Black Futurity + Comics
Comics, it has been said, “traffic in stereotypes and fixity.” This insight is meaningful, not just because it was made by John Jennings and Frances Gateward, but it calls our attention about how the visual culture in the United States.
Mark Dery’s Black to the Future (1994)
Since the term was coined in the 1990s, Afrofuturism has been explored across a number of fields, yet the connection to comics has been obscured. Yet, from the beginning comics have been a part of that conversation. Recently as a part of Altered-Worlds: Black Utopia and The Age of Acceleration as part of the New York Live Arts Festival, I participated in an Afrofuturism and Comic Roundtable that sought to bring attention to the real legacy of comics in Afrofuturism.
As a conversation between contemporary creators, it was a great opportunity to talks about the vibrant independent black comic scene. Yet, the history of black comics connects directly to black speculative practice. Thinking about freedom is not shocking, but that place of comics in that conversation is always worth careful reflection. Those comics books that existed before the 1970s are worth considering. In Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics, I do engage with All Negro Comics (1947). Still, there are other characters to consider. The framework for comics Mark Dery offered emphasized black-created and black-drawn was central to his vision of how Afrofuturism eas expressed in comic. That idea suggests a particular sociopolitical framework, it would bar white progressive vision of black people as part of the Afrofuturist canon. This would mean Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Black Panther would not apply.
Such a limitation is not necessary. The transformative precepts of Afrofuturism to not require you to be white, merely to understand the intersection of speculation and liberation garnered from black considerations of modernity. The Afrofuturist mindset can be embraced across any identity. Thus, the impact of comics as means of transformation is worth considering. Tracing those characters opens the door to better understanding how the constructed nature of race in consumer culture. This understand will shed light our current debates about diversity in popular culture by making clear how a culture is made and remade to serve particular ideas. In the end, that realization opens the door to a better understanding of why the potential embodied in more diverse representation matters.
