Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery

AUTHOR: Johnson, Mat

ARTIST: Warren Pleece (illustrator); Clem Robins (letterer); Steven John Phillips (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2008

Publication History

Published by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint in 2008, Incognegro is the product of both history and personal experience. Author Mat Johnson, an African American who is often mistaken for a Caucasian, traces the evolution of the novel in the author’s note preceding the text. Inspired not only by his own experience but also by journalist and activist Walter White and by the birth of Johnson’s twins (one of whom is “brown-skinned with black Afro hair, the other with the palest of pink skins”), the novel, while subtitled A Graphic Mystery, is also a significant commentary on race in the United States. Johnson bases his protagonist, Zane Pinchback, on White’s legacy, yet places him in the context of Johnson’s own children: Zane is the lighter-skinned twin who can pass as white.

The graphic novel has been well received. Its cover features praise by academic Cornel West and writers Walter Mosley and George P. Pelecanos, cementing Johnson’s prominence as a twenty-first-century voice of the African American experience and a respected author of fiction. Artist Warren Pleece (Hellblazer, issues 115-128; Life Sucks), a frequent contributor to the Vertigo imprint, accompanies Johnson’s text with stark images that are reminiscent of the black-and-white art of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986), yet clearly influenced by more traditional comics art.

Plot

Incognegro follows Harlem journalist Zane Pinchback as he travels to Tupelo, Mississippi, to help exonerate his brother, who has been accused of murder. Zane infiltrates lynchings and then reports on them as “Incognegro,” a nom de plume that protects his identity.

Part I begins as Zane describes his experiences to two friends, introducing readers to the horrors of lynchings as well as to his role in reporting them. He explains his transformation into Incognegro and introduces the concept of “passing.” While recognizing the importance of the work he does, Zane craves recognition and tells his editor that he will no longer report as Incognegro. He travels to the South one last time to exonerate his brother, Alonzo “Pinchy” Pinchback, who has been jailed for the murder of his white girlfriend, Michaela Mathers. Zane’s friend Carl, also able to pass as white, accompanies him, complicating Zane’s practiced presence in the South by calling attention to the two of them and putting them both in danger of being discovered. While Pinchy maintains his innocence, Zane begins investigating Michaela’s murder and soon encounters Michaela, alive. As Part I ends, Zane and Carl watch as men begin to gather around the jail, intent on lynching Pinchy. Zane starts to investigate the disappearance of a sheriff’s deputy, Deputy White, whom he believes is somehow connected to the murder of the unidentified woman.

In Part II, Zane finds himself held captive by Deputy White’s family, the secluded Jefferson-Whites. As he pleads with the family’s leader, Seamus, to let him go, he discovers that the missing deputy is in fact Seamus’s daughter Francis, who has been masquerading as a man. Escaping the Jefferson-Whites and returning to town, Zane resolves the identity of the murdered woman: Francis Jefferson-White. The sheriff continues to press Pinchy for information, believing he is innocent but eager to know what happened to Francis. While Zane has been investigating, Carl has been misidentified as Incognegro by a local Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader and is led to his own lynching.

Carl is hung in Part III. Zane returns to the jail to explain his discoveries to the sheriff and is joined by Michaela, who admits to killing Francis when she caught her investigating Michaela and Pinchy’s still. The sheriff shoots Michaela, avenging Francis’s death, and admits that he knew Francis’s secret. Zane and Pinchy return to Harlem, where Zane receives a promotion from his surly but supportive editor and publishes an article that identifies the KKK leader who lynched Carl as Incognegro.

Characters

•Zane Pinchback, a.k.a. Incognegro, the protagonist, is an African American who can pass as white, a transformation indicated primarily by a change in his hairstyle early in the novel. Fulfilled but emotionally exhausted from reporting on lynchings for a Harlem-based newspaper, he travels to the South to free his brother from jail.

•Carl, Zane’s friend and unexpected companion on the journey to Mississippi, wants to go with Zane so that he can take over as Incognegro. While in Tupelo, he poses as a foreign dignitary, helping Zane gather information, but he eventually proves to be a liability when he cannot keep up the act. He is lynched toward the end of the novel.

•Alonzo Pinchback, a.k.a. Pinchy, Zane’s darker-skinned twin brother, is a serial troublemaker who is in jail for murdering his white girlfriend, Michaela Mathers. He maintains his innocence in the face of a lynch mob and is supported by the town’s sheriff.

•Francis Jefferson-White, a.k.a. Deputy White, a woman passing as a man and serving as a sheriff’s deputy, is missing. She was murdered by Michaela when she discovered Pinchy and Michaela’s still. It is her body that Pinchy finds and mistakes for Michaela’s.

•Michaela Mathers, Pinchy’s girlfriend, killed Francis. Wanted by the police for making moonshine, she disguised Francis’s body as her own in order to flee Tupelo.

•The sheriff, who believes that Pinchy is innocent, is Francis Jefferson-White’s lover and the only one who knows that she is really a woman. He shoots Michaela after learning that she killed Francis.

Artistic Style

In an interview about his work on Incognegro, Pleece expressed his satisfaction with Vertigo’s decision to leave his drawings in stark black and white instead of adding halftones, assuming that the choice was made intentionally. The intentionality of that choice is clear for two reasons: one, the noir style of the artwork reflects the aesthetic of the setting; and two, the contrast and tension between the black and white of the imagery reflects one of the most prominent themes of the novel, the contrasts between the black and white experiences of the South.

Just as the images are constructs, Johnson claims, through the voice of protagonist and narrator Zane, that race is a fallacy and a construct: “That’s one thing that most of us know that white folks don’t. That race doesn’t really exist . . . race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting. Playing roles.” The imagery, then, reflects the central point of the novel. The book is subtitled A Graphic Mystery, and the style recalls the dark shadows of noir style: Night scenes are not just dark, they are black; shadows do not merely muffle faces and figures, they bury them in darkness. While the mystery of the novel is heightened by this imagery, the contrasts of the images serve another, more significant purpose, as a literal manifestation of the contrasts between white and black Americans.

Central to understanding both black and white experiences of the South is the protagonist’s ability to pass as white, illustrated in a one-page, eight-panel progression in which Zane becomes Incognegro, the white man who infiltrates lynchings. The allusion to superhero transformations, from everyday citizen to superhuman, is clear. The page begins with Zane’s affirmation, “I am Incognegro,” and follows with his clarification that he wears neither a mask nor a cape. Still, he is a superhero; a transparent American flag waves over him as he explains his power, invisibility, made possible only by white America’s blindness to its past.

Pleece’s style reinforces that blindness so that readers see what white America sees. Zane is, literally, white, as are the other African American characters in the novel. The absence of halftones means that skin tones are absent, and readers can only assume or perceive a character’s race from the way others treat him or speak to him, from the way he treats or speaks to others, and from other verbal clues. As Zane tells us, “race is a strategy,” and it is no less a strategy in this novel than it is in American society. While this style makes differentiating characters difficult, Pleece uses visual clues to make each character distinct: Carl has a moustache, Pinchy wears suspenders, and some white characters, such as Michaela, have white hair. Such distinctions indicate that, even had Pleece expected the publisher to wash the pages in halftones, his own intention was to draw in stark black and white to complement the content of the novel.

Themes

Incognegro is clearly a story about race, but it is more specifically a story about passing. Characters, both major and minor, pose as something other than they are, and what they really are is not always clear. Even the mystery of the novel, the unsolved murder, is complicated by passing and by disguise: Michaela disguises Francis’s body as her own so that she may safely escape Tupelo; when Zane first encounters Michaela, she appears to be a man, dressed in a trench coat and pants, with a hat placed low over her brow; a cash-poor resident of Tupelo pretends that he is a wealthy man to persuade Carl, himself passing as an English duke, to buy his land.

The most prominent and intentional example of passing is Zane, who transforms himself so that he can more easily pass as a white man. His motive is clear from the opening pages of the story. As he narrates his transformation for Carl and Carl’s fiancé, the story he tells them is illustrated for readers: He easily blends in among the participants and spectators at a lynching and is betrayed only by his actions, not his appearance. His motivation is to write articles about lynchings for primarily northern newspapers, pointing out that lynching is no longer newsworthy in the South. Carl’s fiancé marvels at Zane’s heroism, reinforcing the idea that Zane is a superhero, donning a disguise and putting himself at risk for the greater good. This risk is great, as Carl is lynched when a local Klan leader thinks that he is Incognegro.

The risks of passing are also evidenced by Francis. While she is not murdered because she is passing as a man, her murder hints at the dangers inherent in fooling others: Zane and a local man are imprisoned by Francis’s family because the two men misidentify her gender; the sheriff is robbed of Francis, his lover, because of her secret identity. Carl’s situation is much the same, for it is not just because he is African American that he is lynched but because he is an African American who made prominent Caucasians of Tupelo feel foolish: Women wanted to marry him, he was invited to dinner, and he fraternized with a Klan leader. While their hatred of African Americans is undeniable, these men and women become violent when they feel that they have been wronged or tricked by someone whom they deem to be less intelligent or less capable than themselves, for lynching is used to assert the power of white over black.

A less prominent, but no less important, theme of the novel is that of the role of the media in public knowledge and public reaction. The resolution of the story calls into question media ethics and the media’s responsibility for reporting the truth, as the Klan leader who sees through Zane’s cover at the opening of the novel and later mistakes Carl for Incognegro is himself outed as Incognegro. Zane’s outing of the Klan leader is clearly a breach of ethics, but in the context of the novel, it seems justified. This man is responsible for the deaths of many, including Carl; that he will die in the same horrific manner is somehow satisfying, and he would never have been punished for his crimes otherwise. Zane uses the power of the media, including the public’s willingness to believe what it reads, to mete out punishment. The subtitle of the novel belies the complexity and importance of the story, as its central mystery becomes secondary to the horrors of lynching and the complicated questions of race, gender, passing, and, ultimately, justice.

Impact

Since its publication in 2008, Incognegro has been embraced by academics and readers of serious graphic novels alike. Author Johnson works from both an academic and a personal perspective, combining his study of the Harlem Renaissance with his own experiences as a light-skinned African American to create a novel that speaks to readers on many levels: as a mystery, as historical fiction, and as social and political commentary. While not as widely read or recognized as some of its counterparts, Johnson’s text has been used in history and literature classrooms to teach students about African American history, southern history and culture, and racism, while simultaneously introducing more modern themes such as gender crossing and media ethics. The novel has also contributed to the growing reputation of works of graphic fiction, joining such well-respected works of graphic nonfiction as Maus and Persepolis (2003) in legitimizing the graphic literature genre in academic institutions and libraries. Because Johnson is an academic and writer himself, his own reputation contributes significantly to the reception of the text.

Further Reading

Laird, Roland, Taneshia Nash Laird, and Elihu Bey. Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans (1997).

Johnson, Mat, and Simon Gane. Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010).

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis (2003).

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986).

Bibliography

Chaney, Michael A. “Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 32, no. 3 (2007): 175-200.

Coogan, Peter. “The Definition of the Superhero.” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Johnson, Charles. “Foreword: A Capsule History of Blacks in Comics.” In Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans, by Roland Laird, Taneshia Nash Laird, and Elihu Bey. New York: Sterling, 2009.

Lutes, Jean M. “Lynching Coverage and the American Reporter-Novelist.” American Literary History 19, no. 2 (Summer, 2007): 456-481.