New Record Store Superheroes

At a time when the everyday violence against black people is both accelerating and getting long overdue national attention and an uprising in response to that violence is in full swing, the importance of empowerment narratives is particularly apparent. Such narratives can take many forms including documentary stories of leadership and liberation and fictional stories that help imagine new worlds. As Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II explain in Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (2013), "Every political campaign is based on it. Every adolescent's life begins with it. … imagining what is possible". Graphic narratives engage our imagination in using a combination of visual imagery and text, making them an important site for articulating new worlds.

Writing girls into our collective understanding of power is vitally important. Documentation of teen girls organizing local demonstrations asserting the importance of black lives are an important part of this. Pairing these with fictional accounts helps expand the ways that girls can imagine themselves and the rest of us can imagine girls. Comics like Heavy Vinyl, therefore, can play a crucial role in shifting our collective imagination of what leadership and justice look like.

Like many academics, I have found that my life-long love of fiction has shifted to accommodate the reading I do for work. When my days are filled with reading reports, academic research, and email messages, my desire for imaginative narrative has increasingly been fulfilled by graphic novels and comic books. As a feminist, I am particularly invested in finding texts that feature women or girl protagonists and include at least one woman on the creative team. Anyone familiar with comic books and graphic novels and memoirs knows that the latter is all too rare even if a plethora of texts feature both women and girls. Hillary Chute (author of Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere [2017]) explains that in comics and graphic novels, "girls are the new superheroes." Many of the texts that feature these girls emerge from the imagination of men. While many of these are complex, empowering narratives featuring girls (such as Love and Rockets, Ghost World, and Papergirls), the world of comic writers and artists remains both white-and male-dominated. The girls and women at the center of these narratives are increasingly racially diverse (for example, the Pakistani-American teen protagonist in the latest incarnation of Ms. Marvel and the heroine of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur), yet as Deborah Elizabeth Whaley notes in Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015), black women remain primarily as "sidekicks or one-dimensional" in comics.

Heavy Vinyl is notable for providing a fictional narrative of empowerment featuring a racially diverse, queer-girl dominated cast and for it's almost all woman creative team, featuring writer Carly Usdin, penciler Nina Vakueva, inker Irene Flores (with Kieran Quigley and Walter Baiamonte [Vol. 1] and Lea Caballero [Vol. 2]), colorers Rebecca Nalty (Vol. 1) and Natalia Nesterenko (Vol. 2), and letterer Jim Campbell. Vikueva's realistic drawings capture the characters' emotions and interactions beautifully. Her subtle yet bold style effectively captures facial expression and body language. The bright colors Nalty and Nesterenko use fuel the quick narrative pace. Despite these kudos, the representation of black characters is uneven, granting a black girl agency and power akin to other characters while leaving a young black woman in a supporting role. Thus, just like the world we live in, the fictional New Jersey town where Heavy Vinyl takes place is imperfect. Liberation is possible but the way it's imagined needs to expand.

The plot centers on Chris, a seventeen-year-old white tomboy who has landed her dream job at Vinyl Destination, a local record shop that—unlike any record shop I've ever visited—is staffed entirely by teenage girls and young women. Over the course of volume 1 (released in 2018), we meet her co-workers, Maggie, a seventeen-year old...