All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson

National Book Award–winning novelist Johnson (Middle Passage) follows up his debut graphic novel, The Eightfold Path, released earlier this year, with this comprehensive collection of his sharp and insightful political cartoons, published mostly in the 1960s and ’70s. Johnson recalls how he drew “constantly, since childhood” and published his first comics in his high school newspaper before appearing in Southern Illinois University’s Daily Egyptian, Ebony, Black World, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications. Though Johnson’s college newspaper editor cautioned him against trending too political after he called for a student revolution, the alternative Black press encouraged his uncompromising take on race relations. In one of the collection’s wordless one-pagers, a Black man stands at the viewing window for newborn babies and raises his fist—one infant raises a tiny fist in return. Johnson’s caricaturing, deceptively simple art style reflects the broad-stroke political comics of ’60s–’70s funnies—there’s plenty of silliness and romantic/domestic humor, but the apparent breeziness belies their unflinching, often incendiary views and subversive force. As his work moved into more mainstream publications, Johnson lost none of his satirical edge, as evidenced by the eponymous comic, in which a smiling Black man receives an optimistic forecast from a “weight and fortune” scale mere moments before a falling safe obliterates him. This provocative compendium shines a spotlight on Johnson’s essential contributions to comics’ literary history. (Oct.)