I’ve spent the past month shilling a project by me and Nick Dragotta (please preorder Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil one-shot, Lunar code, before 9/8! on sale 10/1!) but the October release I’m most excited about is the release of All-Negro Comics: 75th Anniversary Edition from Image Comics in late October/early November in a new softcover edition.
Three quarters of a century ago, Orrin C. Evans lead a team of cartoonists to create the first comic book anthology of original Black characters created by Black talent, with the expressed purpose of entertaining while rejecting harmful stereotypes and pushing boundaries in the industry. This was only 8 years after Action Comics #1, 6 years after Captain America #1 and a whole 19 years before Black Panther hit the pages of Fantastic Four.
All-Negro Comics #1 should be among those revered moments in comic book history, but the original print run was quickly removed from newsstands and faded into obscurity, remaining largely unknown for 75 years…until now.
All-Negro Comics 75th Anniversary Edition (an Eisner Award-winning collection) preserves that history for generations to come, containing All-Negro Comics #1, in full and digitally remastered for clarity, several essays for historical context and contemporary reflection, as well as new stories by Black writers and artists of today, featuring the original characters.
I first wrote about the project back in 2010, and I’ve been hoping for a reprint of it ever since. From the moment I heard about it, I knew it was special…and out of reach. There were scraps online, roughly scanned or photographed panels from a pretty rugged edition, but nothing resembling a proper cover to cover scan. It was a book I knew about but figured I would never see, a lost bit of Black history. I can tell looking back at the old post that I was really looking for something to connect some dots for me, and this book felt like it would have been a help, if I could find a copy.
Fortunately, editor Chris Robinson is way smarter than me. He went out and fulfilled what I’d been dreaming about. He ran a Kickstarter to put together a nice hardcover. The new Image Comics edition is an affordable softcover version of that project. He commissioned a few new tales alongside the old ones, and I even got to write an essay for the project, “Hip-Hop and Comic Books was My Genesis.”
The reprint of All-Negro Comics isn’t my project, not exactly, but I really do feel weirdly proud and thrilled that it’s coming out. I think it’s something you should pay attention to. I tabled at Cape & Cowl Con in the Bay Area a couple weekends ago, and brought the All-Negro Comics hardcover with me to show people and try to talk the book up a bit while selling comics. I live in Oakland, Berkeley is just over there. This is Black History Country, you know what I mean? And I was still surprised and thrilled at just how into the book people seemed to be, how energized people sounded. It’s a remarkable project.
If you work at a library or school especially, please check this book out. I spoke with people who are a part of various local library systems and they all saw the vision, but every voice helps in a chorus.
I’ve got some preview pages courtesy of Chris to close this out, and in lieu of a proper conclusion, here’s a bit from my essay that may help convince you:
The point about artists really sticks with me, though. The original sin of comics is the exploitation of the people that make them, and the American comics industry has lurched toward and away from different levels of fairness ever since. All-Negro Comics #1 was meant to open doors that I like to think are getting closer to wide open now. Today, the playing field has leveled some, though of course not all the way. But still, a lot of artists who would’ve once been marginalized by the gatekeepers in their chosen field have found an audience of people who are eager to hear what they have to say, and some have gone on to incredible success, by speaking directly to the people who are eager to be spoken to. In a very real way, All-Negro Comics was meant to do a very similar thing.
All-Negro Comics: America’s First Black Comic Book (ISBN: 9781534331150, Lunar Code 0825IM0457) will be available at local comic book shops on Wednesday, October 22 and independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indigo, and Waterstones on Tuesday, November 4.
I work for a city library (in a smaller, more public-facing role) and I just submitted the title for consideration to be added to the catalog; I hope that they do.