Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024. Chicago. The Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. I stepped out of the elevator to a cacophony of discordant sounds … hip-hop music, the pounding of feet on a dance floor, children running, parents screaming, teenagers arguing about the latest comic. Yes, this was a library. But this library was hosting Pocket Con, an annual comics event focusing on boys and girls of color. As I made my way into the room I noticed two familiar faces to my right, both standing behind adjoining tables: Ytasha Womack and Turtel Onli.
Afrofuturism, the Black Arts Guild, Rythmism, and the Black Age of Comics. So many of the BLACKEST of ideas in one place connected to two people, both of whom I hold dear. Hellos, handshakes, and hugs were immediately exchanged. The conversation was lit, though not all roses and sunshine. The last time the three of us talked at length was when I interviewed them for the obituary for our mutual colleague, pioneering Black cartoonist and comics historian Tim Jackson.
We couldn’t talk about Tim without talking about Black comics, though this conversation about Black comics was laced with the sense of melancholy and loss that death so regularly serves survivors. I asked Turtel what he thought of the obit, if it “did Tim justice."
He responded with his usual matter-of-fact bluntness, “No. Nobody could have done Tim justice.”
Ytasha saw me wince at Turtel’s remark and interjected a bit of … optimism, “I liked it.”
Turtel pivoted, “it really makes you think about how we are remembered, where are we in the …”
“… the archives.” I responded.
And this was us. Somehow, the alchemy of our interactions took us from death to sadness to a discussion of how Black comics creators and their creations are remembered, forgotten, lost and found. If we had glasses and rum, we would have poured libations. A moment of silence amidst the chaos would have to do … for now, we assumed. After all, there were several other comics-related events coming soon. So, when we said, “later,” it was with a sense of certainty. We could not have been more wrong.
Turtel Onli died on Jan. 15, 2025.
Onli was born Alvin Phillips on Jan. 25, 1952. He didn’t know his parents. He was raised by his grandparents with whom he lived until age 18. Onli’s grandfather, the Reverend Samuel David Phillips, was a preacher with a flair for the arts. He was also Onli’s artistic inspiration. Reverend Phillips used oilcloth and house paint to create depictions of scenes and stories from the Bible. What started as a hobby would eventually become a family affair. Young Turtel would often chip in and help with the art while his grandmother would type up scriptures and her husband’s sermons. The scriptures and the reverend’s sermons were typed in black and red ink, respectively, and added to the painting, which the reverend incorporated into the sermons that he delivered at his modest storefront church.
Onli moved out of his grandfather’s home shortly after he graduated from high school in 1970. And he took with him a love of art. Not so much for its aesthetic appeal, but for its ability to clarify, inspire, motivate and, most of all, heal.
“It’s not like I came up initially aware of a lot of African-American artists,” he told me, when I interviewed him in 1999. “I had the benefit that my grandfather was a Pentecostal church pastor, and he did his interpretations of the Bible as art. He used his visual aids for his sermons. So, I grew up in a household of people who drew, but they weren’t integrated to a community of professional artists. I had this deep passion, and I was fortunate enough to be born with a big talent. In other words, I was one of those kids that could always draw.”
Onli Studios, 1981–1982).
For Onli, the 1970s were about learning, honing his skills, creating community and developing his personal philosophy. He got his associate’s degree from Olive-Harvey College and later enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and later a Master of Arts in art therapy. His education didn’t end there, however. He honed his artistic skills in the early 1970s as a courtroom sketch artist for WGN-TV, dipped his toes into activism with the founding of the Black Arts Guild (B.A.G.), continued his studies in Paris at the Sorbonne, and developed a series of comics characters.
“I was 18 with a big talent and as big an ego,” he said. “My thinking was [that] the older African-American artists were uptight about young artists with talent. So, I felt we should have been the next wave. Rather than challenge them, we should just organize ourselves for two things: [First] to deal with the academic rigors of studying art at institutions that, a generation before, wouldn’t have let Blacks in. I felt we had an obligation to really go to those institutions and succeed. And [second] to launch our professional careers.”
