Racial Imagery, Racism, Individualism, and Underground Comix

[3] That people’s basic ideas about race are formed when they are young children underlines how important these simple, attractive images can be. As Jody David Armour explains, “…social stereotypes are… rather well-learned sets of associations among groups and traits established in children’s memories before they reach the age of judgment. And once a stereotype becomes entrenched in our memory, it takes on a life of its own. Case studies have demonstrated that once one internalizes a cultural stereotype, she unconsciously interprets experiences to be consistent with the underlying stereotype, selectively assimilating facts that validate the stereotype while disregarding those that do not.” Jody David Armour, Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: the Hidden Costs of being Black in America, New York University Press, New York, 1997, pp.40-41. (“Comix” were sold to adults only.)

[4] For examples of anti-Semitic cartoons published in Nazi Germany and historic context, see Randall Bytwerk’s online “German Propaganda Archive,” see url1

W.A. Coupe’s cover article for History Today, “Cartoons of the Third Reich,” appears online at: see url2. Contemporary anti-Semites revere the publisher of these cartoons as a “martyr,” as seen at: see url3

The verdict against Rwandan media executives for inciting genocide was the first of its kind since the Nuremberg trials. Sharon LaFraniere, “Court Finds Rwanda Media Executives Guilty of Genocide,” NY Times, December 3, 2003. See url

The racist cartoons from Rwanda can be seen starting at url5. Clicking on the head of the cartoon character takes you to the next picture in the series.

[5] For an extensive collection of contemporary anti-Semitic and racist hate cartoons, posted on a racist website, see url6. These works are not related to the people or purposes of underground comix movement in any obvious way, and serve here as another contrasting body of work.

[6] Openings for contrasting interpretations enter especially through cartoonists’ use of humor, irony, parody, caricature, satire, and their attempts to demonstrate editorial freedom through excess and violation of taboos.

In the 1990s, racists republished some of underground cartoonist R. Crumb’s work: “Evidence that Crumb’s work has indeed been taken at face value was provided […] in 1994, when two of his strips from Weirdo–‘When the Niggers Take Over America’ and ‘When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America’–were published without his knowledge in the Massachusetts-based, white supremacist magazine Race & Reality, whose editors apparently failed to grasp the ironic intent behind the cartoons. David Armstrong of the San Francisco Examiner, in an article reprinted in the Chicago Tribune (October 9, 1994), reported that Crumb ‘expressed surprise’ at the appropriation of his work and quoted him as saying, ‘Some people don’t get satire. To me, it shows how stupid those people are.’ Crumb added, ‘I was sweating when I was doing [the stories]. I thought, “Some people are going to take it literally.” I always have gone close to that line.. . .I release all that stuff inside myself: taboo words, taboo ideas. It pours out of me as sick as possible. I wouldn’t put it in a comic for children. But I don’t work that mainstream audience.'” Biography of Robert Crumb from Current Biography (1995) At present, Crumb’s collected works (and other republished comix) are freely available to children on the shelves of public libraries.

[7] In this period, Black cartoonists won mainstream acceptance with strips such as Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals, Brumsic Brandon, Jr.’s Luther, and Ted Shearer’s Quincy. Black characters also joined the casts of established white-drawn strips, such as Peanuts, Beetle Bailey and Doonesbury. See Steven L. Jones’ “From Under Cork to Overcoming: Black Images in the Comics,” published in 1992 in Black Ink by the Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco.

John Wells’ “The Racial Justice Experience – Diversity in the DC Universe: 1961-1979,” tells how mainstream comic books published by DC introduced racial diversity to their casts of characters during that period at url7. Casey Alt tells the story of the first black Marvel superhero in “Imagining Black Superpower! Marvel Comics’ The Black Panther, 1966-1979,” online at url8.

[8] The more controversial themes in underground comix included depictions of sex, which resulted in the prosecution of Zap Comix #4 on obscenity charges, and sexism. Trina Robbins remembers that “[s]adly, most of the male underground cartoonists understood as little about the new women’s movement as the newspapers did, and reacted to what they perceived as a threat by drawing comix filled with graphic violence directed mostly at women.” Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz Chronicle Books, 1999, p.85. For a quote from the judge who found Zap guilty of obscenity, see “Director’s Statement” (Grand Central Art Center) at url 9.

