I got a copy of this graphic novel from Netgalley. I was intrigued by the premise and boy, did it deliver.

Young Kareem Jenkins is out with his friends when they are gunned down by policemen. Kareem's dead body is transported in an ambulance only for him to wake up half way through. He is rescued by Juncture who helps him understand his new found superpowers. But, he also shares with Kareem a surprising secret - only people of colour can have superpowers.

Detective Ellen Waters was too late to stop the murder of Kareem and his friends but she does see the resurrected Kareem fleeing from the ambulance. Unable to believe her eyes, she follows him to find answers but he manages to escape before she can.

Meanwhile, Theodore Mann, a wealthy businessman, seems to take a particular interest in Kareem. He also appears to know much more than most about superpowered beings... but what does he do with this knowledge?

This was a fascinating read. I am so glad I managed to get the first volume, which includes issues 1-6, as it works as a complete story in itself.

This book is action-packed. Plenty of characters are introduced as protagonist Kareem gets himself into several scrapes and tries to uncover the truth behind his powers. We also get to follow Detective Waters quite a bit, and though she is little more than a reader stand-in, she has a lot of personality.

The art is good and certainly does the job but I do wish it was in colour. The art is strong, don't get me wrong, but I feel like some details are glossed over in the black and white shading. There were some panels that made me do a double-take because I didn't quite understand what was going on in them. I'm not sure why the creators chose this monochrome colour scheme. I'm hoping there will be a colour version in the future.

I have a small, possibly insignificant, point to make about the use of language. I like that Kwanza Osajyefo has gone for the use of dialects for all the characters; it helps give each character a distinct voice, and this I absolutely love.

However, there is one character, Hood Rat, who speaks Arabic. The letters appear separately, which is incorrect. Arabic alphabets conjoin when they are followed or preceded by most alphabets. That the lettering should appear separately means that the software used to design the comic book was not compatible with the language; worse, it means that an Arabic proofreader was not hired to read the work before publishing. In that case, the Arabic should have been left out completely. It looks really bad this way and negates the author's attempt at inclusivity.

I also felt like the book could have done with more female characters. There are a smattering of women, but most have very short appearances and little to do, except for Detective Waters, and even she is side-lined a lot. It would have been good if one of the other main characters, like Juncture, Mann, Coal, or even O, could have been women.

This story is obviously a political statement and I like how it goes about this incendiary topic. Black history, particularly African-American history is incorporated throughout and ties into how the superpowered individuals have and are being treated and the circumstances they find themselves in. Reading this shortly after having watched Netflix's Bright, which also attempted to give commentary on social and racial issues through entertainment, I find myself wondering how a multi-million dollar production could have so spectacularly failed to do what this indie comic book did so succinctly.

I love that Black never forgets that it is a comic book. It is interesting, entertaining, with numerous interjecting plots that culminate in a fantastic finale all the while incorporating its social commentary in subtle but powerful ways. I really can't wait to read more of this series.

A very timely graphic novel. The stark art style really lends itself to the plot.

The black and white art was great.

But the covers - amazing.

A great superhero comic, and at the same time, an excellent commentary on race in our culture. There’s fascinating commentary just painted into the covers. The cover to chapter 5 is especially powerful. I really thought it was an intriguing story, and loved the social issues that were built into it.

Looking forward to future stories about X. And I want to check out Black AF: America’s Sweetheart - due out next month! (Jan ’18)

Check this book out!

[Note: I don't know why this isn't getting more love on Goodreads - yeah, some parts were a little hard to follow, and there were a lot of characters, so I had to go back and forth a couple times to remember which team some of the characters were on - but it wasn't that difficult! I notice that almost no one who reviewed was a POC. It's a shame, too, because this book should have a wider audience.]

