Years before he wrote his National Book Award-winning novel Middle
Passage, Charles Johnson created these sidesplitting and subversive gag
comics about Black life in America, now collected for the first time in
nearly half a century.
Before Charles Johnson found fame as a novelist and won the National
Book Award for Middle Passage in 1991, he was a cartoonist, and a very
good one. Taught via correspondence course by the comics editor Lawrence
Lariar, mentored by the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti, and
inspired by the call of the poet Amiri Baraka to celebrate and depict
Black life in America, Johnson crafted some of the fiercest and funniest
cartoons of the twentieth century.
Reimagining the gag comic as a powerful and incendiary tool, Johnson
tackled America's mid-century afflictions--segregation, inner-city
poverty, police brutality, and white supremacy--by craftily subverting
stale gag tropes. He populated them with bullet-dodging Black Panthers,
doubt-filled Klansmen, militant babies, selfserving politicians, and
complacent suburban liberals.
This collection, Johnson's first in nearly fifty years, brings together
work from across his career: college newspaper gags, selections from his
books Black Humor and Half-Past Nation Time, his unpublished
manuscript Lumps in the Melting Pot, and uncollected pieces. Taken
together, this volume reveals Johnson as long overdue for appreciation
as a cartoonist of the first order.
