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The History of black superheroes chronicles the develompent of the African, African-American and Black pulp and superhero archetype. Such characters were traditionally a rarity in western comics until the second half of the twentieth century. Leslie Roger's Bungleton Green, evolved over time from a one note cartoon minstrel, into a complex character with the ability to travel through time. As of the mid-2000s, black superheroes from America, Europe, Canada, Africa, Micronesia, New_Zealand, the West_Indies or Australia have appeared in many mediums, including print, the web, television and movies.

History

Platinum Age the 1920s

"Bun" (Bungleton Green) of 1920 was a vaguely minstrelized street person whose caricatured antics underlined the reality of separate and unequal treatment of Afro-Americans. In the very first strip "Bun" tried to hustle some insurance money from a traffic accident, only to find out that the law courts saw him as a nuisance rather than as a victim. Bun first appeared in the Chicago Defender November 20, 1920, and ran almost continuously until 1968. Cartoonists for the Black press often drew editorial cartoons as well as comic strips. Sometimes this seriousness spilled over into a strip, as when the Baltimore Afro-American's Fred Watson lambasted Maryland's Jim Crow laws 1926 and, by showing light-skinned Black women drawn similarly to the white women in the strip, reinforced the contention that Blacks, being the same as whites, deserved equal consideration under the law. Newspapers published by the Black press also entered into the fight against the negative depiction of Blacks.

Golden Age the 1930s to 1940s

By the mid-1930's they were leading the struggle against any continuance of minstrelized representations. Papers like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American editorialized against the minstrel image and finally helped to end its presence in the Black community by 1940. Cartoonist Lee_Falk's adventure comic strip Mandrake_the_Magician featured the African supporting character Lothar from its 1934 debut on. He was a former "Prince of the Seven Nations", a federation of jungle tribes, but passed on the chance to become king and instead followed Mandrake on his world travels, fighting crime. He is often referred to as the strongest man in the world. Initially an illiterate exotic dressed in animal skins who provided brawn to compliment Mandrake's brain on their adventures, he was modernized in 1965 to dress in suits and speak standard English.

Many professionally trained Black painters drew comics to earn a living. The Black press offered alternative images to the demeaning and monotonous stereotypes presented in the white press. The comic strips in the Black press depicted a wide diversity of life experiences, often in humorous ways. Yet the realities of what it meant to be Black in America were many times just below the surface of the humor. An example is "Bungleton Green," the longest running comic strip in the Black press, which provides a unique opportunity to chart the evolution of the Black comic self-image. Drawn by five different artists. But humor was the basis of most Black press strips, whether in Wilbert Holloway's "Sunnyboy Sam" 1936 commenting self-deprecatingly on his big nose, or the "innocent truth" of Sammy Milai's curly-haired little boy "Bucky" (1939) who put a little Black girl's white doll under a sun lamp to make the play mother and her doll baby the same color. In the mid-1930's Harrington rose to national prominence in the Black community with his introduction of the stereotype-smashing "Bootsy" cartoon in the Amsterdam News. Early black heroes from the newspaper strips in the 30's, 40's and 50's were: Bungleton Green And the Mystic Commandos (time travelers), Sergeant Joe (rough and tumble soldier), Jive Gray (air cargo pilot and adventurer), The Chisolm Kid (cowboy), Guy Fortune (globe travelling adventurer), Mark Hunt (private eye), Neil Knight (astronaut and adventurer), Don Powers (clean cut pro-athlete) and Speed Jaxon (soldier of fortune).

