Throughout the comic, John Stewart is shown less fighting space aliens than himself. Visually, this is seen in such imagery as page 20 (see Fig. 6), where the inside of John Stewart’s being is shown. Beneath his Black skin and masculine build lies, among other images, his heart has John himself crucified. A Black man is in the position of Jesus, and his Blackness comes not from the outside, but from within his very heart. John Stewart reaffirms his identity even as he is crucified for it. He sees himself not physically as black, but spiritually, raising the question of what makes a person Black and how blackness is experienced.
Mosaic #1 shows W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of double consciousness. The reader is visually shown how John sees himself through the eyes of others. John Stewart is deconstructing his identity within the panels of the comic. Outside of those panels, the advertisements within the comic tell the reader who this character is -- a commodity.
In Fig. 3, a full-page advertisement for basketball player cards is on the left of a full-page comic panel. The ad has a (Black male) basketball player in red doing a layaway. His body language -- legs forming a triangular negative space, one arm with a relaxed hand facing downwards while the other is stretched upward -- is a mirror reflection of John Stewart’s pose as he raises his fist in an act of power, green light emanating around him in glory. The two figures face one another as if deliberately meant to play on one another. If so, does that mean the ad’s tagline of “Good Things Come in Small Packages” applies to John? Is the reader supposed to be reminded that this powerful Black man does not exist -- that John Stewart is but a small package of a man? The struggle of his soul is underplayed when the ad draws attention to John’s physicality, a place Blacks are often visually placed (Johnson 10). In Fig. 7, beside the stunning image of John Stewart’s inner being from Fig. 6 is an ad with the tagline “This kid is having an identity crisis.” Can John Stewart’s struggle be summarized so flippantly? Is that the takeaway the reader is supposed to make, or one the advertisement gives? Lastly, Fig. 8 contains an advertisement for a model rocket. Apparently, the rocket is “Easy to Build…” -- does the same hold true for John Stewart? Is a person so easily built? The comic art would seem to say so. The images of rocket shooting off is analogous to John Stewart flying skyward, pink lines trailing behind him to show his ascent. John’s body mirrors the object on sale. He serves the same purpose as the rocket -- to be consumed after purchase.
Clearly, the placement of these ads creates a metatextual narrative and distract from the narrative of a Black man exploring his identity. The reader is pulled out of the story of this character to see him for the product he is a part of. Such a narrative is a rarity for the time: Kerry Marshall James says when explaining his reasoning for creating his “Rythm Mastr” series that “the market has somehow never been able to sustain a set of black super heroes [sic.] in a way that could capture the imagination” (Art21, “‘Rythm Mastr’: Kerry Marshall James”). It would seem that DC Comics editorial believed this to be true; hence their cancelling of the series. Jones and Hamner confirmed in seperate interviews that DC editorial cancelled the series prematurely at issue 18 despite sales being stronger than the Green Lantern comics starring the white Lanterns (Andrew NDB; Offenberger). John Stewart’s existential crisis of self -- both as a Black man and a human -- is sold short. The character is objectified and with him is identity as a Black man.]]>American comics is a hybrid medium, marrying text and images to tell a narrative. However, within the pages of most American comic narratives is another narrative form -- the advertisement. Michael Ray Charles believes that the concept of blackness as we know it “was linked to early marketing practices, early advertising” (qtd. in “Advertising and Art: Michael Ray Charles”). That is, the advertisements of centuries pass -- ads selling pancake mix or human slaves -- defined what it means to be racially Black today. Comics are an arena where these two concepts meet. The selling of a mass consumer product within a product displaying and dissecting identity is seen in Green Lantern: Mosaic #1.
Throughout the comic, John Stewart is shown less fighting space aliens than himself. Visually, this is seen in such imagery as page 20 (see Fig. 6), where the inside of John Stewart’s being is shown. Beneath his Black skin and masculine build lies, among other images, his heart has John himself crucified. A Black man is in the position of Jesus, and his Blackness comes not from the outside, but from within his very heart. John Stewart reaffirms his identity even as he is crucified for it. He sees himself not physically as black, but spiritually, raising the question of what makes a person Black and how blackness is experienced.
Mosaic #1 shows W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of double consciousness. The reader is visually shown how John sees himself through the eyes of others. John Stewart is deconstructing his identity within the panels of the comic. Outside of those panels, the advertisements within the comic tell the reader who this character is -- a commodity.
