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My new favorite picture! Hat tip to Mixed Race America

Review: Incognegro

I purchased Mat Johnson's Incognegro at my comic book shop yesterday and gave it a read-through between Keith Olbermann's deliciously snarky comments on on Tuesday's turnouts and reading through various postcolonial theologies for school and personal edification. That divided attention span may or may not play in to my first thoughts.

The Good: It's a gripping story, a detective story/social commentary on not only race but gender and human failings. It puts the spotlight on what has been traditionally hidden in our muddy mainstream, not just that lynchings were a regular part of American life until just a few decades ago, but also the blurred edges of identity that we would do well to wrestle with except that we're too busy trying to ignore it. Warren Pleece's art is exceptionally good for the task, as the clarity of the black-and-white drawings obscures the racial differences between the characters, which is the whole point. Even though race and gender are the two things that people allegedly notice about us when they meet us, they are not absolutes and not concrete and can be changed or developed as needed or desired. This is why passing -- either into another race, another class or another gender -- has been such a horror in a society that revels in the comfort of uniformity and categorization, even as, or especially as, it pays lip service to diversity.

The Not-So-Good: The weakness of Incognegro is in what I've called the John Grisham effect: an author writes a book (in this case, collaborates in a graphic novel) with an eye toward the silver screen. Ever noticed how much movies made off John Grisham novels stick to the book so closely? It's because Grisham writes books that are easy to turn into scripts. The pacing in Incognegro has that Hollywood feel to it, with each section a scene rather than a chapter and comic characters appear at the right time to lighten the heavy moment. The graphic novel/comic book is a medium in and of itself, with plenty of creative room for dramatic and incredible storytelling. It would have been nice to see Johnson to push the boundaries of the graphic novel format to tell his story, rather than just using it as a vehicle for his story. Also, as suitable as Pleece's art was, I think he could have gone into more graphic detail to present the violence and horror of what the protagonists were experiencing.

The main character, Zane Pinchback, the Incognegro, also suffers from what I call the Det. Bobby Goren effect (from Law & Order: CI). Like Goren, Pinchback is all-knowing, all-sure, in-control, where he notices every little detail, understands more than anyone what's going on, has the inside track. He's got enough flaws and makes enough mistakes to keep from being a Mary Sue-type character, but I think this might be part of the script-like flaw of the presentation. Once the story gets going, we no longer get a chance to see what's going on in Pinchback's interior, his thoughts, feelings, rationals or understandings of what he's experiencing, and I think the dialogue-only format robs the reader of a deeper experience.

Overall: I should come up with some sort of rating system, huh? What, four-out-of-five stars? Six-ouot-of-seven communion shot glasses? Whatever. Incognegro is a good, important book that I'd recommend to just about everyone to read. Hopefully it will spur discussion, not only about America's history that needs discussion, but also about the present issues of identity, race and gender that we call inappropriate for polite society. Fuck polite. Let's get upset for once. And if they do make a movie/TV show based on Incognegro, you can bet I'll be there to watch it.

Going Incognegro

I'm a big fan of the comic book, or of what the slightly higher-brow of us would call the graphic novel. Anyone who poo-poos the comic book as a medium for rotting kids' brains, well, they've obviously never read them and are poisoned by the homophobic rantings of Fredric Wertham. On my shelf is a small collection of graphic novels that are theologically relevant (we own more than 2,000 in all, but this collection has less than 30 titles in it as of yet), ranging from Preacher (and ER, you might like this one, it's a Suothern-fried commentary on the fundamentalist view of God, done in a style that's a cross between Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Kill Bill) to A Contract With God by graphic novel granddaddy Will Eisner to Art Spiegelman's Maus, a biography of a Holocaust survivor and first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

So I have to say that I'm really excited about reading Incognegro by Mat Johnson. Incognegro is the story of a biracial African American man, Zane Pinchback, who goes undercover as a caucasian to investigate black lynchings in the American South. The idea for the novel comes from Johnson's life:

"Well, I grew up ethnically and racially black, but looking white. The other pieces came to me: learning about Walter White, the birth of my twins, one of which looks more European, the other more African. ... It just seemed like a natural story to tell. And I always wanted this hero to be out there. Someone just like me, who turned what many see as an oddity into something priceless." (from interview at Racialicious)

I read a teaser page for Incognegro in the latest Jack of Fables (which is another fun series, spun off from the widly imaginative Fables by Bill Willingham). It depicted the aftermath of a lynching, the moment in which the men involved would line up to get their picture taken with the body (I realize this is a very link-happy post, but if you follow one link today, follow that one. It heads to a site for a book called Without Sanctuary by James Allen that shows this terrible part of our history. Watch the Flash movie. Note, fellow Oklahomans, how many of these photos were made in our state.). Zane, the novel's hero, circulates the crowd and takes names of those involved, posing as the assistant to the photographer taking orders of the photos for home delivery.