By the 1940s, during the era comics historians call the Golden Age of Comics Books, Jay Jackson's Bungleton Green had become a zoot-suited, "hep cat" who reflected the optimism of the "jazz man".. While Sammy Milai's 1936 strip Bucky was cute, Elton Fax's Susabelle 1942 was more average, in both her looks and actions. With no dialogue, the stories reflected the mischievous nature of childhood within the context of a world at war. Harrington followed Bootsy with the 1940s adventure strip Jive Gray for the Continental Features Syndicate. This syndicate, organized and run by the Black entrepreneur Lajoyeaux H. Stanton, was one of the few national distributors of Black comics. It successfully sold stops and cartoons to Black newspapers all across the country, and featured the work of Elton Fax, Mel Tapley, Ted Shearer and several others, as well as Harrington. "Jive Gray" was based on a real-life World_War_II ace aviator from the all-Black 332nd_Fighter_Group. In it Harrington showed his love of the Black persona by filling his strip with creatively colorful Jive_talk and attractive, elongated figures. The Black cartoonist who took stereotype-squashing and social concern to its greatest height in the strips before the mid-1960's was Jackie Ormes, through her Torchy Brown character published in the Pittsburgh_Courier and its syndicated group of newspapers in 1937 and again from 1950 to 1955. Torchy was an attractive, sexy, intelligent, and self-motivated young Black woman who, within the course of her romantic adventures (the binding theme of the strip), managed to fight racism, sexism, warmongering, and environmental pollution. Drawn in a strong, clean, hard-edge style "Torchy Brown" was a sharp visual contrast to the more delicately drawn strips usually associated with female artists like Nell Brinkley and Dale Messick. As with many protagonists in the strips done by Black artists, Torchy was essentially a self-portrait. Ormes once said "I've never liked dreamy little women who can't hold their own." Torchy's adventures took her from the American South to South America, and her mix of compassion and assertiveness made her a role model for young Black people across the country. Publisher Orrin C. Evans' All-Negro Comics #1 (June 1947) marked the first appearance of a Black superhero in American comic books, Lion Man. His company, All-Negro Comics, Inc., published a single 15-cent omnibus issue, at a time when comics generally cost a dime. Its feature "Lion Man" starred a young African scientist sent by the United_Nations to oversee a massive Uranium deposit at the African Gold_Coast. He's joined by a young war orphan named Bubba, and fights the villainous Doctor Blut Sangro.

Silver Age the 1950s to 1960s

While Black characters in the strips of the 1950s mainstream press generally continued to be African "savages" and faithful servants and sidekick, the comics of the Black press reflected the social conservatism and baby boom of the decade by focusing on Black family life and child-rearing. Chester Commodore's The Sparks, published in the Chicago Defender, gently caricatured the Black middle class and showed them subject to the same domestic foibles as their white counterparts. The Harlem-based New York Age printed Tom Feelings' elaborately drawn "Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History" in 1958-59, as the protests, boycotts and student sit-ins of that period helped to rekindle a renewed feeling of Black pride. Feelings' daring presentation of "natural" hairstyles was an early reflection of the increased sense of self worth connected with the Black community. It wasn't until introduction of the feature "Waku, Prince of the Bantu" in the omnibus Jungle Tales, from Marvel_Comics' 1950s predecessor Atlas Comics, that mainstream comic books depicted an African character as a strong, independent hero. Waku was an African chieftain in a feature with no regularly featured Caucasian characters. The first comic book to star a namesake Black character was Dell_Comics' little-known but groundbreaking, two-issue series Lobo (December 1965 - September 1966). Created by an unknown writer and drawn by Tony_Tallarico, it chronicled the Old_West adventures of a wealthy, unnamed African-American gunslinger hero called "Lobo" by the first issue's Antagonists. On the foreheads of vanquished criminals, Lobo would leave the calling card of a gold coin imprinted with the image of a wolf and an "L". Shortly thereafter, Fantastic_Four Vol. 1, #52 (July 1966) introduced the first known Black superhero in mainstream American comics, the Black Panther, whose name predates the use of the term by the Black Panther Party. As integration became a driving force in the 1960s and newspaper headlines began to be dominated by the Civil_Rights struggle, those activities were looked at in humorously ironic ways by cartoonists of the Black press, while still demonstrating an underlying support for social change. An example is Cleven Goudeau's irreverent and sassy comic strip, "Soul Folks," which appeared in the Berkeley California Postin 1966. Whereas "Soul Folks" was a free-wheeling portrayal of a constantly changing array of adult characters, Morrie Turner drew a strip showing the camaraderie among a continuing cast of children. Influenced by the work of Ollie Harrington, Turner's "Dinky Fellas" started as an all-Black strip in the Chicago Defender, and included a character "Nipper," based on Turner's own childhood. Turner added young white characters to better make his points about racial justice. Facial variation between the races was minimized. Differences were more clearly demonstrated in clothing and language. When Dinky Fellas, now retitled Wee Pals, was syndicated in 1965, it became the first comic strip syndicated in the mainstream press with continuing Black central characters of equal social status to their white counterparts. Morrie Turner had tried unsuccessfully to get Black comics printed by the white press in the 1950s. Even when Wee Pals was first nationally syndicated it was carried in only five major newspapers. But within three months of the 1968 assassination Dr. Martin_Luther_King_Jr., Wee Pals acquired the majority of its syndication sources and other Black kid strips were born, including Brumsic Brandon, Jr.'s Luther (named in tribute to Dr. King) in 1968, and Ted Shearer's Quincy in 1970. While Turner's integrated cast of kids were middle-class, Brandon's was deliberately set in a working-class Black ghetto and dealt less with race relations than with the universal human aspects of a child's struggle for survival. Brandon had been submitting strips (of whites or animals) for mainstream syndication since the late 1930s. With Luther he was determined to "tell it like it is". Brandon put a "message" in the gag format and created is cast of kid characters with names like "Hardcore" (from "hard-core unemployed"), "Oreo" (slang for the person who is "Black" on the outside but "white" on the inside), and their never-seen white teacher' "Miss Backlash". The most biting of the strips born in the 1960s, Luther ended in June, 1986. By 1968, Chester Commodore was drawing Bungleton Green in a Dashiki and Nehru_jacket to reflect the outward militancy of "the brother on the block." A variety of comics continued to appear in the Black press from the mid-1960's to the mid-1980's. In the late 1960's, Eugene Majied drew highly idealized, spiffy-clean images for the history lesson the adult male Muslim lovingly gave his son in "Muhammad's Message" for Muhammad Speaks. Richard Grass Green did the Black family adventure strip "Lost Family" in 1969 for Frost Illustrated (Fort Wayne, Indiana) before turning his artistic attention to comic books.

