Incognegro

Mat Johnson, who won the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction, wrote this graphic novel, and Warren Pleece, whose earlier comics include Hellblazer and The Invisibles, drew it. The result blends a crime mystery with a sharp look at race and at how people see themselves in America.

The story opens in the early twentieth century, when lynchings were a common sight across the American South. Some Black reporters from the North, light enough to pass for white, took on the dangerous work of exposing these killings. Their assignments became known as going "incognegro." Zane Pinchback, who writes that column for a Harlem newspaper, is one of them.

Pinchback would rather stay in the relative safety of Harlem, but he is drawn back to Mississippi when his brother is held on a murder charge that may be false and could end in a lynching. Once there, he faces a moonshine-running brother whose explanations don't add up, and a reckless friend who tags along for fun. Pleece's dark, detailed period artwork gives the book its mood.