In Fig. 3, a full-page advertisement for basketball player cards is on the left of a full-page comic panel. The ad has a (Black male) basketball player in red doing a layaway. His body language -- legs forming a triangular negative space, one arm with a relaxed hand facing downwards while the other is stretched upward -- is a mirror reflection of John Stewart’s pose as he raises his fist in an act of power, green light emanating around him in glory. The two figures face one another as if deliberately meant to play on one another. If so, does that mean the ad’s tagline of “Good Things Come in Small Packages” applies to John? Is the reader supposed to be reminded that this powerful Black man does not exist -- that John Stewart is but a small package of a man? The struggle of his soul is underplayed when the ad draws attention to John’s physicality, a place Blacks are often visually placed (Johnson 10). In Fig. 7, beside the stunning image of John Stewart’s inner being from Fig. 6 is an ad with the tagline “This kid is having an identity crisis.” Can John Stewart’s struggle be summarized so flippantly? Is that the takeaway the reader is supposed to make, or one the advertisement gives? Lastly, Fig. 8 contains an advertisement for a model rocket. Apparently, the rocket is “Easy to Build…” -- does the same hold true for John Stewart? Is a person so easily built? The comic art would seem to say so. The images of rocket shooting off is analogous to John Stewart flying skyward, pink lines trailing behind him to show his ascent. John’s body mirrors the object on sale. He serves the same purpose as the rocket -- to be consumed after purchase.
Clearly, the placement of these ads creates a metatextual narrative and distract from the narrative of a Black man exploring his identity. The reader is pulled out of the story of this character to see him for the product he is a part of. Such a narrative is a rarity for the time: Kerry Marshall James says when explaining his reasoning for creating his “Rythm Mastr” series that “the market has somehow never been able to sustain a set of black super heroes [sic.] in a way that could capture the imagination” (Art21, “‘Rythm Mastr’: Kerry Marshall James”). It would seem that DC Comics editorial believed this to be true; hence their cancelling of the series. Jones and Hamner confirmed in seperate interviews that DC editorial cancelled the series prematurely at issue 18 despite sales being stronger than the Green Lantern comics starring the white Lanterns (Andrew NDB; Offenberger). John Stewart’s existential crisis of self -- both as a Black man and a human -- is sold short. The character is objectified and with him is identity as a Black man.In comics, body diversity speaks to psychological diversity. Sonny is the rough-and-tough rebelling sharecropper with dreams of fighting Jim Crow and white people, and McCoy is the Northern, educated black man among uneducated, bigoted Southerners, offer a variety of possibilities for who a can be a Black man. Most of the items in this exhibit present a black male for all black males. Strange Fruit gives the reader two black men to show a multitude of black male expressions. Two black men do this -- and only two black men.
The central black male figure of this comic -- its main character and the strange fruit of the title -- is not a black male. He is an alien who reads as a black male to the Jim Crow characters and the comic reader. And the only way the alien can be read as Black is from his physical appearance. The character never learns a human language -- only the physics and mathematical equations necessary for him to save Chatterlee (see Fig. 5 and Fig. 6). We know not what he calls himself or what he wants beside a few scattered flashbacks that equate the guns of Chatterlee to space guns. We know not who he is or how he sees himself. Only how others see him (see Green Lantern: Mosaic). And what they see is a black body of colossal proportions. His body is always made to appear large to other characters and sometimes the dimensions of the comic, as seen in Fig. 3 when the alien’s body surpasses the confines of the panels and gutters. The alien takes up space, whether dominating a skyline with his muscled torso and veiny arms as in Fig. 4 or with his long legs reaching the edge of the bound page as in Fig. 5.
