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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.
The Workshop in the History of Material Texts is a weekly seminar that features scholars presenting a wide variety of research in book history, bibliography, manuscript studies, history of reading, publication and printing, and related topics.
Sean Quimby is the Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, where he oversees the Jay I. Kislak Center, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Library at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and the University Archives and Records Center. He received his training in the history of technology as a Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware (M.A., 2000) and in library and information science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (M.L.I.S., 2006). Broadly speaking, his research interests lie in the modern archives, and the conceptual and technical challenges that they pose to researchers and to the institutions that steward them. He began his career at Stanford University, where he oversaw the papers of polymath and technological utopian Buckminster Fuller. Between 2014 and 2020, he was the Director of Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where he worked to acquire, preserve and activate media-rich archives, such as those of counterculture icon and radio host Bob Fass, Dance Theater of Harlem founder Arthur Mitchell, artist, musician, and Talking Heads front-man David Byrne, and playwright Tony Kushner. An experienced fund-raiser, he has led numerous projects funded by private donations as well as grant-giving bodies like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and Council on Library and Information Resources.
Image: All-Negro Comics, no. 1 (June, 1947), Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.