There are many people to thank for their help and inspiration in the completion of Keeping It Unreal—though, for me, the standard acknowledgments list always feels like inadequate gratitude for the myriad ways that things people have said or have written—or how I received the gift of their presence—lived in my consciousness as I wrote this book and helped bring the project to fruition.
I would like to thank Ramzi Fawaz, my collaborator in editing American Literature’s “Queer about Comics” special issue (June 2018). Working together on the special issue and getting to know Ramzi’s pioneering work on superhero comics The New Mutants (2016), as well as our many, many conversations, were indispensable in my becoming conversant with comics studies and to the realization of this book.
Much gratitude also to two collective international groups of scholars, who heard and responded to parts of Keeping It Unreal and other work I’ve done on comics in the past decade: the fabulous members of a fabulous symposium on the African diaspora and visual culture, convened by my Berkeley African American Studies Department colleague Leigh Raiford, and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, in the Herrenhaus castle in Hannover, Germany, in 2014; and the members of the Practicing Refusal Collective/Sojourner Project, founded by Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman.
While I’ve had the pleasure of ongoing conversation with the conferees of the Hannover symposium and the members of Practicing Refusal, single encounters and comments from audience members of lectures I gave as part of a black feminist speaker series at Columbia (thanks again to Saidiya Hartman), in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (thanks again to Ramzi Fawaz), and at San Diego State (thanks to Yetta Howard) were inspiring and crucially important. My gratitude also to audiences at the “Black Currents Symposium” held at Northwestern University in 2012 and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, in 2010.
Thanks also for innumerable contributions to the development of my thought—and for the fantastic gift of making work actually fun—to all of my Berkeley colleagues but especially to my fellow members of the Black Room: Stephen Best, Nadia Ellis, Leigh Raiford, and Bryan Wagner.
A special thanks must go to Julie Carlson, whose characteristic generosity and encouragement made all the difference in turning my scattered interests in comics into a considered engagement with fantasy.
I would also like to thank the Mellon Foundation Project Grant for its support of research for Keeping It Unreal, and James Sime and all the fab folks at Isotope Comics in San Francisco for innumerable instances of assistance and years of nourishing conversations about comics.
The parts of chapters 2 and 3 discussing the superhero character Blade and gay erotic comics appeared in an earlier iteration as the essay “Big Black Beauty: Drawing and Naming the Black Male Figure in Superhero and Gay Porn Comics,” in the anthology Porn Archives (2014). I owe a great debt of thanks to the editors of that volume, Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky, and David Squires.
The least adequate of all these inadequate thanks, and infinite gratitude, goes to my husband and best friend, Stephen Liacouras, last listed but always first in my thoughts.