I love the idea behind this series, but have to agree with other reviews that it's not the best execution: there are a ton of superpowered characters to keep track of. Consequently, their powers aren't really explored in depth (or at least not yet - hopefully this will change with upcoming issues), which feels like a huge missed opportunity. (It also makes the fight scenes chaotic AF!) That said, the artwork is bitchin', and the storyline has loads of potential.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley.)

The well llustrated and plotted graphic novel is based on the premise that black people are the only population with the possibility of mutant superpowers. A group of black mutants believe that the white population would try to annhiallate blacks if the truth were known. A group of white psychopaths want to enslave blacks and extract their hidden powers. Battles rage.
The premise and plot remind me of the idea that ruthless domination by whites is the only way to combat black sexual potency.

“Black,” created by Kwanza Osajyefo, made the list of at least one year’s best list, and while it’s story follows a typical hero’s journey. It’s world building and central question garner attention. The result of a successful Kickstarter campaign, “Black” asks what if only black people had superpowers. Following a young man who discovers he possesses superhuman abilities, he meets different factions, and fights the big bad in this six-issue arc. As a comic, “Black,” is well poised to address contemporary issues on race, violence, state-power, and relationships with the police while providing space for increased representation of minority heroes. This first volume is an excellent start to what I hope will be an ongoing project. The art is reminiscent of an American manga style and the volume is punctuated by a series of powerful covers. The cover work is relevant and powerful, eye-catching, and thought-provoking. Origin stories are tricky since they can be well-worn ground, “Black,” however, is worth the time.

Review provided in exchange for copy provided by NetGalley.

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DNF. I tried - the first issue was a breeze, easy to read, nice black and white artwork (oh, the irony) that is easy on the eye... But then it all goes tits up. Every issue felt like I was only getting half the pages, with so many jumps and so much unexplained in-world terminology (the slip, and more). Plus it's written in "black" (for want of a better word), so it's impossible to even parse some of it and understand what the heck is going on. But the chief problem is that this book is a racist tract, written by and presumably for racists. It blatantly states that if people (ie "whites") were to discover "blacks" with superpowers, there would be a fearful, jealous genocide. Because that's right - every single "white" person is a racist, and all us lily-whites is afeared of Usain Bolt and just wants to lynch him, because he must have a hexadecimal quark, or some shit science (which will be a dodecahedradecimal quark in the next issue, because the editor slept through that bit).

The book continued to look good - the shading is great, and it's kinetic, dynamic and so on, but is far too much so for every single fight scene, and they're just an impenetrable splodge of WTF, especially as we're never told who the people are before they go into the action. It's the politics, however, that suck biggest - and anybody thinking this is a decent evocation of the underdog sticking it to the Mann needs a good hard look at themselves.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I did not like this graphic novel. It was basically a rehash of The X-Men, or The Inhumans, or The Gifted, or New Mutants, or whichever simplistic, derivative Marvel Comic series about mutants you wish to name. This novel brought literally nothing new to the genre unless you count that in this case, the only people with the mutation are black! To me, it was racist.

All the "good guys" were black. All the "bad guys" were white. Neither side was anything more than a caricature. It felt like I was watching a so-called 'blaxploitation' movie from the early seventies. Since this was a graphic novel, and given that a potentially interesting premise failed to be effectively exploited, I found it hilarious that the color scheme was gray-scale! It felt ironically appropriate, but not in the way the creators intended, I'm sure.

While on the one hand I can understand this - and work like it - constitutes a backlash against the inexcusable racism inherent in comic books, movies, and TV shows where - unless you're prepared to be the token person of color - please don't show for the audition, the way to fix a problem where the pendulum has swing way-the-hell too far in one direction is not to swing it equally far to the opposite side, it's to stop it dead in the middle and weld that sucker down so it can never move again. Period.

I think the comic would have carried a much more powerful message had it been less comprehensively biased. As it is, it runs a dire risk of being viewed by too many people - and those are the very ones who most need to get an education - as being nothing more than sour grapes. It didn't help the cause that one of the freedom fighter leaders was named Caesar, the same name given to the chimpanzee in the Planet of the Apes saga. That sounded insulting to me.