Bronze Age the 1970s to 1980s

The Black activism of the 1960's also led to new individualized portrayals of Black characters in the mainstream press. Among these were action-adventure strips like Dateline: Danger 1968, The Badge Guys (1971) and Friday Foster (1972). The Black characters since introduced in humorous strips like Franklin in Peanuts (1968), Lt. Flap in Beetle Bailey (1970), Clyde and Ginny in Doonesbury 1970-75, and Oliver Wendell Jones in Bloom County(1985) are Caricatures drawn consistent with the manner in which the white figures are caricatured. Instead of huge lips and jet black faces to indicate Blackness, it is usually hair style, a goatee (for Black males), or dots or lines for shading. The focus of white cartoonists when portraying Black characters, shifted from appearance to characterization. Marvel Comics published the six-issues Western series Gunhawks (October 1972 - August 1973), starring African-American cowboy Reno Jones and his Caucasian buddy Kid Cassidy. Fast Willie Jackson, published in 1976, was a Fitzgerald Periodicals title. The title character was an easy-going everyman in the Chuck Clayton vein (but without the basketball profiency) who had the hots for the neighborhood brickhouse, Dee Dee Wilson. A JJ look-alike named Jo-Jo, a militant named Jabar, Frankie Johnson, a jive-talkin' pimp, and a weight-lifting strongman called Hannibal. The events of the comic are set in Mo City USA, a predominantly black metropolis. Only one recurring white character appears in the comic, a policeman called Officer Flagg, who Willie and the bunch refer to as "The Man". Also in 1976, Tom Floyd and his independent comic book company leader Comics Group publish Blackman. He had superhuman strength and a red, black, green and white costume. In 1977, DC Comics introduces Black_Lightning, the company's first African-American superhero too star in his own title. He was created by Tony_Isabella and first appeared in Black Lightning #1. Men of War #1 (August 1977) introduces Captain Ulysses Hazard, codename: Gravedigger, the series ran for twenty-six issues and every one of them featured Hazard. Image:Blackmanbc0.png And also in 1977, Al Greim published Comic Crusader Storybook #1, a trade paperback fanzine anthology which included short stories featuring: The Eye (by Fred Fredericks), Shade, Goodguy (by Kurt Schaffenburger), The Eclipse, The Defender, Doctor Weird (by Dennis Fujitake), Xal-Kor the Catman (by Grass Green), Mister A (by Steve_Ditko), Matrix (by Mike Machlan), Thunder_Bunny (by Gene_Day), The Black_Terror & Hyperman (by Mike Machlan and Jerry_Ordway), Space Guardian, and White Raven. The White Raven story was written and inked by Al Bradford and pencilled by Gary Kato. White Raven was Deanna Brown, an ex-prostitute with empathic abilities tied to a "rare tropical albino Raven". As long as the white raven was near she gained the ability to fly. Seitu Hayden's Waliku (Swahili for "the great-great-grandchildren"), which appeared from 1972 to 1975 in the Chicago Defender, showed both children and adolescents in their day-to-day dealings in the ghetto. A protégé of Grass Green, Hayden drew the facial features of "Waliku's" characters to be specifically Black so no lines or dots were needed for shading as in other strips. The futuristic NOG: Protector of the Pyramides by Turtel Onli in the Chicago Defender (1979) was firmly rooted in African symbols. "NOG" was later expanded into a comic book. The series Power Comics, was designed as an educational tool, was published in 1975 by Acme Press of London, England, for distriibution in Nigeria. The books starred a caped and spandex black hero named Powerman, and were written by Don Avenall and Norman Worker, and illustrated by Dave_Gibbons and Brian_Bolland.

