Comics’ ‘Golden Age’ was awfully white

The same week the NAACP issued an advisory about traveling to Florida, where Amanda Gorman’s stirring poem “The Hill We Climb” was banned from a grade school, I received two new books that restore respect to African American artists who’ve worked in cartoons and comic books.

 

Florida has passed laws “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” the NAACP said, adding that Florida “devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by, African Americans and other communities of color.”

Challenges may be new (or renewed) in Florida, but racism limited work and recognition for many for decades, including the talents producing comic books and cartoons.

“Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics,” edited by Qiana Whitted, is a 358-page trade paperback featuring 15 essays about almost-forgotten artists in that Golden Age – which was pretty white.

Obviously, reality is more complicated than clumsy, but hurtful images were too common for too long.

From the 1930s through the ’50s, cartoons and comic books were immensely popular, in Peoria on shelves at Ben Franklin and the Book Emporium, plus wire racks at Rexall drugstores, plus Black newspapers. Like the rest of U.S. society, African American fans enjoyed comics. Unfortunately, however, comics frequently reflected biases derived from Jim Crow and the entire painful history after Reconstruction was dropped. So, many readers asked publishers to eliminate the frequent representation of race and stereotypical, even crude, depictions of Black people.

Whitted’s anthology of observations and analyses by 15 esteemed academics from around the world, including three from Illinois, is somewhat scholarly but well-researched and readable. Besides assessments of artists profiled and their backgrounds, it delves into years of dialogue between readers, artists, distributors and publishers, and the debates that eventually started steps to show fuller pictures of life, history and even fantasy.

“Desegregating Comics” features tales about the original Lobo, the 1965 title about a “Buffalo Soldier” who becomes a cowboy; biographical comics about 1950s figures such as real-life ballplayer Roy Campanella and fictional spaceman/adventurer “Neil Knight of the Air” (whose storylines included one with a villain called “The Trump”); “All Negro Comics”; and “Negro Romance.”

Two pioneers stand out. The first, Alvin Hollingsworth, was born in Harlem and from the age of 12 worked in comic books alongside legends Joe Kubert, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in war, romance, crime, horror and adventure titles. His first signed work was the story “Robot Plane”: in 1945, and a year later he created the character Bronze Man in “Blue Beetle.” But when the comic was printed, the publisher had changed the superhero’s skin color (!). Eventually, he worked on the aerial adventure strip “Scorchy Smith” and did his own syndicated comic strip in the mid-1950s, “Kandy” – an action-driven blend of adventure, romance and sports featuring young engineer Kandy McKay, co-owner of an auto-racing business with her dad and boyfriend. In retirement, Hollingsworth became an avant-garde painter working with a group of artists supporting the Civil Rights Movement, and a professor.

The other standout here was Jackie Ormes, who was born in Monongahela, Pa., and moved to Pittsburgh, where she was a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, which became the nation’s most prominent Black newspaper, with a circulation of more than 350,000 from coast to coast by 1947. There, Ormes worked alongside author Zora Neale Hurston during the novelist’s stint as a Courier investigative reporter. Ormes gradually achieved her real goal, comics, and at the Courier and later at the Chicago Defender, Ormes “used her pioneering comics as a form of progressive Black journalism,” wrote scholar H. Zahra Caldwell, “using a Black female voice and citing Black women’s concerns.” Throughout Ormes’ work, most of her characters were Black or brown, and her storylines addressed the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban north, Civil Rights, and more – all with a light, biting touch.

The second book, “Jackie Ormes Draws the Future: The Remarkable Life of a Pioneering Cartoonist,” is a 40-page hardback children’s book by writer/illustrator/cartoonist Liz Montague.

As Montague shows, Ormes is an inspiration for youngsters with dreams despite obstacles or setbacks. For instance, she endured personal grief: Her father was killed in a car wreck when she was 6 years old; her daughter passed at the age of 3.

As an adult, Ormes’ various characters were bright and confident strong role models with a political edge. In 1937, her “Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem,” about a small-town Southern girl to moves to New York City to find fame as a Cotton Club entertainer, made Ormes the country’s first Black woman with a national comic strip. In the 1940s, she was a Defender reporter and in 1945 created a one-panel cartoon, “Candy,” about a wisecracking maid. Soon, she returned to the Courier and launched “Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger,” about a lively, thoughtful  girl and her big sister, a single-panel cartoon continuing for 11 years. In the mid-’50s, she revived her Torchy character in “Torchy in Heartbeats,” where the independent young women sought romance with a Black doctor while organizing to stop a chemical plant from polluting the water around the Black neighborhood Southville.

Ahead of her time, she ventured into merchandising, designing the popular Black doll Patty-Jo, a chic alternative to the cliched dolls then marketed to African American families.

In retirement, Ormes was stricken with arthritis, forcing her to stop drawing, but she devoted the rest of her life to produce fund-raising fashion shows and served on the board of he DuSable Museum of African American History.

Finally, a slow collaboration between the creative and business sides – and fans – changed storytelling and caricatures, yielding figures such as Marvel’s Luke Cage and Black Panther, and DC’s Cyborg and Black Lightning. But it was a long struggle that should be remembered.

Contemporary Black comic-strip artists and characters have been successful

“Curtis,” from Ray Billingsley, starting in 1988.

“Jump Start,” by Robb Armstrong, launched in 1989.

“Knight Life” (and spinoffs “K Chronicles” and “(Th)ink,” all by Keith Knight, started in the early 1990s.

“Wee Pals,” by Morris Turner, ran from 1965 to 2014.

 

(All except “Curtis” are online at no charge at gocomics.com)