Festival to honor black comic book pioneers

Festival to honor black comic book pioneers

Courtesy of Jerry Craft

"Mama's Boyz" by Jerry Craft, a co-creator of the Black Comic Book Festival.

Black Panther. Black Goliath. Luke Cage.

Graphic novel readers of a certain age â€" generally those old enough to remember when they were called comic books and cost a lot less â€" know them as some of the first black superheroes to grace those multi-colored pages.

Black Panther and Black Goliath were created by Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Don Heck, respectively, in 1966; Cage, also for Marvel, by writer Archie Goodwin and artist John Romita Sr. in 1972.

Among the first superheroes of color, they were far from the last. You can see for yourself just how far the representations have come on Saturday as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hosts the Black Comic Book Festival.

Organized by graphic artists Jerry Craft, Jonathan Gayles and John Jennings, the six-hour-long program will include a screening of Gayles’ film, “White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in Comic Books,” a pop-up art exhibition and “visual homage” to Kirby created by Jennings, panel discussions, workshops, and exhibit tables featuring the work of African-American graphic artists from across the country.

Artists already confirmed to attend include Jewels Smith, Jennifer Crute, Regine Sawyer, Brandon Easton, Jerome Walford, Ray Felix, Trevor Von Eden, Alex Simmons and Keith Miller, Lance Tooks, Titus Thomas, Robert Garrett, N. Steven Harris, Turtel Onli and Chuck Collins.

Admission is free but registration is required.

“People can come and meet some twenty-five authors and illustrators,” Craft said. “A lot of these guys illustrated Batman and Superman. Alex Simmons wrote Archie and Scooby Doo comics.”

The program is a continuation of the "Black Comic Book Day" Craft and others organized for the past two years at Harlem’s Hue-man Bookstore, which closed last year.

Craft, who grew up on 162nd St. between Edgecombe and Amsterdam Ave., has been drawing comics since he was 7 years old. A School of Visual Arts graduate, Craft is creator of the “Mama’s Boyz” comic strip (see the website, www.mamasboyz.com) and has done work for many Daily News supplements.

He said he was searching for a place to hold this year’s comic conference when Deidre Hollman, associate director of the Schomburg’s Junior Scholars Program, contacted him on the Linkedin website.

Turns out Hollman was already in talks with Jennings, an associate professor in the SUNY Buffalo’s Visual Studies Department, and Gayles, associate professor of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, to host a black comic event.

“I wanted to bring the world of black comic books to the youth of the Junior Scholars Program because with our curriculum we continuously strive to break the notion and reality of blackness out of the box,” Hollman said. “The world of black superheroes and sheroes is at once historical and phantasmagorical as it accesses ancestral memory, earthly political consciousness, and brave new world visions of the future we have the power to create.”

Jennings said he “was eager to help put something like this together because there are so many Black comics creators out there who make extremely literate work. There aren't enough positive images of Black protagonists out there; even today and our children and young adults need those images imbedded within their psyches in order to deal with some of the trials and tribulations ahead of them in our great country.

“Comics are a great way to teach multimedia literacy,” Jennings said. “They have always been image and text combined. Think of all of the different types of media that we consume now that are primarily composed of that mixture of media.

Wise librarians and curators around the country have discovered this and are creating venues to deal with this type of literacy and to help create the next generation of graphic novelists and visual storytellers.”

Craft said the program is also a way to give exposure to artists who, because of market demands, often must self publish.

“Many of us don’t have publishing companies behind us,” he said. “We take the money we make and put it back into producing new books.”

For more information see the websites, jerrycraft.net or www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg.

crichardson@nydailynews.com