REVIEW: Incognegro

When I was writing for Beyond Race Magazine, I was trying to find ways to keep active. Eventually (and typically), I decided to go with one of my strengths: reading comics. So I contacted several publishers and gotten preview copies of their graphic novels. I like to think I did a good job.

This is my review of Incognegro, dated October 6, 2008. The reason for posting it here is because author Mat Johnson and artist Warren Pleece have created a prequel for Dark Horse Comics: Incognegro: Renaissance. It is a miniseries that will be published monthly. In addition, Dark Horse has reprinted Incognegro ten years after its initial publication from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint.

Zane Pinchback is a black writer with a unique ability: his light skin allows him to pass for white when he travels to the South to report on lynchings, a talent he calls “going incognegro.” With the Harlem Renaissance in bloom, however, Zane wants to be known for his writing, as opposed to his anonymous fame as “Incognegro.” When his editor sends him to Tupelo, Miss., for one final story – with a promise of a managing editor position waiting when he gets back – Zane discovers that the man about to be hung is his darker-skinned twin brother Alonzo. With opportunistic friend Carl in tow, Zane journeys to save his brother, unaware that he is not the only person pretending to be something else . . . or the Klansman just itching to get a piece of him.

Incognegro is written by Mat Johnson, himself a black man with light skin. In the foreword, he writes about his difficulty fitting in with other black kids in the time of the Black Power movement. With his half-Jewish cousin, Johnson fantasized about situations where he would become a “race spy” . . . a fantasy that he found was a reality for Walter White, a former head of the NAACP, who went undercover in the deep South to investigate lynchings. Johnson’s work is original, as he peels back one layer of deception after another. While Zane is weary of risking his neck to get the story, Johnson allows him to show how he works, whether it’s straightening his hair, convincing a trio of white thugs that he’s a Ku Klux Klan bigwig, or escaping a trap set by a family of race war-minded hillbillies.

Joining Johnson in telling Zane’s story is British artist Warren Pleece. While Incognegro reveals man’s capacity for ugliness, Pleece doesn’t get overly gory with it; no small feat, especially when the first scene of the book shows a black man getting castrated, hung, put in a clown’s costume, and getting his picture taken for commemorative postcards. The black and white art fits the story, and Pleece works well with the Mississippi backdrop and the characters’ expressions, such as Carl’s masquerade as a British duke – complete with an outrageous accent stolen from a popular radio show – evaporating as a Klansman shows off pictures of lynch victims.

Even with the end of Black History Month and a market where a cheaper softcover edition seems inevitable, Incognegro is a must-have graphic novel and well worth the price. (published by Vertigo, DC Comics)

words by Jason Borell