For the Record: Mark Thomas Gibson's Comics Art and (De)Crying US History

Mark Thomas Gibson is a Miami-born Black artist, professor, and self-described American history buff based in Philadelphia. Working in and across artistic media, including drawing, painting, print, sculpture, and hand-drawn animation, Gibson presents his satirical vision of a dystopian America roiled by racist hate and political violence. Rather than dragging us into the doomsday depths of an apocalyptic nihilism, however, Gibson's work invites us to reflect on current events on the national and global political stage and to reimagine how we can collectively drive systemic change in pursuit of the common good. This presentation will examine how Gibson draws upon and expands a popular tradition of "black pulp," from All-Negro Comics (1947) to Milestone Comics (founded in 1993), bringing these visual codes and politics into productive conversation with the history of western art and its traditional hierarchies/politics of taste. In his comics-form "artist books," Some Monsters Loom Large (2016) and Early Retirement (2017), as in his more recent Town Crier series, which unfold as a series of large-scale political cartoons-as-paintings, Gibson plays with the visual and narrative conventions of both political caricature and comic-book fantasies in order to reverse the racist whitewashing of US history, as well as to expose the exclusionary--and predominately white--practices of the gallery and museum. This paper offers close readings of central works in Gibson's fast-evolving practice, revealing the comics/art continuum as a fertile ground for collective activism and political consciousness now.