The alien is a black body. That is its purpose; Jones has said that “The appearance of The Colossus [sic.] acts as [sic.] a mirror on their [the other characters’] motives” (qtd. in Dietsch). The authorial intent was to have the alien’s black body be a metaphor, yet Jones and Waid ended up relying on visual stereotypes that make the black body inhuman to the reader. One cannot relate to the alien because one does not know who or what the alien is. He is only his appearance -- an appearance that is stereotypical -- the unintelligible black muscular man. Sonny, as the Nat Turner uncouth with a heart of gold, and McCoy, the portly intellectual of diminutive stature and authority, are equally stereotypical. Even a non-character perpetuate visual stereotypes, as seen in the picaninny character in Fig. 2. Jones and Waid use various types of visual and narrative stereotypes of black bodies in a story about black oppression. The black bodies are diverse but the type of diversity is reductive rather than inclusive. Strange Fruit serves as a reminder that quantity and breadth of bodies does not equate to qualitative and deep representations of oppressed identities. ]]>Out of all of the items in this exhibit, Strange Fruit has the most body diversity. The main black male humans of the comic are Sonny and Mr. McCoy. As seen in Fig. 4, Sonny is lean but with some muscle definition, as befitting a physical laborer on a plantation farm. His hair is free and goes in many directions and his beard is full. His clothes are too large for him, as seen from the blue shirt spilling over from his pants and how he pulls at his trousers and excess fabric stretches across his leg. Mr. McCoy, the Northern engineer sent to Chatterlee from D.C. to help save the town, is noticeably different from Sonny. Fig. 6 shows him to be shorter, rounder in body, with neck fat. He wears glasses, a visual shorthand signifying his higher intelligence to that of the other recurring characters who lack glasses and the knowledge to save the town from the flood. Furthermore, his pencil moustache and formal attire of a bow-tie, white shirt, plaid brown suit, and hat, put him in stark contrast to Sonny and most of the residents of poor Chatterlee.
In comics, body diversity speaks to psychological diversity. Sonny is the rough-and-tough rebelling sharecropper with dreams of fighting Jim Crow and white people, and McCoy is the Northern, educated black man among uneducated, bigoted Southerners, offer a variety of possibilities for who a can be a Black man. Most of the items in this exhibit present a black male for all black males. Strange Fruit gives the reader two black men to show a multitude of black male expressions. Two black men do this -- and only two black men.
The central black male figure of this comic -- its main character and the strange fruit of the title -- is not a black male. He is an alien who reads as a black male to the Jim Crow characters and the comic reader. And the only way the alien can be read as Black is from his physical appearance. The character never learns a human language -- only the physics and mathematical equations necessary for him to save Chatterlee (see Fig. 5 and Fig. 6). We know not what he calls himself or what he wants beside a few scattered flashbacks that equate the guns of Chatterlee to space guns. We know not who he is or how he sees himself. Only how others see him (see Green Lantern: Mosaic). And what they see is a black body of colossal proportions. His body is always made to appear large to other characters and sometimes the dimensions of the comic, as seen in Fig. 3 when the alien’s body surpasses the confines of the panels and gutters. The alien takes up space, whether dominating a skyline with his muscled torso and veiny arms as in Fig. 4 or with his long legs reaching the edge of the bound page as in Fig. 5.
The alien is a black body. That is its purpose; Jones has said that “The appearance of The Colossus [sic.] acts as [sic.] a mirror on their [the other characters’] motives” (qtd. in Dietsch). The authorial intent was to have the alien’s black body be a metaphor, yet Jones and Waid ended up relying on visual stereotypes that make the black body inhuman to the reader. One cannot relate to the alien because one does not know who or what the alien is. He is only his appearance -- an appearance that is stereotypical -- the unintelligible black muscular man. Sonny, as the Nat Turner uncouth with a heart of gold, and McCoy, the portly intellectual of diminutive stature and authority, are equally stereotypical. Even a non-character perpetuate visual stereotypes, as seen in the picaninny character in Fig. 2. Jones and Waid use various types of visual and narrative stereotypes of black bodies in a story about black oppression. The black bodies are diverse but the type of diversity is reductive rather than inclusive. Strange Fruit serves as a reminder that quantity and breadth of bodies does not equate to qualitative and deep representations of oppressed identities.The three title pages here show three different spaces in three different lights. Fig. 1 shows a black figure aiming and loading a bazooka weapon at an urban water tower. Without the following panels providing context for this page, the reader is to assume this black male is conducting urban warfare on the communal water supply. For all intents and purposes, this person is conducting warfare on a source the community is dependent on -- a source the community does not control, but the bureaucracy does. Water is essential for life, but the distribution and management of such vital necessities in urban communities is relegated to the hands of a few (historically and still often white) politicians. Black people have and still do not (if Flint, Michigan’s water epidemic is any indication) live in areas where they have access or control to safe life necessities like water, organic fresh food, clean air, and so on. The water tower is not an animate threat to the black man aiming a military weapon at it, but what the tower represents -- a lack of control, racial equity, and autonomy -- is threatening.
