IT'S LIFE AS I SEE IT - Serio Comics 5
IT'S LIFE AS I SEE IT: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940 - 1980 compiled & edited by Dan Nadel, published by New York Review Comics & Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, drawn & written by...
I definitely missed a week
And I might miss some more
Because
I am working on a new, fifth Haggadah!
To follow up The Trump Passover Haggadah, The Yada Yada Haggadah, The Biden-Harris Haggadah, and The Curb Your Haggadah (perhaps)
Which can all be found & bought here
Fortunately, I already targeted this collection, IT’S LIFE AS I SEE IT: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940 - 1980, for Black History Month, which I bought on a recommendation by the Skylight Books staff member, Alex
When I found and then enthused about Charles Johnson’s ALL YOUR RACIAL PROBLEMS WILL SOON END in week 1 of Seriocomics back on MLK day
Because the new, fifth Haggadah has benefited tremendously from this week’s study of the work of:
Tom Floyd, Grass Green, Seitu Hayden, Jay Jackson, Charles Johnson, Yaoundé Olu, Turtel Onli, Jackie Ormes, and Marrie Turner
Compiled and edited by Dan Nadel
For publishers New York Review Comics and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
With essays by Charles Johnson and Ronald Wimberly
The collection as Dan Nadel explains in his introduction shows that the understanding of the tradition of Chicago comics, and comics in general, is strong, but it’s never been the full story, as Chicago had a vibrant yet utterly separate Black publishing industry that encompassed multiple comic strip genres, particularly in the years before, during, and after The Civil Rights Movement, i.e. 1940 - 1980
This also happened to encompass the time, place, & culture that was formative of the parents & the birth & early childhood of the parodic subject of the new, fifth Haggadah
No, not Donald Trump, not Jerry Seinfeld and his crew, not Joe Biden & Kamala Harris, not Larry David and his own crew
But, yes, you may have already guessed it
It always helps me to publically declare a work in progress
Because it makes me deliver it then
So I am now announcing to the subscribers of the Seriocomics & Shuffle Synchronicities Substacks that sometime before the first night of this year’s Passover, April 5th, 2023
We should expect to see the self-publication of:
THE MESHUGAH KANYE HAGGADAH
Meshugah, if you’re not Jewish, means:
Like the others, it’ll be written in script form, and it gives readers the experience to perform the story of ye attending a Passover Seder
This one is hosted by Jewish music mystic elders Bob Dylan & Rick Rubin
Along with guests like Lil Dicky, Doja Cat, HAIM, Ezra Koenig, Billy Joel, Lenny Kravitz, Barbara Streisand, & Drake ;)
Who all hope to teach him more about Judaism
But may or may not be surprised to find that
Kanye
When he finds inspiration
That isn’t limited to a Christian nor a Jewish nor any sectarian G-d
Can still channel plenty of teachings, too
It will also be a collaboration with musician, author, Leo Nala, & fave ex-day-job-co-worker who brought a Kanye for President sign in 2016 to our shared desk lol, & who is the designer of the Seriocomics logo & a previous Shuffle Synchronicties guest poster
Leryl Joseph!
