CREATIVE
Welcome to the first issue of ScriptGraphics to be produced in the 2012 New Year! We’ve had a great end to the last year with Team SG doing a great job on our line of color books, ready for release this summer. To all the creators who have put in time and effort I can only say BRAVO! This is a great rime to be a creator and with all the things we’re taking on I figured to start off the year with a tribute issue to the unsung black characters and creators of yesteryear. When I first decided to take on this ‘Black in Comics’ tribute issue cover, I felt a twinge of angst at doing it. The history of Blacks in comics hasn’t always been kind, nor fair. We’ve come a long way but sometimes when I read the books of today, where Blacks are vastly under-represented or treated as if they’re put in as nothing more than an after thought, I’m filled with a not so small amount of anger. It isn’t as if they’re aren’t a lot of characters of color in comic books, it’s just that they don’t count for much. Of the two major companies today and the many independents on the stands, only one book comes to mind when you think of a Black headlining a book: ‘The Black Panther’. (It was a good book too, but I’m not going to wax poetic about it. They’ve already taken him out of his homeland and exiled him to America, making him a poor mans Daredevil.) D.C. recently did a Black Lightning six issue run but they’ve never had a true commitment to their Black characters. Tyroc, of the Legion of Superheroes, has had his whole world vanished from the D.C. continuity. Don’t feel bad about that though, he was the only Legionnaire introduced prior to 1989 that never appeared during Paul Levitz’ 15-year run on the Legion (even the deceased Ferro Lad, Invisible Kid, and Chemical King appeared in flashback stories). Additionally, D.C. who owns the entire Milestone Comics Universe, and was supposed to be re-connecting it to the D.C.U. (and had a pretty good story run in the pages of Justice League of America which established that they were now part of the D.C.U.) have now decided to not do them. Instead they’ll appear sporadically in ‘a couple stories here and there’. Already they’ve put Hardware in ‘Brave and Bold’ and pretty much devalued his armor and made the character a jerk. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. As with all things there needs to be a historical perspective to sort it all out:
THE DARK AGES! Initially, Blacks were so devalued in American society that white men were hired to mimic Blacks in minstrel shows, painting their faces black with charcoal and singing in spiritual style which was both homage and mocking at the same time, depending who was doing the show. That imagery naturally carried over to visual depictions of American Blacks who, more often than not, were portrayed as being ‘savages’ or of savage nature. It reached a horrifying peak in Tex Avery’s MGM cartoon, Half-Pint Pygmy, which was horribly marred by its mis-use of a black character. Over time the portrayals stopped being effective as intellectual Black Americans began to take stands and challenge the imagery. Intelligent whites saw through the racism and softened their positions. This could only happen when human beings see other human beings as human beings. Unfortunately, peer pressure being what IT is, most white Americans, even the ones that sympathized with the Blacks of that time, couldn’t fight the status quo, but they could temper it. This led to: THE BLACKS AS CHILDREN PHASE! Black kids, still drawn in the racist style but who were far more intelligent than their ‘savage’ forerunners, began to populate the creative culture. I’d like to point out here that even Will Eisner’s ‘Ebony White’ was a product of this thinking. Ebony, the character, was cool enough to drive a car and assist The Spirit, often saving his bacon so to speak, but still never evolved beyond the visual stereotype of earlier depictions of Blacks except to be made far younger and therefore more reader friendly and less threatening. From the Stanley Stories Blog*: Li’l Eight-Ball was a creation of the late 1930’s. He first appeared in the Walter Lantz Cartune A-Haunting We Will Go, directed by ex-Disney nut job Burt Gillett and featuring uncredited vocals by Mel Blanc. This cartoon can be seen on Universal’s second Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD collection. Stereotypes aside, it’s a charming, rather wild-spirited cartoon. *(c) 2008, 2009 by Frank M. Young. http://stanleystories.blogspot.com/2009/09/is-this-stanleys-work-last-of-lil-eight.html
This is not charming to those who had to live with that depiction. Fortunately, there were Blacks who figured that offering an opposing point of view was a better way to go than to rail against the status quo. All-Negro Comics was America’s first-ever comic book, written, illustrated and published entirely by African-Americans, aimed primarily at African American readers. It carries a cover date of June 1947. No information about the press run or distribution remains, but it is believed that the comic was distributed outside of the Philadelphia area. A second issue was planned and the art completed, but when Orrin was ready to publish it he found that his source for newsprint would no longer sell to him, nor would any of the other vendors he contacted. Getting a book to publication is not an easy feat in any age and even more so ‘back then’, particularly if you’re Black. Still, that issue contained a detective story, an adventure about a African hero in the ‘Tarzan’ tradition, a sex-comedy about two opportunistic tramps and a fairy tale for little children which shows how Blacks viewed ‘charming’ Black characters as opposed to how they were being portrayed:
There’s much more that I would like to elaborate on about this era of American comics but I’ll leave that for another time and another format. This period is somewhat painful for many Black comic creators who
