“My fan base has arrived,” Mandingo says right before they do. Of course he has a fan base. The worse the artist, the better the marketing campaign. There’s four of them, and Mandingo knows each by their first name. I hear them talking, and the intimacy of their knowledge of each other’s lives is surprising. Turns out they follow one another on Twitter. They blow 140-character kisses at each other all day. These guys, they ask me a lot of questions. Polite, interested ones, and by the way they won’t look me in the eye I can tell they looked me up before I got here. The usual questions come: when did you start, what’s your favorite thing to draw, what book would you most like to be assigned to. Then this one lands:
“How come you ain’t got more positive dark-skinned characters in your work?” one of them asks me. He asks it three times, too. The first time, I hear it, but it’s barely audible, just above the din of the room, just low enough that I can ignore it, which I do. I can feel the dread building, but I swallow it for later consumption. About fifteen seconds later the question comes louder, but I keep staring down at the charcoal in my hands, drawing. This time, it’s clear I’m ignoring the asker, that I’m not trying to play these race games, having reached my quota for the hour. Mandingo, for his part, offers to show the crew some of his new work, the pencils for his next issue of Afro-Dike-Y. Apparently, she is fighting a villain named Brickhouse, who from appearances seems to have been driven criminally insane by elephantiasis of the boobies. Some of the guys, distracted or flinching from confrontation, move closer to Mandingo’s side of the table and oooh. But not this kid. He just asks the same damn thing all over again, so loud that even silence would be an answer to him.
I look up, and of course he is the lightest-skinned one here besides me. Of course he is. This defender of the darker masses. And what am I to say to him? I didn’t write this work, I just drew it. They sent me a script, and I drew it. The characters, they all came with descriptions of how they looked, which were mostly based on images of famous people of the period, and I was given the images of those people as well. The guy who wrote it did this, not me. The guy who wrote it, go pick on him. The guy who wrote it, a guy I’ve never met or even talked to on the phone, he really might be color struck, but not me. You can get his email from his website. I’m sure he would love to hear from you.
I tell him this, and I am exhausted from it. I stay chipper though, smiling, and we are both relieved. If we were the type of people who enjoyed confrontation, we would have put down the comics years ago and started punching people in the face for real, instead of just looking at illustrated violence.
He buys a book, has me sign it to “Leon.” Shakes my hand front and then sideways and ends it with a snap. With the final handshake test, I have proven I am black. I have returned to America to defend my Negro title triumphantly. Again I have used the timbre in my voice to show that I too speak the language, that I do not distance myself from him. I have temporarily compensated for my paler skin, my straightish hair, and the fact that my dad was a honky. I have passed the exam presented to me. Yay. Don’t we all feel so much fucking better now? Wee-ha. Aren’t we all just one big happy family? Woo.
They loiter. I laugh a little too hard at a joke, stuck in the gear of overcompensation, and then feel someone watching me. The teenage girl sits on the floor directly across the room from me, her back against the wall. My book is still in her hands, resting in the lap made by her folded legs, her Jew-fro like a chestnut cloud floating. The book is open, but she’s staring at me. She appears as disgusted as I am by my inadequacies.
A good twenty minutes in, we’ve basically formed a Little Africa. Other black folks come in, some fans, some in the industry, and pool in our corner of the room. We talk about how so few white people will come to our corner of the convention, and joke until we convert our unease to laughter. We make reference to other legendary black superheroes, artists, writers, like they are our secret gods. There is a “we,” and I am included. I revel in the conspiracy. When the mandatory light-skinned joke is made, dismissing a prominent illustrator for not being black enough, I laugh loudest. Aha, those light-skinned folks, with their moderately less stigmatized lives. I don’t care because I haven’t been around black Americans in a group in a while and missed the camaraderie. I miss my family. I want to belong in my family. I want acknowledgment of shared experience, worldview, ancestry. I have no more real family, I realize within the fragile bliss. My father’s gone, Becks is gone, but in this moment it’s less painful for me. I fit in and I don’t fit in but it feels so good not to be thrown out. I see Caucasians in the room, looking over our way, puzzled and annoyed by the segregation. They stand in a pack of their own race, but their own race is invisible to them.
—
The group from around the table makes its way over to the conference room, and that means there is even a crowd worth facing. I sit with Mandingo and a few others as three dozen or so audience members space out in the chairs so the room seems less empty.
“What is it like as a black artist creating comics?” The first question goes. Serve, volley, pass the microphone. Mandingo answers it. I don’t pay attention to what he says. I pay attention to what he says when he finishes, because he actually passes the microphone to me next to answer. And as Caucasoidal as I am, as racially ambiguous — again, again, because it never goes away — I still talk to them about my experiences as a black man in comics and the predominantly black crowd actually listens. No one stops me. No one stands up and yells “Fraud!” and challenges me to name the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They just listen. The people sitting onstage with me accept my presence, so the crowd does too. My self-loathing at the glee I take from this is overshadowed by the joy itself. The usual questions follow: How do you break in to the field? What’s your advice to an up-and-coming black artist? If you could work on any project, what would it be? I have answers prepared, prepackaged, marinated in whole milk in the fridge overnight. They love them. I am pithy. I am witty. As a child I worried about rejection, that my own community would gather together and cast me out like a bleached ugly duckling. My life’s fight has been to prove I’m a swan. That has brought me to this moment. Now, surrounded by the superhero imagery of my youth, I flap my wings. Look at me y’all! Let me shake my tail feather. I’m a swan, yo!
We’re hitting the zone known as Final Questions, when I hear a female voice ask, “But what is it like for you, as a biracial artist creating comic books?”
Mandigo looks out, brown hand grabbing the mike to answer, then stops. His mouth goes to say something, yet his jaw stutters free of sound. He looks confused. Then looks at me. I don’t know how I look. I’m pretty sure someone just called me out as a race traitor. The b-word, leaned on in the middle of the sentence, pushed like the last paste in the tube.
Squinting to see over the stage lights, I make out a standing woman, facing me, a looming triangle of shadow. I think it’s that creepy teenager, but it’s not. The questioner is in the back, on the left-hand side of the hall near the exit. When I shade the stage lights with my hand, I see she’s dressed in flowing white wrinkled layers like a toga. She’s a goddess. Or dressed up like one — she’s got the crown of golden leaves on and everything. When the others on the stage next to me begin to whisper, I realize I still haven’t said anything.
“Well, I don’t think of myself as a ‘biracial’ artist,” I say, laying my tongue on the b, pushing the word back to her. “I’m black, and I’m an artist. I’m a guy who draws pictures. I mean, that’s the ultimate freedom, isn’t it? To define oneself as a human being! Is ‘Human Being’ not a category? I draw my doodles inside the confines of boxes, but I refuse to let the preconceived boxes of others define me.”