In the mid-twentieth century, American newspapers were thriving, and the funnies pages were often filled with comic strips that we still recognize today, with plenty of reprint books available. But the newspapers that were aimed at the African-American community had their own comics, and these were unseen by most of America and almost never collected into books. About Comics is changing that with three new books.
To start with, we’ve got two books from the man Langston Hughes called “Negro America’s favorite cartoonist,” the great Ollie Harrington (a.k.a. Ol Harrington and Oliver W. Harrington, currently the subject of an exhibit at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum.) Under license from Harrington’s widow, we’re putting out two collections of Harrington’s central work, “Dark Laughter.” These gorgeous single-panel weeklies mostly displays the adventures and mishaps of Bootsie, a scheming, scamming, womanizing trouble-maker who is nonetheless beloved by much of his Harlem community.
The first book is Bootsie’s War Years, collecting the panels from mid-1941 into 1946. During that time, we see Bootsie evade the draft, eventually get enlisted, train, get sent overseas to fight in World War II, and then return home to a U.S. still heavily laden with racial discrimination. Harrington took a year off from cartooning during this period to serve as a war correspondent, and returned with greater insight into the lives of African-American soldiers. A foreword is provided by University of South Carolina professor Qiana Whitted, who has won an Eisner Award for her writings on comics and race. This 6″x9″ black-and-white paperback has almost 150 cartoons, with extensive annotations to explain the people and events being referenced. Cover price: $18.
We’re giving a larger, 8.5″x11″ treatment to Bootsie’s Big ’50s, our collection of the panels from mid-1954 up through the first week of 1958. That’s because for many of these cartoons we were able to use much better source, giving you a fuller look at Harrington’s richly-detailed drawing. This includes the run of cartoons that weren’t just in the paper, they were used as the covers for the Pittsburgh Courier‘s magazine section. Bootsie’s still in a lot of cartoons, but there are plenty without him, particularly when Harrington went for strongly barbed humor about school desegregation and other racism-related matters of the day. Cover price: $18.
Our final book in this launch, Breezy, is admittedly less of a masterwork and less revelatory of history than the above. Breezy is a fairly typical teenager strip, with gags built around young Breezy Biggins showing he ordinary teen desires for romance and good times, if a bit of an excessive love of baking soda. While it does dip a toe on a few occasions into race moments, it spends a lot more time on puns. However, cartoonist “Tap Melvin” was actually Melvin Tapley, who (among other things) spent years as the main artist and co-publisher of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book. This first-ever collection of the strip includes examples from across the series run in the 1940s and ’50s. We’ve priced this horizontal (8.5″x6″) 100-page collection at $8.99, matching the price of our Green Book facsimile editions.
