Professor Frances Gateward, along with her co-editor John Jennings, were awarded the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art is the first book to explore not only the diverse range of black characters in comics, but also the multitude of ways that black artists, writers, and publishers have made a mark on the industry. Organized thematically into “panels” in tribute to sequential art published in the funny pages of newspapers, the fifteen original essays take us on a journey that reaches from the African American newspaper comics of the 1930s to the Francophone graphic novels of the 2000s. Even as it demonstrates the wide spectrum of images of African Americans in comics and sequential art, the collection also identifies common character types and themes running through everything from the strip The Boondocks to the graphic novel Nat Turner.
Media Theory and Criticism Professor Wins Major Book Award
February 8, 2016