Even that aside, it was not well-thought out. Rather than go with Marvel's asinine "x-gene" ploy, the creators (and I admire them for this) tried something different. Unfortunately, it wasn't something new! They made the mistake of taking the easy way out by simply making the quantum leap. It didn't work. The idea here is that some people (all black!) have unusual arrangements of quarks in their body. Quarks are the foundations of hadrons, which most people unknowingly know as protons and neutrons, and which form the nucleus of every atom.

There are six known quarks, divided into three up-types, named (with characteristic physicist quirkiness) up, charm, and top, and three down-types, named down, strange, and bottom. We're told that gifted black people (who may not necessarily be young!) have a hexaquark, like this is something rare, but it really isn't. Their expert is very confused and talks bayrons rather than baryons. But that, with its unintended allusion to Bay Watch, works given how some of the women are portrayed in this story. Which is another problem.

There's precisely one female super hero, and one transgendered one. The only other females are background or ancillary personnel. There is one professional assistant, one cop, and one lab technician. Two of these unaccountably wear eyeglasses whereas not one other person in the entire book does, and one of them - the so-called quantum particle expert - wears a lab coat. Barf.

The comic is hypocritical in this regard. On the one hand it's admirably, if ineffectively in my opinion, championing black characters in graphic novels, but on the other hand it's keeping "bitches" down. That's inexcusable, especially given that the women's liberation and black civil rights movements have historically often worked hand-in hand, because both sectors of society have been oppressed and in disturbingly similar way in some regards (such as having no vote, for example).

Why are there so few important black characters in graphic novels? Because most of those novels have traditionally been written by white folks and it never occurs to them to include non-whites. It's not that they hate black folks and what to keep them down or actively exclude them; it's just that (and this is no excuse) they just don't think of it. Why are there so few women of note in graphic novels? Because most of them are written by men - who don't hate women and don't wish to keep them down; it simply never occurs to them to include women. They just don't think of it. That's what happened here.

The main character is named Kareem Jenkins. He's shot for two reasons. The first of these is that it's a case of mistaken identity because all black folks evidently look alike to New Jack City cops, as a sorry history of shooting deaths in New York has shown and continues to show. The second is that when he's told to freeze, by armed cops, he's too stupid to do exactly that. Instead, he rabbits and is shot and ostensibly killed. A dozen or more black men have been fatally shot by NYPD in the last twenty-five years, and very few cases have even gone to trial, let alone ended in a conviction, but this novel repeatedly refers to NYPD as New York's finest. I don't know if that's meant to be ironic.

Kareem is unique because he rises again, and then is kidnapped by a character who far from being Straight Outta Compton, is straight outta The Matrix movie. He's Morpheus by another name, and he even sits with legs crossed in an armchair when we meet him, and effectively invites the kid to take the black pill. Yawn.

This leads to him discovering a hitherto totally unknown world of back mutants, all of whom have powers of some sort, but there are then so many of these characters so quickly introduced that they become lost and meaningless in the crowd. The irony of course is that here, all black people do look the same, not because they're all drawn the same (the artwork was pretty decent), but for no other reason than that this comic book has failed to differentiate them by giving them distinctive personalities and back-stories.

Having some of them speak in what in some circles, and for better or for worse, has been dubbed 'ebonics' is not giving them a personality. It's not giving them character. It's not making them individual. It's just cynically pigeon-holing them. There should have been fewer of them initially, and they should have been properly introduced instead of being treated like so many nameless, interchangeable slaves. This was a serious fail.

The plot doesn't work because we're expected to believe that a handful of white folks have pulled the wool over people's eyes for literally centuries, working in concert with the black community! I'm sure this isn't what the creators intended to convey, but it's very effectively what they achieved, because as the white community has, we're told, systematically sought to wipe out this 'black threat', the black community has been trying to hide the mutants, and neither side has ever let anything get out to the public! It's simply not credible.