[9] Jeremy D. Mayer argues that “The election of 1968 signaled the end of the civil rights era, and the beginning of Republican dominance in presidential elections, a dominance built in large part on the successful racial tactics of the Nixon campaign.” “Nixon Rides the Backlash to Victory: Racial Politics in the 1968 Presidential Campaign,” The Historian 64 no.2, pp.351-366, Winter 2002.

[10] Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s suggestion for film criticism also applies to the more-conveniently-scrutinized medium of comics: “One methodological alternative to the mimetic ‘stereotypes-and-distortions’ approach, we would argue, is to speak less of ‘images’ than of ‘voices’ and ‘discourses.’” This means more than attending to both the visual and verbal elements of comics. They propose that we analyze who we can hear “speaking” through these picture-stories. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, NY and London, 1994, p.214

[11] See “White Power Comes to Midvale,” (George Lincoln Rockwell Party, Incorporated, 1973,) and “New World Order Comix: The Saga of White Will!!,” written by William L. Pierce (National Alliance, 1993) Note: These were NOT created by artists associated with the underground comix movement or distributed through comix distribution channels! A wikipedia encyclopedia entry on William L. Pierce can be found at: url10

[12] For example, a textbook I have used, Writing for the Mass Media, by James Glen Stovall, has a section on “Language sensitivity” that begins “Writers must understand that language has the ability to offend and demean.” pp.76-78.

[13] The main beneficiaries of “racial preferences” have been white. For arguments to support this statement, see url11. At the same time, the discredited science of “racism” that was developed to rationalize these privileges has harmed the majority of white people. Allan Chase explains that “[f]ar from being aimed at ethnic, social, and racial minorities, scientific racism has from its early-nineteenth-century origins been directed at the majorities of the populations of England, France, Germany, the United States, and other industrial nations. […] In our own times, the white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant people who do the hardest work on the land, in industry, and in commerce remain, numerically, the chief targets and victims of the new scientific racism in America.” Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism, University of Illinois Press, 1980, p.xvii.

[14] I owe this explanation to Justin Podur, author of ZNet Institutional Racism Instructional, (2002), url12.

[15] I refer to slavery in the past tense, but 27 million people are still bound as slaves, in such places as Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India, according to Kevin Bales’ Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2000.)

[16] Angela Y. Davis, Are Prison Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003, p.28. Davis cites scholars who have concluded that leasing convict labor created worse working conditions than had existed under slavery (p.32.) Also see the entry on “Black Codes in the United States” in Africana at url13.

[17] Massey and Denton call the depth of black segregation “unprecedented and utterly unique compared with that of other groups,” that “it shows little sign of change with the passage of time or improvements in socioeconomic status,” and that “[t]hrough prolonged exposure to such an environment, black chances for social and economic success are drastically reduced.” (Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Harvard University Press, 1993, p.2.)

[18] See, for example, Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D.’s “individualism: the only cure for racism.” See url14. This essay appears as part of a larger site devoted to this theme, “Diversity & Multiculturalism: The New Racism,” url15.

The argument against granting “special privileges” because of past injustice has a long history, and seems reminiscent of General Howard’s refusal to distribute “forty acres and a mule” as reparations to newly-freed, formerly-enslaved people after the Civil War on the grounds that the freedmen should earn money to buy the land rather than receiving it as a gift. (See Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (University of California Press, 1999, pp.33-4.)

[19] The inheritance of family wealth that had been accumulated at a time when legally-enforced segregation advantaged Euro-Americans, perpetuates racial inequalities. See Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (University of California Press, 1999) and Thomas M. Shapiro’s The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2004.)

As an analogous problem of inherited inequalities in mainstream comics, the most popular characters remain to this day those that were invented during the period of legal segregation. Craig Lemon argues that “there no black superheroes fronting big-name books…[b]ecause all the iconic heroes in existence today (with the exception of Wolverine) were created between the 1930s and the 1960s, when black characters were taboo, or poor caricatures at best….” url16.

Thomas Sowell argues against seeking reparations for the historical injustices of slavery in The Quest for Cosmic Justice (Free Press, 2002.)

[20] William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim: Revised, Updated Edition (Vintage Books, 1976), can be fully searched at amazon.com. Ryan’s revised 1976 foreword expands the application of “[t]he generic formula of Blaming the Victim – justifying inequality by finding defects in the victims of inequality” to the non-black and non-poor majority.

