Chris Gavaler's Blog, page 49
March 13, 2017
My Morning Memes, part 5
As we enter week 8 of the Trump multi-media reality show, 1984 parallels continue to abound. Congressman Bob Goodlatte is also taking a leading role in my political memes, with his most recent hypocrisies making him a top contender for Minster of Truth. Goodlatte held another “telephone town hall,” dodging all questions about his contradictory positions on Trump spending and a balanced budget. His support of the Obamacare replacement bill also earned two memes last week. I took the photo of his office pillow myself, but credit goes to a 50 Ways Rockbridge member who took the amazing shot of the rally outside Delegate Ben Cline’s office. And the last image is an update for my daily Dear Bob blog. My personal favorite though is the RESIST meme, so let’s start there:
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March 6, 2017
Black in the 21st Century
Trump promised to make America great again. But when it comes to African American representation and authorship, that Golden Age started during the Clinton presidency and has only begun to peak right now. This is my fifth and final installment in this series exploring African American superhero history.
The presence of black superheroes continued to expand across the comics industry in the 90s. Former sidekick Shilo Norman assumed his predecessor’s identity in Miracle Mister—though in a costume that entirely obscured his racial identity, as had the Jim Rhodes Iron Man five years earlier. Former characters continued: Don McGregor wrote another Black Panther mini-series with artist Dwayne Turner in 1991, John Stewart starred in Green Lantern: Mosaic and Luke Cage in Cage in 1992. Darryl Banks penciled a new Green Lantern series beginning in 1994, and Tony Isabella renewed Black Lightning in 1995, the same year newcomer Doug Braithwaite began penciling at Marvel. New characters debuted: Whilce Portacio and Jim Lee introduced Bishop to The Uncanny X-Men in 1991, Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove’s Steel first appeared in The Adventures of Superman in 1993, and Marvel’s Night Thrasher series began in 1993.
The most influential new character, however, came from Image Comics, a creator-owned company that formed a year before Milestone. Todd McFarlane’s 1992 Spawn altered the unchallenged domination of Marvel and DC in superhero comics, with reports of the first issue selling 1.7 million copies. Where Black Panther’s skin-covering costume might have been an avoidance of race in 1966, Spawn’s equally skin-covering costume might suggest the altered significance of race as a comparatively incidental characteristic a quarter of a century later. Svitavsky, however, argues otherwise: “This concealment is yet another way of soft-pedalling black superheroes to resistant readers,” noting the costume pattern in nine black characters (2013: 159).
Less commercially successful, Ania, a consortium of Dark Zulu Lies Comics, Africa Rising, UP Comics, and Afro Centric Comic Books, released a number of short-lived titles in the early 90s (Poole), and Dawud Anyabwile and Guy A. Sims’ Brotherman Comics debuted in 1990 and ran for five years. Pioneering artists Jones and Pollard both left comics in 1995 after co-penciling Daredevil #343. Ania folded shortly after its formation, and Milestone began cancelling titles in 1995, before closing its comics branch in 1997. McDuffie moved to TV animation, writing for Teen Titans, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited, and beginning in 2000 his Milestone character Static starred for four seasons on the WB’s morning cartoon Static Shock. McDuffie returned to DC for a Milestone Forever mini-series in 2008, and after 2008’s Final Crisis, the Milestone universe was merged into DC’s main continuity, with Static joining the Teen Titans, while Icon, Rocket, and their team members appeared in a Justice League of America story arc. After McDuffie’s death in 2011, Milestone Media and DC continued their partnership with a Static Shock reboot as part of the initial lineup of DC’s company-wide New 52 reboot in 2011 and with the Milestone universe entering DC’s multiverse as Earth-M in 2015.
Other superhero comics by black creators continued through the 90s. Jimmie Robinson founded his Jet Black Graphiks imprint in 1994, soon expanding into Image Comics and later Marvel. Kerry James Marshall presented Rhythm Mastr as an art installation in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and weekly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette beginning November 1999: “Marshall’s comics propose an alternative to mainstream superhero culture by introducing protagonists taken from African archetypes and African American cultural life” and spirit powers “which once guided enslaved Africans to insurrection and freedom” (Carnegie). Jim Owsley, having changed his name to Christopher Priest, developed the new title character Xero for DC with artist ChrisCross in 1997. Xero continued the black cyborg motif of the 70s Misty Knight, the 80s Cyborg, and the 90s Deathlok, now with a black man “reconstructed of chemically-dependent bio-mechanical implants” (Priest & ChrisCross 1997: 21), earning Marc Singer’s praise for “its richness and complexity, free of the tokenism and erasure which have dominated the genre” (2002: 116). Though introduced and drawn as “a 6’6” blond man” (Priest & ChrisCross 1997: 7), Xero removes his light-skinned face and wavy hair to reveal dark skin and a black goatee near the conclusion of the first issue (19). Priest wrote all twelve issues, before beginning yet another Black Panther series in 1998. This iteration proved to be one of the most commercially successful, with Priest writing the final 62nd issue in 2003.
