Double Issue: an introduction by Kurt Mueller       The cover of “Gullah Sci-Fi Mysteries, featuring Mam E,” issue #7, introduces readers to “Uncle Remus,” a storming, snarling behemoth emerging from a forest of flower shapes, his oversized hands clenched with rage. This Remus isn’t Joel Chandler Harris’s jolly slave, the eponymous minstrel-like narrator of several collections of African American folklore. Nor is this the Remus re-popularized by Disney with Mr. Bluebird on his shoulder; this Uncle Remus, as the caption reads, “ain’t feeling too Zip-a-dee!”       He also isn’t really the star of his own comic book. The cover image is not actually a cover but a single, poster-sized painting on treated paper: The Avenging Uncle Remus (2007), by Houston-based artist Dawolu Jabari Anderson. Anderson spins Uncle Remus anew as an Incredible Hulk-like abolitionist, cursed with W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” and wielding a ring from Saturn that endows him with powers of mind-manipulation. He is an uncertain entity in a galaxy of similarly subverted super-stereotypes—an alternate reality illustrated by Anderson as a series of episodic pictures of oversized comic book covers. With a sharp, ironic wit, Anderson reclaims demeaning ethnic characterizations and an unjustly attenuated Black History, re-imagining them as fresh and nuanced narratives.       The center of Anderson’s cosmology is Mam E, whose gingham shirt, prodigious proportions, apron, and kerchief make her a clear incarnation of the “mammy” archetype familiar to Gone with the Wind and Aunt Jemima branding. Like Remus, Mam E’s plantation alter ego was visited by Emereciana, an extra-dimensional Saturnian scientist monitoring the egalitarian advancement of Earth, and a personification of ancient African wisdom. Madam Ethiopia, as Emereciana is known “on Earth,” refashioned Mam E’s “instruments of servitude (broom, iron, washboard etc.)” as conductors of kinetic energy and social change. In Anderson’s dynamic, freeze-frame compositions, Mam E (anti-slavery but pro-stability) squares off against the anarchist Remus and Jezebel-like Emereciana. In Anderson’s universe, simple and straightforward identities and reader identifications—hero and villain, good and evil, us and them—are rendered as open-ended questions.       This ambiguity extends to the multiple temporal contexts Anderson engages with each image. His comics creatively appropriate characters and dialects from the tales of Reconstruction Era America, while also incorporating elements of twentieth-century science fiction. The series title offers as much: “Gullah” refers to the African-American inhabitants of the Georgia and South Carolina lowlands, communities known for preserving African linguistic and cultural traditions. “Sci-Fi,” meanwhile, embraces “the phenomenon of African-American artists that have expressed some form of escapism by means of space travel, e.g. Jazz musician Sun Ra, Stevie Wonder, and Parliament Funkadelic.” Anderson’s comics simultaneously look backward and forward while acknowledging a precarious present—a history still being formed.       “Mysteries,” furthermore, connotes just such narrative suspense and the potential of the unknown. Following Anderson, the word can also be an inflection of “my stories.” Viewed as such, the plot lines developed by Anderson further a storytelling heritage. Besides shared subject matter, the crossover is formal. Like an oral tradition, comic books imply shared authorship, and require audience assistance in visualizing a “text.” The fact that Anderson’s comics are only covers can be understood as a sendup of the limited dimensionality of stereotypes, but they can also be read as prompts to be completed by the viewer.        Anderson’s prompts become direct addresses in another series of poster-sized works entitled “Negro Week”—the real-life predecessor to today’s Black History Month. On poster-sized paper, Anderson depicts young girls in sundresses expressing amazement as they grasp token-sized, haloed Martin Luther King Jr. and Michael Jordan idols.  Accompanying slogans, spinoffs of Milk and Nike advertisements implore one to consume African American History in a gulp, or to slam-dunk it. Anderson’s sardonic message: we’re being sold a cursory image of Black culture and progress. Generally, advertisements (like comics) rely on vivid images and abbreviated text for seduction and accessibility. Anderson’s works, as pop art, at once celebrate the broad appeal of these vernacular forms while caustically criticizing their regular intentions and results, namely a market that furthers inequality. In this duplicity, Anderson’s works reveal their own subversive alter ego.