[21] John H. McWhorter argues that while “only naiveté could lead anyone to suppose that racism does not still exist, or is not still a problem to be solved,” a “Cult of Victimology” has become an important barrier to black equality. A 20 page excerpt of his book Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black America (published by Free Press in 2000) is online at amazon.com. Larry Elder argues against the idea that white racism remains “an intense and formidable obstacle” to black upward mobility in Ten Things You Can’t Say in America (Griffin Trade Paperback, 2001.) The full text of Elder’s book can be searched at amazon.com.

Star Parker argues against welfare programs in Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves the Poor and What You Can Do About It (WND Books, 2003.)

David Horowitz rejects the usefulness of the idea of “institutional racism” and goes on to say that “[t]he belief in the power of ‘institutional racism’ allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a ‘racist’ society, when it is the only society on earth – black, white, brown, or yellow – whose defining public creed is anti-racist, a society to which black refugees from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of refuge and freedom.” David Horowitz, Hating Whitey: and Other Progressive Causes, Spence Publishing Company, 1999, p. 82.

An editorial in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, “No More White Racism in America?,” responds to the idea that racism is no longer a major concern with four brief examples demonstrating the large-scale persistence of racist views in the United States (Issue 38, Winter 2003/2004, url17.)

[22] See “’Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation’: Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at the Black Panther,” by Erika Doss, republished in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, (Routledge, 2001, pp.175-187; online at amazon.com.)

[23] “Even though his ideas were not new, Wertham’s testimony [in Belton v Gebhart] captured the imagination and hearts of those in the courtroom. One example Wertham offered was particularly effective. He introduced popular comic book images to illustrate racism’s pervasiveness in America’s society. The comics showed Africans or African Americans depicted in stereotypical and humiliating situations.” From the Master’s Thesis of Liza R. Rognas, as excerpted at: url18.

[24] Wertham’s book is available online at: url19. For this passage, link to Chapter 4: The Wrong Twist. The quote is from page 101 in the published edition.

In criticizing American comic books for their racist content, Wertham was continuing a complaint made by previous critics of American comics. During World War II, Margaret Frakes had warned that depictions of Japanese “literally as beasts with fangs for teeth and bright yellow skin” in American comic books were more terrifying than the depraved German cartoons of Jews. [“Comics Are No Longer Comic,” Margaret Frakes, Christian Century, November 4, 1942, p.1349.]

A powerful series of contemporary, cartoon-based paintings by Roger Shimomura illustrates the kinds of harm that have been associated with these anti-Asian cartoon stereotypes. See his work at url20.

[25] Mainstream comics publishers, most famously EC, have also published comic book stories opposing racism.

The western jungle and war genres had not died out completely during the Nixon years. In 1971, John Kerry said responsibility for the My Lai massacre, belonged not only to recently-convicted Lieutenant Calley, but “in large part with this country, which allows a young child before he reaches the age of 14 to see 12,500 deaths on television, which glorifies the John Wayne syndrome, which puts out fighting man comic books on the stands….” [Emphasis added.] Statement of John Kerry, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971, p.193. url21

[26] See, for example, Douglas Kellner’s article “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader (2nd edition), edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, SAGE Publications, 2003, pp.9-20.

[27] This efficient, assembly-line method of cranking out comic books, incidentally, was largely the invention of Jews who created the comic book industry in the 1930s and 1940s because anti-Semitism was keeping them out of higher-paid illustration work. See “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry,” Arie Kaplan, Reform Judaism, Vol. 32, No. 1, Fall 2003, url22. Cartoonist Al Jaffee explains that anti-Semitism at the ad agencies drove Jewish illustrators and writers into the comic-book field: “We couldn’t get into newspaper strips or advertising; ad agencies wouldn’t hire a Jew.”

[28] For the definitive history of this self-censorship code, see Amy Kiste Nyberg’s Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. (University Press of Mississippi, 1998.)

One reason that artists had turned against the code was that with the increasing use of psychedelics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many people found the burden of holding up a social façade at variance with their own innermost thoughts increasingly unsupportable. Robert Crumb, for example, responded to this tension by letting his art become a conduit for whatever was deep and unspoken, regardless of whether what came up was morally “good” or whether it made him appear to be a “good person.” It was in this context that he put on paper the racist imagery that he found “bubbling up” out of him. [Crumb’s reflects on the racial images in his work in The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, edited by Pete Poplaski (Little, Brown and Company, 1997, p.109.) There he shifts from a discussion of the sexual imagery in his work to saying “Similarly, using racist stereotypes, it’s boiling over out of my brain, and I just have to draw it! Pour it on as thick as I can and not leave any of the paranoia out. Put it all in there. Hey, in my own defense, I am not a racist! Come on! […] But all this stuff is deeply embedded in our culture and our collective subconscious, and you have to deal with it.”]

