I caught
this article yesterday in which they talk about the photo archives of Johnson Publishing, the company that produced magazines like
Ebony and
Jet for many years. The company, as you may recall hearing last year, filed for bankruptcy and its vast archives were to go up for auction. It turns out that a "consortium [that] includes the Ford Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Smithsonian" got together and purchased the entirety of it all specifically in order to donate to the the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Good for them! Lots of kudos are in order here!
But I was curious -- all of the articles I can find are only referencing the
photo archives. There's no mention of any illustrations or, more pertinent to this blog, comics that those magazines may have published. As I went looking from article to article to see if any other materials are indeed included in this collection, I was reminded that former
Ebony cartoonist Walt Carr was to release a collection of his comics last year in a book entitled
Just Us! But the book seems to not have materialized.
I found information about a book release party on August 29 of last year, and a Facebook post saying the book "will be available on Amazon mid-September" but I can't seem to find anyplace (including Amazon) that even has it listed! On September 29, 2019 the folks over at
Daily Cartoonist made note of the book but said they couldn't find it anywhere at that time. I also found notice of a book signing scheduled for October 23 in Baltimore. There seem to be a few different photos of the completed book from different sources, so at least a few proof copies were printed up but I can't find any actual evidence of the book's existence beyond that.
Does anyone know what happened to it? I found another article from February of this year stating that Carr was doing some illustrations for a book by Pamela Woolford, but there's no mention of
Just Us! Was it something that Carr just had printed up for himself and he's selling individually? I'd definitely be interested in getting a copy but there doesn't seem to be any purchase information listed online anywhere.
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