1. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 505.
2. My blithe and brief description of la movida of course fails to track the extensive scholarly and cultural-criticism debate about the extent, content, and meanings of la movida and whether in fact its developments should be characterized as a cultural movement or an “efflorescence,” as I’ve termed it. See Gema Pérez Sánchez, Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to La Movida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 1–10, 106–112. See also William J. Nichols and H. Rosi Song, eds., Toward a Cultural Archive of La Movida: Back to the Future (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014).
3. Pauline Kael, “Law of Desire: Manypeeplia Upsidownia,” in For Keeps (New York: Dutton, 1994), 1132.
4. Pedro Almodóvar, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, ed. Frédéric Stauss, trans. Yves Baignéres and Sam Richard, rev. ed. (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006), 180. Almodóvar concludes, “Today I think it fitting that we don’t forget that period, and remember that it wasn’t so long ago.” Though Almodóvar’s gesture of refusing the memory of Franco is unique in my own thinking, this gesture—not unlike so many contributions that may appear to be the creation of singular genius—was apparently a hallmark of a significant portion of la movida politically engaged art. Michael Harrison, writing of the Barcelona-situated 1980s comic Anarcoma, notes, “Anarcoma and its original queer sensibility appear at a time when Spanish culture was attempting to emerge from the shadow of an oppressive dictatorship. A number of cultural texts of the time move specifically to forget the Franco period, and to re-create a sense of national cultural identity, in many cases by moving toward a kind of postmodern aesthetic that relies heavily on the primacy of images and eschews deep political discourse.” Harrison, “The Queer Spaces and Fluid Bodies of Nazario’s Anarcoma,” Postmodern Culture 19, no. 3 (2009): 4.
5. Kael, “Law of Desire,” 1133, ellipses in original.
6. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1981), 172, 173.
7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (1961; repr., New York: Grove, 2004), 20–21, emphasis added.
8. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 122.
9. Jackson, Fantasy, 174–175, emphasis in original.
10. Jackson, 175.
11. “BDSM” stands for “bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism”—or, more properly, the D and the S do double duty, so that D denotes “domination” and S denotes “submission” as well.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (1807; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115.
13. Hegel, 116–117, emphasis in original.
14. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (1952; repr., New York: Grove, 2008), 107, emphasis added.
15. Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 12, 15.
16. Bloch states, “Hope is critical and can be disappointed. However, hope still nails a flag on the mast, even in decline, in that the decline is not accepted, even when this decline is still very strong. Hope is not confidence. Hope is surrounded by dangers. . . . Possibility is not hurray-patriotism. The opposite is also in the possible. The hindering element is also in the possible. The hindrance is implied in hope aside from the capacity to succeed” (17).
17. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; repr., New York: Grove, 1967), 162n25.
18. Fanon, Black Skin (Philcox trans.), 203–204.
19. The reference to “Y a bon Banania” (translated in Charles Lam Markmann’s earlier version as “sho’ good eatin’”—but this is obviously not a literal translation) links the passage quoted in the main text to a more famous flight of rhetoric in “The Lived-Experience of the Black Man” chapter (somewhat more euphoniously and evocatively titled “The Fact of Blackness” for Markmann): “I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.” Fanon (Philcox trans.), 92.
20. Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong (Boston: Shabhala, 2013) 54–55.
21. Bloch, “Something’s Missing,” 4, emphasis in original.
22. Ernst Bloch, “Art and Utopia,” in Utopian Function, 110–111.
23. Karl Marx, “Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1975), 209, emphasis added. Livingston and Benton translate the phrase as “dreamed of something.” Zipes and Mecklenburg translate Bloch quoting Marx as “dreamed of a thing” (Bloch, “Art and Utopia,” 110).
24. See the epigraph: “You might not like bein’ who you are, but you better start likin’ it, / because you sure can’t be nobody else / In other words: I can’t be you—ain’t no way, yeah–you can’t be me / Well, that’s how it is, sisters and brothas / . . . / It’s the Law of the Land.” The Temptations, “Law of the Land,” written by Norman Whitfield, Masterpiece (Tamla Motown [UK], 1973).
25. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, vol. 2, Outer Space, Inner Lands (Easthampton, MA: Small Beer, 2012), 2.
26. Ernst Bloch, “Art and Society,” in Utopian Function, 49.
27. Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of LaTisha King (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 15–16.
28. See David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
1. By “sensed,” I have to mean feared: the fears of annihilation with which antiblackness menaces those who are embodied as black.
2. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (1953; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 214, emphasis in original.
3. Bloch, 215, 214.
4. Bloch, 215.
5. See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 60–74.
6. Put “gay fan art” prefaced by any superhero’s name—but especially Batman—in your image search engine and see these very wishes transformed into their own joyously rendered drawings.
7. L. L. McKinney (writer) and Robyn Smith (artist), Nubia: Real One (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2021) 6. Also referenced: L. L. McKinney (writer) and Alitha Martinez (artist), “NUBIA in FUTURE STATE,” in Future State: Immortal Wonder Woman #1 (March 2021): 25–46.
8. DC Entertainment Rights and Permissions, email to the author, November 11, 2015.
9. Heike Raphael-Hernandez, email to the author, November 13, 2015.
10. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 100.
11. I am not counting as a reappearance of the original Nubia a related character called “Nu’bia,” which appeared in Wonder Woman comics beginning (briefly) in 2000. Though “Nu’bia” was a reiteration of the character Nubia, its overlap with the original character was confined to the correspondence between the two characters’ skin color and the addition of an apostrophe to her name—evidently to make the name less offensive and more authentic, or to differentiate this new Nu’bia from the old Nubia. Nu’bia was an Amazon but not Diana’s sister, and she possessed none of the Wonder Woman superpowers that the original Nubia supposedly shared in identical fashion with Diana. (L.L. McKinney’s 2021 rendition of Nubia, by contrast, does possess Wonder Woman’s powers.) Grant Morrison, in addition to his Final Crisis Nubia–as–Wonder Woman, also features a black Amazon called “Nubia” in Wonder Woman: Earth One (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2016), another parallel-Earth alternate universe. Morrison’s Earth-One Nubia is Queen Hippolyta’s counselor and lover but is not a version of Wonder Woman, nor does she possess her powers. “Nubia” in Johnson’s Wonder Woman: Dead Earth is a black Amazon character, a warrior who counsels Queen Hippolyta and tutors Diana in combat skills, but it is not clear whether this Nubia bears any similarity to the original other than the shared name, blackness, and martial prowess. See Daniel Warren Johnson (writer/artist), Wonder Woman: Dead Earth (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2020).
12. Phil Jimenez, email to the author, November 15, 2015.
13. Jimenez.
14. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle (New York: Routledge, 1994), 200, 201, 200.
15. Phil Jimenez, introduction to Wonder Woman by Phil Jimenez Omnibus (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2019), 7.
16. For an illuminating and nuanced recent consideration of Wertham’s argument specifically about Wonder Woman, see Carol L. Tilley, “A Regressive Formula of Perversity: Wertham and the Women of Comics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 22, no. 4 (2018): 1–19.
17. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (1952; repr., New York: Grove, 2008), 124–126, first, fourth, fifth, and sixth emphases added.
18. Fanon, 17.
19. Tilley, “Regressive Formula of Perversity,” 3.
20. Comichron, accessed July 24, 2019, www.comichron.com. The website banner reads, “COMICCHRON: A RESOURCE FOR COMICS RESEARCH!” and relies on reports and statistics provided by the primary comics distributor in North America, Diamond Comics Distributor.
21. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 305, emphasis in original.
