As I mentioned in post #99, I've always been fascinated by how artists represent black people, especially in comics. It seems that I'm not the only one, and I've been reading a book called "Black images in the comics" by Frank Stromberg.
It's interesting to see how the images of black people have been largely, for want of a better term, racist for many years, with blacks portrayed by white artists, as Ollie Harrington once put it, as "a circle, black with two hotdogs in the middle for a mouth"
I hang out with a lot of black people and sometimes I can't relate when I hear about"how bad they have it" as London is a pretty cosmopolitan place, with integration pretty well ingrained in the fabric I feel. I've not suffered too much racism myself as a Vietnamese, but then I guess I, like the author of this book, find it hard to relate exactly to what it's like to be black.
However, what this book does show is how the artists have drawn the zeitgeist, perhaps drawing a slice of how the mainstream see black people, and on reading the book more closely and seeing the images of blacks in subservient and negative ways, I start to begin to understand what it is that black people talk about when they talk about having it hard.
If this is how they are depicted on paper, then it must be difficult to rise above it in real life. I can't put it much better than the author himself
"Racism in comics is not only a matter of the drawings. It can be distinguished on three levels: The first is the purely pictorial (in which a certain minority is depicted with various stereotypical attributes); the second is the purely textual (in which captions and not least the use of language present persons in a negative way); thirdly and probably the most subversive, is on a content level (in which for example people from a certain minority are constantly portrayed as evil, stupid, foolish subservient...or quite simply nonexistent"
I've decided to try and pick out a black image from the book that displays none of these attributes, but shows a man more like a human. I really liked the way this came out and it's going to someone who recently sent me post, which is now up on my REAL wall
June 19, 2011 at 8:58 AM
Your postcards are amazing!
June 19, 2011 at 4:04 PM
Sounds like a really interesting read. I think your sketch captured what you were going for. He looks cool, stylish, maybe a police detective from the 40's or 50's when they wore hats. Great job!
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