Mat Johnson is an educator and award winning author. Johnson has had over a dozen books published, including novels, nonfiction, graphic novels, and anthologies. In a personal essay Johnson wrote, “I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one.” As a biracial child, growing up Johnson identified as black, but looked white, and a lot of his writing touches on that subject and others like it. Johnson published his first book “Drop” in 2000. Drop, is a coming-of-age tale of a man determined to break the pattern of the ghetto he despises and who in the process is forced to come to terms with his hatred for himself. Johnson’s, The Great Negro Plot was published in 2007. It’s a nonfiction reconstruction of the little-known, New York Slave Insurrection of 1741 and the resultant trial and hysteria. In 2015 Johnson’s novel “Loving Day” was published. The book is titled after the historic 1967 Supreme Court decision which made interracial marriage legal and is a funny, sometimes absurd look at what it means to be mixed race in this country. Regarding the book Johnson once stated, "Most people of mixed heritage they grow up minorities in their own house...Unless they have many, many siblings, they are the only or one of the only people of their exact ethnic makeup. And so, to me, this idea with Loving Day was a chance to explore a group identity…”Johnson made his first move into the comics form with the publication of the five-issue limited series Hellblazer Special: Papa Midnite, where he took an existing character of the Hellblazer franchise and created an origin story that strove to offer depth and dignity to a character who was arguably a racial stereotype of the noble savage. In February 2008, Vertigo Comics published Johnson’s graphic novel, Incognegro, a book about a 1930s black reporter from the north who built a career investigating lynching’s while undercover as a white person, as he is light-skinned enough to do so. The noir mystery deals with the issue of passing and the lynching past of the American South. #MatJohnson #LovingDay #TheGreatNegroPlot #Philly #Incognegro #Drop #Hellblazer #BlackNovelist #BlackComicWriters #28DaysOfBlackComics #28DaysOfComics