Aware of the dearth of black superheroes in the first several decades of the genre, 21st-century comics have literally rewritten superhero history. The 2004 miniseries Truth: Red, White and Black retconned a black Captain America into a super-soldier variation of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, followed by the character’s grandson joining Young Avengers in 2005. In 2008, Blue Marvel was retconned as a 1962 superhero forced to retire when the public learned he was black. For the revisionist Young Allies Comics in 2009, Whitewash Jones was renamed Washington Carver Jones, with an explanation that the World War II comics produced by the Propaganda Office “exaggerated the story” and that the “art was all caricature,” with Jones made to “look like something out of a minstrel show!” (Stern & Rivera 2009), Cyborg also received a miniseries in 2008 and was retconned as a founding member of the rebooted Justice League in 2011, and starred in an on-going Cyborg title in 2015.
Black representation continued and in some cases has increased in other 21st-century titles. DC recreated its 1930s Crimson Avenger as a black woman in 2000. Alex Simmons and Dwayne Turner premiered Orpheus in DC’s Batman: Orpheus Rising in 2001. Marvel’s 2002 The Ultimates introduced an alternate Earth Nick Fury based on Samuel L. Jackson, who would play the film version of the character beginning in 2008. In 2003, the daughters of Black Lightning became the duo Thunder and Lightning, and a black teenager assumed the title-role of DC’s Firestorm in 2004. Reginald Hudlin wrote a new Black Panther series beginning in 2005, giving the title to the sister of the original character in 2009. Luke Cage joined as a permanent member of The New Avenger in 2005, before becoming team leader in 2010 and finally leaving the team after 95 issues in 2012. Coordinating with the animated TV series Young Justice, DC introduced a new black Aqualad in 2010 and added an African Batman Incorporated character David Zavimbe in 2011, giving him his own Batwing series the same year, before passing the Batwing identity to African American veteran Luke Fox in 2013. Beginning in 2011 Ultimate Spider-Man featured Miles Morales, a mixed black and Hispanic teen, as title character. Marvel’s Storm was featured in 2005 and 2014 miniseries, and in 2014 Marvel introduced its fifth Deathlok series, with a new black character in the title role. Continuing the John Stewart Green Lantern and Jim Rhodes Iron Man tradition, the final December 2014 issue of Captain America introduced the Falcon as the new Captain America, launching All-New Captain America the following month, followed by the ongoing series Sam Wilson: Captain America in 2015. As a result, four of the seven members of the 2016 All-New All-Different Avengers are characters of color: Sam Wilson Captain America, Miles Morales Spider-Man, Sam Alexander Nova, and Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel. The five-member 2016 Ultimates include one white woman, Carol Danvers Captain Marvel, and four characters of color: Monica Rambeau, Black Panther, Blue Marvel, and Miss America Chavez. 2015 also saw three new black lead characters: Lunella Lafayette of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur; the first black Robin, Duke Thomas in a team of Robins in We Are Robin; and a new black female Iron Man, Riri Williams Ironheart, who assumed the title role with Invincible Iron Man #1 (January 2017).
Fifty years after Kirby and Lee’s Black Panther premiered in Fantastic Four and coinciding with the introduction of the film version of the character, renowned journalist Ta-Nahesi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther debuted in spring 2016, selling roughly 300,000 copies, one of the year’s best-selling superhero comics—a reversal of Roy Thomas’s early 70s lament that it is hard to get whites to buy comics in which the main character is black. The change in representation, writes Carolyn Cocca, reflects “how much the fan base has changed just over the last several years,” one that includes readers who, “due to changing population demographics and gains of civil rights movements, are not only more diverse but also more vocal with their desires and their dollars”; “The superhero genre,” she concludes, “has come far in a number of ways, but has far to go” (2016: 2-3). Laura Hudson draws a similar conclusion in a 2015 Wired editorial, acknowledging that “the faces on the pages [of] popular comic books have steadily grown more diverse,” while also critiquing a “demographic imbalance” in which “the editors and creators of mainstream comics remain overwhelmingly Caucasian” (Hudson 2015). According to Tim Hanley, roughly one of every five comics employees was non-white in 2014 (Hickey 2014). As editors Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II write in their introduction to Black Comics, “comics are still only peppered with representations of the multifaceted Black experience by Black artists” (2013: 4).
February 27, 2017
My Morning Memes, part 4
We have survived another two weeks of President Trump’s multi-media reality show. Because the star continues to approach his job with the research, responsibility, and nuance of a Golden Age comic book writer, I’m continuing to respond in the form of one-panel political comics, AKA Facebook memes.
While that means more 1984 and Fascism references, this past week Trump’s Congressional yesman Bob Goodlatte has claimed more of my satirical spotlight. Despite Congress being on recess for “district work,” Bob somehow found himself on the other side of the globe. (This was confusing until I found a World Geography quiz in his elementary school file.)
Bob did however “phone it in” for a fake town hall before going AWOL. In addition to my ostrich and Where’s Waldo? spoofs, I also made Bob a wild west Wanted poster. The first version included the generic phrase “Dead or Alive,” which some especially conscientious folks on Facebook objected to, so I removed it from the second version.
Moving further down to the most influential local issue, I also designed an anti-gerrymandering bumper sticker (“crooked,” get it?), which appears on my Facebook banner as well as my actual car bumper out here in the non-virtual world. (If you want one for your own non-virtual car, let me know.)
Finally, I make a cameo in the last meme. That’s me standing next to Bob’s cardboard cutout at the town hall held in Roanoke last week. It was an overflow crowd, even though everyone knew Bob wasn’t going to be there. That might help to explain why Senator Kaine is reporting a 900% increase in calls and letters since the election.
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February 20, 2017
Black in the 80s
I started this series on African-American superheroes and creators searching for the “Golden Age” that Trump promised his voters. So far I’ve eliminated the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Many consider Ronald Reagan the greatest President in history, and in fact the 80s are the most positive decade I’ve found yet. But not for the reasons some conservatives might think.
The early 80s is a transitional moment in black representation. When DC re-introduced the Teen Titans in a 1980 DC Comics Presents backstory, Guardian-Hornblower was absent, but the team now included Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s Cyborg, who would also be featured in the following month’s The New Teen Titans first issue. Pérez’s black and white costume design literalized the duality of African-American identity by juxtaposing the character’s exposed skin with his white machinery—arguably an extension of Lee and Kirby’s Africa/technology binary established in Black Panther’s 1966 debut. Pérez’s costume design, at least the eighth iteration of a black male superhero with a chest-exposing top, pushed the motif to its final extreme. The effect, writes Davis, reminds “the reader that he is more than just a mere robot,” while “reinforcing the double consciousness that he embodies” as a black character (2015: 209).
Cyborg also deepened the trend away from the use of “Black” in superhero names and so deemphasized race as a black characters’ most defining trait. Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont established Storm as team leader in 1980, a role the character would play extensively and through multiple authors and titles for the following four decades. Marvel followed with two new superheroes in 1982: Bill Mantlo and Ed Hannigan’s Cloak of the Cloak and Dagger duo premiered in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man and Roger Stern and John Romita, Jr.’s new female Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau, in Amazing Spider-Man Annual. A Cloak and Dagger mini-series followed in 1983, and Captain Marvel would appear regularly in The Avengers until 1988, including as team leader. The Falcon also received a mini-series in 1983, and Jim Rhodes, as scripted by Dennis O’Neil, assumed the lead role in Iron Man and in the mini-series West Coast Avengers until 1985. Beginning in 1984 John Stewart similarly replaced Hal Jordan in Green Lantern, until the retitled Green Lantern Corps was cancelled in 1988, the year Black Panther returned in a mini-series. In 1986, John Ostrander, Len Wein, and John Byrne introduced Amanda Waller in Legends; though not a superhero, and often villainous, Waller would become one of the most prominent black female characters in the superhero genre.
The 80s also marked an increase in African-American creators working in superhero comics. Mark Bright entered in the late 70s, soon followed by Denys Cowan, Larry Stroman, and Paris Cullins. Wayne Howard left the industry in 1982, and Billy Graham died in 1985, but Ron Wilson continued to draw Marvel titles through the 80s. Bright teamed with writer Jim Owsley on the 1983 Falcon four-issue mini-series and the final ten issues of Power Man and Iron First in 1986. Arvell Jones became the primary artist for DC’s All-Star Squadron in 1984, and Keith Pollard’s titles included Green Lantern and Vigilante. Chuck Patton was lead artist on Justice League of America from 1983-1985, Milton Knight drew the retro-style Mighty Mouse for Marvel in 1987, and Malcolm Jones inked DC’s Young All-Stars into the late 80s. Cowan drew the 1988 Black Panther four-issue mini-series, while also teaming with Dennis O’Neil on the 1987-90 The Question. Joe Phillips started his career on NOW Comics’ Speed Racer in 1987, and Brian Stelfreeze would be featured as the primary cover artist for DC’s Shadow of the Bat in the 90s.
As black writers grew more prominent, black representation grew more complex. In 1989, Bright and Dwayne McDuffie revived Monica Rambeau for the single issue Captain Marvel. Bright replaced Rambeau’s previously vague afro with distinctly rendered cornrows, a first for a black superhero. Beginning in 1990, Cowan drew McDuffie’s Deathlok, a reboot of the early 70s cyborg super-soldier. Matt Wayne, eulogizing McDuffie after an award for diversity in comics was named after him, called McDuffie “the first African-American to create a Marvel comic,” one who “challenged our worldview, but so subtly that we could ignore it and watch the explosions, if that’s all we wanted” (Wayne 2015). McDuffie said himself of Deathlok, “I also managed to sneak in something of myself, Humanistic values somewhat at odds with the conceit of vigilante fiction” (2002: 29). In his March 1991 script draft for issue #5, he explained to Cowan: “I’m trying to implicitly connect the cyborgs to mutants and oppressed minorities” (2002: 49). At the story’s conclusion, Deathlok holds a copy of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which he quotes at length (56). McDuffie’s collected run is titled The Souls of Cyber-Folk.
In 1993, McDuffie and Cowan created Milestone Media with Michael Davis and Derek T. Dingle. Jim Owsley was originally involved, but left before the founding. Unlike other independent comics companies, minority-owned and otherwise, Milestone partnered with DC in order to secure wide distribution while also maintaining creative and legal control of its properties. Both the Milestone and the DC logos appeared on all covers. Milestone launched four titles in its first month: Hardware, Blood Syndicate, Icon, and Static, all written or co-written by McDuffie, with three more titles to follow in 1994, plus the DC-Milestone multi-title crossover and one-shot Worlds Collide the same year.