Even if we allow that it worked before, it sure as hell would not work now! Have the creators of this series not seen the black community? Everyone is a showman or woman. There are pop divas and DJs with monumental egos. There are sports personalities with attitude, there are movie stars all about showmanship and conspicuous consumption, and there are so-called 'reality' shows and talk shows which are all about self-promotion.

None of this is confined to the black community, but we're not talking about how white folk might behave here. There is no way in hell, if any of this community had these powers, that they would all consistently keep them secret! It's simply not credible and this unarguable fact brought the whole story down and gave the lie to this farcical 'secrecy' claim. Besides, it made no sense to begin with - not in this day and age. If the white folks are trying to wipe-out the gifted peeps, then the best way to stop it is to go public, not go private. "Morpheus" is a moron!

Neither is it credible that the white folks would be able to continue their pogrom of extermination into modern times when much of the world is now ruled by non-white leaders. Are we supposed to believe that black leaders in African nations were in on it with the white folks? Bullsh! (More on that shortly). This is a classic case of failure to think outside the box, the box being the United Whites of America. Far too many of these kind of dystopian or secret society stories are far too hide-bound by 'American' thinking, or constrained by 'The American Way'.

What far too many authors fail to grasp is that there's an entire planet outside the USA that doesn't think about the USA from one week to the next because they have more important things to think about! They do not conform to US norms or patterns of thinking! They do not live the way US citizens live! They do no view the world like US people view it. Any story like this, which has global implications, yet which tries to pretend the entire globe is just like the USA is doomed to failure, and this one fell right into that trap.

There was almost cussing in this story! It's not credible. Almost all the time, when a cuss was about to be issued here, it was cut off. Instead of "Fuck!" we got "Fu-". Instead of "Shit" we got "Sh-" hence my "Bullsh" comment above. It's not realistic. It maybe be practical for some readerships, but people don't talk that way in real life, and everyone, even kids and churchgoers, knows it. You either have to include it to make it real, or you have to skip it for the sake of the readership. You can't have it both ways without it sounding truly dumb, and suspending suspension of disbelief. In short, either sh or get of the po.... Yeah! That's dumb it sounds.

A brief lesson in genetics: Not all mixed race couples have exclusively black children. Even a black couple can legitimately have a white child. Nature is color-blind! The reason for all this is that there is no difference, at the genetic level, between black people and white people and Asian people and whatever people.

Just like in real life there is no X gene, there is no B-for-black-gene either. There are gene networks wherein many genes acting in concert can achieve remarkable ends, but there is no 'negro network' than can make a person black or pigeon-hole one as such and more than there is a 'honky network' that can make a person white. This begs my last question: why did this affect only black people? There was no rationale given for this. We were expected to take it on trust.

Maybe the authors had some plan to work this out later, but forgive me for having little appetite for swallowing that when I'd already been asked to swallow much that was unpalatable in this graphic novel. I got the impression that they were winging it; tossing in some quantum nonsense and hoping to get by, but as we've seen, there is nothing in our genes to confer powers on one race and not another, so how much less credibility is there in ascribing this same effect to something even more fundamental: sub-atomic particles?

Quarks do have a property referred to as 'color', but it has nothing whatsoever to do with actual color as we perceive color day-to-day at the macro level. It's just a word; not a meaningless word because it has meaning to physicists, but it doesn't convey the same thing to them when they talk about quarks as it does to the rest of us when we talk about LED TVs. There is quite literally no color at the sub-atomic level as any electronic microscope image you can find online will show. Some of them have artificial-color added for clarification purposes, just as those glorious space images do, but in reality the sub-atomic world, just like the outer space world, is a very colorless one indeed.