Incognegro is commentary on the social construction of race and its impact on all of us. Johnson stands those constructions on their heads, especially those of "passing" and the "Tragic Mulatto."

The rest of Zane’s subterfuge can be chalked up to philosophy and role playing. “Race doesn’t really exist,” he says. “Race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting. Playing roles. That’s what white folks never get. They don’t think they have accents. They don’t think they eat ethnic foods. Their music is classical. They think they’re just normal. That they are the universal and that everyone else is an odd deviation from form. That’s what makes them so easy to infiltrate.” (New York Times review)
...
"Well, I have a different concept of race, more distance. Yes, I wanted this to be a different story. This is not a Tragic Mulatto story. While I am interested in the form, I’m also interested in taking ownership of it, not borrowing it. I took the shame and judgement out of Passing, and tried to show it being used in a positive, practical light." (Interview on Racialicious)

Tomorrow is comic book day -- the day the week's new comics hit the shelves -- and I'm hoping my guy will have this so I can get read it. Personal review to come.

Highway to Heaven

A friend of mine clued me to this story the other day:


Texas ministry sees I-35 as holy highway

Some believe I-35 might be shorthand that links the interstate to Isaiah 35:8 of the Bible: "And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not pass over it, and fools shall not err therein."

... So ... basically, the road to heaven is constantly under construction and features the occasional porn shop and casino in border areas. Got it.

This, by the way, is as clear as I can figure to be an example of eisegesis that I've ever been able to find.


If you're a fan of NPR, head on over to the Diane Rehm Show to listen to this morning's discussion about the debate between teaching evolution and creationism. The show was prompted by the statement last week by the National Academy of Sciences that urged the teaching of evolution as a basic bedrock foundation of scientific principle, rather than teaching creationism/intelligent design instead or offering up both evolution and creationism and letting the kiddos decide between the two.


Firstly, kudos for the Academy for calling this what it is, creationism, and not intelligent design. I often joke about how NOT-intelligent the design of the world is (Have you seen that March of the Penguins movie? I used to like penguins until I saw it; now I think those are the creatures most horrifically enslaved to an inefficient genetic compulsion I've ever seen. Granted, it's kept them going for all these thousands of years, but man, yikes. When and if their climate changes, they're all screwed, them and the poor polar bears. Yes, we lament only the cute and cuddly seeming), but a recent viewing of a NOVA documentary on the Dover, Pa., case really gave me a good view of how intelligent design is an evolution (pun intended) of creationism with a shiny new gloss.


What I found most interesting about the creationism supporter on the Diane Rehm show was his insistence that his arguments weren't based in the Bible, but he took issue with how "materialism" (not the Brittney Spears-worshipping kind, but the kind that's based in the material of the world, he says) removes the ultimate purpose from human existence. Which, really, isn't a religious issue at all, but a worldview issue. Actually, that kind of anthrocentric worldview to me sounds vaguely like human-worship; that is, it says that we're so very important that we were created for some special purpose, and any idea that says we're just here through random chance reduces us to nothing more special an aemoeba. Which is impossible because humans are too important to be the same as aemoeba.

I rather find the concept of human existence in the world -- and hell, aemoeba existence, too -- as a product of random mutation rather awesome (not in the same vein as "these earrings are awesome!" but "That f-5 tornado bearing down on my house strikes awe in my heart"), moreso than that of some creator who has designed us for some purpose. Out of all the billions upon billions squared possibilities in the universe, there you are, just you, a unique person. Sit back for a second an appreciate that as a miracle, one that's reduced to the mundane by the fact that there are 6 billion and counting miracles walking the earth.

Admittedly, that sounds a bit like human worshipping, too, but with a different focus, one on being rather than goal, purpose or ultimate accomplishment. Very much like how the concept of God's grace was described to me, that we receive it not because of anything we do or even believe or join, but because we are.

Comic book scribe extraordinaire Alan Moore said it better than I did more than 20 years ago in his Watchmen series, about when the whole creationism mess was first rearing its ugly head:

Doctor Manhattan: Thermo-dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless
generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so
specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.

Laurie Juspeczyk: But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!

Dr. Manhattan: Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.