Sunday, April 18, 2021

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Comics
ISBN: 9781681375618
Pages: 200
Publication Date: June 1, 2021

IT’S LIFE AS I SEE ITBLACK CARTOONISTS IN CHICAGO, 1940–1980

edited by Dan Nadel, essays by Charles Johnson and Ronald Wimberly, cover designed by Kerry James Marshall

$24.95

Between the 1940s and 1980s, Chicago’s Black press—from The Chicago Defender to the Negro Digest to self-published pamphlets—was home to some of the best cartoonists in America. Kept out of the pages of white-owned newspapers, Black cartoonists found space to address the joys, the horrors, and the everyday realities of Black life in America. From Jay Jackson’s anti-racist time travel adventure serial Bungleton Green, to Morrie Turner’s radical mixed-race strip Dinky Fellas, to the Afrofuturist comics of Yaoundé Olu and Turtel Onli, to National Book Award–winning novelist Charles Johnson’s blistering and deeply funny gag cartoons, this is work that has for far too long been excluded and overlooked. Also featuring the work of Tom Floyd, Seitu Hayden, Jackie Ormes, and Grass Green, this anthology accompanies the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition Chicago Comics: 1960 to Now selected and edited by Dan Nadel, and is an essential addition to the history of American comics.

Published in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, on the occasion of Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, June 19–October 3, 2021. Curated by Dan Nadel.

Click to enlarge images

PRAISE

An important and groundbreaking collection, bringing together important voices and biographical context illustrating four decades of Black perspectives on everything from daily life to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the strips will make your jaw drop with the way they bring to life a particular period in history, some of them will make you shake your head with the poignant realization of how little has changed, and some of them will just make you laugh.

—Eve L. Ewing, sociologist and Marvel Comics writer

Nadel’s lush, profound and well-researched volume sheds well-deserved light on some of the most talented, tenacious and sadly unsung, heroes of modern comics.

—Emil Ferris, author of My Favorite Thing is Monsters