Today is the birthday of one of America’s greatest civil rights leaders and in honor of the day I’m also going to post the video to his famous “I have a Dream” speech, which I highly encourage you to watch since it is one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century.
Fun fact: the man was also a huge Star Trek fan.
He was such a huge fan that he personally begged Nichelle Nichols to keep her iconic role as Lt. Nyota Uhura on the show.
Anyway, another tradition that this blog has for Martin Luther King Jr. Day is talking about black representation in the comic book industry. Today I thought it would be nice to talk about the first black comic book character to star in his own solo comic book series: Lobo.
Origin and Career
The character made his debut in his own self titled series in December of 1965.
The comic was published by a company called Dell Comics, which had survived the comic book crash of the 1950’s by publishing Disney licensed comics and grew to become the largest comic book publisher of the 1960’s.
He was created by writer and Dell Comics editor Don Arneson and artist Tony Tallarico. Both of them were white men from Minneapolis and Brooklyn respectively and thought that having a black cowboy as the main character of a series might be a good sales hook to lure interested readers.
Since the comic was published two years after King’s famous speech and in the middle of the American Civil Rights movement I can see the logic.
The story itself starts off at the very end of the Civil War, where it is revealed that the main character fought for the Union and is happy to finally be free.
Unfortunately, the unit is attacked by a bunch of Confederate soldiers who haven’t heard that the war is over. The main character is fed up with the violence and decides to move West to start a new life for himself. He becomes a cattle drover on a ranch where he is framed for murder and decides to become a vigilante and hunt down other criminals. His trademark is a gold coin with a wolf’s head on it, which is where he gets his name since “Lobo” is Spanish for wolf.
His name is never revealed and his race is never brought up as a point of contention. He’s a good and capable man who just happens to be black.
Now, believe it or not, this story does have some basis in historical fact. There were black soldiers who fought for the Union during the Civil War,
many people did move out west in an attempt to start a new life after the war and there were black cowboys such as Nat Love who worked in the West as cattle drivers.
So we have a publishing company at the height of its power, with a character based in a genre that was doing really well at the time and steeped in historical fact, coupled with a good creative team telling a story about a black man in the middle of one of the most progressive and forward looking eras in American history.
What could possibly go wrong?
So what happened?
The series was cancelled due to poor sales numbers. Basically, how the industry worked back then was that publishers would print a certain number of copies of a book and sell it to retailers who would mark up the price and sell it to the public. Any copies that weren’t sold would have their covers cut off and returned to the publisher.
After publishing the first issue of Lobo comic book retailers returned over 90% of the copies that Dell Comics had shipped out.
It’s worth mentioning that this is not the case with comic book distribution today since the distribution industry doesn’t allow returns and is dominated by a singe company called Diamond Distributors,
but that is another story.
While there is not official explanation for the crappy sales numbers it’s probably safe to assume that a comic book with a gun wielding black man on the cover in 1960’s America probably didn’t go over very well with the majority of the American comic book buying public, who just so happened to be white.
Still, it was a well written, well drawn character with some serious and well meaning effort behind his creation and while we may never grace the cover of another comic book ever again, his position in the annuls of comic book history is assured as the first African American solo comic book character.
For any international readers that might not know about this day, the 18th of January is a day where Americans celebrate the birthday of a man who was the face and soul of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s during a time when America was still grappling with a lot of issues concerning the grossly unequal treatment of black people in America. He was a man who had his faults just like the rest of us but accomplished so much in such a short period of time that he is remembered as a great man by many. I’m putting his famous “I have a Dream” speech below and I highly encourage everyone reading this to take five minutes out of their day to watch it.
But this is a blog about comic books so let’s see if there’s anything in the comic book industry’s history that can tie into the birthday of this man who had a dream that inspired millions.
The truth is that black people have actually been part of the modern day comic book landscape since its beginning in the early 1940’s and were even around before the publication of the first Superman comic in 1938. The problem is that a lot of the portrayals of black people during this time period are horrifically outdated and fall into some very uncomfortable racist stereotypes. So here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to list some of the most important and influential moments in comic book history that have either involved a black character and/or a black creator in chronological order. I can’t promise we’ll cover all of them and I can promise that some of these will probably be pretty uncomfortable but here it is.
1934: Lee Falk creates the first black character in comics
Lee Falk was a comic strip producer in the early 1930’s. His two most famous creations were “The Phantom”
and another strip entitled “Mandrake the Magician” which ran from 1934 all the way to 2013.
Mandrake had a black sidekick named Lothar, who was an African prince of a confederation of jungle tribes (told you this might get uncomfortable)
The man was incredibly strong, capable of lifting an elephant with one hand, and the less I say about his outfit the better. He is widely regarded to be the first African character in comics and despite the stereotypes he was a loyal friend to the main character and managed to hold his own in a fight. His appearance would be changed in later issues of the comic strip to slightly less offensive garb.
1947: The first collection of black superheroes
In 1947 an African American journalist named Orrin Cromwell Evans
created the first comic book publishing company founded, led, and staffed by African Americans called All Negro Comics. They only managed to publish one anthology series featuring a collection of black heroes in 1947. Here’s the cover.
