The Great Negro Plot

I came to GNP, indirectly, having been contracted to attack the subject.

To be honest, I thought slavery was

an overdone topic in African American fiction since Beloved, but the pre-America NYC angle interested me. What I found though is that what I was reacting to about the topic was the cliche of chattel slavery, rather than the reality of it. This take on New York City’s 1741 slave revolt is a mix of fiction and nonfiction, told with the Africans who experienced it at the center of the narrative.

Books by Mat Johnson

Hunting in Harlem

In HIH, my goal was to tell a well plotted book that could transcend the pitfalls of the concept-driven narrative. Translation: I wanted a good story that wasn’t predictable. While the surface topic is Harlem’s gentrification, for me it was really a dialogue about the dangers of belief and fanaticism, written as it was in post 9/11 NYC.

    Hunting in Harlem is a satire, but hopefully with moments of tension as well. It is also an in-group discussion about the future of the black community for this first generation to come of age in a post-Civil Rights world. What do we do now that, after centuries of struggle, white people are not our biggest problem anymore?

Drop

As an MFA candidate at Columbia University’s writing program, I was working on a sweeping Toni Morrison-style epic family drama. I was about halfway done when Victor Lavalle, then my fellow student, was laughing with me on the phone. He said, “When we talk, you’re funny and profane and wild. Why doesn’t your writing look like that?” What I realized was that if I kept going the way I was going, the best I could do was be a second hand copy of somebody else. So I tried to write like myself. Throwing out the other manuscript, I started Drop. The result was my first published novel.

    Drop was also my intro into the world of publishing. The resultant angst was the source of the world of Bobby Finley, a character in Hunting in Harlem (above).

Hellblazer: Papa Midnite

I grew up reading comics—the first thing I ever read on my own was a reprint of Hulk #1 (minus cover, ghetto style). In college,

I started reading Sandman and from there

got hooked on Vertigo Books. When an opportunity arose to write for Vertigo,

I jumped at it. I pitched and idea based around my Great Negro Plot research, and Karen Berger went for it, asking that I use  Papa Midnite as a character, who came complete with an existing audience (and of course the movie Constantine was coming out). In general, I prefer creating my own characters and stories, but I saw a chance to take a character that was little more than primitive black stereotype (no disrespect to the great Alan Moore) and turn it into something with more depth, reality. Plus, I got to write for Hellblazer on my first dabble in the medium, how dope is that?

Incognegro

After the success of Papa Midnite, I pitched the story of a mystery based around a Walter White type brother who pretends to be caucasian to investigate black lynchings in the American deep south. They went for it, and bought the movie rights as well. The gifted Warren Pleece is illustrating, and it will hit next year. My cousin Ben Karp and I used to talk about going “incognegro” growing up, or passing, and I always joked that Incognegro would be my breakthrough bestseller (some people think I look like a caucasian, but I am a biracial African American). The graphic form let me tell the tale in an interesting way without doing a stupid commercially driven novel.