“I was Anti-Everything”: Cartoonist Jackie Ormes and the Comics as a Site of Progressive Black Journalism

In 1953, cartoonist Jackie “Zelda” Ormes was featured in the One Tenth of a Nation Newsreel series. She was shown in her studio meticulously drawing her popular comics. This short film was put out by All-American Newsreel, a company that produced some of the only Black newsreels in the twentieth century. They would be shown nationwide at the start of feature films. The One Tenth series featured fourteen prominent African Americans and was an attempt to recognize African American contributions during the 1950s.¹ By this time, Ormes’s comic strips reached millions weekly and she had created one of the first Black, mass-marketed dolls, modeled after fictional Patty Jo from her widely circulated Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger strip. Ormes’s characters would become so popular that by 1948, when asked what he might take with him to a desert island, writer Langston Hughes declared, “I would miss . . . Jackie Ormes’s cute drawings.”² Ormes’s inclusion in the film, as well as Hughes’s reference, signaled the status she had earned in the Black press and Black popular culture.

When this film was produced Ormes was approaching the zenith of her twenty-year career as a cartoonist in Black newspapers. This made her the longest running, most syndicated Black woman cartoonist, a record still unchallenged in the modern day. Ormes’s comics are not simply vehicles for easy laughs; they exist as powerful sites of Black feminist radical clapbacks and pointed societal interrogations. The erasure and marginalization of Black women’s artistic, intellectual, and activist labor within histories of the twentieth century will come as no surprise to the reader. Thankfully, these contributions are being steadily unearthed. Scholars such as Mia Bey, Farrah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage in their collection Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women and Brittany C. Cooper in her work Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, Ayesha K. Hardison’s Writing Through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature, among many others, have provided a critical overview of this work by African American women.³ Yet we must continue to expand our definitions of both intellectual and activist labor. Black comics, and in Ormes’s case, Black women cartoonists occupy a marginalized space in art and activism. Her comics work to upend this marginalization. Her strips are an example of Black women’s astute evaluations of the world around them and the interior and exterior challenges mounted to survive them. Her comics provide a valuable unvarnished critique of American life and inequity at midcentury using the voices and bodies of Black female characters.

Decades after her strips ran, Ormes exclaimed to an interviewer, “Me, I was always fighting battles, I was antiwar—I was anti-everything-that’s-smelly!”⁴ Due to the lack of a formal or informal Ormes archive, her personal politics are hard to discern in full. What is clear, however, is that she was involved in groups characterized as radical in different capacities, and the worldview she articulated in the few interviews she granted could also be considered radical for the time. However, her comics speak in a clear radical voice and her fight was on display within the pages of the Black press, in a most overlooked place—the funny pages.

I hope to add to the important work on Ormes begun by other scholars. Researcher Nancy Goldstein provides the most comprehensive text on Ormes. Her groundbreaking book, Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist, gives an overview of her prodigious creative production and her larger life. The widest collection of her comics is collected here, as well as the sole interviews with her then-living relatives.⁵ Literary scholar Edward Brunner discusses the exceptionalism of Ormes’s Black female characters in his article, “‘Shuh! Ain’t Nothin’ To It’: The Dynamics of Success in Jackie Ormes’s ‘Torchy Brown.’”⁶ American Studies scholar Deborah Elizabeth Whaley dedicates a chapter to Ormes in Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and...