The Colors of Jay Jackson’s Colorless Future

I’m very happy to be headed to the Comics Studies Society’s conference in East Lansing, Michigan this week. CSS posted its call-for-papers last winter:

“Since the turn of the century, comics have considered the contested nature of American identity. Comic strips, comic books, and editorial cartoons featured stereotypes and caricatures that contributed to non-white people’s marginalization in the United States and advanced narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. The weight of this visual history often obscures the moments when artists, writers, and publishers fought against the regressive imaginary and offered something new. From the dynamic imagination of African American cartoonists such as Jay Jackson’s Bungleton Green in the 1940s to contemporary comic innovators such as C. Spike Trotman’s Iron Circus Comics, the urge to create diverse comics has a long legacy.

“Given this history, we celebrate the resistance, resilience, and resolution demonstrated in the comic medium. As we approach the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, it’s a time to reflect on the progress made and the work that still lies ahead. We recognize that the revolution will be drawn and celebrate the artists, scholars, and communities that embrace the comic medium to do so. We celebrate an expanding literature in comic studies that highlights how those groups, often framed at the margin, have moved to the center of the cultural conversation. This is achieved not only through the celebration of characters that reflect them but also by seizing the imagined affordance of the comic form to elevate, transform, and inspire new conversation. Building on the dynamic comic scholarship that recognizes how readers leveraged the imagined affordance of the comic page to create new worlds and challenge old paradigms. 

“We invite comics scholars from around the world to submit proposals for the 8th annual Comics Studies Society that engage in topics pertaining to the transformative potential of comics.

“Some possible topics:

Graphic representations of social justice movementsBiography, liberation, and comicsContemporary African-American cartoonistsContemporary webcomics and identityFandoms and identityTransmedia storytellingSatire and political cartooning Afrofuturism in legacy and new media textsRecovering lost voices(Re-)narrating the pastComics production and communityThe social and political work of comicsComics and/as communityTransnational comics productionComics journalism and protestComics engaged with ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, DRC, and NicaraguaComics engaging with the history and legacy of ethnic violenceHidden legacies of transnational creatorsSite-specific readings of comic texts

By coincidence, I include both Jay Jackson and C. Spike Trotman in my forthcoming book The Color of Paper. I also considered excerpting a section on the Legion of Superheroes, but I’m glad I didn’t because I’m now appearing on the “Race and Rep” panel with Dr. Gabrielle Lyle who’s writing on that topic. George Herriman was tempting too, though that was before I taught Krazy Kat for a modernist poetry class. Ultimately though, I submitted this abstract:

“In 1944, Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos, Jay Jackson’s weekly Saturday comic strip in the Chicago Defender, featured a 41-week narrative set one hundred years in the future on a new continent where Green people subjugate White people through Jim Crow laws. While Jackson’s plot directly parodies his contemporary U.S., because the strip was published in black-and-white, Jackson also uses the ambiguities of color and racial designations to heighten his critique. His characters include a “brown boy” named Bud; a “White youth” named Jon; Lotta the “Colored mayor of Memphis”; an unnamed “Yellow man” accompanying the mayor; and a range of Green people, including a “Green girl” named Vertina and a pro-White “militant Green man” named “Red Greenman.” Jackson visually distinguishes Black characters through sometimes ambiguous crosshatching, but otherwise all characters are the identical color of the newsprint. Green and White skin are both light gray or, in a recent 2021 reprint, actually white. The tensions between verbal and visual racial designations further intensify due to the racial misnomers, since White skin is not white, Black skin is not black, yet Green skin is (apparently but unverifiably) green. Jackson also terms White characters “colorless” and “chalkies,” which do not suggest the actual color of White skin, but highlight the incongruities of white and Whiteness and black and Blackness. While Jackson’s plot directly critiques Black-and-White racial inequalities, his use of the black-and-white comics medium offers a fundamental challenge to color-designated racial categories overall.”

I’m in the process of finalizing my presentation slides, which should give at least some sense of the talk: