All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson
by Charles Johnson
Buy on AmazonYears before he wrote his National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, Charles Johnson created these sidesplitting and subversive gag comics about Black life in America, now collected for the first time in nearly half a century. Before Charles Johnson found fame as a novelist and won the National Book Award for Middle Passage in 1991, he was a cartoonist, and a very good one. Taught via correspondence course by the comics editor Lawrence Lariar, mentored by the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti, and inspired by the call of the poet Amiri Baraka to celebrate and depict Black life in America, Johnson crafted some of the fiercest and funniest cartoons of the twentieth century.…
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"Charles Johnson’s remarkable literary career, which has encompassed a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a National Book Award, has overshadowed his equally remarkable work as a cartoonist. The first collection of his comics in more than 50 years, All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End – which takes its title from one of his ever-caustic captions – invites the reader to roll their eyes at society’s absurdities and ponder what’s changed since the ’70s. Some of his comics memorialize a long-past cultural moment, while others remain glaringly relevant. All feature his characteristic sharp wit and supple line."
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