The Black Cartoonist Movement and a Renaissance of Comics
Black artists have made significant contributions to cartooning, dating back to pioneers like Henry Jackson Lewis. However, unlike movements like the Bay Area Women’s Comics Movement of the 1970s (marked by anthologies like Wimmen’s Comix) and the Queer Comics Movement of the 1980s (marked by anthologies like Gay Comix) there has been no widely recognized modern movement of Black cartoonists. These art communities developed communal voices, visual language, and aesthetics forged in response to major political turning points. While the legacy of segregation and racism—such as the barriers faced by Orrin Evans when publishing All-Negro Comics in 1947—has contributed to the invisibility of Black communal presence within comics.
Black cartoonists within the history of the Black Press speak to the transatlantic modernist approach to narrative, typified by the intellectual and cultural movements that followed The Great Migration—most notably the Harlem Renaissance. This is the Black Cartoonist Movement. These writers, painters, and intellectuals used humor, drama, and action to develop an aesthetic in syndicated strips like Bob Pious’ The Dopes and Jay Jackson’s Bungleton Green, which reached audiences nationwide. Though we can see this cultural influence in contemporary cartoonists like Tauhid Bondia’s Crabgrass, these traditions also appear in the works of contemporary artists like Kerry James Marshall and Aminah Robinson.
This paper explores the influence of this Black cartoonists movement on the cultural narrative and aesthetic, highlighting the artists who crafted stories of day-to-day life targeting an exclusively Black audience.