In All-Star Squadron #23 July 1983 DC_Comics introduced Amazing Man. As with many Black superheroes in mainstream comics, going back to the early ones in the sixties, the character began playing to themes of self-improvement in the context of a relentlessly hostile culture and later descended to playing the role of pawn sacrifice and professional victim. Eventually we have the extremely unfortunate situation where Amazing Man appears on the cover of All-Star Squadron, chained to a burning cross while a White_Supremacist in a red, white, and blue costume and a white hood rants about eugenics. In 1988, Eclipse_Comics republished the Acme Press Power Comics series from the seventies, but changed Powerman's name to Powerbolt. Powerbolt, who was superstrong and could fly, appeared in stories rendered in a simple style reminiscent of Fawcett_Comics' Golden Age Captain Marvel. His only apparent weakness was snakebite.

Aluminum Age the 1990s to 2000s

In February 1993 Milestone Media launched their first four titles. Published through comic-book giant DC Comics with a special licensing agreement. Headed by Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Derek Dingle and Michael Davis. The four books were Icon, Blood_Syndicate, Hardware, and Static. Later they launched four expansion titles: Kobalt, Shadow_Cabinet, Heroes, and Xombi. In 1997 Roland Laird published the graphic novel Still I Rise.

See also

• List_of_black_superheroes *African_characters_in_comics
• Ethnic_stereotypes_in_comics

External links

• The Museum of Black Superheroes
• East Coast Black Age Of Comics Convention History of Black Superheroes
• Salute to Pioneering Cartoonists of Color *From "Under Cork" to Overcoming: Black Images in the Comics *Afros, Icons, and Spandex: A Brief History of the African American Superhero
• Jorge's Black Supers List *Faces that look like his *Superman in the Cotton Fields: Comics in Black and White, Mostly White *Fast Willie Jackson *Hitting the Wall III: Amazing Man *"Black Skins" and White Masks: Comic books and the secret of race
• Comics that Shouldn't Happen: Captain America #186
• Why Don't "Black Books" Sell?
• The Black Proteges
• Black Power or Blaxploitation?
• Orrin C Evans and the story of All Negro Comics *X-Ray Vision Needed to Find Black Superheroes
• Blacks get seriously involved in "the funnies"
• A Face On the Past *Comics in Black & White "How the funnies weren't"
• A Milestone Retrospective *The New Black Age of Comics *Ferndale Man Launches "Tribe" of Super-Heroes
• Fanzing #32 Diversity In The DC Universe: 1961-1979 *Inside the Eye: By Bill Schelly

Category:African_American_culture Category:Comic_books Category:Comic_strips