With Fig. 2, a more traditional American comics scene is shown: a group of black figures are in motion, from the drum player in the foreground to the swinging mass to the viewer’s left to the flying figure to the right. Once again, the scene takes place in an urban environment. This time, the viewer is not only the street, but looking upwards. We are behind the action and cannot directly see the faces of the figures. Much like with Warhol, we are meant to see these figures as bodies in action and to see the scene. We see debris from the ground and the central building is partially demolished, showing a figure on the inside. The scene is chaotic, filled with movement and bodies that the viewer is a part of. There is an inclusion the viewer feels here that is absent in Fig. 3. There, the viewer looks down from the lighting equipment of a TV news set. The black female anchor sits behind her desk, reporting, as other bodies crowd the bottom of the page. There is plenty of empty space and no movement. The lights and TV equipment dwarf the human figures. There is a great contrast between the two images. In the former, black people are in abundance, taking up space and performing actions, but out on the dark, urban streets near a less-than-pristine neighborhood. In the latter, only one black figure sits still, her body contained, and is dwarfed by the machinery and professional environment. The social capital of the space -- the dark dirty urban streets versus the white-collar newsroom -- decreases with the presence of black bodies. Conversely, black bodies respond to the prestige and lightness (see: whiteness) of the space they occupy (also seen in Michael Ray Charles). From these images in Rythm Mastr, it can be surmised that black bodies and physical space affect one another.
]]>No work in this exhibit takes up space like Kerry James Marshall’s Rythm Mastr series. These works occupy multiple spaces at the same time. This is a fine artwork (each artwork is owned by the Museum of Modern Art) whose medium is a comic newspaper strip (Art21, “Rythm Mastr”: Kerry James Marshall). These works also address multiple types of spaces. Black bodies warp space. Black body warps space in a way a white body does not -- the choice of Jeremy Grey as the hero of Captain Confederacy over a black male lead and the alien lead of Strange Fruit are proof of that. This is psychological space, though. The interaction between blackness and physical space within a narrative is not as pronounced. Rythm Mastr offers insights into both types of spaces.
The three title pages here show three different spaces in three different lights. Fig. 1 shows a black figure aiming and loading a bazooka weapon at an urban water tower. Without the following panels providing context for this page, the reader is to assume this black male is conducting urban warfare on the communal water supply. For all intents and purposes, this person is conducting warfare on a source the community is dependent on -- a source the community does not control, but the bureaucracy does. Water is essential for life, but the distribution and management of such vital necessities in urban communities is relegated to the hands of a few (historically and still often white) politicians. Black people have and still do not (if Flint, Michigan’s water epidemic is any indication) live in areas where they have access or control to safe life necessities like water, organic fresh food, clean air, and so on. The water tower is not an animate threat to the black man aiming a military weapon at it, but what the tower represents -- a lack of control, racial equity, and autonomy -- is threatening.
With Fig. 2, a more traditional American comics scene is shown: a group of black figures are in motion, from the drum player in the foreground to the swinging mass to the viewer’s left to the flying figure to the right. Once again, the scene takes place in an urban environment. This time, the viewer is not only the street, but looking upwards. We are behind the action and cannot directly see the faces of the figures. Much like with Warhol, we are meant to see these figures as bodies in action and to see the scene. We see debris from the ground and the central building is partially demolished, showing a figure on the inside. The scene is chaotic, filled with movement and bodies that the viewer is a part of. There is an inclusion the viewer feels here that is absent in Fig. 3. There, the viewer looks down from the lighting equipment of a TV news set. The black female anchor sits behind her desk, reporting, as other bodies crowd the bottom of the page. There is plenty of empty space and no movement. The lights and TV equipment dwarf the human figures. There is a great contrast between the two images. In the former, black people are in abundance, taking up space and performing actions, but out on the dark, urban streets near a less-than-pristine neighborhood. In the latter, only one black figure sits still, her body contained, and is dwarfed by the machinery and professional environment. The social capital of the space -- the dark dirty urban streets versus the white-collar newsroom -- decreases with the presence of black bodies. Conversely, black bodies respond to the prestige and lightness (see: whiteness) of the space they occupy (also seen in Michael Ray Charles). From these images in Rythm Mastr, it can be surmised that black bodies and physical space affect one another.