While the title and obvious historical focus suggest that this is a book about race, I'd suggest it runs much deeper than that. It's a book about identity, suggesting that we can be born to one identity but choose another and, of course, that none of us are defined by just one identity. It's about how we see ourselves and how others see us. That's as much about gender, career, even taste, as it is about race. If Mat Johnson was writing this in 2025 instead of 2008, he might have included a trans character. It all plays into the same theme.

Of course, we're going to focus more on race because of how it came about and how it chooses to focus. Johnson is an African American man but he has light enough skin that people mistook him for white. Doing that deliberately is called "passing" and I've reviewed a book of that title, published in 1929 by Nella Larsen. However, the passing her character did was within society, to open doors that were closed to blacks during segregation by letting people assume that she's something that she isn't. That was dangerous but this book takes that to a whole new level.

That's because Johnson learned about Walter White, a chief executive of the NAACP. He was a black man who could pass for white too and he used that effectively as a superpower. He can't run faster than a speeding bullet or leap small buildings in a single bound, but he can walk into lynchings in the deepsouth and be welcomed by the racists stringing up black people as one of their own. Why would he do such a thing, you might ask? So that he could investigate them and report on them. And so that's what Zane Pinchback does here.

This isn't a superhero book, but I like the parallels that it raises. Clark Kent is supposed to be a human journalist, so he has to operate within the range of human possibility. However, he can simply take off his glasses and become Superman without anyone realising. Zane Pinchback is an octoroon, one eighth black, so is legally a black man subject to all the rules and restrictions that society applies to black men in the 1930s, when this is set. However, he looks white, so he's able to simply adopt the character of a white man and, just like that, none of those rules apply any more. Of course, he uses his superpower to do good, as all superheroes should, infiltrating lynchings and reporting on them under the superhero name of Incognegro.

There's a powerful irony here, in the fact that these white bigots feel that they have the right to take the lives of black men, in many cases for no better reason than that they're black men. I'm sure they would argue that they're not human beings or that they're all criminals or some such. However, it's impossible to justify judging other people on the colour of their skin when it's indistinguishable from their own. How can a white man see himself as inherently superior, both morally and intellectually, to a black man when he can't even tell the difference between them? I love that these southern bigots know that there's a black spy in their midst but simply can't figure out who it is. Is it you? Is it me? Johnson uses this irony for a truly brutal twist.

We're thrown right into the horror because the very first page is a single panel of a lynching, a real family affair with the kids, complete with beer and picnic baskets and a Klansman cutting off the genitals of a black man, dressing him in a clown outfit and hanging him from a tree. It's not a pretty sight for anyone, least of all a legally black man who knows he can't do anything to stop it, not even react. Instead he asks questions, gathers names and addresses and gets out of there before he's strung up beside the victim. That takes a special kind of courage, one that we could fairly classify as a superpower.

Fortunately, this is Pinchbeck's last mission as Incognegro, because he only just makes it out of there alive, but then his editor throws him back in. This time the black man arrested and being held in jail for murdering a white woman is his twin brother, Alonzo Pinchback, who remained in Mississippi when Zane travelled north and settled in Harlem. And so Zane heads back home to investigate the murder and hopefully find a way to keep his brother from the lynch mob.

I absolutely love that Zane and Alanzo are twins, brothers who look very similar even if they're not identical. It serves to deepen that irony I mentioned above, because the locals don't even think of applying any of the bigotry they instinctively feel for Alonzo, the black murderer, to an educated white man who's just arrived in town, even though they kind of look alike. They simply can't see Superman underneath Clark Kent's glasses because their hate is blinding them. This plot device also came about because of reality, because Johnson has twins of his own, born in 2005, only three years before he published this book, and one looks black but the other white.

It seems likely on first evidence that Alonzo didn't do it, not least because Michaela Mathers, the victim, was both his girlfriend and business partner in a moonshine operation. Given that the sheriff's deputy, Francis White, vanished at precisely the same time, it's possible that he's the murderer and he skipped town to escape judgement, probably going back home to his own family who aren't local. Zane visits them to ask questions but his cover as an official is rumbled by the revelation that Francis is actually female, passing as it were as male because she could. Her features were as homely as Zane's skin is pale. See what I meant when I said that identity here isn't just race?

There's much more to come that I'm not going to go into because you ought to read this graphic novel for yourself.

It looks good, the artwork courtesy of Warren Pleece, who works with clean lines and avoids the use of shading. This is a black and white comic book, pun not intended, and that decision means that we find ourselves struggling to tell who's black and who's white. Given the subject matter, of course, that's highly appropriate. Pleece is especially effective with his full page panels that tend to be drawn from above, like the one that kicks off the book. These gatherings are happy affairs, celebrations, with a contagious joie de vivre. However, in there somewhere, almost lost to the background, is the hanging body of a black man who's been tortured and murdered. The sheer contrast nails home how accepted lynchings were in the south and how routine.

And that's the biggest reason why this isn't a superhero comic. People die. Horribly. Not all the characters who start these missions live long enough to finish them and see them recounted in an Incognegro column in the newspaper. Johnson masterfully manouevres his way through the twists needed to keep us on the hop and his biggest success is to tell a fundamentally black and white story so deeply that its depths apply on a much broader scale.

Close to the end of the book, Zane tells his editor that he's only going to partly retire from his fieldwork. He's still going to write the arts column that he's been aching to create, but he also won't put his metaphorical Incognegro mask away for good. "I'll just wear two hats," he states and, just in case we hadn't noticed that he's been doing that all along, we realise that this is a part of simply being human. We're all different and we all identify differently. Most of us pass daily for what we're not, just to get by in this world, whatever labels others might give us. This is an admirably deep graphic novel and, while it's largely about race, it's about a lot more than that. ~~ Hal C F Astell