Black Female Authorship and the African American Graphic Novel: Historical Responsibility in Icon: A Hero's Welcome

This article, a study of the Milestone Media graphic novel Icon: A Hero's Welcome, argues that African-American graphic novels are an important literary forum for black women's voices. I examine the ways in which Rocket, Icon's female narrator, revises the conventions of both the slave narrative and the conventional superhero comic story in order to locate black women within the American histories from which they traditionally have been absent. Rocket, sidekick to the superhero Icon, both helps her alien counterpart to assimilate into a black male identity and rewrites their adventures together to reflect her own process of self-discovery.