Note: This event will be in person and also live-streamed. To receive a Zoom link for this seminar, please email Aylin Malcolm. For information about the Workshop in the History of Material Texts, please visit the website.
All-Negro Comics (1947) is generally regarded as the first comic book produced by and for African Americans. The man behind it, Philadelphia journalist Orrin C. Evans, imagined a sustained run with global distribution. But only one copy was ever produced. Understanding how and why All-Negro Comics was so short-lived requires us to examine the intersection of race and racism with the material contexts of comic book production and distribution in the 1940s. This talk aims to build on a growing scholarly literature around the history of race and comics by looking at the process by which All-Negro Comics might have made its way, in Evans’ words, from the “brush stroke(s) and pen line(s)” of its artists into the hands of readers.