22. Jean LaPlanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 314.
23. LaPlanche and Pontalis, 318, emphasis in original.
24. Ramzi Fawaz, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 22–23, emphasis in original.
25. This is a quotation from the unpublished draft of an essay titled “A Queer Sequence If There Ever Was One; or, The Comics Revolution in Literary Studies,” which Fawaz provided to me in late 2018. Following is a citation for the published version of this essay, which does not include the exact quotation utilized in the main text: Ramzi Fawaz, “A Queer Sequence: Comics as a Disruptive Medium,” PMLA 134, no. 3 (2019): 588–594.
26. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8, emphasis in original.
27. Sedgwick, 9.
28. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 5, accessed at https://web.stanford.edu.
29. Leo Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 149, emphasis added. The original essay appeared in Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006): 161–174.
30. Bersani, 140.
31. Bersani, 144.
32. Bersani, 142.
33. Bersani, 142.
34. Bersani, 152.
35. Bersani, 140.
36. Bersani, 139–140, emphasis added.
37. Bersani, 142.
38. Bersani, 145, emphasis added.
39. Bersani, 141.
40. Bersani, 148.
41. Bersani, 149.
42. Bersani, 139, emphasis added.
43. Bersani, 146.
44. Bersani, 145.
45. Bersani, 148.
46. Bersani, 145.
47. Bersani, 148, emphasis added.
48. Bersani, 149.
49. Bersani, 147.
50. Bersani, 148, emphasis added.
51. Bersani, 147.
52. Bersani, 148.
53. Bersani, 147.
54. Bersani, 146.
55. Bersani, 149, emphasis added.
56. Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 35–36.
57. Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” 147.
1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (1952; repr., New York: Grove, 2008), 17, emphasis in original. Fanon’s earlier translator Charles Lam Markmann renders this italicized bit of pidgin without italics but in quotation marks, thus: “‘Sho’ good!’” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; repr., New York: Grove, 1967), 34.
2. Fanon, Black Skin (Philcox trans.), 119.
3. Fanon, 131n15.
4. Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1.
5. Vidal, 96.
6. Vidal, 96, emphasis in original.
7. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Comics as Media: Afterword,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 255.
8. Mitchell, 259.
9. Mitchell, 263, emphasis added.
10. Mitchell, 256.
11. See Harry Brod, Superman Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way (New York: Free Press, 2012).
12. See the illuminating introductory essay, “The Sweeter the Christmas,” by Francis Gateward and John Jennings, in The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of a Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, ed. Gateward and Jennings (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1–15, especially 1–4.
13. See Noah Berlatsky, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
14. Jeffrey A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 178.
15. See my discussion of this matter in the context of Los Bros. Hernandez’s marvelous comic, Love and Rockets. Darieck Scott, “Love, Rockets & Sex,” Americas Review 22, nos. 3–4 (1994): 73–106.
16. Reginald Hudlin, “The Black Panther: A Historical Overview and A Look to the Future,” in Black Panther: Who Is Black Panther?, by Hudlin (writer) and John Romita Jr. (art) (New York: Marvel, 2006), n.p. Capitalization emphasis in original, italicized emphasis added.
17. J. Reid Miller, Stain Removal: Ethics and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 98, emphasis in original text.
18. Miller, 98, emphasis added.
19. See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), in Black, White and In Color: Essays on Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206.
20. I have discussed this matter at length in Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010). See especially the introduction.
21. Fanon, Black Skin (Philcox trans.), 92, emphasis in original.
22. This was a problem faced by creators of Superman after World War II: while during the war there were evidently issues in which Superman beat up Hitler and essentially won the war or even prevented it before it started, later references to World War II tried to align themselves with history by rewriting comic-book history to accommodate actual history—retconning, i.e., introducing new “retroactive continuity”—so that they erased Superman from the 1940s to begin his existence later. This is the most common choice, since Superman’s “continuous” story has been restarted at least three times since the 1980s. In the 1970s, however, with a mere forty years of previous existence to explain, DC Comics’ writers devised elaborate explanations of Hitler’s possession of a powerful magical weapon that prevented Superman from landing in Festung Europa—since Superman’s second big weakness after Kryptonite is supposed to be magic.