Onli also recalled feeling the need for both a political statement and an artistic movement. He took inspiration from Jim Smoote, a childhood friend and artist he had known since first grade. At the time, Smoote had done a lot of quilts that incorporated watermelons. Onli recalled riffing off of the “old Black cliché of coming out of a bag” and then they turned their attention to watermelons and pickaninnies as cultural icons. He wanted to give them a different spin. Onli recalled working at a restaurant that was a conduit for Irish immigrants: “They would tell me stories about how the leprechaun was used to insult them, [How they came to] embrace the leprechaun and the four-leaf clover, and everything that was Irish, to dignify themselves. … But the thing is that they really pushed it. Now if you think of a leprechaun and its habits, he’s drunk all the time, totally irresponsible, not doing anything dignified, playing tricks on people. We call it … what? The luck of the Irish. Now you tell me the difference between a leprechaun and a pickaninny. They both got the same habits, they probably hang out at the same bar, except one brings in a watermelon and the other one brings in some rye whiskey or something. But my point is, they embraced all of their symbolism, including that which was used against them and gave it a positive spin. So, we felt … I felt, if we could do a positive spin on watermelon and pickaninnies [and] then that would be a positive contribution as art makers. We felt that the watermelon being red, black, and green, should have been the emblem of Black liberation.”
B.A.G. adopted the watermelon as its symbol to decidedly mixed reactions. Many in the African-American arts community were offended. "The elders in the Black art scene hated our concepts and, further, art historians would choose to marginalize B.A.G.'s impressive footprint and legacy. Sort of like being blackballed in Black circles for being universally Black." [efn_quote]Quoted on Lambiek Comicopedia by Kjell Knudde in 2025 from a no-longer-accessible post on Onli’s The Art of Turtel Onli blog.[/efn_quote]
Throughout the '70s, B.A.G. members worked together to create art exhibitions and joint publications. Among the publications were the 1974 Funk Book and a series of greeting cards. By 1978, B.A.G. had lost much of its initial momentum. Onli and the other members decided to disband. Onli spoke of B.A.G. with fondness, but when he described the end, there was no expression of regret. The end of B.A.G. was the beginning of his next adventure. On the advice of Eartha Kitt, he went to Paris. It was time for him to internationalize his career. And he knew he couldn’t be in Paris and keep B.A.G. together.
In 1978, Onli also created NOG, a Black, dreadlocked, interplanetary superhero whose name stood for “Nubian of Greatness.” NOG was more than a character. He was an early embodiment of "rythmism," a series of ideas that Onli had been developing throughout the mid to late 1970s as part of his ongoing efforts to theorize his art making. In 1979, NOG started appearing weekly in the Chicago Defender Newspaper and would go on to appear in three graphic novels: NOG, Protector of the Pyramids (1981), NOG is Back (1994), and NOG Nu!! (2011).
Onli used the terms "rythmism" or "rythmistic" to describe his art. In a 2014 interview conducted by Rebecca Zorach on neverthesame.org, he said, “I don’t think I invented the area that I refer to as being Rhythmistic, I just think I gave it a name. And a big part of being Rhythmistic is to sort of function with a ‘future primitive’ mindset. I think it’s genetic memory that whoever we were when we started is still in us, and I don’t mean at birth; I mean way, way back, all that primitive, tribal, pre-language way of communicating and expressing. It still flows through us, along with whatever has yet to come, so I think that when you mix the two, you end up in a future primitive state. And I think it’s really curious that when you look at all humanity as you go backwards, they start sounding alike, the belief systems get real similar, and then when you get to that pagan phase, boy, they do the same things, they’re looking at the sky and seeing the same things.”
The 1980s saw Onli’s focus shift toward refining his ideas while exploring applications for his unique brand of art. He started the decade by co-publishing a zine called Paper (1980) with the Osun Center for the Arts and founding Onli Studios. He also started meeting with creators, editors and executives in the mainstream comic-book industry. In 1984, Onli became the director/art therapist of the Black on Black Love Fine Arts Center at Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes Public Housing Complex. Onli left the Center in 1989. He went on to teach art at Chicago public schools for more than two decades. He also taught at Columbia College in Chicago. He held a position as adjunct professor of art appreciation and drawing at Harold Washington College until his death.
