DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint brought together novelist Mat Johnson and artist Warren Pleece to create Incognegro, an original graphic novel that recreates a terrible period in American history when the brutal lynchings of black Americans were carried out throughout the South as if they were wholesome, county fair-like entertainment for the family. Incognegro will be released as a hardcover this month.
During the early 20th Century, lynchings, gruesome enough already, were often preambled by the humiliation and outright torture of the innocent black victims and often captured and preserved in “souvenir” photographs handed out to the festive white crowds that attended. These terrible events carried on for decades and were chronicled in raw detail by journalists of the independent black press of the period. During these years many light-skinned black reporters went undercover—the story at the heart of Incognegro—and “passed” for white in the racist South, risking their lives in order to observe these horrific events closeup and expose them.
Johnson is an acclaimed African American novelist and teacher of creative writing at the University of Houston. He has published such novels as Drop and Hunting in Harlem (both from Bloomsbury) and was named a James Baldwin Fellow by the U.S Artists Foundation in 2007. He’s not necessarily a stranger to graphic novel storytelling either: Johnson wrote the Hellblazer: Papa Midnight graphic novel for Vertigo in 2005.
Johnson was drawn to this hellish historical period by his own life experiences. Johnson is himself, “light-skinned,” and while in college he read about the work of Walter White, a journalist and former head of the NAACP in the 1930s who made trips to the South passing as white in order to write about lynching. Johnson himself grew up “a black boy who looked white” in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia and his experiences lead him to ponder the vagaries of ethnicity in American culture. He said he often fantasized about living in another time or situation where his appearance would be “an asset instead of a burden.” He even fantasized about going “incognegro” in the war against white supremacy. Indeed, Johnson has learned that, “passing for white is a part of [African-American] mythology.”
During his college years, Johnson discovered White, a relentless anti-lynching advocate. Walter White was a man of even fairer complexion than Johnson and used his complexion to “pass” as a white man, in order to report from the deep South. White’s real life experiences echoed Johnson’s childhood fantasies, and inspired him to craft a graphic novel that confronts one of America’s darkest chapters.
Incognegro is the story of Zane Pinchback, a light-skinned Manhattan-based black journalist who passes for white and infiltrates the lynching culture of the 1930’s south at his own considerable peril. When his brother is arrested and charged with the murder of a white woman, Pinchback sets off for Mississippi to uncover the facts in the case and hopefully get his brother out alive. Accompanied by Carl, another light-skinned black who can pass, Pinchback unravels a poisonous knot of intrigue, corruption, and lethal smalltown secrets while trying to stay out of the hands of the local Ku Klux Klan. It’s a harrowing narrative, filled with tension, suspense and storytelling twists with an unflinching eye for the squeamish goings-on of the time.
Johnson says he’s out to use the graphic novel to remind his audience of the harsh historical realities of African American emancipation. “Despite abolition, de facto slavery and racial intimidation lasted for a long time in the south,” explained Johnson, “and from the end of slavery through the end of the civil rights movement there were pretty much no African-Americans in positions of power or authority.” Up until the mid-20th century, racist Southerners fought viciously to preserve their racial dominance and way of life, said Johnson. But now he believes that the general population sometimes forget that the rights of African Americans were secured by blood. While the racists, “ultimately lost, these days when presented with the horrors of lynchings, there’s an initial kind of, disbelief,” explained Johnson, “that these events could have happened.”
Johnson’s first experience working in comics was writing for Vertigo’s Papa Midnight, a 2005 series based on a black character from Vertigo’s Hellblazer series, set in 18th century Manhattan. Johnson said that his work on the mini-series taught him “how to write in the graphics form. Not just in the panel-to-panel format, but also how to take advantage of the visual medium.” For Incognegro, Johnson opted for the original graphic novel format—a single book rather than a periodical series—which allows for a stronger story flow unfettered by the need for cliffhangers and other conventions required by the monthly comics serial.
Tackling the novel’s visual component is Warren Pleece, a Vertigo veteran and an illustrator with an eye for realism. “I've been a fan of Warren's work for years,” said Johnson. “I think it's his most impressive work to day; the period detail and sense of drama he brought to the piece is palpable and moving,” said Johnson. “I know people often kiss the asses of their creative collaborators, but I can't help it. He's the real deal.”
The result is a graphic novel that can be read as literature and a work that is sure to attract readers beyond hardcore comics fans. The book has also been optioned as a film property and Johnson said he’s more than ready to work on more comics projects. “Hell, I hope so,” he said, “I have the ideas, so we'll see.”