23. Fanon, Black Skin (Philcox trans.), xiv.
24. Fanon, 201.
25. Hillary Chute, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 24, first emphasis added, other emphases in original.
26. Mitchell, “Comics as Media,” 264, emphasis added.
27. Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2010), 84.
28. Horrocks, 84–86, emphasis in original.
29. Horrocks, 86.
30. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
31. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008): 11.
32. Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2011), 162.
33. See Rey Chow, “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony Alessandrini (New York: Routledge, 1999), 34–56. See also Samuel R. Delany, “Some Queer Notions about Race,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality, ed. Eric Brandt (New York: New Press, 1999), 259–289.
34. Don McGregor, introduction to Marvel Masterworks: Killraven, vol. 1 (New York: Marvel, 2018), vi.
35. Morrison, Supergods, 156, 165.
36. Don McGregor, “Panther’s Chronicles,” in Marvel Masterworks: The Black Panther, vol. 1 (New York: Marvel, 2010), vi.
37. McGregor, introduction to Killraven, viii, emphasis added.
38. McGregor, ix.
39. McGregor, ix.
40. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (1953; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), xvii.
41. Stan Lee, “A Combo That’s Hard to Beat,” in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2 (New York: Marvel, 2007), 548.
42. See Arlen Schumer, “The Origins of Kirby’s Black Panther,” in Black Kirby Presents: In Search of the Motherboxx Connection Exhibition Catalogue, ed. John Jennings and Stacey Robinson (Buffalo: Black Kirby Collective, 2013), 121–125, especially 122.
43. Both interviews are quoted in Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! The Jack Kirby Collector 25, no. 75 (Winter 2019): 58.
44. See Schumer, “Origins of Kirby’s Black Panther,” 124.
45. This interview is cited as “Jan.-Feb. 1970 Stan Lee interview by Mike Bourne for Changes magazine (published April 15, 1970),” in Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said!, 58.
46. Roy Thomas, “Absolutely Fab-ulous,” in Michael Chabon’s The Escapist: Pulse-Pounding Thrills (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2018), 185.
47. McGregor, Panther, v.
48. McGregor, ix.
49. McGregor, v.
50. McGregor, vii, emphasis added.
51. Lee, “Combo That’s Hard to Beat,” 548, emphasis added.
52. See Martin Scorsese, “Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain,” New York Times, November 4, 2019, www.nytimes.com. See also Ryan Lattanzio, “Francis Ford Coppola Says Marvel Movies Are ‘Despicable,’” IndieWire, October 20, 2019, www.indiewire.com.
53. Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation about Race in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018), 269–270.
54. Dyson, 270.
55. Dyson, 271.
56. Dyson, 272.
57. Dyson, 273.
58. Dyson, 276.
59. Dyson, 277.
60. Salamishah Tillet, “‘Black Panther’ Brings Hope, Hype, and Pride,” New York Times, February 9, 2018, www.nytimes.com.
61. Tillet.
62. Okorafor also wrote another comics miniseries with her own original characters, called LaGuardia, about a travel ban on extraterrestrial immigration and two-way flows between the United States and Biafran activists in Nigeria.
63. Nnedi Okorafor, “Hello, Black Panther Fans!,” in Black Panther: Long Live the King, by Okorafor (writer) and André Lima Arújo (artist) (New York: Marvel, 2018), n.p.
64. Okorafor, emphasis added.
65. See Laura M. Holson, “U.S.D.A. Lists Wakanda as Trading Partner,” New York Times, February 19, 2019, www.nytimes.com.
66. Abdulkareem Baba Aminu, “Afrofuturista! The Fantastical Adventures of Nnedi Okorafor,” Full Bleed: The Comics & Culture Quarterly 2 (2018): 53.
67. Manohla Dargis, “Review: ‘Black Panther’ Shakes Up the Marvel Universe,” New York Times, February 6, 2018, www.nytimes.com.