[29] The original Standards of the Comics Code Authority have been posted online at: url23. Wertham opposed the code, and complained in 1955 that “the same corruption with sexiness, violence and race prejudice” continued to characterize comics bearing the Comics Code seal, offering as an example the March, 1955 issue of Lorna, the Jungle Girl, whose cover showed “colored, howling savages about to attack a sexy white girl in a bathing suit and a handsome white man.” Advertising Age, January 3, 1955, page 8. (Cited in Steven E. Mitchell’s MA Thesis, Evil Harvest: Investigating the Comic Book, 1948-1955, Arkansas State University, 1982, p.119.)

[30] The projects alluded to here were Slow Death #1, Radical America Komiks and Conspiracy Capers. The organizer of Conspiracy Capers, Skip Williamson, was one of the comix artists most attuned to politics. According to a recent article, “Williamson says he’s never had a political allegiance of any kind even in the hotbed of ’60s radicalism. ‘I never thought about changing anything,’ he says, preferring instead, ‘standing on a soap box and ranting.’” (Felicia Feaster, “Radical departure: Underground comic artist brings the counterculture to Eyedrum,” Creative Loafing, February 12, 2004. url24. According to this article, Williamson “admits that a biological cocktail of his mother’s Hispanic/Native-American heritage and some ‘Virginia redneck’ on his father’s side seemed to ensure a cantankerous recognition of the economic and social troubles of the land of his birth.”)

[31] An example of comix mocking New Left concerns over racial stereotyping in cartoons can be found in Bobby London’s “Why Bobbie Seale is not Black,” published in Merton of the Movement, (Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1972.) In that story, he depicts as a humorless drunk the editor of an underground newspaper who tells him that his cartoon of Black Panther Bobbie Seale is an insultingly counterrevolutionary racist stereotype. To take another example, Jaxon’s “White Man’s Burden” condemned the ethnic pride movements of Native Americans, Chicanos and Asian Americans as basically just more varieties of racism. The story was published in Slow Death #6 (Last Gasp, 1974.)

When comix artists drew for political newspapers, restrictions based on the politics of the material could kick in. Becky Wilson remembers drawing a comic strip for a peace march in the early 1970s: “The theme of that issue of the underground newspaper was ‘We Are All Viet Kong.’ I drew a comic (written by my boyfriend at the time, Mark, who was a big Willis O’Brien fan) on the theme ‘We Are All King Kong.’ As I recall, it was 4 panels. In the first one, King Kong is wearing a button that says ‘We Are All Viet Kong.’ He climbs to the top of the Capitol dome and starts shooting down the planes buzzing him with his AK-47. In the final panel his head is flipped back and a crowd of people is jumping out of his hollow body. Naturally the crowd is multiracial, both sexes, and includes in the foreground a Viet Kong warrior in black PJs & hat with a button that says: ‘We Are All King Kong.’ Ten thousand copies of the paper were printed but never distributed because of the comic, which was denounced as racist and sexist, as well as the Berrigans saying it presented too violent an image of the march (which was probably true, in retrospect.) I could never quite understand the racist & sexist thing, though. Perhaps I just didn’t draw African Americans very well, or maybe they were objecting to my portrayal of the Vietnamese person, but you sort of have to resort to some kinds of stereotypes to get the idea across in cartoon language when you have limited space to make your point. I was particularly mystified by the ‘sexist’ part, since I considered myself a hardcore feminist.” [Rebecca Wilson, personal e-mail, January 21, 2003.]

[32] Tim Jackson has assembled a “Salute to the Pioneering Cartoonists of Color” at url25. Jackson focuses on black cartoonists who worked for black newspapers. Other cartoonists working for ethnic papers in the US included Japanese-Americans Jack Matsuoka and Pete Hironaka, and a number of Jewish cartoonists.

