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Mark Doox's The N-Word of God

Jesi Bender


The N-Word of God
Mark Doox
Fantagraphics Books, Feb 2024

Buy at Bookshop.org
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mart, sad, and horribly beautiful, Mark Doox’s literary graphic novel is timely and thought-provoking as it reconceptualizes Abrahamic imagery and teachings to tell the story of what it is to be Black in America. Doox calls his art Byz Dada (Byzantine Dadaism) and seem like they are from gilded illuminated manuscripts, but reimagined with Black representation, including many racial stereotypes. There’s Sambo as a saint, Goltzius’s Phaeton but with bantu knots, George Washington crossing the Middle Passage, and Our Lady of Ferguson. In one part, a virgin Aunt Jemima is told that she is with child by an angel and she protests, since she “hab bin knowns by a man.” But the angel corrects her—“You are mistaken. For he that has been with you and has known you has been legally considered in the past by the Supreme Court of the Land to be only three-fifths a man . . .” Doox reveals horrible aspects of this country in heart break, anger, dark humor, and, yes, even hope as the N-word strung together becomes the cosmic vibration that sustains all of life (. . . NNNNN-NNNNNNN . . .). This is a must-read.



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Jesi Bender