Black Comics Recs
Been meaning to do something like this for a while and it was on my mind, so... since it seems like a lot of people have trouble finding indie comics outside the Big Six, here's a handful of the Black-led and often Black-owned indie comics I've picked up over the years:
Iron Circus Comics (https://ironcircus.com/) was originally founded to publish the founder’s webcomic and now publishes a whole range of diverse titles. You might know them for Kim Hyun Sook’s autobiography Banned Book Club; their anthologies of stories based in various mythologies, like The Woman in the Woods and Other North American Stories and The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Stories; or their Smut Peddler anthologies of woman-created and -centric erotica. And they’ve got a Pride sale on right now!
FairSquare Graphics (https://fairsquaregraphics.com/) describes itself a family, immigrant and minority-owned company who might be best known for their 1920s-era queer graphic novel A Boy Named Rose, which got nominated for an Eisner in 2024. For the purposes of this list I specifically want to highlight their Mutiny: Black Girl Magic series, which is currently in preorder, and their “Noir is the New Black” line, especially Watson and Holmes, which I sadly cannot find on their website anymore but I love and desperately want the next volume for. It’s Sherlock and Watson as modern-day Black men in Harlem, and features one of my favorite Holmes designs literally ever.
I’m pretty sure Stranger Comics (https://www.strangercomics.com/) exists first and foremost to publish their World of Asunda Afro-fantasy series, though the also have other titles like Jaycen Wise, who appears to be the reverse Indiana Jones (stealing artifacts from museums to return them to their points of origin) and Defiant: the Story of Robert Smalls, a Black hero of the American Civil War.
Etan Comics (https://etancomics.com/) is a Pan-African company that releases their comics (or at least some of them) in both English and Amharic. Their titles include Tokoloshe Hunters, a shonen manga style anthology of Southern African mythology (that features some of the most harrowing sample pages I’ve ever seen); Jember, a superhero comic drawing in part on the history of Punt; Hawi, a mythology-based superheroine story at least partially based in a sci-fi version of the Axumite Empire; and their current headliner offering, Zufan, an epic sci-fi retelling of the 1896 Italian invasion of Ethiopia.
Honorable mention to Tuskegee Heirs: Flames of Destiny (https://tuskegeeheirs.com/), a futuristic sci-fi action-adventure comic that casts the titular teenaged heirs of the Tuskegee Airmen in giant robot battles against invading A.I. villains, and The Lie Behind the Star (https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/quinnhoward-22779913/the-lie-behind-the-star-graphic-novel), a sweeping bio-technology based sci-fi epic, which are both self-published by their creators. The Lie Behind the Star has unfortunately had a lot of production chaos since its IndieGoGo campaign wrapped, but the writer and project manager has some of the best sci-fi takes on YouTube so I’m still rooting for him to get it done.
Second honorable mention to BlackMask Studios, who I thought was Black owned until I looked them up and realized they’re a lot bigger than I thought, but I want to mention anyway because if you can get your hands on Kwanza Osajyefo’s Black, its second volume White, and/or the two Black AF spin-offs, you should (https://www.simonandschuster.com/series/BLACK). The pitch is, “What if only Black people had superpowers?” and while it’s not perfect—especially not the first volume, since they didn’t know if they’d ever get more and thus tried to essentially cram an entire superhero universe into 6 issues—it is super raw and righteously, unapologetically angry in a way that is both challenging and extremely cathartic. Other comics on this list were created with love to give Black children heroes to see themselves in; Black was created to cuss out the system and kick you in the teeth.
