Review: Incognegro Renaissance #2

Dark Horse“s Berger Books imprint releases “Incognegro: Renaissance”“ #2 this week and fans of the now classic, Incognegro graphic novel will continue to be amazed by the collaborative magic of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece. Johnson and Pleece may be the most cohesive writer/artist combo working in comics at the moment. Panel after panel and page after page of this prequel prove the point. For ready reference you“ll need only to study how the photograph develops on the first page of this issue.

Incognegro Renaissance is a prequel to the original graphic novel ”“ a powerful tale about how the protagonist, Zane Pinchback, a light-skinned Black man, passes as white in order to investigate the scourge of anti-black lynch mob violence in the south during the early half of the 20th Century. It“s no small feat for a writer/artist team to effectively pull-off racial passing as a superhuman ability, but Johnson and Pleece have been pitch perfect in their visual manipulation of the black/white and grey-scale shades in conjunction with Johnson“s dialogue. Mat Johnson is an established and critically acclaimed novelist; thus it is not surprising that he is a master of dialogue. Credible dialogue is a fleeting phenomenon in comics. And a book set in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance simply could not exist without it.

For those unfamiliar with American history, racial passing ”“ i.e. black people who were light enough to appear to be white actually feigning whiteness in order to better navigate a white supremacist world ”“ had been an unexplored phenomenon in the comic book genre before Johnson and Pleece introduced us all to Incognegro. In this prequel, readers are treated to the origins of the protagonist in a roman-a-clef style setting of the Harlem Renaissance.

The series is a murder mystery that will require Pinchback to exploit his fair skin to infiltrate the white world in order to discover how a failed black novelist was murdered at an elite party of the Harlem white literary establishment. Already the narrative deploys just enough history so that readers can learn a bit about the artistry and industry of the Harlem Renaissance moment; and just enough mystery about Black identity and the phenomenon of passing to force readers to do some research on their own.

In “Incognegro: Renaissance”“ #2 readers continue to follow the trail that Pinchback is on in order to uncover the murder mystery. Along the way and through a small but engaging cast of characters, we can all learn a bit more about the complexities of racial identity and the arbitrary nature of the rigid racial lines that continue to define the world in which we live. 4/5.

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Writer: Mat Johnson
Artist: Warren Pleece
Editor: Karen Berger
Cover Artist: Warren Pleece