The comic featured heroes like the private detective “Ace Harlem” and the African hero”Lion Man” and unlike most comics at the time it was sold for 15 cents rather than 10 cents.
Sadly the company wasn’t very successful. The comic was only able to circulate within the segregated communities of pre Civil Rights black America so distribution and circulation numbers are unknown and it’s very difficult to find copies that are in good condition. Still, it was the first comic to be written, drawn, and published exclusively by African Americans so it deserves some recognition.
1956: EC Comics publishes “Judgement Day”
In 1954 the Comics Code Authority was founded. It was an attempt to censor perceived violent, overly sexual, and otherwise immoral behavior that was allegedly causing the youth of America to descend into delinquency. One of the hardest hit comic book publishers was Entertaining Comics, otherwise known as EC Comics, which published stuff like this.
One of their most controversial (for the time) stories was a short story called “Judgement Day”.
Basically the story went like this. A mysterious representative of the Galactic Federation lands on a planet inhabited by robots in order to deem whether or not they are worthy to join the Federation. While inspecting the planet the astronaut notices that the robot’s society is sharply divided between the orange robots and the blue robots. While the two groups are the same the orange robots have more rights and privileges than the blue ones (subtle) and as a result the astronaut decides they are not ready to join the Federation and proceeds to leave the planet. This was the last panel of the comic showing the astronaut with his helmet off.
Needless to say the Comics Code Authority was not happy and EC comics would eventually be driven out of business, although they do live on through MAD magazine.
1954: The first Black solo star in comics
Marvel’s predecessor Atlas Comics published Waku: Prince of the Bantu in their 1954 story collection Jungle Tales.
He was the first black character to be given a solo series in any comic book, feel free to judge the publisher’s use of ethnic stereotypes to your heart’s content.
1961-1967: The introduction of black supporting characters in Marvel and DC Comics:
The early 60’s saw the introduction of non stereotyped African American characters into mainstream comic books. Characters like Jackie Johnson in the 1961 DC Comics series Our Soldiers at War
and Gabe Jones in Marvel’s 1963’s Sgt. Fury’s Howling Commandos
introduced the comic book world to the idea that black people could actually be written and treated like human beings in comic books. Special mention deserves to be paid to another black supporting character who was introduced in 1967, the long lasting and kind hearted editor of the Daily Bugle Robbie Robertson.
Who has helped make Spiderman’s life considerably more tolerable and who has been a staple presence to the Spiderman mythos ever since.
1965: The first African American solo comic book series:
In 1965 Dell Comics published the first comic book series starring a black character called Lobo.
He only lasted two issues.
1966-1980: An explosion of black superheroes
Over the course of the 1970’s black superheroes and issues facing black men and women in a post Civil Rights America would become a major part of American comics, so much so that to talk about them all would take all day. Since you could write a book about the subject I’m just going to show some of the more famous black characters to come out of the era along with the date where they were first published
Black Panther (1966)
The Falcon (1969)
Black Racer (1971)
Luke Cage (1972)
Green Lantern John Stewart (1972)
Black Goliath (1975)
Storm (1975)
Misty Knight (1975)
Black Lightning (1977)
Cyborg (1980)
I highly encourage everyone reading this to check these heroes out. Granted they weren’t always perfect and many of them still played to certain stereotypes that a lot of black Americans had to deal with but I think it’s safe to say that the 1970’s was a good decade for black and African American superheroes.
1989-2011: Dwayne McDuffie
No article talking about African Americans in comic books would be complete without talking about the legendary writer and creator Dwayne McDuffie.
See, everything I have talked about in this article has had one small problem. An overwhelming majority of the black characters that were created and written for were drawn and written by white men and despite everything that happened in the 1970’s, the comic book landscape was overwhelmingly dominated by white characters. McDuffie was probably the most famous and public face in the industry that wanted to change that. Now there are a fair number of black comic book creators out there but here’s a small sample of some of the stuff McDuffie worked on.
You will notice that if you were a fan of superhero cartoons in the early to mid 2000’s you were probably a fan of his work.
But that’s not what made McDuffie important to the comic book landscape. Before he became in incredibly successful screen writer he was actively pushing for more diversity in comics. In 1993 he founded a company called Milestone Media with several other black comic book creators with the express purpose of bringing a wider range of diversity to the comic book landscape. It reached a deal with DC comics early on where DC would publish the titles while Milestone would write and create them.
And things were going well until 1996 when the comic book market crashed and Milestone was forced to cancel most of its titles. However, all was not lost and Milestone found success in launching a television show based around one of its most popular characters Static Shock.
Sadly Dwayne McDuffie died due to complications from heart surgery in 2011. His work continues to survive with Static Shock becoming a part of the mainstream DC universe and the countless numbers of people who were inspired by his work.
So there you have it, an incredibly brief, overly simplified, and not too detailed overview of black characters in comic books. While many black and African American creators and heroes were either cast aside or poorly written due to racial prejudices at the time the comic book industry has (for better or for worse) forged ahead with their attempts to bring a more diverse collection of characters to their pages and while the results have ranged from outright offensive to well written and meaningful I am personally glad we live in a time where I can enjoy characters like Static Shock and Luke Cage.
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Cambrian Comics 