The Four Color Media Monitor

The Hyde Park Herald reports that veteran artist Turtel Onli, a founder of the Black Artists' Guild and early independent publisher, has passed away at 72 years old:

Turtel Onli, a graphic artist known for his self-published comics and for founding the “Black Age of Comics” movement, died on January 15. He was 72.

Onli was born Alvin Phillips on January 25, 1952. Raised by his grandparents in Hyde Park, Onli’s love of art ran deep. His grandfather, a reverend, would paint depictions of biblical stories to use as teaching charts in his sermons. Seeing his grandfather’s work had Onli “hooked” and inspired him to create “narrative art using (his) style,” he told the Indie Comix Dispatch.

[...] In an interview with SAIC News about his 2024 exhibition, “Turtel Onli: The Black Age of Comics,” which was on display at the Logan Center last spring, Onli said he had long wanted to create comics, but encountered some resistance. In 1981, he met with the vice president of a big-name comic book company in New York City, who dismissively asked him, “do Black people read?”

And so, Onli began to chart his own path outside of mainstream comic publishing. He began self-publishing his own comics and reaching out to other Black artists to publish limited runs of their work under the Onli Studios imprint. His “way of responding to a problem or an opposition,” he told the South Side Weekly in 2015, “is not to get mad but to get busy.”

Onli’s style, which he called “Rhythmism,” combined classic superhero imagery with Afrofuturist and primitivist influences. He told SAIC News that his comics aimed to push back against stereotypes of Black creators and characters.

I have no idea who that company vice president was, let alone the company itself, but that certainly was out of line to ask such an insulting question, years after both Marvel and DC introduced Black characters, both superhero and not. But, Onli did the right thing to spend more time in the independent scene, and unlike today's mainstream, who go out of their way to do social justice pandering, he developed his own organic creations. So, very sorry he's gone, because his work in the indie market alone was one of the finest examples he provided, and should be going forward at a time when the corporate owned comics have collapsed.

Labels: conventions, exhibitions, good artists, history, indie publishers, misogyny and racism