Category: Black comic strips

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Breezy

Meet Breezy Biggins!

Breezy is a smart, playful, and ambitious lad with a typical teenage boy’s fascination with girls and an atypical obsessions with bicarbonate of soda. in the 1940s and ’50s, “Breezy”, created by Melvin Tapley (working under the name Tap Melvin or just T. Melvin) was a fixture in Black community newspapers across the United States, but it was never available in a book… until now!

Melvin Stanton Tapley (1919–2005) was such a prolific cartoonist that his work for the Black newspapers would often appear under several names on the same page, with his own name being used for editorial cartoons, the advertising strip The Brown Family and the adventure series Jim Steele; either “Tap Melvin” or just “T. Melvin” being used on the comedy strip Breezy; and “Stann Pat” being the signature on the instructive manners panel Do’s and Don’ts. Tapley was also an editor for New York’s Amsterdam News, a co-publisher and cover artist of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, and, for over a decade, the president of the Peekskill, New York chapter of the NAACP.

Selected as one of the “Best Books of 2022” by Panels & Prose.

  •  ‎100 pages, black and white, 8.5 x 6 inches.
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1949996409
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1949996401

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Bootsie’s Big ’50s: a Dark Laughter collection

“Negro America’s Favorite Cartoonist” – that’s what Langston Hughes called Ollie Harrington, whose cartoons and comic strips were a staple of America’s Black newspapers for decades starting in the 1930s. In his single-panel series “Dark Laughter,” Harrington brought out the vibrancy of Harlem life in its day, while serving some cutting looks at the politics of the time.

At the heart of “Dark Laughter” is Bootsie, a cunning, conning, girl-chasing ne’er-do-well who is nonetheless beloved in his Harlem community… if often reluctantly. Bootsie is both the victim of the world’s troubles and a frequent cause of them for others.

Here’s a collection of prime cartoons from the mid-1950s, drawn with the detailed joy that only Ol Harrington (who also worked as Oliver W. Harrington) could bring, finally available to a larger audience.

  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 155 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1949996352
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1949996357
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.35 x 11 inches
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Bootsie’s War Years: a Dark Laughter collection

In the 1940s, the comics pages of America’s weekly Black newspapers were filled with characters both inspirational and aspirational. In addition to the life stories of great African Americans, there were fictional tales of Black reporters, Black detectives, Black government agents, Black aviators, Black people rising in the ranks of society, even Black superheroes, all to give their audiences the sense of the best that was possible.

Then there was Bootsie.

Bootsie was a liar, a womanizer, a layabout, a scammer, a cheat, and an all around disreputable dude. Among the denizens of Harlem he was scorned, threatened, detested… and yet nonetheless loved as a part of the community.

Collected in this book for the very first time are almost 150 “Dark Laughter” cartoons from 1941 through 1946, during which time Bootsie goes from being a draft evader to a draftee, an enlisted man, a serviceman on the ground in Europe, and ultimately to a veteran for the winning side. In these, cartoonist Ollie Harrington’s lively art captures the rich reality of Bootie’s world while telling tales that are sometimes joyous, sometimes very harsh, like the world itself.

  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 161 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1949996336
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1949996333
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.7 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.41 x 9 inches
  • Order from Amazon