ABSTRACT
Ebony Flowers’s Eisner-winning collection of graphic short stories, Hot Comb, places Black female bodies front and center. Flowers’s characters represent what should be obvious but has not been told often enough within mainstream comics: that Black women inhabit their bodies and live into their identities in many and varied ways. Although Flowers’s characters at times struggle with vulnerabilities exacerbated by structural inequality and an added history of bodily invasion, their bodies are powerful in their presence, and especially in their excess, when they tease and shatter the boundaries of reality, as well as those of panel and page. Interspersed parodies of advertisements for Black hair products demonstrate a complicated mix of pride and consumerism. The wide cast of characters in Flowers’s collection, illustrated in Flowers’s signature texture-heavy style, not only tell entertaining stories about hair, but cannot be easily dismissed or oversimplified.
