Comics More Than Words: All-Negro Comics

Speaker(s): Qiana Whitted (University of South Carolina)

We are very excited to announce the very first event of the newly created Comics: More than Words Research Unit, supported by the DLCL department and kindly sponsored by the English and Art History Departments.

We will be hosting Qiana Whitted, Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, who will be presenting on All-Negro Comics: “All-New, All-Negro: Orrin C. Evans and the Golden Age of Comics”. Professor Qiana Whitted uses the single issue of Evans’ All-Negro Comics as a way of illustrating the stakes of Black popular representation during the 1940s and 1950s. Her discussion asks what Ace Harlem, Lion Man, and the series’ other characters can teach us about the stories that African American readers felt were not being adequately told during the comic book industry’s Golden Age.

Qiana Whitted is professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. A graduate of Hampton University with a PhD from Yale University, her research and teaching focus on Black literary and cultural studies, and American comics and graphic novels. She is the author of the Eisner Award-winning book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest and co-editor of the collection on Comics and the U.S. South. She is currently editing a collection of essays on blackness in early American comics. She is also the editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and chair of the International Comic Arts Forum.

In preparation for the talk and the subsequent discussion, please read and/or take a look at Evans’ All-Negro Comics.

If you would like to follow our next events and be informed of the other activities of the group, please contact Cynthia (cinziag [at] stanford.edu) to be added to our Comics mailing list: comicsru21 [at] stanford.edu (comicsru21[at]stanford[dot]edu).