(H)AFROCENTRIC COMICS

Originally published in four  separate volumes, this graphic novel introduces the outspoken college-student revolutionary Naima Pepper and her friends.

Naima is a mixed-race, half-black, half-white, student struggling to reconcile the inequalities that she sees on the campus of the fictional Ronald Reagan University and in the surrounding neighborhoods of Oakland, California. She decides to start an online anti-gentrification movement, Mydiaspora.com, envisioning it as a social networking space for black people to congregate when they tire of “white folks.” To raise funds, Naima and her friends decide to throw a concert. Naima and her best friend, Renee, go on a quest to organize support for the concert, including a humorous meeting in which they try to entice a white, dreadlock-wearing hipster couple to contribute solar panels. Following this, Naima is in need of a senior internship to graduate. When she can’t find an internship that suits a revolutionary, her fairy godmother (who looks like Fannie Lou Hamer) creates one as a “racial interpreter” that finds Naima answering stereotypical questions asked by white people about black people. The novel hosts a multicultural cast of college students who engage politically, blending satire and history for a recipe of topics millennials don’t shy from. Sporting a tank top with the word “Ally” written above a photo of John Brown, perched on top of the literal soap box she preaches from, Naima Pepper is a force to be reckoned with.

Readers will be smitten with Naima, and they will hope for more of her. (Graphic novel. 14-adult)