Like Deathlok, Icon’s Robin-esque sidekick Rocket, Raquel Ervin, reads from her copy of DuBois in the Icon premiere. McDuffie also alludes to Booker T. Washington and Toni Morrison, but the four-page wordless opening is most striking for its revision of the Superman origin story. Instead of the early twentieth-century mid-west, Icon’s spaceship crashes near a 1839 cotton field where an enslaved black woman, not an elderly pair of white farmers, adopts the alien infant. August Freeman, now a lawyer and a “big rich, conservative” (McDuffie & Bright 2009: 167), hides his abilities until challenged by his future sidekick, a black teenager named Raquel: “I told him how just seeing him opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me … how I thought he could help lots of people if only they could see what he can do” (23). Her challenge also encapsulates Milestone’s mission. Echoing O’Neil’s 1970 Green Arrow and Green Lantern, Rocket teaches Icon that submission to authority is misguided when authorities abuse their power—as when white police officers attack them without provocation. She also brokers a truce with a gang of mutated criminals, the Blood Syndicate, challenging them to do more than fight turf wars (143). With a supporting cast that includes Raquel’s grandmother and a female African-American mayor, Icon contain a range and density of black characters previously unseen in superhero comics.
February 13, 2017
My Morning Memes, part 3
Life in Trump’s alternate reality provided its usual opportunities for political memes these past two weeks. The first below is a reference to Clinton’s final vote count, 2.9 million more than Trump, and of course the Republican insult of calling liberals “snowflakes.” Mussolini made a couple of encore appearances, flanked again by the ironies of Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric and even a few non-fascist GOP voices. There are my own attempts at inspirational call-to-arms, and of course our President is always good for at least one stunningly hypocritical tweet. Oh, and he said “a bad high school student would understand” his Muslim ban was right. That I thought everyone on Facebook would instantly recognize the references suggests maybe I’m spending a little too much time in the deep end?
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And here are two I can’t take credit for. The 50 Ways Rockbridge logo was designed by another member, Katie Knudson, and I inserted it between two photos I took during our last meeting (over 125 attended, up from 25 the month before). It’s the banner on our Facebook page now:
And the “Missing” flyer is out of Indivisible Harrisonburg. We share Representative Bob Goodlatte, so I just inserted our Rockbridge address as instructed:
February 6, 2017
How Many Plagiarists Does It Take to Screw Up the Trump Senate Confirmations?
“Every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment where they can learn, thrive, and grow.”
That’s what Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, wrote on her Senate confirmation questionnaire.
Vanita Gupta, President Obama’s head of the Justice Department civil rights division, wrote in a 2016 press release: “Every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment that allows them to thrive and grow.”
Is that plagiarism?
According to the Washington Post, it is. The newspaper first reported the story and made the allegation.
According to the Washington Examiner, it’s not. That newspaper’s Jason Russell argues: “Phrasing like that is a fairly standard talking point in the education policy world. It’s one of those noncontroversial vague statements that anyone might say.”
I teach writing to college students, so forgive me if I point out that Russell seems a little confused about the difference between adjectives and adverbs. I’m not sure whether he means “noncontroversially vague statements” or “noncontroversial statements that are also vague.” If it’s the second, he should really place a comma between the two adjectives, but even then the relevance of “vague” is unclear. Worse, “fairly standard” is a contradiction. Either something is standard or it is not standard. If we allow for degrees of standardness, then “fairly standard” would be synonymous with “fairly non-standard.”
Sticking to plagiarism though, Russell gives two examples from education websites to support his claim that DeVos did not commit any infraction.
The New York Foundling Child Abuse Prevention Program: “CAPP believes that every child should receive their basic right to safety so that they can have the opportunity to grow and thrive.”
Let’s Grow Kids: “Police officers play an important role in ensuring that each child is growing up in a safe environment where she/he can learn and thrive.”
Do his examples support his claim?
The website statements share two consecutive words: “and thrive.” He’s right. That’s not plagiarism.
DeVos’ statement shares five non-consecutive words with CAPP: “every child … learn … and grow.” That’s also not plagiarism.
But her statement shares eight non-consecutive words with LGK: “child … safe … environment where .. can learn … and grow.” Is that plagiarism?
There are a variety of rules about the limits of verbatim language, some as strict as three consecutive words, some as lenient as seven. Indiana University, for example, identifies “word-for-word plagiarism” when “seven or more words are copied from the source, and quotation marks are missing.”
DeVos more than doubles that limit. Her statement shares a total of fourteen words with Gupta’s, the first eleven consecutively: “Every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment .. thrive[,] and grow.”
But that’s not all she did. Regardless of verbatim word choice, she also and more importantly did not acknowledge the source of the words. Even Russell acknowledges this: “DeVos gave answers that mirrored verbatim what a certain law or the Education Department website says,” adding the rhetorical question: “Is that really so bad?”
In my college, a student who submitted a paper that contained the uncited and verbatim passages that DeVos used would be brought before our Honor Council and likely expelled. Whether it’s “really so bad” for the U.S. Secretary of Education to be held to a lower standard than the students is in my first-year writing seminar is a matter of opinion. Whether she plagiarized is not. She did.
Russell acknowledges that too: “Yes, DeVos should have added, ‘As the law says, …’ or ‘As the department’s official policy reads, …’ But copy and pasting the law, and saying that it’s something you’ll do as secretary, isn’t worth making a fuss over.”
I’m sure the student who plagiarized in one of my classes last year felt his violation of the Honor Code wasn’t “worth making a fuss over” either. That’s why I begin every semester of WRIT 100 with a Plagiarism Test Certificate. Perhaps the Senate should use it for their confirmation hearings too.