68. Reginald Hudlin (writer) and Scot Eaton (artist), Black Panther: Bad Mutha (New York: Marvel, 2006), 3.
69. Reginald Hudlin (writer) and Larry Stroman and Ken Lashley (artists), Black Panther: Back to Africa (New York: Marvel, 2008), n.p., emphasis in original.
70. Hudlin, Stromand, and Lashley, n.p., emphasis in original.
71. Okorafor, “Hello, Black Panther Fans!,” n.p.
72. I do not profess to fully understand the lineaments, much less the history, of Nigerian “masquerade,” but it is a spiritual practice and cosmological feature that Okorafor also uses to significant effect in her Akata Witch series, where an albino Nigerian girl becomes initiated into a society of African witches.
73. Nnedi Okorafor (writer) and Leonardo Romero (artist), “Timbuktu,” Shuri 4 (March 2019): 10.
74. Nnedi Okorafor (writer) and Leonardo Romero (artist), “The End of the Earth,” Shuri 5 (April 2019): 21.
75. Okorafor and Romero, “Timbuktu,” 10.
76. Stan Lee, “When Inspiration Struck,” in Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 2, 292.
1. Raphael Sassaki, “Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie!,” Alan Moore World (blog), accessed January 2020, https://alanmooreworld.blogspot.com.
2. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 305.
3. Leo Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 146.
4. Bersani, 152.
5. Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 12.
6. Carol L. Tilley, “A Regressive Formula of Perversity: Wertham and the Women of Comics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 22, no. 4 (2018): 8.
7. My thanks to Claude Potts, a librarian at the Gardner Library at UC Berkeley, for alerting me to this provenance. Potts found a citation to the original Legman article, along with a notation describing Sartre’s engagement with it, in Alexander C. T. Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). This information appears in note 28 of Pierre Lagrange’s “A Ghost in the Machine: How Sociology Tried to Explain (Away) American Flying Saucers and European Ghost Rockets, 1946–1947,” 224–244.
8. Gershon Legman, “The Psychopathology of the Comics,” Neurotica 3 (Autumn 1948): 14–15, reprinted in Neurotica Issues 1–8 (London: Jay Landesman, 1981). Subsequent citations refer to the 1981 reprint version.
9. Legman, 16.
10. Legman, 18.
11. Legman, 18. Legman’s observation here—like many of his observations—is arguable. The descriptive vagueness of “Jewish noses” renders their identification challenging at best in a representational form where noses are only indicated by ink-drawn lines and pixelated color effects. In addition, there is the fact that a great many Golden Age superheroes, like Captain America and nearly every other hero of Timely/Marvel, were most frequently featured in stories fighting Nazis and cruelly caricatured Japanese soldiers and saboteurs. For these Nazi and Japanese villains to often have demonstrably “Jewish noses” across the span of different artists’ work would be a tremendous conspiratorial feat. Or else it would have to be the product of an association in the US cultural unconscious between Nazi villainy, Japanese caricatures, and visible “Jewishness” that, while not impossible, does not seem very likely.
12. Legman, 18.
13. Legman, 18.
14. Legman, 19.
15. Legman, 19.
16. Legman, 18.
17. Legman, 19, emphasis added.
18. Legman, 21.
19. Legman, 24.
20. Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007), 50.
21. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (1952; repr., New York: Grove, 2008), 125–126.
22. Legman, “Psychopathology of the Comics,” 29.
23. Markmann’s 1967 translation is arguably more faithful to Legman. Markmann translates, “There is still no answer to the question whether this maniacal fixation on violence and death is the substitute for a forbidden sexuality or whether it does not rather serve the purpose of channeling, along a line left open by sexual censorship.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; repr., New York: Grove, 1967), 147, emphasis added. Markmann preserves the word “censorship,” but his appending “sexual” to it has a similar effect as Philcox’s translation, ascribing a psychological process to what Legman is referring to as the result of political action.
24. Jeffrey A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 178.
25. Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2.
26. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206.
27. Nash, Black Body in Ecstasy, 6.
28. Nash, 4, emphasis in original.
29. Felix Lance Falkon with Thomas Waugh, Gay Art: A Historic Collection of Gay Art (1972; repr., Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2006), 121.