[33] Fuller wrote and drew Ebon, a comic based on mainstream superhero models, which Gary Arlington published in an untrimmed edition without slick covers in January, 1970. The back cover was a house ad for Gary Arlington’s comic book shop (the epicenter of the comix movement), in which Ebon, the hero, holds up a copy of a fringe-science tract that Gary had published about gravity, and also plugs five comic book titles including “Bob Crumb’s Zap.” He tells the reader, “Baby, they gonna blow your mind!”

Ebon didn’t meet with much success, partly because it was mismatched with the largely white, adult audience reached by comix distribution channels.

Fuller returned five years later with the comic book series White Whore Funnies and Gay Heartthrobs. White Whore had the distinction of being one of the few underground comix to make the leap into porn shop distribution.

Fuller was a peripheral member of the comix scene. Jay Kinney remembers that Fuller did attend some comix parties and was on friendly terms with some cartoonists, but describes him as “a fringe member, at best, of a largely white movement.” [Personal e-mail correspondence.] Comix typically were published as anthologies including work by a variety of cartoonists. The only anthology titles in which Fuller participated were ones that he edited himself.

Grass Green’s obituary appeared in The Comics Journal #247, October, 2002. An online obituary by Michael Vance was published by SFReader, August 15, 2002, at url26. A sample of Grass Green’s work can be found at url27.

[34] Ron Turner, for example, publisher of Last Gasp, tells in his introduction to Jay Kennedy’s Underground and Newave Price Guide (Boatner Norton Press, 1982) of getting stoned with his friend, black radical Terry Collins, and showing him Radical America Comics: “I confess that I was curious how he would take Watermelon Jones, the archetypal black. He loved him!!!!” (p.33.)

As for myself, my friendship networks in those years were almost completely white, partly as a result of having grown up in a racially segregated suburb of San Francisco, and then majoring in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, which was almost a completely white program.

By bringing up the question of cartoonists’ ethnic identities, I do not mean to deny that cartoonists can successfully create characters belonging to other groups, or that cartoonists sometimes create offensive caricatures of members of their own groups. Cartoonist Charles Johnson contends not only that cartoonists can create characters of other groups, but that their failure to do so indicates “lack of invention, daring, or innovation,” a failure of the imagination, and often a failure of empathy. He condemns Crumb’s stereotyped “Angelfood McSpade” character as not “avant-garde or provocative in any positive way.” See his foreword to Frederik Strömberg’s Black Images in Comics: A Visual History (Fantagraphics , 2003,) p.13.

[35] In an off-the-cuff 1966 piece that Crumb did shortly before he triggered the comix movement, he rejects the idea of doing “topical” material. In his story, topicality gets represented primarily by a “negro” who walks down the street holding a lit match and saying “burn baby,” before administering a cathartic beating to the two white protagonists, who accept this abuse out of guilt for their “constant racial slurs” and other unnamed misdeeds. (“Yin & Yang, The Loveless…,”March, 1966. See The Complete Crumb Comics: Mr. Sixties, Volume 4, Fantagraphics, 1990, p.20.) The issue of guilt had been subjected to a penetrating analysis by James Baldwin in his 1965 essay “White Man’s Guilt,” republished in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, edited by David R. Roediger, Schocken Books, 1998, pp. 320-325.

[36] I have assembled a database with 227 examples of comix stories in my collection that include representations of racial diversity, most of them in the period covered in this article. These are from 174 different books, by almost 100 cartoonists. The artists who appear four or more times in these listings are Guy Colwell (7 items), R. Crumb (39 items, and deserving an article of his own), Dave Geiser (4 items, a large proportion of Geiser’s work dealt with race), Justin Green (7), Bill Griffith (6), Jaxon (8), Jay Lynch (7), Trina Robbins (6), Sharon Rudahl (5), Frank Stack (6), and S. Clay Wilson (4.)

[37] Regarding cartoonists’ service to imperialism, John J. Johnson’s Latin America in Caricature (University of Texas Press, 1980) detailed how US political cartoonists have represented Latin Americans.

[38] Ethnic Notions was directed by Marlon Riggs. url28

[39] Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains how this works, and argues that cartoonists created racist, sexist and classist stereotypes to ease the anxieties that people with power and privilege experience: “Existing differences and inequalities are magnified for fear they will diminish. Stereotypes are reconstructed and reasserted precisely when existing hierarchies are being challenged and inequalities are or may be lessening. Accordingly, stereotyping tends to be not merely a matter of domination, but above all, of humiliation. Different and subordinate groups are not merely described, they are debased, degraded. Perceptions are manipulated in order to enhance and to magnify social distance.” Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “White Negroes,”excerpts from White on Black: Images of Blacks in Western Popular Culture (Yale University Press, 1992), republished in Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (SAGE Publications, 1995, p.26.)