This semester I also included the admonitory example of another Trump appointee, Monica Crowley. The Fox News contributor was in line for a senior communications position in the National Security Council but stepped down after multiple examples of plagiarism were identified in her 2012 book, her Washington Times column, and her Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation. CNN provides a passage-to-passage comparison of dozens of examples. I recommend it as essential reading for anyone applying to Washington and Lee University. Prospective Trump nominees might take a look too.
January 30, 2017
My Morning Memes, part 2
I was going to keep it to one meme a day, and so collect a round-up of my political image-texts here every couple of weeks or so. But then the March inspired me, and Trump’s lies about his penis inauguration size, and the latest fascist parallels, and his hilariously dismal ratings, and then, dear God, the ban.
I will offer one apology though. The fourth image features Trump’s words superimposed over pictures of Melania during her modeling days. The juxtaposition, while striking, invited slut-shaming when I first posted it on Facebook, and that’s my fault. If anything, I think we should feel concern for her. I can only imagine what kinds of mental, emotional, and physical abuse marriage to Donald Trump must involve.
So here’s our pussy-grabbing, Muslim-hating President’s first week in office:
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January 23, 2017
My Morning Memes
Facebook memes combine my top two areas of interest: comics studies and political speech. Like other political cartoons, political memes are image-texts, though not in the usual “cartoon” sense. The images aren’t exaggerated, caricatural drawings, and the words aren’t contained in speech bubbles or caption boxes typical of one-panel comics. Memes usually use photographs, and their words are often superimposed without borders. I make mine on Word Paint, the digital equivalent of a woodcutting in the age of Photoshop, but the limitations can be practical and aesthetic too.
I’ll save the formal and creative analysis for another time. For now, here’s the collected sequence I created and posted on Facebook, beginning in October and ending (for now) with the inauguration. Though it wasn’t my intention, they form a diary-like chronicle of political events surrounding Donald Trump, as filtered through my indirect narration. Some are amateurish on the graphic design learning curve (it turns out that font size and ink color are everything, and that some photographs are basically impossible as backgrounds), but many hit the note they’re stretching for. If there are any you like, copy and paste at will.
The first two are before the election, starting with a quote from Speaker Paul Ryan taken out of context. The first after the election is my angriest (and features my Two-Face alter-ego, who also appears in longer cartoons here, here, here, here, and here). After Trump’s official election by the Electoral College, my tone shifts to inspirational activism (which coincides with my other blog, Dear Bob, in which I’m writing my Congressman Bob Goodlatte every day). After that I started posting images everyday too. There’s a three-meme sequences on fascism and another after Meryl Streeps’ Golden Globes speech, followed by confirmation of Russia’s interference in the election and Trump’s cabinet nominees contradicting his policy statements during their Senate hearings. After the first White House press conference, they shift to overt calls-to-action in the week before the inauguration. The day of which there’s no direct reference to Trump, just scifi allusions, because, seriously, we’re in an alternate reality now, right?
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January 16, 2017
Black in the Bronze Age
Trump promised a return to the Golden Age, but when was that exactly? Once again Ester Bloom:
The boundaries of America’s “golden age” are clear on one end and fuzzy on the other. Everyone agrees that the midcentury boom times began after Allied soldiers returned in triumph from World War II. But when did they wane? The economist Joe Stiglitz, in an article in Politico Magazine titled “The Myth Of The American Golden Age,” sets the endpoint at 1980, a year until which “the fortunes of the wealthy and the middle class rose together.”
We’ve already toured the not-so-golden decades of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. So that leaves the 70s. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the first year of what comics fans call the Bronze Age. How do you think it looked for African American characters and creators?
Take a look:
Reflecting the legislative gains of the Civil Rights Movement, superhero comics featured black characters at an increasing rate. Though more African American artists entered the industry, black superheroes were still written exclusively by white authors who relied on shifting stereotypes and expressed ambivalent attitudes about black political power. Acknowledging both the “good intentions” and “cultural ignorance” of white creators, William L. Svitavsky summarizes black superheroes of the era as combining “a veneer of streetwise attitude with a core of values comfortable for middle-class white readers” (2013: 153, 156). In 1969, Stan Lee and artist Gene Colan introduced Sam Wilson as the Falcon in a three-issue Captain America story arc, with a fourth-issue epilogue leaving the new hero to fight crime in Harlem. Because Black Panther is African, the Falcon is considered comics’ first African-American superhero. He returned for a single episode six months later, in which he tells Captain America: “Your skin may be a different color . . . But there’s not man alive I’m prouder to call . . . Brother!” (Lee, Colan & Romita 1970). Like Kirby and Lee’s Black Panther, the Falcon places interracial unity above black identity. Colan’s chest-exposing costume design echoed the open-shirt of the 60s Lothar and established a norm for black superheroes for the coming decade. Though white superheroes of the 70s also sometimes wear shirts with v-shaped openings (Sub-Mariner, Killraven), the pattern is disproportionately common for black men, who, writes Conseula Frances, “in the popular American imagination, are often read as hypersexual” (2015: 141). The costume design reflected that hypersexuality visually while writers contained it narratively by portraying black men as physically powerful but willingly subservient.
