Black Comics - Vom Kolonialismus zum Black Panther
In the organizer's words:
Black Comics
From colonialism to the Black Panther
Curated by Dr. Alexander Braun
Western democracies, especially Germany, have begun to deal intensively with their colonial history. This has revealed painful abysses of robbery, abduction, enslavement and genocide, which have been concealed for far too long by the fiction of adventure and the supposed development of civilization. The reality was different: inhumane and cruel.
And what does the comic have to say about this? It is difficult to expect that the cultural products of racist societies would not present a similar picture. One negative example is Hergé's "Tintin in the Congo" from 1930, in which the blonde Belgian reporter alongside Catholic missionaries brings education and virtue to the "stupid" Africans.
But: only nine years later, Jijé did better and gave the European comic - in the middle of the Nazi occupation of Belgium - a black boy
as the title hero ("Blondin et Cirage"). What's more, despite its colonial agenda, "Tintin in the Congo" became a bestseller in the Congo itself and remains one of the most popular comic titles in Africa to this day. The album became the initial spark for an African comic culture of its own: around 50 percent of comic artists on the entire continent come from the Congo. The example shows: There is little to be gained here with crude clichés and quick condemnations. The subject is very complex and full of ambivalences.
At the beginning of the 1950s, the EC publishing house denounced racism in the USA and the machinations of the Ku Klux Klan. In the early 1970s, Jack Kirby and Co. expanded the superhero cosmos to include a whole squad of African-American heroes, led by the "Black Panther". The struggle of the civil rights movement had borne fruit. Now there were not only black heroes, but they were also increasingly being drawn by African-American artists. The black community was increasingly making its own mark on the comic landscape, and independent authors and illustrators such as Ho Che Anderson and Kyle Baker paid homage to their idols Martin Luther King and Nat Turner in graphic novels. Today, the comic scene from New York to Cape Town, from Paris and Brussels to Kinshasa is more polyphonic and colorful than ever before.
With around 100 original works and lots of archive material, the exhibition sheds light on the genealogy of black figures in comics and their creators.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog.
This content has been machine translated.Location
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