[40] Steven L. Jones tells the story of the fight against these harmful images in the 1920s and 1930s:

“Predictably, Black community activists were outraged with the typical portrayal of Blacks as ebony humanoid clones. Walter White and W.E.B. DuBois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, fought not only against the indiscriminate lynching of Blacks, but also against the comics’ defamation of Black people. Sometimes the fight took the form of court challenges. An occasional victory helped maintain hope, as in the late 1920s when a major Chicago newspaper was forced to lighten up its solid black ink representation of Black skin tone, or in the early 1930’s when the Amos ‘n’ Andy strip was removed from the marketplace.

“Newspapers published by the Afro-American press also entered into the fight against the negative depiction of Blacks. By the mid-1930s they were leading the struggle against any continuance of minstrelized representations. Papers like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American editorialized against the minstrel image and finally helped to end its presence in the Black community by 1940.” Steven L. Jones “From Under Cork to Overcoming: Black Images in the Comics,” published in 1992 in Black Ink by the Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco, 6th page (un-numbered); This was republished from the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies’ 1986 anthology Ethnic Images in the Comics.

[41] Aunt Jemima, for example, was originally based on a performance by a white man in blackface and drag, who sang a song about “Aunt Jemima.” See M.M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (University Press of Virginia, 1998, pp. 68-71.)

[42] For an example of how this worked in underground comix, compare a photograph of San Francisco State College President S.I. Hayakawa to Jay Lynch’s portrait based on him, Professor “Hiacowcow.” Lynch’s toothy picture bears more resemblance to the anti-Japanese cartoon stereotypes of the 1940s. (“Nard n Pat,” Bijou Funnies #2, 1969.) Another noteworthy aspect of Lynch’s portrayal can be found in Hiacowcow’s fractured, heavily and implausibly Asian-accented English. In real life, the Canadian-born S.I. Hayakawa went on to serve in the U.S. Senate, where he campaigned to make English the official language of the United States. url29. (For pertinent arguments about racism in relation to nonstandard English, you can study the debates over “Ebonics.”)

[43] Perhaps Steel got the idea of putting a clearer explanation of his ideas about race in his comic because of responses to his first issue of Armageddon, in which he had drawn what may have been the only representation of Martin Luther King to have appeared in any underground comic. (As a detail of a confusing larger composition, Steel had shown King sodomizing Alabama Governor George Wallace who, in turn, is fucking a pig labeled “Statism.” King’s dialogue balloon reads “I got a dream… about a pig too, boss… you oalfy [sic] mother fucker.” [Ellipsis in the original.])

[44] The unbelievability of the dialogue may have followed from the impracticality of the theory it promotes. Similar problems plagued Steve Ditko’s attempts to put Ayn Rand’s philosophy into comic book form. With his libertarian comic Mister A (Comic Art Publishers, 1973), Ditko became one of the few mainstream cartoonists to turn to underground comix distribution channels. For an elaborate fan site devoted to Ditko’s work, see url30.

[45] Sympathetic representations of black people were rare enough to make readers wonder about the racial identity of the artist. Trina Robbins recalls that “I often included black characters, especially positive and strong women, and in 1971 had an ongoing adventure strip in the Good Times underground newspaper about my heroine, Fox. Fox was also included in Girl Fight #2. And don’t forget my LuluBelle stories in High Times. […] I later found out that some people thought I was Black because of my positive portrayal of black characters. […] My memory may be failing me, but aside from Guy [Colwell], I really can’t recall any other early underground cartoonists who included positive black (or any other ethnicity) characters.” [Personal e-mail, September 9, 2003.]

[46] Kinney regards my snatching this atypical panel from his first published comic from obscurity to illustrate this article on racism and cartooning with chagrin and responded with gently-expressed irritation. I expect the other cartoonists whose work I discuss here might also express similar chagrin and/or irritation if I had told them of the use I am making of their work. The tremendous regard I have for Kinney’s work is a matter of public record (for example in my “Underground comix” article in the Encyclopedia of the American Left, First Edition, Oxford University Press, 1990.)

