ALL YOUR RACIAL PROBLEMS WILL SOON END - Serio Comics 1
ALL YOUR RACIAL PROBLEMS WILL SOON END written and drawn by Charles Johnson, published by New York Review Comics - 01/16/22
Trying out a new subject for a series of posts
As I continue to slowly near the completion of my own first graphic novel
There may be other topics to expand the universe of Cowen Substacks hehe
This one is even going by a different pen name, David Cowen
And it’s not devoid of music as I did shuffle for insight about this sub-Substack and got a song no joke/no lie by a musical group called Plan B
Plan B!
They sing
Then in Spanish:
The perfect combination!
The graphic novel of course is Plan B for the screenplay version of the story
Besides the new pen name
It also has a new working title of
SHOULD WE, um, BUY A GUN?
And I’m trying out a subtitle
I always enjoyed how Alison Bechdel subtitled her mainstream breakout FUN HOME as A Family Tragicomic
And wanted a similar unique adjective phrase subtitle
Someone in my life helped prompt me to think of the word:
Seriocomic
Which is a word that has fallen out of use a bit
And hasn’t really been used in that genre-defining punning way before based on some Googling
But it essentially means:
Seriocomic - Combining the serious and the comic; serious in intention but jocular in manner or vice versa
It’s somehow more specific than the more contemporarily popular word Dramedy
Which also according to the Oxford English Dictionary means:
Dramedy - a movie, play, or broadcast program that combines elements of drama and comedy.
It suggests a sense of irreverence toward tone, even an extreme one, that moves between the bipolarities of life from joy to pain, mourning to celebration, happiness to suffering, death back to life, etc….
SHOULD WE, um, BUY A GUN? A Seriocomic
Perhaps there should be a second word there like Bechdel’s
A Romantic Seriocomic
A Marital Seriocomic
A Sericomic of Remarriage
A Sericomic of Civil Union
LOL
Not sure yet
Probably just: A Seriocomic
Anyway, I had Martin Luther King day off today from the day job so I went to my local bookstore, Skylight, which is a few blocks south of me on Vermont Avenue here in Los Feliz
They have an Annex full of art books, not just graphic novels and comics, but photography and design and much more
It was a joy to stand in the aisle and move slowly from book to book, really reading the first 15 pages and on to the next
I was reminded how unique the browsing experience can be from Amazon, which has unfortunately remained too much of my go-to since the Pandemic
After 4-5 books, I landed on ALL YOUR RACIAL PROBLEMS WILL SOON END: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson (published by New York Review Comics)
And, sure, I felt the MLKness, but also was absolutely delighted by the seriocomic nature of the work
The collection published by New York Review Comics @nyrcomics is of cartoons Johnson drew in his 20s and 30s in the 60s and 70s mostly
Before his turn to prose novels (he won the 1990 National Book Award for his historical masterpiece MIDDLE PASSAGE) as well as academia
With these short gags, he skewers all aspects of ‘racial problems’ from that era which of course still echoes today
Including the publishing and production of racial themed content
From white authors trying to tell black stories
What mass media did to harmonize stories of racial conflict
How black authors struggled to sell black stories
And how that was then co-opted when it became popular
There’s also…
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