Celebrate Black History Month With These Powerful Reading Recommendations

Follow Dark Horse Comics:

Celebrate Black History Month With These Powerful Reading Recommendations

02/06/2021 2:00pm

In honor of Black History Month, here are some of our top recommendations of comics and graphic novels featuring Black protagonists and creators.

Coming soon: Dark Horse Comics welcomes YouNeek Studios to our publishing line. YouNeek Studios, founded by Dwayne McDuffie nominee Roye Okupe, features a YouNiverse of superheroes based on African stories by African creators.
Details here >>

Titles available now from comic shops and bookstores:

1.) Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery and Incognegro: Renaissance

As part of Karen Berger's imprint at Dark Horse, Berger Books, we are proud to recommend Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece's outstanding original graphic novel Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery and the prequel series, Incognegro: Renaissance.

Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery follows Zane Pinchback, a reporter for the New Holland Herald, who is sent to investigate the arrest of his own brother, charged with the brutal murder of a white woman in Mississippi. With a lynch mob already swarming, Zane, whose skin color is light enough that he can pass for white, must stay "incognegro" long enough to uncover the truth behind the murder to save his brother and himself.

And in the prequel series Incognegro: Renaissance a black writer is found dead at a scandalous interracial party in 1920s New York and Harlem's cub reporter Zane Pinchback is the only one determined to solve the murder. Zane must go "incognegro" for the first time--using his light appearance to pass as a white man--to find the true killer.

A page-turning thriller of racial divide, Incognegro explores segregation, secrets, and self-image as our race-bending protagonist penetrates a world where he feels stranger than ever before.

2.) LaGuardia

Set in an alternative world where aliens have come to Earth and integrated with society, LaGuardia revolves around a pregnant Nigerian-American doctor, Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka, who has just returned to NYC under mysterious conditions--via LaGuardia International and Interstellar Airport.

There, she and her sentient, plant-based alien friend become part of a growing population of mostly African and shape-shifting alien immigrants, battling against interrogation, discrimination and travel bans, as they try to make it in a new land. But, as the birth of her child nears, Future begins to change. What dark secret is she hiding?

In 2020, LaGuardia won the Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album - Reprint, and the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic.

Written by Nnedi Okorafor, Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner (Who Fears Death, Binti, Akata series) and illustrated by Tana Ford (Silk, Duck!), with colors by Sal Cipriano.

3.) Concrete Park

Created by Tony Puryear and Erika Alexander, Concrete Park is a sexy sci-fi saga that follows Earth’s outcasts, exiled to a distant desert planet, where they will either destroy each other or create something new.

Inspired by the blaxploitation film genre, Concrete Park takes the tropes and turns them on their heads with a sci-fi twist. There is truly nothing like it.

4.) Number 13

Co-written by Robert Love and David Walker, Number 13 is the story of a young cybernetic amnesiac, who wanders a post-apocalyptic wasteland searching for a father he can't remember. He possesses powers coveted by irrational, feuding factions of the future, and he quickly becomes entangled in their deadly struggle for world dominance! This sci-fi adventure that works as an allegory for the search for identity in a grim, violent world is a powerful read.

5.) Muhammad Ali

This incredible graphic novel celebrates the life of the glorious athlete who metamorphosed from Cassius Clay to become a three-time heavyweight boxing legend, activist, and provocateur: Muhammad Ali. Not only a titan in the world of sports but in the world itself, he dared to be different and to challenge and defy through his refusal to be drafted to fight in Vietnam, his rejection of his "slave" name, and ultimately his final fight with his body itself through a thirty-year battle with Parkinson's disease. Witness what made Ali different, what made him cool, what made him the Greatest.

Dark Horse Comics

Celebrate Black History Month With These Powerful Reading Recommendations

Tags

Recent Posts

Archive

Services

Sites

Company

Contact & News

Dark Horse Comics

Celebrate Black History Month With These Powerful Reading Recommendations

Tags

Subscribe

Recent Posts

Archive

Services

Sites

Company

Contact & News