Black Women in Fantasy Saved Me Where Academia Failed

This is Superhero Girlfriends Anonymous, a column by Ravynn K. Stringfield about comic books’ greatest weapon: the superhero girlfriend.

Quitting has never been my forte. And my lifelong inability to cut my losses meant that even though I desperately wanted to quit my doctoral program in my second year, I stayed, struggled, and tried the patience of everyone around me.

The aftermath of defending my master’s thesis in American Studies had left me drained and uninspired, despite the fact that my project had excited me. I’d done a two-paper portfolio: One paper explored how Black Panther comics of the ’60s and ’70s reflected the social movements of the time, and the other thought through how artists visually represented passing—often light-skinned Black folks “passing” as racially white—using Mat Johnson’s Incognegro graphic novel as a case study.

For the project, I taught myself to do archival research and was proud as a peacock at the praise I was given for my work. I figured out how to find archives, often, but not always, housed in university libraries, and scour their databases to get a sense of what items the archives had. I made an appointment, introduced myself to the libraries, and requested boxes to see during my visit. I asked my historian friends for recommendations on what to take on my first archival trip and packed my bag with a camera for photos, a journal for any longhand notes, and a flash drive to save my scans.

I flipped through a few dozen issues of Marvel’s Jungle Action comics featuring Black Panther, as well as several Captain America and Fantastic Four titles at the comics archive at Virginia Commonwealth University. I read the issues as I scanned them and took quick notes on storylines and the fan letters readers sent in when I walked back to my table to grab another from the box.

The more I read, the more the lack of Black women and girls present in meaningful ways on the page bothered me. Though I had committed to a project on Black Panther as the focal point, searching for racial diversity in comics, the distinct lack of women characters triggered an alarm in my brain. So when I stumbled across a few issues that featured a new-to-me character, T’Challa’s Black American girlfriend, Monica Lynne, I kept her close to my periphery as I worked. At that moment, I could not commit to a project or a paper on her, but she distracted me.

I had to show I could color inside the lines before I could make the picture my own.

Even as a side character, Monica demanded attention. Her speech often reflected 1970s Black American vernacular, and she wore her hair in a neat Afro, both of which gave Wakandans pause. Monica did not always like it in Wakanda, feeling ill at ease in the palace, where she was meant to be invisible, a background fixture while everything about her defied that.

There was something about Monica that refused to be relegated to the background, a quality I envied. I saw myself folding into someone smaller in graduate school. I increasingly lacked the energy to continually insist upon the validity of how I, and others like me, experienced, thought about, and wrote about the world. Though often depicted as out of place in Wakanda because of her speech and dress, Monica’s inability to blend was a lesson in stepping confidently into the world and changing for no one.

*

After a summer of writing and research, I defended the project in the fall of 2017. But by the time the degree was conferred in January of the next year, I was searching for a way out of my program.

Much of academia suits my preferred working style: freedom to choose my own projects, to create my own structure, to pick my working environments and hours. I am compensated for having to tiptoe through the institution as if it were a microaggression-laden minefield with excess opportunities to pursue my first loves: reading and writing. But—and there’s always a but—there was a lot about how these arrangements would be executed that I couldn’t foresee.

As a Black woman graduate student in an interdisciplinary program, I didn’t anticipate how much I would have to do to prove I could, at minimum, do literary or media studies before I could be “trusted” to try something a little more experimental. Before I could lean heavily on Black women’s scholarship, I had to prove I knew my fields’ canon, which was largely constructed by white men, with a few women thrown in for a little razzle-dazzle. I had to show I could color inside the lines before I could make the picture my own.

Frustration came in waves until it became a sustained flood.

I wanted to do something where the learning curve wasn’t so steep, the cost to my well-being not so high, the often-imagined sense of pressure and urgency less intense. My long-term dream then was to become a BuzzFeed writer or a novelist (never mind that neither of those would have guaranteed a stable income or been any less stressful). On particularly frustrating days, I visualized myself dropping everything to open a bookstore/coffee shop combo that also sold cute paper goods. I would go so far as to google “how to start a business” before returning to reality and facing my term papers.

In the weeks after my master’s degree was conferred, I was particularly susceptible to the escape my daydreams offered. My classmates were unclear on whether they should encourage me to stay or support my decision to leave; I was clearly struggling, but no one actually wanted to suggest that a Black girl abandon the program.

Their responses, both the genuine concern and the platitudes, didn’t actually matter to me. As much as I spoke about leaving, I ultimately feared trying anything else. Graduate school, though far from lucrative, offered a mockery of financial security—but at twenty-four, I had known nothing else. What I needed was a lifeline—a project that would make this whole thing feel worthwhile.