Oddball congregations of quarks, which are the components of all matter, living or not, cannot grant powers to one race without granting them to all. It's another case of failure to think through. I mean, do Asians have powers? They're not white, but they ain't black either! How about the Latinx community? Deal or no deal?! What bothers me about this is that the authors seem to be saying that black people are somehow fundamentally different from all others, which is patently not true, but by saying it, they're risking undoing what decent, good-faith people of all races have been trying to accomplish for decades: true color-blindness wherein all are equal, all are one family, and all are brothers and sisters. The plot for this novel seemed like a very negative step to me unless it was handled better than it was here.

Black folks do have something rare and it is a real superpower: they have greater genetic diversity, especially those resident in Africa, than do any other humans. The reason for this is that all humans started life in Africa, not in Eden. We're all black. Unfortunately, the pale skin minority has forgotten this, and instead of seeing it as something unifying and something to be proud of, too many people see one color or another as a fault or a defect, something to be despised and rejected. Americans are often proud of their Irish, or German, or English, or native American, or whatever ancestry. What a pity they arbitrarily stop it at some point before it ever gets all the way back to eastern Africa where it all began.

So in conclusion, I cannot recommend this story as a worthy read. There were too many problems with it including endless excessive violence, but at least it was gray-scale so there was very little red ink to deal with. The one positive sign I saw was that in the end, Kareem took off on his own, rejecting all the bullsh- he;d witnessed. I commend him for that, but for me, it was too little, too late.

I think this is the beginning of a really good series.

When Kareem is shot by police for 'walking while black' he should have died but he is alive and kicking with superpowers to boot! Kareem has become some kind of super human being. He has become one of the Empowered.

Kareem is taken under the wing of 'The Project', a global network of scientists who are working to keep the Empowered hidden from a world that would otherwise exploit them. Only black people develop these super human powers and their existence has the potential to set off a war against black people or even enslavement.

Kareem spends time getting to understand his powers but it is clear he is different because he has every ability possible and he is still discovering more. It is not only The Project who are aware of his special abilities though, a secret US government agency is also after him. As Kareem gets to know more about his abilities he finds himself in disagreement with the Project but breaking away from them exposes him to the Government agency and to a group of black super humans who are tired of hiding in the shadows and want to take the government on.

Kareem finds himself caught between competing factions and should he be discovered he is also at risk of putting millions of black people at risk.

I think this is an imaginative and exciting new comic series. I thought this volume tried to pack a lot into the story and it became a bit confusing at one point. It was still a very good read though and the ideas behind it are innovative and fresh.

I enjoyed reading it and will definitely be following the series.

Copy provided by Diamond Book Distributors via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

I honestly can't finish this. I have tried, and I'd like to give it a fair review, but I just can't at this time.

This is a really great concept and there were some really great moments in here and also a lot of specific nods to current events with certain plot points and phrases. It has the potential to be a really great series but I felt like this volume was just too convoluted to be entirely enjoyable. There were way too many characters and only maybe five or six of them got any kind of characterization beyond a pithy name and a power set. I still plan on checking out the next volume in the hopes that they can tighten up the story a little bit, but so far it's kind of all over the place.

I like the concept of this book and the cover-art is very powerful. The artwork is solid, but I had hoped that there would be a bit more color used in the artwork in the novel itself, but everything is just black and white. The story is the same with all the black people against all the white people, so I guess the artwork fits it well.

The story is action-packed to the rim but I also had a couple of problems with it. The novel is very polarizing and does nothing to show that race shouldn't matter. The storytelling is a bit confusing at times and it doesn't really help that there are loads of characters involved who aren't always introduced properly.

All in all I didn't like this novel as much as I thought I would.

Wow. This comic blew my mind.

Think X-men but set in the world as we know it, especially the nastier parts of this world like entrenched racism. Only in the world this comic describes, 0.5% of black people have superpowers.

This story explores the different reactions to that and has a lot of anger and hope in it, which is why I enjoyed it so much. Emotion is the one thing that this series doesn't lack.