Onli is most known as the founder of the Black Age of Comics. It was originally coined in an article he wrote for a February 1993 issue of Comics Buyers’ Guide. That same month, Onli held the first Black Age of Comics Convention at the Southside Community Art Center in Chicago.
Onli understood the power of the word. The Black Age of Comics was a rallying cry. He told me, “If you can create distribution and marketing and challenge the mainstream … there’s so much other artwork going on, there’s so many other storylines going on. If those people would be co-supportive and create a marketplace, then they could break this other thing down”
Onli went on to recall a conversation with a mainstream comic-book company executive several years prior that had inspired the Black Age of Comics. The executive told him that, “Black people don’t care about comics.”
Ever the activist, Onli got other people’s books and displayed them at his convention tables. If the creator was Black, Onli grabbed it. If the comic featured a Black character, Onli grabbed it.
“People [were] impressed,” Onli recalled, “you know, they’d walk up to the table and they were like, “Man, I didn’t know all these Black comics were out,” and there was a full range. I would not play critic — if you put out a book, I would buy it. I wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, your artwork’s not good, your storyline, it’s not that; I was not pushing a party line of any type. I’d say, great, you’ve got a book, what’s the wholesale cost? If I bought a book that I thought was really mediocre in content, it was still fantastic because it existed as a book.”
While often referred to as the beginning of a movement, the Black Age of Comics was very much the culmination of Onli’s efforts to mobilize artists, his experiences publishing comics and developing rythmism, and his interactions with mainstream comics professionals. Onli used the Black Age of Comics to relaunch NOG in NOG is Back and to draw attention to two comics characters he had recently created: Malcom 10 (1992) and a co-creation with Cassandra Washington, Sistah-Girl (1993). The founding of the Black Age of Comics also coincided with the publication of Mark Dery’s essay “Black to the Future" in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1993), which is credited with coining the term Afrofuturism. While entirely separate in terms of their creation, Afrofuturism and Rythmism were compatible ideas that embraced futures, imagination, liberation, mythology and technology through a Black cultural lens. Dery’s essay included five images, four of which were images from comic books featuring Black characters.
The Black Age of Comics was a quintessentially rythmistic idea. It called for unification around the idea of Black comics coupled with full-throated acknowledgement that Black comics exist now, then and forever.
Looking back at articles published in the early 1990s about Black comics, there was a brief obsession with Brother Man, Milestone Comics, and ANIA press, often written in terms that dovetailed with archetypes and ideas clumsily drawn from Black history. The Simms brothers’ Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline was young, community-based entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and calling on others to do the same. Milestone Comics and ANIA Press were often pitted against one another as representations of the contrasting philosophies and legacies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It was as if MLK and Malcolm X were the first independent Black comic book characters.
And yet, over time, the historical narrative shifted to acknowledge other Black comics creations. And toward the latter part of the 1990s, the Black Age of Comics re-emerged as the primary framework for understanding Black comics and creators.
It was around that time that Yumy Odom, who was then the Director of the Pan African Studies Program at Temple University, reached out to Onli, first by letter, later by phone. Odom had first learned about Onli in 1988 when Odom wrote about NOG as part of a graduate paper on Black independent comics. Odom was looking to start a Black comics convention. “I asked [Onli] if we could use the name Black Age of Comics,” Odom told me. “My comic convention was gonna be called First World Comics Convention. I wasn't linked to Black Age of Comics on purpose [at first, but] what's the point of people having the same or similar ideas but not actually working together?”
Onli said, “Yes,” making possible the first East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention (ECBACC) at Temple University in 2002.
“That’s how ECBACC got started,” Odom said, "by linking all of these people who are all across the country." Onli and Odom would eventually meet in person for the first time in person at ECBACC 2006 where Onli was a recipient of the ECBACC Award for Lifetime Achievement (since renamed the Oren C. Evans Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement). To this day, ECBACC is an annual ode to the Black Age of Comics, bringing together a veritable who’s who of Black independent comic characters and creators. And in addition to embodying the Black Age of Comics, ECBACC inspired such Black comic cons as Onyx Con, Motor City Comic Con, Kids Comic Con, Bronx Comic Con, and Schomburg Center Black Comic Book Festival.
