Ben Passmore’s ‘Your Black Friend’ Expanded, Republished in Hardcover
Ben Passmore’s 2017 Ignatz Award-winning comics zine, Your Black Friend, will be expanded into a 112-page hardcover volume that will be re-released in February 2018.
Originally published by Silver Sprocket Publishing as an 11-page zine, the new hardcover edition, retitled Your Black Friend and Other Strangers, will now include a new cover and an added selection of Passmore comic strips focusing on race, gentrification, the prison system and other topics. The comics added to the collection were originally published on the political cartooning website, The Nib, and in VICE.
In Your Black Friend, Passmore delivers a sly comic broadside on the cultural myopia, subliminal racism and social presumptuousness exhibited by irritating, albeit well-meaning, white people, while in the presence of their black friends. In one instance in the comic, he cites linguistic black face, i.e., imitating black speech: “ ‘white friends wanting to participate in blackness,’ like it was a costume, but [he] knows they wouldn’t want to live with the consequences of actually being black.”
Your Black Friend, was the winner of a 2017 Ignatz award for excellence in indie comics and was nominated for an Eisner Award. The mini-comic also earned a slot on NPR’s 100 Favorite Graphic Novels list.
The new edition of Your Black Friend and Other Strangers, will be published in hardcover, February 28, and priced at $19.99. Silver Sprocket titles are distributed to the book trade by SCB Distributors. Silver Sprocket Publishing is an art crew, comic and zine publisher, and record label based in San Francisco.
