![]() ![]() R: March on Washington, 1963 by Alvin Carl Hollingsworth Courtesy of IDW Publishing ![]() Hired almost begrudgingly because of economic pressures and the need for cheap but talented labor, they created at the boundaries of representation – not only in terms of who was depicted in what race-based idioms within the comics themselves, but also in terms of who was tasked with creating them. In almost every case, these artists worked all but unsung, separate from their white colleagues and editors. ![]() ![]() Quattro is correct of course, this convention afflicts social discourse at every level - but when it comes to the life and work of the 18 Black men whose biographies, challenges, and accomplishments in the postwar American comics industry, making those distinctions and contexts clear is even more salient. One of the first questions asked when meeting a stranger is, ‘So, what do you do for a living?’ as if the entirety of a person’s hopes and dreams, tragedies and triumphs, beliefs and experience, is contained in their answer.” There is a tendency to reduce a life to what a person does for money. In the introduction to his essential new title, Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books, author Ken Quattro writes in part, “My goal with each person profiled in this book is to provide context for their lives, the environment that formed them. ![]()
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