When we made the plan, Leryl & I joked how when we saw Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris’ Netflix film, You People, we both thought it was quite funny & helpful, but that in an alternative universe, we would’ve written it together & added some, um, more depth…
LOL, Shuffle Synchronicities moment, no joke/no lie, as I texted Leryl for consent to include the above, this song came on:
OK, so back to the seriocomic IT’S LIFE AS I SEE IT
Editor and compiler Dan Nadel starts the collection with an essay that is an honest yet humble appraisal of his privilege yet responsibility to bring these obscure works to wider public attention
This is followed by a coming-of-age essay by Charles Johnson about the difficulty of his path
He mentions the support provided by a Jewish cartoonist, Lawrence Lariar, and advice from the white cartoonist, Charles Barsotti, from the bleakly gatekept The New Yorker…
The most striking moment to me though was the inspiration from Amiri Baraka, who was one of the leaders of the Black Power movement, to bring talent back to the Black community, and how Johnson was able to both honor that idea but to also discern that for himself he didn’t want to exclude non-Blacks from his career and talent
We’ve already seen a number of Charles Johnson’s cartoons in post 1
But you could be forgiven if you mistook him for the first artist’s Tom Floyd’s similar one-page gags, which goes to show how much depth there was in Black cartoonists at the time
Richard “Grass” Green’s cartoon Smoke Power was next and it’s set in a future where a Black man feels so good about life, and racism is so not a problem, that he feels emboldened to risk his reputation to protest the rise of anti-smoking culture
It made me think about how some people were outraged by Kanye wearing the Maga hat, or ‘worse’, but how, to me, it’s clear if perhaps misdirected that Kanye is fighting for the right to be so FREE that he can be as wrong as anyone else in this country
LOL on this 93,000+ song playlist, no joke/no lie, another Kanye song just came on:
It does remind me of one of Seitu Hayden’s cartoons, which reminds me to not mix too much non-Seriocomics content into this post LOL
Next was Jay Jackson’s Bungleton Green, which first captured the editor Nadel’s interest in Black Chicago cartoons
And is a truly brilliant high concept & quite well-executed story especially for 1944
It imagines a sci-fi future where a new Green human race emerged and took over America and treats non-Whites neutrally, but treats Whites like they treated Blacks
What’s interesting here is that Jackson seems to have the skill & vision to marry the superhero & science fiction genres with a reformatory and satirical tone
Yet he was given no major publishing outlet
This is another thing that Kanye talks about, perhaps haphazardly at times, but the idea basically is that Jewish-Americans are credited not just with initiating Hollywood but also with inventing Superhero comic books
Growing up a few years after Kanye who was born in 1977 and me in 1984, I often looked at Hollywood and humor as a Jewish man the way he must have looked at the NBA and rap music as a Black man
As sort of a birthright to be worked for but also given if so
Due to a combination of some entitlement and attitude issues resulting from that, maybe not enough development of my talent due to some behavioral issues, & perhaps changes to the entertainment industry for the better, the amount of ‘help’ I received was not insubstantial but never enough as I thought I’d receive in the older mindset
For instance, my SNL USC professor jokingly asked “Who are you sleeping with there?” when I published my Kanye shouts in The New Yorker, yet I knew no one there, and it was rejected initially
But at the same time, I received an interview for the day job due to a connection from college which I could afford to attend due to generational wealth
Thankfully in the newer post-metanoia mindset, I can see the benefits of failing to receive even easier access to immediate success
This is all to say that there are a lot of gray areas as Dave Chappelle joked on SNL and as guest poster and Rabbi Jay Michaelson wrote in The Rolling Stone to what Kanye says about Jews in entertainment who both want to honor their creation of lots of it, yet punish those who claim they also didn’t gatekeep it, & also to what fellow bipolar music writer, & NPR supporter of Shuffle Synchronicities, & guest poster Kiana Fitzgerald & I talked about in part of the 1st episode of the Shuffle podcast
OK back to…
The sequence of Jay Jackson’s story with Dark Mystery was one of my favorites as she hooks up the main White character to a machine that’ll detect through him watching videos of interracial love if the White character has residual racism against Blacks
If so, the machine will kill him, yet the main Black character from the past has faith that his White friend will survive the test, and the White friend indeed does, which shows how optimistic Jay Jackson was even in the 1940s
There’s also a striking panel that speaks to what Kanye seemingly tried to talk about in regard to Adolph Hitler, which, in my mind, though I’ll admit this mind can be sometimes as mixed up as Kanye’s with spirit / mental illness, is that, to Jews, and some White Americans, Hitler is on a whole other plane of evil compared to anyone
This includes the White Americans who formed the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries
And yet to some Black Americans when they count the 60 million Africans estimated to have lost their lives in that process, not to mention the Native Americans, versus the 6 million Jews, they don’t see such a false equivalence
And yet Jackson is able to maintain his visionary and reformatory optimism for the future as he notices the next generations seem to keep getting better and better at this living together with less and less racism thing
See Steven Pinker’s scientific explanation that not just intellectual IQ rises a standard deviation every generation but also moral IQ from his book The Better Angels Of Our Nature
At this point, looking for a Charles Johnson gag, I had the shadow thought: Are you cuckolding your Jewish identity and losing your audience and community, Dave?
