Youtube review of Donald Goines by very talented Pittsburgh comic creators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s55KM5Ruggs

Sample Youtube Playlist

 

Nice Overview of Comics Made in Africa.

Here's some of the art.

I'm putting the link here so I don't forget about it.

https://afropolitancomics.com/en

Had no idea about Matt Baker: early black and possibly gay comic book artist...

Take a minute to read this Josephine Baker: WW2 Spy Comic

Take a minute and read the whole thing here. Also fits into my theory that great dancers make great martial artists. Also: Where is my movie?

A look inside the disturbing trailer for "White Nights, Black Paradise" where Philip Shropshire and Writers of Color gets a shout out blurb. (Thank you Sikivu...)

Writer who writes about out of print books by black writers. Just noting this here...

Here's the link:

https://catapult.co/stories/the-long-night-a-novel-by-julian-mayfield

Check out @gonzomike 's wonderful piece at @CatapultStory on the novel, THE LONG NIGHT, by Julian Mayfield. The latest in a monthly column by Gonzales exploring out-of-print books by African-American authors, which is an absolute must read. https://t.co/VqarWnoP9M

— Andrew Nette (@Pulpcurry) April 26, 2018

Short Review of the Shockingly Good Novel by Sikivu Hutchinson "White Nights, Black Paradise"

(Yes I'm late on the reviews but will complete at least 15. This I vow!)

White Nights, Black Paradise by Sikivu Hutchinson

I sort of had mixed feelings coming into this novel because Jim Jones is not the most likeable figure in American history. He's a cult leader who not only killed his flock but much of that flock was black and poor. So imagine my surprise when I came away from the novel kind of liking the dude minus the slaughtering drug fueled paranoia that ended in Jonestown, of course. It's also a frankly brilliant debut fiction effort by Sikivu Hutchinson, who, for my money, is probably the most talented African American atheist/Humanist writer on the scene and has done something that the white Four Horsemen have never done: write a really good novel. She's also seriously good looking which probably isn't fair. But I digress.

The novel is a constant explosion of ideas and you could write a critical book just discussing all of them. My copy of her novel is just riddled with notes and yellow highlighter. Here are the notes just from the first 13 pages or Chapter One: There's a woman who's thankful that she got an abortion and found it a relief. The Jim Jones church was an extremely progressive church that actually helped black people, or at least, if the novel reflects reality, wanted to help black people. (Jim Jones adopted a black male, which is going the distance. I also found myself checking Wikipedia just to see which parts are true. Yes that black adopted son exists even though he has disavowed the church, again of course...) There's a black character who openly espouses her atheist viewpoint where she says, in part: "...I don't believe in God. You know I don't have any tolerance for magical shit." And as a black atheist person who reads and watches tv and movies I don't think I've ever heard a black person openly espousing their atheism. And the whole book is like that. You're just reading things and perspectives that you've never seen before uttered by black characters. It's almost the Anti Oprah in terms of its intellectual approach to the world. (Side note: There's an attempt to turn this into a tv series and boy if a black director wanted to make his or her mark doing some completely shocking television this would be the book you could turn into your HBO/AMC produced  10 to 12 episode version of "The Wire". )

That's just scratching the surface of all the great ideas. At my own blog I might go into some of the other issues about how the novel sort of describes a dying black press (I say that as an ex Pittsburgh Courier reporter who was fired for attempting to unionize...) or this perplexing question: if you're a progressive atheist and really want to help black people are you better off just lying about religion like Jim Jones, who in the novel used the Bible as simply a tool to teach about class struggle, or do you tell people the truth about that "magical shit"? The novel strongly suggests that if you want to reach black people lying your ass off might be the way to go. For a higher good of course...

Bottom line, really a fount work put forth by Hutchinson. It's really a must read if you consider yourself a black intellectual. Its kind of like if Lorraine Hansberry was resurrected and she started to write novels. (Hoping that Sikivu doesn't smoke.) We'll still be talking about the ideas here for decades to come. Highly recommended. Really beyond Five Stars. Should immediately be placed in the must read "canon" along with "Invisible Man" and "Native Son". It's that good and she even rewrote some of it to make it "better" than the first draft I have. You know, on Facebook and Twitter, I've asked Sam Harris to write the fictional atheist version of "Handmaid's Tale" or "1984", preferably as an "Animal Farm" like allegory or even science fiction. (No one can hear you scream about fundamentalism in space...) So that atheists would have our own metaphor for what we find troubling. Perhaps I've been asking the wrong writer to do that...

Philip Shropshire

www.threeriversonline.com

http://worldtv.com/the_acid_jazz_channel/

http://writersofcolor.blogspot.com/

PS: Here is the excellent promo piece that was done for the novel on Youtube.

Sorry for the long delay...

I promised 15 reviews. And there's going to be 15 reviews. I also dream of fully funding this. But first things first...

#AHS #AmericanHorrorStory Okay I kind of want to see those Angela Bassett Blaxploitation flicks..

I suppose someone could write them as well. It's not like they would have to be well written I guess.

And like Winter: Reviews are coming.