Imagine a world to come when mysterious green people subject whites to Jim Crow segregation and a multiracial duo of time travelers launches an uprising. Or conjure a view of the 1960s when race riots became the source of children’s inventions or romantic entreaties. Chicago’s African American cartoonists have created such tales for decades, and their often neglected work is now receiving wider attention.
“Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” is on view through October 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago at 220 E. Chicago.
It’s Life as I See It can be purchased through the Museum’s online shop.
“One of the lessons of Lawrence Lariar’s course was avoiding stereotypes,” Johnson said. “There used to be very vicious stereotypes of Jewish, Black, and Irish people, and he was a liberal Jewish man who said, ‘Don’t do that.’ And I remember cartoons that were in Muhammad Speaks, the cartoonist would always draw white characters with tails, like devils, and I looked at that and thought, ‘Well, OK, that’s the Nation Of Islam, that’s what they talk about and how they depict things,’ and I don’t do that. I know lots of different kinds of people who are good people.”
“At one point, I got wind that some people at the paper didn’t like my use of grammar, Black English,” Hayden said. “There was not even the term Ebonics at that time. Looking back, I would have used more commas and apostrophes. But I got zero feedback as far as what people thought of the strip, I was just doing it.”
“My work is not about the future,” Olu said. “It’s about the past, present, and potential future and other times in the here and now. Retrofuturism goes back to the past. Kind of like Star Wars, the introduction to Star Wars [“A long time ago, in a galaxy far away . . .”] is where my images originate. These are African kinds of concepts that may be right now in other dimensions, but not necessarily the future. I use other living modalities, usually focusing on African American images in the cosmos, not necessarily just the future.”
Some of the cartoonists in the exhibit and compilation built reputations through working across different media. Johnson remains committed to drawing but became far better known for his words rather than his images. His novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award in 1990 and along with myriad accolades for his fiction and nonfiction, he directed the creative writing program at the University of Washington. Kerry James Marshall contributed his recent comic strips to the exhibit and created the book’s cover, although it’s his mastery as a painter that is globally acclaimed. Olu retired from teaching but she previously balanced her scholastic duties along with cartooning—drawing editorial cartoons weekly for the Crusader Newspaper Group—with drumming and displaying her artwork at the Bridgeport Art Center (she is regularly part of its Third Friday series).
Chicago Black cartoonists in “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now”
A sampling of images from some of the cartoonists on display in the “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” exhibition as well as the book It’s Life as I See It.
