It's Life As I See It, Black Cartoonists in Chicago 1940-1980

Edited by Dan Nadel, essays by Charles Johnson and Ronald Wimberly, cover designed by Kerry James Marshall. Published by New York Review Comics.

Softcover, 200 pages, B&W, 2021. 

Between the 1940s and 1980s, Chicago’s Black press—from The Chicago Defender to the Negro Digest to self-published pamphlets—was home to some of the best cartoonists in America. Kept out of the pages of white-owned newspapers, Black cartoonists found space to address the joys, the horrors, and the everyday realities of Black life in America. From Jay Jackson’s anti-racist time travel adventure serial Bungleton Green, to Morrie Turner’s radical mixed-race strip Dinky Fellas, to the Afrofuturist comics of Yaoundé Olu and Turtel Onli, to National Book Award–winning novelist Charles Johnson’s blistering and deeply funny gag cartoons, this is work that has for far too long been excluded and overlooked. Also featuring the work of Tom Floyd, Seitu Hayden, Jackie Ormes, and Grass Green, this anthology accompanies the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition Chicago Comics: 1960 to Now, and is an essential addition to the history of American comics.

Published in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, on the occasion of Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, June 19–October 3, 2021. Curated by Dan Nadel.

An important and groundbreaking collection, bringing together important voices and biographical context illustrating four decades of Black perspectives on everything from daily life to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the strips will make your jaw drop with the way they bring to life a particular period in history, some of them will make you shake your head with the poignant realization of how little has changed, and some of them will just make you laugh.
—Eve L. Ewing, sociologist and Marvel Comics writer

Nadel’s lush, profound and well-researched volume sheds well-deserved light on some of the most talented, tenacious, and sadly unsung heroes of modern comics.
—Emil Ferris, author of My Favorite Thing is Monsters

This zesty anthology fills a gaping hole in the history of American cartooning by portraying nine seminal Black cartoonists and presenting . . . their creative, incisive, and socially eviscerating cartoons and comic strips. . . . [It’s Life as I See It is] an invaluable treasury of dynamic comic works of satire, protest, solidarity, and liberation.
—Donna Seaman, Booklist

The comics in this book are fantastic: innovative, incisive, layered, and—most importantly—blazingly funny. . . Though many of these artists were ignored by the mainstream, they created their own mainstream, a thriving space in which their Blackness was a starting point for rigorous engagement with American society.
—Tope Folarin, Vulture

[It’s Life as I See It is] a landmark book and one that details the untold stories of the Black illustrators who shaped the world of cartooning.
—Ayla Angelos, It’s Nice That

A fascinating collection of comics. . . . Dig deep and you’ll be absorbed.
—Henry Chamberlain, Comics Grinder