For the Falcon’s one-issue return to Captain America, Stan Lee had pitted him against a black gang whom the Falcon denounces: “They’re like a black version of the Klan! All they preach is hate Whitey! They can set our progress back a hundred years!” (Lee, Colan & Romita 1970). After another six months, Sam Wilson becomes a permanent character. The January 1971 Captain America cover includes the bottom subtitle “Co-Starring: the Falcon!” and for the following issue the title was redesigned Captain American and the Falcon, which it remained until 1978. Captain America’s previous sidekicks included Bucky from 1941-1947 and Golden Girl, from 1948-9, making the Falcon his longest serving partner. Andre Carrington argues:
Narratives of the black and/or female superhero as a team player promulgate a reductive politics of representation that puts minoritized characters on the page in order to support white male characters’ claims to iconic status. Black and female characters frequently appear to buttress the notion that the white male superhero is the sine qua non of the idealism that white Americans spread throughout the globe. (2015: 155)
While Sam Wilson significantly increased the representation of African Americans in comics, in terms of social power, the character also positioned a black man as the equivalent of a white adolescent male and a white adult female.
The Comics Code Authority’s revised guidelines went into effect in February 1971, and one of the first new series affected was Jack Kirby’s New Gods. Issue #3, cover-dated July, introduced Black Racer, an incarnation of death in the form of a paralyzed Vietnam vet, months after the Supreme Court upheld bussing as a means of integrating public schools. July also saw the release of Shaft, widely popularizing the “Blaxploitation” film genre and heavily influencing the portrayal of defiant African Americans in subsequent superhero comics.
Between the Falcon’s premiere and his 1970 return, Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams had started their seminal run on DC’s Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow, beginning with an indictment of Green Lantern by an unnamed African American man: “I been readin’ about you…how you work for the blue skins…and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins…and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with–! …the black skins! I want to know…how come?!” (O’Neil & Adams 2012: 13). Now a year into their run, O’Neil and Adams replaced the previous Green Lantern substitute with John Stewart, an architect who lives in an “urban ghetto” and challenges white authority figures, including police officers, a Senator, and the Hal Jordan Green Lantern: “Listen, whitey, that windbag wants to be President! He’s a racist…and he figures on climbing to the White House on the backs of my people!” (276, 280). Two months later, Marvel premiered the first superhero comic book series featuring an African American character, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. Archie Goodwin and George Tuska’s Cage gains his superpowers by volunteering for human experimentation while wrongly imprisoned, calls people “baby” and “jive-mouth,” and utters “a cry of raging defiance” (Thomas et al 2011: 192, 208). Tuska’s splash page features Cage posed in his open shirt, giving an eye-clenching, open-mouthed roar, his apparent response to the “Harlem” backdrop surrounding him (190). The creative team also included inker Billy Graham, one of the first African American artists employed at Marvel.
Where Adilifu Nama reads Stan Lee’s earlier Falcon dialogue as signaling “a rejection of the type of race-based political brotherhood (and sisterhood) advocated by Black Power nationalism” (2011: 72), Marvel’s new editor-in-chief Roy Thomas retitled the series Luke Cage, Power Man the following year, echoing the increasingly popular movement. Beginning in 1974, Ron Wilson, another recently hired African American artist, would provide cover and pencils, and when the series changed to Power Man and Iron Fist in 1978, it would be the second Marvel title in which a white character received second billing after an African American. In 1972 Marvel also premiered “Reno Jones and Kid Cassidy” in the western Gunhawks. Reno is the third African American Marvel character named “Jones,” and the seventh and final issue, retitled Reno Jones, Gunhawk, featured him alone. Also due to dropping sales, DC cancelled O’Neil and Adams’ Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow in 1972, two issues after introducing John Stewart.
Samuel R. Delany, possibly the first black writer in superhero comics, scripted two issues of Wonder Woman in 1972. He left before completing his intended arc because of DC’s decision to restore Wonder Woman’s original costume and powers. Delany was replaced by Robert Kanigher, who with Don Heck co-created a dark-skinned Wonder Woman named Nubia for three issues in 1973, ending the industry’s forty-year exclusion of black women from superhero comics. Jack Kirby also introduced a young black sidekick, Shilo Norman, in Mister Miracle #12—a title cancelled seven issues later. The same year, Marvel elevated Black Panther to the cover-feature of Jungle Action, which had previously starred Tarzan knock-off “Tharn the Magnificient.” Luke Cage alum Graham penciled twelve issues of writer Don McGregor’s nineteen-issue run, which included the story arc, “Panther vs. the Klan.” A month after Black Panther’s Jungle Action debut, Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s Blade the Vampire-Slayer premiered in The Tomb of Dracula, with likely the first comic book cover to depict a black man protecting a white woman from a white man. Colan again draws a black man with an open shirt, and Marv Wolfman scripts Blade with standard Blaxploitation slang, “dig?” and “dude” and telling a disrespectful police officer that he did not understand “Pig English” (Wolfman et al 2004: 6). At the end of the same summer, Len Wein and Gene Colan’s Brother Voodoo began a five-issue Strange Tales run. The Haitian wizard is a “noted psychologist” who dismisses voodoo as “superstitious bunk” before assuming his dead brother’s role as the island’s “Houngan, voodoo priest” in a costume that largely reproduces Colan’s chest-revealing Falcon design (Thomas et al 2012: 49, 52). Joining the small but expanding group of African Americans in mainstream comics, Wayne Howard, who worked mostly in horror and had received his first credit at DC in 1969, inked the October issue of Marvel Team-Up in 1973. Keith Pollard and Arvell Jones received their first Marvel credits in 1974. Jones would move to DC in 1977, and Pollard would pencil and ink the final issue of Black Panther’s Jungle Action in 1976, later taking over as penciller for Amazing Spider-Man in 1978.
