Mapping the Black Comic Imaginary: Beyond the Black Panther at the MSU Museum

The historical link between Afrofuturism and comics offers a vital avenue to explore black speculative practice. Identifying comics that reflect the structure of Afrofuturism provides a critical way to understand the intersection between liberation and speculation at the heart of Afrofuturism. This commentary explores the curator’s framing of the utility of organizing Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics exhibition presented virtually and physically at the MSU Museum in Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI, USA. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the MSU Museum was closed to the public and this exhibition was re-imagined as a virtual experience and published online in February 2021.

What can we learn about black speculative practice by engaging with comics?
Theorist Reynaldo Anderson argues that Afrofuturism allows us to explore overlapping "tropes of science fiction, history, trauma, reparation and politic" in the service of transformation and liberation (Anderson, 2020). Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics, a virtual exhibition hosted by the Michigan State University Museum in East Lansing, MI, is an opportunity to explore the place of comic books in the black speculative tradition (Figure 1). The choice to pursue comics to understand Afrofuturism grows from the term's origins in the 1990s. In his essay "Black to the Future," cultural critic Mark Dery called our attention to the fact "African-American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come." Dery urges the reader to seek Afrofuturism in "unlikely places" and explore "far-flung points." As he laid the ideological groundwork for Afrofuturism, Dery relied heavily on comic books. Indeed, Dery argues Afrofuturism "percolates" through "black-written" and "black drawn" comics produced by Milestone Media and uses that company's characters to illustrate his groundbreaking essay (Dery, 1994: 182).
The bold visual style and the complex world offered by Milestone was not an outlier.
Instead, careful consideration of comics produced by African Americans highlights an engagement with speculation and liberation that defines Afrofuturism.
Building on the global impact of Marvel's Black Panther (2018), the premise of Beyond the Black Panther seeks to understand the wider scope and differing impacts represented by Afrofuturism. The logic behind the exhibition explicitly moves beyond the definition of Afrofuturism as, "Speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technolculture-and, more generally, African-American dignification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future" offered in Dery's original essay. (Dery, 1994: 180) Instead, the exhibition builds on Alondra Nelson's framing of Afrofuturism as a way to think about black speculative practice and its connection to modernity (Nelson, 2002: 6).
While comics may seem an unlikely space to revisit the definition and meaning of Afrofuturism, questions about race and the meaning of modernity defined comics in the United States. As a "humor-based" response to rapid social, political, and economic change created by urban and industrial growth, comics documented both the reality of these changes and the imagined disruption offered by blacks and ethnic immigrants in cities (Gordon, 2002).
Comic scholars have explored how the popular imagination informed by comics offers a fertile ground to consider how a predominantly white audience engaged with questions of identity and power in a rapidly changing culture. The story of how black comic creators offered alternative views of black life and culture is less well known.
Nonetheless, these contributions were significant. Rebecca Wanzo rightly calls our attention to how "…the wide circulation of comic and cartoon art" contributes to a language of "national belonging and exclusion" in the United States (Wanzo, 2020: 3). This language suggests comics have a privileged position in popular discourse.
However, as Thierry Groensteen's classic essay "Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?" suggests, the nature of the engagement with comics as a transformative and impactful artistic practice remains a complex cultural narrative, especially in the United States (Groensteen, 2008: 3). In the United States the rise of the "graphic novel" is linked to social and political critiques of the underground comix movement. This association has shaped a particular view of those graphic narratives worthy of popular celebration and critical investigation. Yet, if we consider Afrofuturism as a critical framework and its clear links to the comic medium, a broader approach to thinking about comics and futurity emerges.

Beyond the Black Panther follows a path highlighted by Kodwo Eshun in his 2003
essay, "Further Considerations of Afrofuturism." Eshun suggests Afrofuturist practice is a "program for recovering the histories of counter-futures" and that it highlights the "critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention" for black people (Eshun, 2003: 301-302). In this light, examining comics through an Afrofuturist lens offers a vital way to explore how transformative narratives created by comic exploring "dimensions of de-hierarchization" to determine meaning or interpretation (Anderson, 2015: 175). Anderson's focus was rooted in a concern that the fixity that of Afrofuturism and the centrality of Octavia Butler's work to our understanding of Afrofuturism. Butler is often described as the founding voice in modern Afrofuturism and her novels feature speculations on the cause of oppression and alternative structure that offer freedom. Adapted by Duffy and Jennings, two scholar-artists with a long history of collaborative work linked to Afrofuturism, this graphic novel calls attention to the literary roots to Afrofuturism and highlights that tone and scope of comic storytelling linked to Afrofuturism is vaster and more complex than the viewer might consider. If the public that engages with the exhibits seeks out the independent works created by Duffy and Jennings, they will see an example of the Afrofuturist logic Dery called our attention to in 1994. However, if they seek out Butler's novels, they will also be given access to transformative literary figures and hopefully, discover the countless writers inspired by her legacy.
Such attempts to bridge the "hidden" past of black speculative practice while engaging with contemporary creators offer the opportunity to consider how the museum might serve as a platform for lesser-known creators. One of the great ironies of the historical moment that gave rise to Afrofuturism was the explosion of African American comics linked to the independent comic market of the late 1980s and early 1990s. These comics produced outside the corporate structures shared a careful engagement with unique artistic practice, alternative narrative pathways and rejection of mainstream tropes (Hatfield, 2005: 1-3). Black creators made a significant creative contribution to this independent comic moment. While Dery focused on Milestone Media, other publications from the era highlight that African American vision offered something different (McDuffie, 2010). In considering what comics should be included in Beyond the Black Panther, a major goal was an engagement with this independent comic market. As the title suggests, I wanted to look beyond those characters at the center of the popular discourse and understand the ideas presented in Marvel's Black Panther could be found in various black comics. The decision to include creators such as Shawneé and Shawnelle Gibbs or Jiba Molei Anderson captures independent comic creators' diverse material (Anderson, 2014;Gibbs and Gibbs, 2018). As was the case three decades ago, these contemporary creators build different story worlds.
In the case of Anderson, his work The Horsemen: Divine Intervention captures the idea of how Afrofuturism might reshape a superhero narrative (Anderson, 2014). Much of our contemporary superhero media is rooted in European pantheons. The widespread presence of gods and goddesses is barely interrogated. Anderson's decision to draw on his West African roots and be inspired by that cosmology to craft a story of African gods that seek to change the world is refreshing. Gods are not new in comics, but because the cultural milieu that shapes his story offers characters and traditions as rich and complex as any we have seen before, we gain something from seeing how he embraces the transformative potential he sees in his cultural context legacy. The Gibbs Sisters are equally inspiring in their independent work. Storytellers inspired by the realworld history of African American activism in the late nineteenth century, their comic, The Invention of E.J. Whitaker builds on the history of Tuskegee University to imagine a transformative black female inventor who captures the ways black men and women sought to liberate and elevate black people in the early 20 th century (Gibbs and Gibbs, 2018). These creators offer an essential reminder for readers of the dynamic vision that drove African Americans to create institutions and promote actions that supported black progress.
In bringing together the comics in the exhibition, we point the way to a complex understanding of the scope and depth of Afrofuturism. The creators in the exhibition draw inspiration from the full complexity of black diaspora to create the story they tell.
In doing so, they entertain us and open the door to new ideas and pathways for us to explore. In this way, they are a powerful reminder that our popular culture plays a vital role in societal change.