30. Rupert Kinnard, onscreen interview at 17:12, rough cut of No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, directed by Vicki Kleinman (accessed with permission of the producer Justin Hall, May 2020).
31. Falkon with Waugh, Gay Art, 59, emphasis in original.
32. Thomas Waugh, Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics Before Stonewall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2002), 20, emphasis added.
33. Deborah Shamoon, “Office Sluts and Rebel Flowers: The Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for Women,” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 86.
34. The latter technique is also used in Japanese gay manga, such as Gengoroh Tagame’s glorious S/M fantasy—nevertheless taking place in a recognizably “real” world, its setting being family-owned restaurants—Gunji. See Gengoroh Tagame, Gunji, English ed. trans. Anne Ishii (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder, 2014), 59. I have also seen this technique taken up in Patrick Fillion’s comic Rapture, which is discussed further in the main text. See Patrick Fillion, writer and artist, Rapture 2 (Canada: Class Comics, October 2006), 4.
35. See Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 222.
36. Belasco, foreword to The Brothers of New Essex: Afro Erotic Adventures (San Francisco: Cleis, 2000), n.p.
37. Belasco, 136.
38. Belasco, 136.
39. Belasco, 145, 146, ellipses in original.
40. Belasco, 156, ellipses in original.
41. Belasco, 169.
42. Belasco, 172.
43. See chapter 5 of my Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
44. Patrick Fillion, writer, Space Cadet #1, art by Bob Grey (Canada: Class Comics, April 2010), 6, 4, 8.
45. Fillion, 18, 19, ellipses in original.
46. Patrick Fillion, writer and artist, Rapture #3 (Canada: Class Comics, January 2009), 5.
47. Patrick Fillion, Hot Chocolate (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder Verlag, 2006), i.
48. Belasco, foreword to Brothers of New Essex, iii (emphasis added; first ellipses added, second ellipses in original).
49. David Barnes, “Raheem,” in Meatmen: An Anthology of Gay Male Comics, vol. 22, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Leyland, 1998), 103, ellipses in original.
50. Joseph Beam, “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart,” in In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, ed. Beam (Boston: Alyson, 1986), 242.
51. I do not know which of the many, many issues of the various Archie titles this panel sequence comes from. See https://boingboing.net, accessed June 2020.
52. Bloch, “Something’s Missing,” xvii.
53. Isaac Julien, “Confessions of a Snow Queen: Notes on the Making of The Attendant,” in The Film Art of Isaac Julien (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2000), 82.
54. Fanon, Black Skin (Philcox trans.), xiv.
55. Jean LaPlanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 318, emphasis in original.
56. Linda Williams, “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation and Interracial Lust,” in Williams, Porn Studies, 302, emphasis in original.
Epigraph: Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 15.
1. Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce, and Kevin Quealy, “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” New York Times, March 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com.
2. Huey B. Scott, conversation with the author, October 4, 2019.
3. Scott.
4. Gershon Legman, “The Psychopathology of the Comics,” Neurotica 3 (Autumn 1948): 7.
5. Legman, 8.
6. Legman, 25.
7. Legman, 7, emphasis added.
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Aminadab: Or the Fantastic Considered as a Language,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Critical Essays, trans. Chris Turner (1947; repr., London: Seagull Books, 2017), 188, 202, emphasis added. Originally in Situations I: Essais critiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
9. Sartre, 192–193, emphasis in original.
10. Sartre, 192.
11. Sartre, 204, emphasis in original.
12. Sartre, 206, emphasis in original.
13. Sartre, 210, emphasis added.
14. Sartre, 194.
15. Sartre, 194–195.
16. Sartre, 208–209.
17. Sartre, 209, emphasis added.
18. This may speak to an idea I’ve broached before in Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010): it may not be possible to have anything other than an instrumental relationship to the past.
19. Hillary Chute, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 24.
20. See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
21. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995).