Winner of the 2014 Will Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work.Bringing together contributors from a wide-range of critical perspectives, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation is an analytic history of the diverse contributions of Black artists to the medium of comics. Covering comic books, superhero comics, graphic novels and cartoon strips from the early 20th century to the present, the book explores the ways in which Black comic artists have grappled with such themes as the Black experience, gender identity, politics and social media. Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation introduces students to such key texts as: The work of Jackie Ormes Black women superheroes from Vixen to Black Panther Aaron McGruder's strip The Boondocks

Foreword, William Foster III Introduction, Sheena Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II Part I: Comics Then & Now 1. Brief History of The Black Comic Strip: Past and Present, Sheena C. Howard 2. The Trouble With Romance in Jackie Ormes's Comics, Nancy Goldstein 3. Contemporary Representations of Black Females in Newspaper Comic Strips, Tia C. M. Tyree 4. Black Comics and Social Media, Derek Lackaff and Michael Sales 5. Beyond B&W? The Global Manga of Felipe Smith, Casey Brienza Part II: Representing Race & Gender 6. Studying Black Comic Strips: Popular Culture, African American Repertoire, and Discourses of Race, Angela M. Nelson 7. Blowing Flames into the Souls of Black Folk: Ollie Harrington and his Bombs from Berlin to Harlem, Christian Davenport 8. Panthers and Vixens: Black Superheroines and Sexuality in Contemporary Comic Books, Jeffrey A. Brown 9. Gender, Race and The Boondocks, Sheena C. Howard 10. From Sexual Siren to Race Traitor: Condoleeza Rice in Political Cartoons, Clariza Ruiz De Castilla and Zazil Reyes Garcia Part III: Comics as Political Commentary 11. "There's a Revolutionary Messiah in Our Mist": A Pentadic Analysis of Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel , Carlos D. Morrison and Ronald L. Jackson II 12. Inappropriate Political Content: Serialized Comic Strips at the Intersection of Visual Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Humor, Elizabeth Sills 13. Will the "Real" Black Super Heroes Please Stand Up?!, Kenneth Ghee 14. Culturally Gatekeeping the Black Comic Strip, David DeIuliis Afterword, Jeet Heer Bibliography Index