Jeffrey A. Brown acknowledges DC’s and Marvel’s attempts “to create legitimate black superhero characters,” but attributes their failure “to achieve any long-lasting success” to those characters being “too closely identified with the limited stereotype commonly found in the Blaxploitation films of the era,” including Superfly in 1972, Coffy in 1973, and Mandingo in 1975 (2001: 4). Marvel’s Blaxploitation phase peaked in 1975, with Steve Englehart’s retconning of the Falcon’s past as a Harlem criminal named “Snap.” Marvel introduced its first two black female superheroes that year. Influenced by actress Pam Grier’s performances in Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba Baby, Tony Isabella and Arvell Jones created Misty Knight for an episode of Marvel Premier Featuring Iron Fist. Her bionic arm later established her as the first African American cyborg—a motif for black superheroes expanded in later decades. Len Wein and Dave Cockrum’s Storm had debuted in the new, multi-ethnic X-Men team a month earlier. Cockrum had intended the character to be called “Black Cat,” before merging her with another of his unused ideas for a white male superhero “Typhoon.” Storm is worshipped as a rain goddess by a tribe in Kenya in her first appearance. 1975 also saw Tony Isabella and George Tuska’s Black Goliath debut in Luke Cage, Power Man. The superhero’s alter ego, Bill Foster, was originally created by Lee and Don Heck in 1966 as an assistant to Henry Pym, A.K.A. Goliath, in The Avengers. Marvel launched a Black Goliath solo title the following year, which, like Brother Voodoo, lasted only five issues. Rather than an open shirt, Tuska’s costume design included a bare midriff, a variation on the skin-exposing costumes of female superheroes. Black Goliath, like John Stewart Green Lantern earlier, casts a black superhero as an imitative replacement of a white character and so, argues Svitavsky, “falls too easily into the cliché of the competent ethnic supporting character, such as Tarzan’s ally Mugambi or the Lone Ranger’s Tonto, who ultimately reinforces the white hero’s preeminence” (2013: 158). At DC, Dennis O’Neil’s Bronze Tiger shared the first cover though not title of Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter, and a second, unrelated Powerman appeared in 1975 too. Commissioned by a Nigerian ad agency and designed by British artist Dave Gibbons of later Watchmen fame, the black and white Powerman was distributed in Nigeria for two years. On the color covers, “Africa’s Hero with Super Powers!” sports a fuchsia unitard and lion-print briefs.
Murray Boltinoff, who had been editing Superboy since the late 60s, prevented artist Mike Grell from introducing a black character in 1975. Grell recalls Boltinoff explaining: “You can’t do that because we’ve never had a black person in the Legion of Super-Heroes, and now you’re going to have one in there who’s not perfect. We can’t do that” (Cardigan 2003: 89). Boltinoff’s concern that a black superhero must be depicted as “perfect” reflects the overwhelmingly white-dominated industry’s anxiety over representing African Americans, especially when the general lack of representation places a greater burden on each individual character. Grell still drew the character, Soljer scripted by Jim Shooter, as “a black man who had been colored pink” (89). Soljer’s pink skin thematically reverses the norm of white authors creating black characters who are what Kenneth Ghee terms “White heroes in Black Face” (2013: 232), as signified most obviously with the use of “Black” as a modifier, indicating “White” as the unstated norm.
The DC policy barring black superheroes changed in 1976 when Grell and Cary Bates created Tyroc, who defends his all-black island against the Legion of Super-Heroes before joining the team. “When it comes to race, we’re color-blind!” explains the white-skinned Superboy, who is then echoed by three of his multi-colored teammates: “Blue skin, yellow skin, green skin…we’re brothers and sisters…united in the name of justice everywhere!” (quoted in Singer 2002: 111). Grell so disliked Bates and Boltinoff’s handling of race that, now given the opportunity to draw a black superhero as he had previously advocated, he intentionally undermined the character by designing what he considered an unappealing costume for Tyroc—which included the same open-shirt design as worn by the Falcon, Brother Voodoo, Luke Cage, and soon Black Lightning (Cardigan 2003: 89). DC’s change regarding black superheroes coincides with Jeanette Kahn succeeding Carmine Infantino as publisher in January 1976. The Tyroc episode of Superboy Starring the Legion of Super-Heroes is cover-dated April, and a second black superhero was added to a pre-existing team that fall. After the series had been cancelled in 1973, Teen Titans resumed with “The Newest Teen Super-Hero of All . . . The Guardian!” on its cover (#44). Mal Duncan, an amateur boxer from “Hell’s Corner” introduced in 1970, assumes the superhero identity of the pre-Code character Guardian—and then the magic trumpet-wielding Hornblower in the subsequent issue, which also introduced his girlfriend Karen Beecher, who would become Bumblebee and join the team three issues later. Both remained on the team until the next cancellation in 1978. Paul Kupperberg and Joe Staton’s Tempest joined Doom Patrol in 1977, becoming the third black superhero to join one of DC’s pre-existing teams.
