Black graphic novels crystallize the difficulty in defining what is a black novel. Earlier, this book asked is a novel black because of its content? Because of its writer? These questions become even more complicated because graphic novels are mostly collaborations. The genre often begins with a conversation or exchange of ideas between writer and illustrator, followed by the creation of text and panels and perhaps more co-editing and collaboration. Sometimes the project is passed on to others who handle the tone and color of the pictures, the lettering of the text, and overall design. The works discussed in this chapter represent this collaborative process and do so frequently across lines of race, gender, and sometimes national borders. The resulting visual styles are quite varied, but they share familiar patterns of inquiry and a rooting in traditions of black culture.

The genesis of black graphic novels represents an ongoing engagement of visual culture by black writers. The dialectic between text and image has long generated a means for black creators to explore and redefine what it means to be black. From the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, writers composed in an increasingly optic culture, and it is no surprise that their works embrace visual culture to provide texture and trope. Portraiture in narratives of the enslaved, photo essays, novels whose font formats are key to their themes, and finally graphic novels are examples of iconography used to question the vacillations within a perceived collective identity.

When one looks at the terms used to talk about visual elements in literature, they seem tailor-made for a canon heavily focused on seeing and perception, where the very concept of representation is central to narratives of race and culture. Evocative terms such as “the panoptic,” “scopic regimes,” “the spectacle,” and “surveillance” seem to beg to be applied to works with titles referencing seeing, color, and perception such as The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Bluest Eye, and The Color Purple. Blackness is at its origins a visually defined quality. The lived experience of being black is constructed through the valuations given to seen phenotypic traits and sustained through, among other modes, visual manifestations. Black literature has consistently offered commentary on the meaning of blackness by questioning the relationship of what is seen to what is.