For Onli, the Black Age of Comics was a way of bringing both comics making and activist energies to bear on a social and aesthetic problem. When I spoke to him in 1999, he said, “I teach art in the high schools, and I’m deeply troubled every time I see a teenager that’s just a profound talent, and there’s nowhere for them to go because generations of African-Americans have not done the right thing to create the business infrastructure where he can get a job. Here’s a kid with more art-making ability than the kid that plays basketball next to him or the kid that does rap music next to him. But this kid that does art is so humiliated and defeated because he knows there’s nowhere to go and [be that].”
In 2005, Onli embarked on a most personal project. He curated an art exhibition for the Center for Visual and Performing Arts in Munster, Indiana, titled Reverend Phillips and Turtel Onli: An Artistic Legacy. The exhibition used his grandfather’s Pentecostal charts depicting scenes from the Bible and his own rythmistic artwork to make a statement about legacy while questioning the resonance of the visual within Black culture.
In 2010, he opened Onli Studios at the Bridgeport Arts Center in Chicago. In 2011, he revisited NOG with the publication of the graphic novel, NOG Nu!! And in 2011, Onli put on a Black Age of Comics event in Chicago.
I was at the 2011 Black Age of Comics celebration, along with Black comics creators from both coasts. It started at Kenwood High School, morphed into an impromptu house party that evening, and ended the next day with those of us still in town taking a group photo at the South Side Community Arts Center, the first place to hold a Black Age of Comics Convention. This was before social media had taken hold as a "place" for Black creators and scholars to come together. John Jennings and Damian Duffy’s Black Comix: African American Independent Comics, Art and Culture (2010) had been published a few months prior and served as our primary guide to knowing who each of us was. Ytasha Womack was there.
Womack had published her first book, Post Black (2010), the year before and had begun work on a second book focusing on Afrofuturism. The term had been around for 17 years, but it hadn’t taken hold in the public imagination. Rather, it was known primarily among academics, critics and creators who focused on the more obscure areas of science fiction and Black studies. So much so that, even in this crowd, Ytasha had to explain what Afrofuturism was as she described her upcoming project. This was the context in which she met Onli. Onli had some knowledge of Afrofuturism, having had his work appear in a 2011 art exhibition titled Afro Futurism in the Visual Arts at the Tubman African-American Museum in Macon, Georgia. Womack interviewed Onli for a section of her 2013 book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. On page 143, in a section titled “The Black Age in Comix,” Onli said:
I was always looking for the future, because I was never content with the things around me. From the time I started my professional career, I coined a term called rythmism, which incorporates Afrofuturism. I talked about one part Sci-Fi, one part mysticism, and one part an advanced environment, derived from an Africanized thought pattern. It was about projecting what things could be, through incantation, mysticism, or magic. It was about aesthetically working to have a visual vocabulary for things to come, instead of things that were established.
Womack and I spoke this past February about Onli’s passing. She was fascinated by Onli’s work: “One thing that made [him] especially fascinating is that he [had] a specific commitment to creating comics that depicted Black people in these alternative futures and worlds. He was doing Afrofuturism before the term came into vogue.” Womack was also inspired by the fact that while Onli “was creating the space for Black comic-book creators to come together … he was also showing that you could be a Black comic book creator and pull from African aesthetics or other aesthetics that are not the tried-and-true realistic illustration style.”
Afrofuturism would go on to gain significantly more notoriety in academic and creative circles over the next five years. A big part of these gains was due to academic conferences and comics conventions, of which Onli was a part. But in 2018, in the wake of the Black Panther movie, Afrofuturism exploded. This was when the demand for articles, books, conferences, exhibitions, panels, podcasts and other media focusing on Afrofuturism went into overdrive. And Onli was swept up in the fervor for more, becoming for many, a figure in the Afrofuturist movement.