The main character is a black teenager who has just discovered his powers and has a very uncertain future ahead of him, he has some very adult decisions to make and so far he's facing them like a champ.

The artwork is black and white, which I love. The characters are diverse and beautiful (I grew up reading Asterix, need I say more why this matters to me?). The language and story immerse you into this world completely, this is a series well worth following for its originality and storytelling power.

Warnings: racism, police brutality, violence, murder

Awesome idea - what if only black people had superpowers? Now, if you have heard of Luke Cage or seen the Netflix series (which specifically was driving the BLM movement message home in it's trailer with a guy able to withstand bullets), you would agree that this is an interesting premise to build on. Also, a story centering the experience of black people in a society that hates their existence is a conversation we need to keep having. However, Black veers off from that by like the 3rd chapter and plunges into conspiracies and gets a bit unbelievable.

It starts off pretty well - Kareem, who somehow survives a police shooting, wakes up in a secret facility and told he has powers. Supposedly, a small population of people (who are black or mixed) have these quarks (subatomic particles or something - physics is NOT my strong suit) that give them powers. This is however, sold in the plot as a worldwide conspiracy to keep black people subjugated, and so that they don't pose a threat to the white governments. There are also different factions in these super-powered people who have different approaches to how things should be done to protect their people.

Now, I'm a fan of superhero themed graphic novels, but if you are going to tell me that there is a 'worldwide' conspiracy to hide powered people's existence, there better be a good reason. I would even accept that this was a US-centric problem, like how it happens in most dystopias, but if there was even a slight hint that there were conspiracies out there. For the whole book, it is presented like a secret that no one, not even in the age of the freaking internet and smartphones, knows about. And this is where I had a problem with how the rest of the plot played out, because it all depended on the premise of 'no one knows'. Still, we have powered humans getting into government facilities, having amazing battles (the artwork for which was super-cool, by the way) and literally no mention of how they are covering this all up. Like, one panel with some conspiracy blogs or something - was that too much to ask?

Another thing - what about countries with a majority of black people, or where white populations were lower? How were they hiding the existence of an albeit small, but noticeable fraction of the people being powered? Nobody's third cousin or something doing some weird things? It was just all - they lock up all the powered people on false charges. Which is a problematic concept to tackle, because it makes it sound like powered black people were considered a threat and have been enslaved, or imprisoned throughout history for that reason - when in fact, colonialism, racism, slavery and apartheid are complicated issues involving dehumanizing a race and cannot be simplified to suit a narrative like - hey, so some black people are super-amazing, so we have to make sure all of them are subjugated. Then again, I admit it is not exactly my lane to comment on, but I think it could have been presented as a multi-dimensional issue instead.

The artwork is pretty good, with realistic character designs, a range of abilities and people being presented and some really cool fight scenes. Overall, a good graphic novel, with some amazing artwork, but perhaps it doesn't handle the subject matter to its full potential.

An X-Men style graphic novel where only Black people have superpowers. This was good, but it took me a while to figure out what was going on just because there were so many characters and factions, and the pace was so fast. I still could hardly tell you the names of any of them, besides the main character.

This meaningful graphic novel sheds light on historical and current challenges black individuals confront, by exploring differing approaches to challenging white supremacy!

What if ... there was a strain of quarks that gave some humans superpowers? And, what if, the small minority of humans who have these abilities also happen to be black? This is Heroes meets Get Out. Well drawn and intricately constructed. Fast paced and fun. I especially liked the bonus at the end that showed some of the scene layouts and how they translated into artwork. I can see this becoming a movie

BLACK (Volume 1) has an amazing premise:
<i>In a world that already hates and fears them -- what if only Black people had superpowers. </i>
An exciting, interesting idea, and sharp illustrations are let down by over-crowding by characters without much of (or any) introduction, and confusing storytelling. Perhaps the pacing will smooth out in the later volumes.