cartoons reflecting the history and culture of Black America, inspired by an Amiri Baraka talk, and even hosted a PBS how-to-draw show called “Charlie’s Pad.”
Nadel’s book takes its title from an installment of “Black Humor” in which a Black painter displays an all-black canvas to a white patron. “It’s Life as I See It” is an unusually rich collection, with work that cuts across formats, from traditional newspaper strips to independent or self-published underground and art comics like Turtel Onli’s dynamic abstract story lines in his own Future Funk periodical. Some figures are better known, like the pioneering Jackie Ormes (the subject of an eponymous full-length biography, subtitled “The First African American Woman Cartoonist”), while others, like Onli, are obscure.
What is clear here is that Chicago’s Black publishing world played a profound role as a platform for Black creativity, enabling a rigorous comics culture to emerge. Perhaps most significant in this regard was The Chicago Defender, the newspaper founded in 1905 that actively advocated for the Great Migration. Jay Jackson’s weird and weirdly mesmerizing 1944 sci-fi action series “Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos,” which takes place in 2044 in a “new world” ruled by green people who discriminate harshly against whites, hails from its pages; so too does Morrie Turner’s “Dinky Fellas,” a slice-of-life four-panel daily gag strip often compared to “Peanuts,” starring Black and white kids who muse about integration, among other hot-button topics. The Defender served the Black population moving from the American South to Chicago; in one memorable Turner set piece from 1964, a Black boy walking down the street doesn’t even notice when his white friends yell “BOO,” but when one tries “MISSISSIPPI” he jumps in the air with fright.
Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s WAKE: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF WOMEN-LED SLAVE REVOLTS (Simon & Schuster, 208 pp., $29.99) is a recovery project of a different sort: It dramatizes Hall’s search for any evidence she can find of female slave rebellion, across centuries of archival documents. The details are often tantalizing, heartbreaking and scarce. And while Hall (a lawyer and historian) does present a chapter on her grandmother Harriet, born into slavery, who wanted to stay in Omaha in 1913 to fight the Klan while her husband urged a move to Chicago, the most searing narratives locate us in uprisings in colonial New York City and on a 1769 English slave ship. “Wake” imagines — which is to say, it scripts and visualizes — the stories of the women Hall finds in archives, about whom she knows only small bits of information from incomplete records. She positions this as trying to do a service to the dead: “All I can do for them is imagine their story.” Martínez’s black-and-white drawings carry enough detail to reconstruct these lives but look loose enough to feel evocative and poetic.
“Wake” is especially powerful when treating the visual culture of slavery, such as the infamous, often-reproduced 1787 Brookes Diagram, which displays the maximum number of slaves allowed by regulation for stowage in horrifically packed ship quarters. Martínez and Hall reprint and counter the diagram, offering panels of individual faces and bodies, aiming to restore humanity to those previously illustrated as cargo. As Hall reports, there was a revolt on one in 10 slave ships; and the more women aboard, the more likely a revolt. “Wake,” then, is operating in the wake of slavery, and in a state of being awake to the past, a process Hall frames as both devastating and grounding.
When I first started FACTORY SUMMERS (Drawn & Quarterly, 152 pp., $22.95), by the French Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle, the phrase that kept coming to mind was “aggressively modest.” Was Delisle, by turning to his teenage job at a pulp and paper mill, just scraping around for more stories, having already published a slew of celebrated comics travelogues (starting with the riveting “Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea” in 2005)? This slim volume really grew on me, though: It’s a poignant, understated book that avoids overexplaining (except bits on machinery and how paper is made), allowing the reader to linger in the gaps across vignettes. Some of these quiet episodes are quite lovely, especially those limned at the edges with mourning. The gulf between Delisle and his divorced father, for instance, also a mill employee, is vast; they rarely see each other, even when working in the same building. The break room scenes, in which the young Delisle is silent, often center on sex (in surprising ways; I felt jolted out of a reverie by their frank, explicit content) and are reported with a keen ear. “Factory Summers” is the key to Delisle’s nonfiction oeuvre: It shows his growing curiosity, in those formative years, both about how things function structurally and about people — and how he learned to listen to them. Its light touch makes a big impact.
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