[47] For a clearly presented argument against both “race realists” who say races are biological categories and against those who say science has proven that races are merely socially-constructed figments of racist imaginations, see Kenan Malik’s lecture “Why Do We Still Believe in Race?” at url31. Malik argues “science can neither confirm nor disconfirm race as a biological reality, because race is not a scientific category.”

[48] Jay Kinney, personal e-mail, October 9, 2003.

[49] For an example of a Black Panther Party photograph which demonstrates this, see url32.

[50] Jay Kinney, personal e-mail.

[51] Jay Kinney, personal e-mails.

[52] Tim Jackson explains that minstrelized stereotypes appeared even in black newspapers. url33. A formerly posted (or hard to find right now) website of Nation of Islam cartoons of the 1960s included an example that seems to draw on this tradition. Jackson suggests that such images could represent the dependence of black papers of the 1920s on unsupportive white syndicates for their graphic material.

[53] See Racial Matters : The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 by Kenneth O’Reilly (Free Press, 1991), and search the contents, which are online at amazon.com, using the keywords “cartoon” or “coloring book.” According to O’Reilly, “Physical violence, as opposed to violent rhetoric, was never more than a peripheral part of the black struggle for equality. Political violence, in contrast, was a central part of the FBI response to that struggle – something located within the mainstream of government policy toward blacks.” p.316.

David Horowitz calls O’Reilly’s book typical of the tendentious texts that by being “disingenuous and disdainful of the facts, would establish the Panther myth for a new generation” in his autobiography Radical Son: a Generational Odyssey (Free Press, 1998), one of several of his books which can be searched online at amazon.com, (p.298.)

Brian Glick’s foreword to Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Wall and John Trudell’s The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (South End Press, 2002) criticizes O’Reilly’s book from the other direction, as a “prime example” of a white historian regurgitating COINTELPRO’s hostile caricatures of the Black Panther Party (p.xvi.) The Cointelpro Papers can also be searched online at amazon.com. It tells this story of the Black Panther Coloring Book: “the FBI utilized the services of an infiltrator to have the Sacramento chapter of the BPP print a racist and violence-oriented coloring book for children. When the item was brought to the attention of Bobby Seale and other members of the Panther leadership, it was immediately ordered destroyed rather than distributed. Nonetheless, the Bureau mailed copies to companies […] which had been contributing to the Party’s Breakfast for Children program, in order to cause the withdrawal of such support.” (p.159.) This book also republishes examples of COINTELPRO cartoons that the FBI used against the Puerto Rican Independence Movement.

[54] The art for the Black Panther Coloring Book can be seen at: url34.

[55] Kinney wrote to me: “If you recall the “pig” cartoons from the BPP Platform and Program flyer… they were by Teemer (or that’s what the signature looks like to me) and depicted confrontations between blacks and the pigs. These were in illustration of the 10 Point Program. The whole flyer is mimeod with the address and contact info of the New Haven Chapter of the BPP on the front.

”So the question then is, is the flyer I have also a forgery? Did the BPP never actually use those cartoons? Did some BPP chapters *like* the cartoons and use them, not knowing they were malicious FBI provocations? Or did the BPP just claim that they were a FBI hoax because they proved embarrassing? I guess if we checked back to issues of the BP newspaper at the time, we could see if they also ran in there.

”Here’s the thing: I recall seeing the drawings (or at least some of them) back at the time, 68 or 69. (Possibly in the BPP paper, to which I subscribed.) They were one of the things that made me not trust the BPP. They may even have counter-influenced my own New Left

Comics, if I saw them prior to doing my strip. That would be interesting: FBI forged BPP cartoons influence me to hit back at the BPP with tit for tat stereotypes.” Jay Kinney, personal e-mail, October 15, 2003.

[56] In the case of Oliver C. Willis vs. the Postmaster General, filed in Arkansas in 2001, the court decided that a single incident involving a racist cartoon did not create an illegal, hostile work environment. url35. In 1998, Detroit Edison was found guilty of harassment for a number of incidents including a racist cartoon posted on the locker of a black worker. url36. In Smith v Leggett Wire Company, settled in 2000 in Kentucky, a dissenting opinion counted a lewd and racist cartoon as one element of a hostile work environment. url37.

[57] In my experience, reading really good underground comix created a sensation like hearing a block of wood cracking apart between my ears.

