Broken Frontier

Other Heroes: African American comics creators, characters and archetypes is on display now until June 30, 2007 at the JSU Liberal Arts Gallery, Dollye M.E. Robinson Liberal Arts Building, Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi. The show, curated by Damian Duffy and Professor John Jennings, is made possible by The Jackson State University Art Department, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Research Board, the UIUC African-American Studies and Research Program, and Eye Trauma Comix.  Duffy sat down with Broken Frontier for a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion about questions of race and comics.  Last week we chatted with Duffy about African-Americans in the industry.  This week, we discuss the Other Heroes exhibit.

BROKEN FRONTIER:  What kinds of comics are spotlighted in the exhibit?  Would you say that there are subjects of particular concern to African-American comics creators?

DAMIAN DUFFY:  Other Heroes is an exhibit about African-American comics creators, characters and archetypes. So that means there’s work by black comics creators and work by comics creators of other races about black characters or African-American issues. There’s also illustrations, painting, installation and photography work that isn’t actually sequential art, but references comics to talk about racial representation.

For example, there’s Dann Tincher’s illustration, Money By Any Means, which portrays Ebony White from Eisner’s The Spirit rapping 50 Cent lyrics. There’s Patina Edochie’s photographs, which anthropomorphize post-Katrina New Orleans as a Mardi Gras mask inspired super heroine. (Right: Katrina Hero by Patina Edochie)

But at the same time there’s original artwork from Hardware by Denys Cowan & Prentis Rollins, and pencil drawings of Black Lightning from Trevor Von Eeden. There’s pages of Shepherd Hendrix’s art from Stagger Lee and prints of Spike’s webcomic Templar, AZ. There are superhero comics, fantasy comics, crime comics, political comics, editorial comics, and newspaper comic strips. Excerpts from graphic novels and sketches from indy comics.

So, it’s not quite what you think, this art show. The work and its concerns are very diverse. Some is action, some is romance, some is politics. Other Heroes is not just about race, it’s also about diversity. And part of that diversity is expressed in the huge spectrum of media and messages represented in the artwork. That being said, there are some common threads in the artwork in Other Heroes. There is a big focus on the politics of race, and the way race effects identity. Bringing socio-political double standards to light and arguing for social equality are recurring themes in much of the work. In some cases, it’s an attempt at equality of representation, filling the void for strong three-dimensional African-American protagonists to stand next to the many white comics heroes. Other work, like Keith Knights’ (Th)ink pieces or Lance Tooks’ Miscegenation of Life confront issues of racial politics more overtly.

(Right: Page 3 from Miscegenation of Life by Lance Tooks)

But that’s just some of the work. Ken Patterson’s Confused Minds is a funny true slice of life comic strip about relationships. M. Rasheed’s Monsters 101 is kind of a schoolyard fairy tale. Eric Battle’s book illustrations are fantastically cool drawings of vampires. There are a lot of different things going on both in terms of visuals and subtext.

BF:  Why have an exhibit devoted to African-American comics creators?  Have other recent exhibitions of comic art excluded African-Americans?  And beyond that, would you say there's something special to be accomplished by focusing the spotlight on black creators?

DD:  Well one of our particular inspirations for both Other Heroes and Out of Sequence was the Masters of American Comics exhibition in 2005. I’m not a big fan of canon building, and that’s what the show was trying to do. They ended up with a uniformly male and, with the exception of George Herriman, uniformly white group of artists. I don’t know, I have a lot of problems with that show. We went up to the Milwaukee mounting of Masters, and it was just… inert. And to make a Jack Kirby page inert, it was weird.

Anyway, Masters, that was a motivator for John and me as curators.

In the larger sense, I think an exhibit of African American comics creators helps balance things. I mean, historically, black characters in mainstream comics… well, the black characters in all of American popular culture really, have been less than three dimensional. And shows like this one can help break down those caricatures, the barriers between people those caricatures represent.

But if you’re talking about race, and then you curate a show where the artists are chosen just based on race, that turns into something really contradictory for me. Which is why we made the focus of the show not just artists’ races, but more the concept of race. I did a little intro comic about that for the catalog: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/eyetrauma/ohcatintro/

I also think it’s important to have an exhibit devoted to African-American comics creators for the same reason it’s important to put comics in a gallery in the first place: to show people something they probably didn’t know was there. At the Other Heroes opening at Jackson State University, I can’t tell you how many people told me they didn’t know there were comics like this, or they didn’t know comics could do that.

BF:  Does the setting, in Jackson, Mississippi, give special meaning to the Other Heroes exhibit?

DD:  Yes, and that gets to the “something special” accomplished by focusing the spotlight on black creators. Jackson State University is historically black, so bringing a show there that presents positive representations of African-Americans and shows the work of talented artists of color, that can be inspirational. We had some high school students from Jim Hill High School come check out the show the morning before the opening, and they were really interested in it, very engaged, both in the art and the subject matter. Kyle Baker’s images from Nat Turner vol. 2, for example, work both as a skillful pieces of drawing and a quick and powerful history lesson.

I think the show is a good way to open up people’s eyes to the possibilities of comics. The art faculty at JSU were saying they thought the pieces would be really inspirational to their students as well; I think that’s why they’ve extend to the show to the end of June.

Jackson was also a homecoming for John, who grew up near Jackson, and is a JSU alum and former faculty member.

And having the show open in Mississippi is the reason behind the Other Heroes catalog. We’re selling the catalog online through print-on-demand site Lulu.com. We’re donating all of our proceeds past printing costs to Scholarship America, for the charity’s Disaster Relief Fund, which helps low income Gulf Coast students displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita seek post-secondary education.

   

BF:  The whole Other Heroes exhibit is suffused with such a strong energy of good humor and optimism!  What is our greatest reason for such a positive outlook?

DD:  Because comics are awesome!

I mean, I think right now is one of the biggest opportunities for comics to grow as a medium, to become something bigger than the economic boundaries of the direct market or movie tie-ins. The medium in America is becoming way less insular, even if certain segments of the industry are not. Getting people to look at comics as art isn’t as much like pulling teeth as it used to be. Once you get to the point where that isn’t even an argument anymore, where you don’t have to keep proving to people that comics is art, that’s when things start happening and the medium starts evolving in really exciting ways. And, if we’re not at that point yet, we’re very close. There’s a lot of untapped potential in comics that’s only now beginning to open up, and that’s a reason for some serious enthusiasm.

And Spider-Man 3’s coming out! Venom with the snarly teeth! It’s a great time to be alive and geeky!

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Other Heroes: African American comics creators, characters and archetypes is on display now until June 30, 2007 at the JSU Liberal Arts Gallery, Dollye M.E. Robinson Liberal Arts Building, Jackson State University, Jackson, MS. The show was curated by Damian Duffy and Professor John Jennings, and made possible by The Jackson State University Art Department, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Research Board, the UIUC African-American Studies and Research Program, and Eye Trauma Comix.

Damian Duffy is the editor-in-chief and head writer of Eye Trauma Comix. He writes and letters a lot of comics on their website, http://www.eyetrauma.net. He and co-curator John Jennings have a graphic novel called The Hole: Consumer Culture coming out from  Front 40 Press in Winter, 2008.

To learn more about Other Heroes and Damian and John’s October 2008 comics art exhibition Out of Sequence, go  here. To see pictures from the Other Heroes exhibition go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/otherheroes/