Yet, I do really believe what I am saying vis-a-vis Kanye
And am doing what Charles Johnson does too, both critiquing the Other and his own culture
And perhaps self-interestedly might be necessary for me to break through even more professionally as well
LOL, I still remember the Jewish Journal interview where the kind & pop culture-savvy Erin Ben-Moche asked if I was friends with the people I was parodying like Jonah Hill
LOL, no lie/no joke, the Shuffle as I wrote about cuckolding my Jewishness, is:
It’s funny because while Part 2 is about the personality of the women Jay-Z dates:
Got this smarty art chick to whom I pose this question
I read a couple books to add to her soul's progression
and
Got this model slash actress, slash part-time waitress
Spend a whole day she hangin' round with part-time haters
The original Girls, Girls, Girls from that album Blueprint, largely produced by Kanye, was very explicitly about how Jay-Z doesn’t limit himself when it comes to ethnicity about whom to date:
I got this Spanish chica, she don't like me to roam
So she call me cabron plus marricon
Said she likes to cook rice so she likes me home
I'm like, "Un momento" mami, slow up your tempo
I got this black chick, she don't know how to act
Always talkin' out her neck, makin' her fingers snap
She like, "Listen Jigga Man, I don't care if you rap
You better R-E-S-P-E-C-T me"
I got this French chick that love to french kiss
She thinks she's Bo Derek, wear her hair in a twist
My, Cherie amour, to a belle
Merci, you fine as fuck but you givin' me hell
I got this Indian squaw the day that I met her
Asked her what tribe she with, red, dot or feather
She said all you need to know is I'm not a ho
And to get with me you better be Chief Lots-a-Dough
Now that's Spanish chick, French chick, Indian and black
That's fried chicken, curry chicken, damn I'm gettin' fat
Arroz con pollo, french fries and crepe
An appetite for destruction but I scrape the plate
I love
OK sorry too much Shuffle again lol but it’s also just “life as I see it” lol
Sometimes cartoons like comedy like memes like poems and novels are just very one-dimensional blunt instruments like perhaps the above panel from Yaoundé Olu
Yet speaking of The New Yorker, they went after You People critically
I don’t go after artists anymore critically, I only enthuse about artists, and only critique other critics
But also with love
They said Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris’ film wasn’t a good romantic comedy
which is both fair and not
Because to me it was much more clearly a Meet The Parents meets Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner political satire family comedy
And in that, it often worked, or at least it got us discoursing about the issues in the Zeitgeist, or, ahem making new art about the subjects…
And I actually really appreciated romantic-comedically how Jonah and Lauren London (Nipsey Hussle and Lil Wayne’s ex and don’t forget she’s half-Jewish) started connecting over their shared love of fashion (Gucci slides) … even if it was glided over ;)
Fascinating enough, the next artist Turtel Onli introduced me to Nubian mythology, as it’s inspired by how Southern Egypt’s culture overlapped with Sudan and other parts of more traditionally Black Africa
I had heard of Nubian culture very superficially through some hip-hop like:
But didn’t realize they had a completely different relationship with the Egyptian pyramids than the Jews
The Nubians In Turtel Onli’s Black Panther-esque story protect and celebrate it…
While the Jews in the Passover story view it as a symbol of suffering and slavery…
Jackie Ormes comically points out how different human experiences can be, and that such differences shouldn’t divide us when we understand and make room for them
The collection concludes with Morrie Turner, whose Dinky Fellas followed by Wee Pals were encouraged by Charles Schultz of Peanuts fame who according to Nadel told Turner to “create a feature comic strip that could offer a vision of Black childhood equivalent to the one Schulz had put forth for white children in his own work”
And yet it seems Turner’s work
Like many other artists both Black and White
Was made for everyone…
Okay, that’s post 5 of Seriocomics!
IT'S LIFE AS I SEE IT: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940 - 1980
There probably won’t be any posts here on Seriocomics or on Shuffle Synchronicities for the next few weeks while I work on the Kanye Haggadah
But we’ll see ;)