[58] “Even after seeing all three [“Mr. Biggott”] cartoons, only 36 per cent of our sample […] recognized both the elements of prejudice and ridicule correctly.” [“The Analysis of Deviant Cases in Communications Research,” Patricia L. Kendall and Katherine M. Wolf, Communications Research, 1948-1949, p.160.] A third of the respondents “failed to see their satirical elements” and believed “that the cartoons were designed to create racial disturbances and to intensify existing prejudices!” [Ibid., p.161.] The webpage from the Columbia University archives which describes the documents left by these studies also mentions Watson Goodwin’s 1945 investigation of the effects of an American Jewish Congress comic book “There Are No Master Races,” which found that this comic book did not have much effect on “willingness to accept persons of other races….” url38

[59] This question does not rely on whether the cartoonist intended a liberal, anti-racist purpose.

[60] To make this sound a little less impossible, consider an analogous case. Jody David Armour argues (in the context of testimonies in court cases) that “…the more subtle [group] references may be particularly pernicious because subtle references inconspicuously may activate the relevant stereotypes. This deprives jurors of the opportunity to monitor consciously their responses for convergence with their personal beliefs.” (p.148) Armour’s argument here is that Americans’ conscious racism has been dropping for 40 years, but our unconscious habits, steadily reinforced by media distortions, remain prejudiced. Therefore, rather than urging “color-blindness” we must become color-conscious so that we can act from our principles with awareness, rather than from our unconscious feelings. Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: the Hidden Costs of being Black in America (New York University Press, 1997, pp.40-41.) (Armour was not arguing that something as unreliable as satire would accomplish this purpose!)

[61] By using the plural “cartoons” I intend to suggest that the issue has less to do with individual, problematic cartoons, than with a larger cultural climate. I think Alan David Freeman’s analysis of “racial discrimination” can be extended to apply here. Freeman describes “the victim’s perspective,” which describes “conditions of actual social existence as a member of a perpetual underclass. This perspective includes both the objective conditions of life (lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing) and the consciousness associated with those objective conditions (lack of choice and lack of human individuality in being forever perceived as a member of a group rather than as an individual.)” By contrast, “the perpetrator perspective” interprets the problem as an “action, or series of actions, inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator.” From a victim perspective, “the problem will not be solved until the conditions associated with it have been eliminated.” Alan David Freeman, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine,” published in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas, editors, (The New Press, 1995, pp.29-30.)

[62] “Censoring the College Press” by John K. Wilson (2002) describes a dozen cases of cartoons in college newspapers provoking protests over racial insensitivity. (url39) The Free Expression Network (url40) and “Tongue Tied” (url41) collect some more recent examples.

Plentiful evidence of the damage done by racist speech is provided by the essays in The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography, edited by Laura Lederer and Richard Delgado (Hill and Wang, 1995.) The essays make little direct mention of cartooning, though Richard Delgado and David Yun’s article “Pressure Valves and Bloodied Chickens: An Assessment of Four Paternalistic Arguments for Resisting Hate-Speech Regulation” begins with a list of examples of “hate speech incidents” which includes a “series of anti-Semitic cartoons” which ran in the Syracuse University newspaper (p.290.)
For a vigorous defense of free speech, see bell hooks’ “Censorship from Left and Right,” in Outlaw Culture (Routledge, 1995.)

[63] The comix were part of the “sixties,” and as Peter Gabel clarifies “The 60s was fundamentally not a movement for reform or revolution according to the inherited meaning of those words, as if what the world needed was a reordering of the external relationships of reality to make economic and political ‘systems’ more equal, or to overthrow the power of the ruling class and replace it with some kind of externally pictured mass democracy, or anything of that kind. The movement was rather a movement of desire, of aspiration, an opening up of closed space that allowed millions of people to come to see and feel something invisible – namely, the artificiality and even unreality of the inherited world and the possibility of a better, more humane, and more real one.” Peter Gabel, “Law and Hierarchy,” republished in Tikkun, Vol. 18, NO. 2, March/April 2004, p.44.

[64] Tim Wise, “Why Whites Think Blacks Have No Problems,” July 17, 2001. url42. Wise has a website which collects his anti-racist essays at url43.

[65] Angela Y. Davis, Are Prison Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003, p.11. See the many links to articles on “Race & the Drug War” collected by AlterNet at url44. Common Sense for Drug Policy has a documented list of eighteen “Drug War Facts” on “Race, Prison and the Drug Laws” at url45.

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