As far as Afrofuturism was concerned, Onli was an ardent supporter of the cause. But in private conversations with Yatasha and I, he was at times ambivalent about his inclusion. Not out of ego, jealousy, or a lack of belief, but a genuine sense of feeling subtly misrepresented. After all, he had created B.A.G., rythmism, and the Black Age of Comics. And in so doing it could be legitimately argued that he was doing artistic, cultural, intellectual and political work that at different times paralleled, encompassed, or overlapped the work of Afrofuturism, before Afrofuturism was a thing.
From the 2010s until his passing, Onli’s work appeared in exhibitions that centered him outside of Afrofuturism. In 2011, he was part of a solo exhibition referencing B.A.G. titled Passion Fruit: The Other Chicago Black Movement at ETA Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago. He had two solo shows focusing on rythmism: one in 2015 at the Harold Washington Library Center titled Rythmistic Journey: The Art Enterprises of Turtel Onli and another in 2020 at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago titled Rythmistic Residency. He was featured as part of a 2021 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago titled Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now. His most recent solo show, in 2024 at the University of Chicago Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, was focused on Turtel Onli: The Black Age of Comics.
My last conversations with Onli were in November 2024 to get his comments for the Tim Jackson obituary and in December 2024 during Pocket Con. Onli was blunt, earnest, straightforward, but not mean. He had this way of leveling even the harshest criticism that came across as very matter of fact and even well intentioned. The suddenness of Jackson’s death added a heightened level of reflection to our interactions.
When I talked to Onli after Jackson’s death, he made a comment that put his grandfather’s work in a different context. He told me, “Black people do not value seeing creative depictions of themselves in the same way they value hearing it in music. … if you go to the Black church, the pastor has the greatest sound system, the greatest wardrobe, and virtually no artwork.” This exhibition was all about the things that his grandfather taught him about the importance of community, the visual. It was Onli’s origin story.
In our November 2024 interview, Onli shared some thoughts about the 2021 Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now exhibition, which featured him and, in retrospect, reflected his personal journey. In what came across more as a life lesson than as a criticism, Onli lamented that it didn’t “show the debt of entrepreneurship and collectivism that has been in the Black community, particularly in Chicago … They think of the Defender more as a statement against oppression, instead of a manifestation of entrepreneurship and enterprise.”
Onli went on to describe his respect for Tim Jackson in terms that resonated with his backstory: “Oh, I've always known him to have equal balance between creativity, culture, and commerce. The commerce part really stood out because so many people in the visual arts, particularly, are trained to think that all that matters is passion and devotion. And if you're passionate enough and devoted, it'll happen. Tim understood commerce from minimum wage to licensing into royalties to those kinds of things. That's why he spent years … with syndicating his own cartoon strips.”
That was Turtel Onli. Both far-seeing and down-to-earth practical. Pentecostal paintings with his grandfather, the Black Arts Guild, Rythmism, Art Therapy, the Black Age of Comics, Afrofuturism — he experienced, he engaged, he lived through so much, and all of this left him with a holistic sense of art, culture, economics, and politics that refused to be conceptualized outside of the ways that he touched people’s lives.
Turtel Onli was a grandson, artist, teacher, healer, and activist who wanted to be remembered as a Rythmist who founded the Black Age of Comics.
***
Bibliography
Stanford Carpenter. Turtel Onli Interview. Recorded at Tyrtel Onli’s Hyde Park Home. 07/19/1999
Stanford Carpenter. Yumy Odom Interview. Recorded over the phone 01/2025
]Stanford Carpenter. Ytasha Womack. Recorded over the phone 01/2025
Duffy & Jennings 2010. Black Comix: African American Independent Comics, Art and Culture by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. Mark Batty Publisher; first edition (July 27, 2010)
Hillesheim 2021. Brett Hillesheim. Interview: Turtel Onli. In Indie Comix Dispatch. July 06, 2021
Knudde 2025. Kjell Knudde 2025 – Lambiek Comicpedia entry for Turtel Onli
Womack 2010. Post Black: How a New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity. Lawrence Hill Books (January 1, 2010)
Womack 2013. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Page 143. Ytasha Womack. Lawrence Hill Books; None ed. edition (October 1, 2013)
Zorach 2014. Rebecca Zorach. An Interview with Turtel Onli. In Never The Same: Conversations About Transforming Politics & Community in Chicago & Beyond. 2014?
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