Caution: My personal rant begins now...
I am a creature of social media, and I get most of my news from social networking sites. Twitter is the ultimate platform for information and quite often within the noise of ridiculous news tweets like what is happening with Kim and Kanye's baby or the latest racial rants about Django Unchained, we could care less about, I try to search under the sea of tweets for new information that would be valuable to me and to others. Among these superficial news items that have no benefit to us, there may be a lonely tweet or two that gets sent into the world of Twitterverse to be ignored within the sphere of influence of major media sites that tweet about foolishness. It's so disappointing and sad that many black journalists have succumbed to the pressures of writing stories that have no profound effect on African Americans, other than to be a source of infotainment to readers simply to garner attention to their media websites. I'm not saying this of ALL black journalists, but the major ones (you know who they are) have become vulnerable to the formula of tweeting and writing news stories that are simply fluff pieces that most people don't care about.
I just had to get that off my chest before presenting this news item, because hopefully more stories like this (abeit this may not be hard news) its important that readers and subscribers of news get a fairly balanced presentation of the latest news in pop culture.
If you are in the NYC area, this Saturday January 12th 2013, The Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture of Harlem, New York, will be launching their first Black Comic Festival. According to Bleeding Cool:
it is described as “a dynamic festival for young people that celebrates the rich tradition of black superheroes and features a screening of the film “White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in Comic Books”; a pop-up art exhibition of “Black Kirby”- a visual homage to the legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby by artists John Jennings (SUNY Buffalo) and Stacey Robinson; panel discussions, hands-on workshops, and exhibit tables with premiere black comic book artists from across the country. Free. All ages welcome. Registration is required.”
You can contact schomburged@nypl.org for more information.
Check out the video trailer below about the depiction of black comic book characters.