Monica Lynne led me to that answer.

*

The universe is insistent when it doesn’t want you to miss something.

A classmate sent me a New York Times piece on the first Black artist to work on the Black Panther comics, a man named Billy Graham. I emailed her back, thanking her for sending me the piece, and then promptly forgot about it until I saw the same piece the next day as I scrolled through Twitter.

That was enough of a sign for me. I read it this time, my tempered interest building until it bubbled over when I realized that one of the main sources for the piece was Billy Graham’s granddaughter—a young woman named Shawnna who had been housing a large portion of his work and who also happened to live not fifteen minutes up the road from me.

She received my hasty email with good cheer and made time to meet with me, first at a coffee shop, where we talked about about her collection of Graham’s work, then again at her home, where she allowed me to carefully thumb through first drafts of illustrations, read the start of several of his plays, and hold a huge map he had illustrated of Wakanda.

At the time, I didn’t think of her as an archivist, carefully curating her grandfather’s work, but she was. Shawnna strived to make her grandfather’s story available through teaching and sharing, and she unintentionally became both a storyteller and a keeper of memory, like Monica Lynne did in a famous Black Panther story arc that Graham illustrated.

What I needed was a lifeline—a project that would make this whole thing feel worthwhile.

In 1976, Jungle Action Featuring the Black Panther #19, the story begins with Monica visiting her sister Angela’s grave, on a visit home to Georgia. As she walks, narration from her point of view recalls a memory of her and Angela playing outside one summer in the 1950s when she refused to share a soda with her sister, remarking that they “did not have the same childhood as James Baldwin or Eldridge Cleaver. [Their] bitterness did not come till much later . . .” When T’Challa saves her from an attack orchestrated by a group of men dressed in hooded white cloaks, the Black Panther believes there is more to the story of her sister’s death.

At first glance, readers may believe T’Challa is faced with the real Ku Klux Klan, but there are key differences—the outfits are the wrong color, and, foregrounded in the interior cover of this issue, there is a Black man in this group, which we eventually learn is called “The Dragon’s Circle.” Nevertheless, this group is equally dangerous, perpetuating hate crimes like throwing a brick through the Lynne’s home just after Monica’s father warns T’Challa that asking questions is a surefire way to cause more pain.

There is a history here, tied to the Lynne’s family, to their home in Georgia. Even though Black Panther’s context is a fictionalized Wakanda, he and others around him, including some of the artists and writers who have worked on his stories, are beholden to histories of Black Americans. And here, Monica Lynne was our window into this world: one not wholly characterized by race-based violence, but one of family and legacy, memory and land as well.

I found that I couldn’t leave my program when these stories existed—both the stories of the Lynnes, a Black Southern family much like my own, and that of the real-life Graham family. Monica Lynne, along with her family, brings a familiarity to a marvelous fantasy of Wakanda and made me feel as if I too had a story to contribute to such a legacy. And that feeling is affirmed when I know Billy Graham and his family’s story have now become part of the history of Wakanda. I wanted to hear these stories, and I was honored that anyone trusted me enough to tell them.

I never did a formal academic piece on Billy Graham’s art or Monica Lynne’s family story. I wrote a term paper on my findings and the start of a conference paper, but nothing else. It was, in part, a result of the pandemic and a result of trying to find a dissertation project I felt confident I could be consistent with for the next several years.

The experience of learning from Graham’s granddaughter and thinking through Monica Lynne’s presence in Black Panther comics shifted my priorities, though not in the way I might have imagined. I didn’t pursue that project, but afterward, I didn’t leave. I stayed in graduate school and finished and defended my dissertation on my own terms. My project centered on Black women and girls in new media fantasy narratives, and I tried to imagine scholarship that connected the intersections of technology and the magic in girlhood. I explored how Black girls use digital tools to decide who they are and then tell others about the selves they have created.

The Black women and girls in and around academia who created, collaborated on, and curated these stories rejuvenated me. It gave me the strength to refocus, and finish.

Monica Lynne’s presence in the Black Panther comics I was studying led me to ask different questions. She helped me begin to think through what Black American women’s relationship was to fantasy as a genre, in superhero comics and in other types of media, affirming that there was indeed a place for us. Discovering the family behind the illustrator who helped bring her to life guided me to think about Black women not only as characters but also as creators and curators of this work. Together, these women, one fictitious and one real, illuminated a story that had deep roots and beckoned me to search deeper.

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