Clifford Thompson: ON THE OTHER HAND... • Cleaver Magazine

Clifford Thompson
ON THE OTHER HAND…

Origins of My Comics

As a young boy growing up in Washington, DC, in the early 1970s, I fell in love with the comic strip Peanuts, which left two indelible marks on me: a preference for simple forms in visual art—Charles Schulz drew his characters with just a few exquisitely placed lines—and a fascination with confused, misunderstood male characters, of which Charlie Brown, for me, was the prototype. Later, Stan Lee’s book Origins of Marvel Comics, which included reprints of the origin stories of Marvel’s superheroes, left me agog at the bold, brilliant colors used to depict the heroes’ adventures.

Those factors combined during my high school years in “The Telstar,” the Black teenage superhero I invented, wrote about, and drew.

When I was eighteen, three things happened that affected all of this. First, I began to sense that my drawing style would not be a good fit in the fiercely competitive world of comic book art. Second, my fascination with the confused young male began, in my hands, to take the form of prose fiction—much of it, at the time, autobiographical.

And third, I went away to college in the Midwest. That meant leaving my all-Black neighborhood to be in a predominantly white setting. That itself was not what I found so difficult—though it took getting used to in some ways—so much as the separatism I discovered among my fellow Black students, who seemed to disapprove of my friendships and romances with a number of whites. I have wrestled with that issue ever since: given how much American Blacks as a group have suffered over the centuries at the hands of whites, are anti-white attitudes understandable, inevitable, logical? Or is any form of prejudice, for whatever reason, simply wrong?

My visual art impulse, it turned out, was not dead. In my mid-forties, after having occasionally sketched over the years, I began painting in acrylic as if on a mission. Today I am a member of Blue Mountain Gallery, a painting collective in New York City.

My writing focus, meanwhile, had shifted to the personal essay and memoir, forms in which I addressed subjects including childhood, American identity, family, the arts, and race. (You might call my nonfiction narrators confused middle-aged men.) Then, several years ago, my writing and visual art, you might say, had a reunion, in the form of my graphic novel, Big Man and the Little Men, published by Other Press in 2022. Working on that book, I discovered, or rediscovered, a concern in comics, especially comics that deal with complex subjects: how to convey sophisticated ideas in words spare enough not to overwhelm the images but, rather, to form a partnership.

As if that weren’t enough, I recently I began to think about how to combine the concerns of the personal essay with visual art. The first result is “On the Other Hand…”

Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine named as one of the “most anticipated books” of the season, and which NPR called “captivating.” He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men, which is “slim in size and substantial in impact,” in the words of the Times Literary Supplement.