Image Brings Bingo Love to a Wider Audience

Writer: Tee Franklin / Artist: Jenn St-Onge, Joy San / Image Comics Bingo Love started as a Kickstarter project back in March of 2017. This graphic novel about two queer Black women finding happiness together has come a long way in less than a year: blowing through the initial goals in five days on Kickstarter, garnering the 2017 Queer Press Grant from Prism Comics in April, and being picked up for circulation by Image Comics in October. There’s plenty of praise out here for this book and it is well deserved. If an accessible, loving portrayal of Black queer love is what you’re looking for, this is a good book to pick up. Tee Franklin, creator and tireless leader of the #BlackComicsMonth hashtag and Twitter account, has been an outspoken advocate for more representation of all things Black and Queer for quite some time. Her stepping forward as a radical creator has been long awaited.

In Bingo Love, she tells the story of Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray, two Black teen girls who meet in 1963, fall in love, then struggle to be together over the next 50 years and beyond. The girls face resistance from their very religious families and their own reservations. After years living the lives dictated to them by others, they are reunited at — you guessed it — a Mother’s Day bingo game, only to find that their love has not diminished one bit. Now adult women, wives, and mothers, they again face resistance, but maintain their love and overcome all obstacles to be together. The real seal…