would rather operate as if it never happened. I’d like to think those who went before us paved the way for us to create beyond the negative stereotypes and found a bit of dignity in spite of it all. To be fair, some white publishers were cultivating products for the Black market featuring Black characters too. Parent’s Magazine published two issues of Negro Heroes, dated Spring 1947 and Summer 1948, featuring reprints from their Calling All Girls, Real Heroes and True Comics. Fawcett published three issues of Negro Romance, the second issue being reprinted by Charlton as Negro Romances number four, dated June through October 1950 and May 1955 respectively as well as a series of sports hero comics sometime in the 1950’s that included short runs of books starring Jackie Robinson and Joe Lewis. There was also Treasure Chest Comics which featured stories about other sports stars like Jesse Owens, and it has the added distinction of being the first to feature a Black Man not only running for, but winning the Presidency! This was back in the mid 1950’s. BLACKS IN COMICS GO COMPLETELY INVISIBLE! For the most part Blacks aren’t seen in comics shortly after this period. They don’t exist in backgrounds, or as protagonists or lovers or anything (except for the occasional historical or odd sports story featuring Black figures from history or sports). What would be next? BLACKS RETURN TO COMICS! Marvel Comics’ 1950’s predecessor, Atlas Comics, published the African tribal-chief “Waku, Prince of the Bantu”, in the anthology styled ‘Jungle Tales’. This pre-dates the Black Panther by at least 10 years. Early 1960 and the growing civil rights unrest in the country leads the comics industry to discovering a whole new market demographic. Jack Kirby creates and pencils a regal and technologically savvy nation of Black Africans known as Wakandan’s led by the enigmatic Black Panther. Stan Lee pens the tale which is ably inked by the smooth Joe Sinnot and history is made. This is the first time there’s been a Black lead character in a major comic book from a major company even if it’s not his own book. Both of these heroes were African and so not
truly Americans. Comic books’ first known African-American superhero, Marvel’s Falcon, was introduced in 1969 to great fanfare in Captain America, starting with side-kick status which hasn’t changed even today. It wasn’t until 1972, with Marvel’s Luke Cage, Hero for Hire that a Black character got to have his very own book in which he was the headliner and featured character. No side-kick status for this mean mother from the streets who took no guff from street thugs or Dr. Doom. D.C. Comics, not wanting to be outdone chose to create their own Black character with Black Lightning. A lack luster character, at best, whose invention was truly seen as an attempt to cash in on the growing Black market and demographic. In upcoming years both Marvel and D.C. would introduce many other ethnic characters but none would command an ongoing series outside of The Black Panther. But there’s still something amiss... None of these have the real distinction of being the FIRST comic book to feature a Black character or to have one headline his own title by a major publisher. Dell was a book publisher, which put it outside of the general comic publishing arena, except they did publish comic books for a time. “Lobo” was created by writer D. J. Arneson and artist Tony Tallarico, it chronicled the Old West adventures of a wealthy, unnamed Black gunslinger called “Lobo”. He would leave the calling card of a gold coin imprinted with the images of a wolf and the letter “L” on the foreheads of criminals he vanquished. Two books were published but when the first issue got to retailers they refused to sell them, so the second issue was never sent out. This brief article only scratches the surface of the disparity between and lack of knowledge about what it takes to write a good story about Black characters. I’ll tackle that in an upcoming article. DG
The D Spot Welcome to the first installment of the D Spot produced in the 2012 New Year! I didn’t know if there would be more space for an additional article for this first issue to be produced in 2012, but I figured what the hey. This article is called: The Evolution of a Cover. The cover should carry a number of firsts, so first there would be the ‘hidden’ cover which I thought should be obscure because most fans of comics know nothing about it or its significance in the annals of comic publishing. It was the first book, by a major publisher, to feature a Black character in the lead role. That book is Lobo. The next first would be the overall series of covers that harken us back to the firsts that populated the comic market as this issues cover pays homage to the Black characters of comics. This issue is due to hit the mailboxes during Black History month, after all. There were many more that I wanted to put in but I had the constraints of the cover size to consider. More books would have meant they would have been far to hard to see. I also wanted to have it framed by white as sort of a pun on how those books operated in the marketplace. Next, I married all the elements together and everything fit and was readable. Placement of some issues were done in a way so they wouldn’t be blocked by the type I’d be placing, which I knew would hide some of them. Key historic books should be seen through the foreground image that I wanted to grace the cover as a homage of sorts. Now I was ready to attempt a most interesting visual concept that spoke directly to the heart of where and why Black comics have such a hard time making a place for themselves in the American comic landscape. Images, like words, are sometimes used to hurt and degrade even if
the intention wasn’t truly based on hatred, but instead, ignorance. Now came the image I feared, and reviled, but understood all too well. It might have been a somewhat likeable character if the stereotype which led to it’s creation hadn’t been so blatantly racist in design. The actual stories of the character had a bit of truth to them and he was a statement about the subway system and I really wish the creators had went in a slightly different visual direction. Still, times being what they were, I marvel at there being any sensitivity being shown at all. Taking the most benign image I could find, I reversed it to white, added a drop shadow and wire framed it to put it above the composite graphic I’d already done. This would be to show where we came from, not from a Black perspective, but from an industry that wanted to do something considered good but was hampered by the prevailing racial attitudes of the times. It would be easy, quite easy, to just dismiss the artisans of the times for not railing against the system and fighting to be honest and truthful, but they had families to feed and sometimes paying bills are more important than taking a political stand that would have without a doubt put them and their family in the street. Anyway, the last elements were the lettering. Black Characters in American Comics would be imbedded in the fabric of the comic books as much as Lil 8 Ball would be ahead of that same self fabric. All the other lettering concerning SG (ScriptGraphics), as well as the logo, was made metalic to ‘pop’ it from the imagery to make it instantly readable. So there you have it. A homage to what came before, a testament to what’s out there now, and a nod to what’s been glossed over and virtually unknown to the public at large. This is my tribute to what was, what could have been, what is; and I await what is yet still to come... DG