Marvel introduced its next black superhero, Thunderbolt, in 1977 for three issues of Luke Cage, Power Man, but killed the character after his next appearance in 1980. Lee Alias’s costume design is the first since Black Panther to not feature an exposed chest—though, also like Black Panther, the costume also completely disguises the hero’s racial identity, repeating the second most common pattern for black superheroes. Thunderbolt, like DC’s Guardian/Hornblower, also reprised a black character first introduced in 1970, this time in Daredevil #69. The practice of reusing and expanding previous secondary characters is common—though here it also emphasizes the dearth of such black characters since both sets of authors went back seven years to find ones to transform into new superheroes.
As Jack Kirby returned to Marvel and a new Black Panther series, DC premiered its first African American superhero title in 1977, Tony Isabella and Trevor Von Eeden’s Black Lightning, a very late example of Blaxploitation influence. The hero’s costume includes a mask attached to an afro wig to disguise his identity as a school teacher who wears his hair conservatively short. “The Afro-mask,” writes Blair Davis, “also serves to make an ethnic minority character ‘more ethnic’ by giving him a hairstyle that was viewed not only as a fashion statement but also as a form of political expression in the 1970s” (2015: 203). Isabella was originally hired to script a very different black character:
The Black Bomber was a white bigot who, in times of stress, turned into a black super-hero. This was the result of chemical camouflage experiments he’d taken part in as a soldier in Vietnam. The object of these experiments was to allow our [white] troops to blend into the jungle…. I convinced them to eat the two scripts and let me start over. To paraphrase my arguments… “Do you REALLY want DC’s first black super-hero to be a white bigot?” (Isabella 2000)
Von Eeden, identifying himself as the first African American artist employed at DC, recalled in a 2016 interview how his white colleagues “chose to play a very mean-spirited and ill-advised ‘prank’ on me” involving a collapsing chair. He never “heard of any other such pranks being played on anyone else at DC Comics,” and in addition to “being ALWAYS treated as a ‘black’ artist (as if I represented an entire nation of fundamentally alien people, all by my lonesome),” he soon found “it was very hard to even want to do one’s best for people who seemed to not only not really appreciate it—but had actually tried to punish and humiliate me, in return.” Von Eeden later left during “DC’s eventual downsizing of its entire staff (freelancers like me being the first to go),” concluding that the “very same people who’d given me the opportunity to live my dreams, had directly caused that dream to become a living nightmare” (Gill 2016).
DC cancelled Black Lightning after its October 1978 issue, and Marvel cancelled Black Panther after its May 1979 issue. Gerry Conway also scripted Black Lightning in a 1979 Justice League of America issue in which Superman asks him to join the team. Len Wein had desegregated the team in 1974 when he included the John Stewart Green Lantern in a single episode, but Conway’s Black Lightning declines. Nama reads the issue as “a clear critique of black tokenism” (2011: 26). Marvel, however, expressed no qualms when Falcon joined two issues of The Defenders in 1978 and eleven issues of The Avengers beginning in 1979. DC had intended to debut their first African American female superhero in her own series in 1978, but Vixen and a range of other planned and low-selling titles were cancelled due to the company’s financial troubles during the industry-wide slump. Gerry Conway and Bob Oksner’s Vixen debuted in Action Comics in 1981 instead. The character echoes Black Panther’s African-based animalistic powers, but with a sexualized name, and like Cockrum’s Storm, cover artists Ross Andru and Dick Giordano draw her hair in flowing waves for her debut image. DC also briefly introduced E. Nelson Bridwell and Ramona Fradon’s Doctor Mist in Super Friends in 1978, adding the character to main continuity in 1981. Like Black Panther, Doctor Mist hails from a fictional African nation.
Reviewing superhero comics in 1982, Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet formulated “a descriptive framework of the general patterns found in the subgenre,” concluding that a superhero is “an adult white male” because “Black heroes (Black Panther, Black Goliath, Black Lightning, the Falcon) don’t seem to appeal to a predominantly white readership; they are not role models” (1983: 185-6). Roy Thomas, Marvel’s editor in chief from 1972-1974, observed the phenomenon with frustration: “It’s kind of a shame. You could get blacks to buy comics about whites, but it was hard to get whites to buy comics in which the main character was black” (Howe 131).
[So much for the Golden Bronze Age? Next week we’ll try the Golden Age of the 80s.]
January 9, 2017
Black in the Silver Age
Trump promised a return to the Golden Age, and the Golden Age in superhero comics was the 40s and early 50s–an era far from golden for African Americans. Ester Bloom writes:
The boundaries of America’s “golden age” are clear on one end and fuzzy on the other. Everyone agrees that the midcentury boom times began after Allied soldiers returned in triumph from World War II. But when did they wane?
Some put the end point “at the economic collapse of 1971 and the ensuring malaise.” For superhero comics, that late 50s and 60s era is called the Sivler Age. Maybe that’s the historic period Trump wants take us all back to? Let’s take a look. Here’s what it meant to be black in the Golden Silver Age:
The 1954 Comics Code mandated that “Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible,” and its first decade and a half saw an end to overtly racist caricatures and an incremental shift toward more complex representations (Code 1954). Initially, however, superhero comics avoided black characters entirely and employed no well-documented black creators. President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 and the 1961 freedom riders bus tour testing desegregated interstate travel in the South produced no immediate reaction in superhero comics. But when Marvel’s Stan Lee and Jack Kirby returned to World War II for the first issue of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos in 1963, they included African American soldier Gabriel Jones in the seven-member outfit—even though President Truman did not sign the executive order desegregating the armed forces until three years after the war ended. The first issue was on sale while Martin Luther King was arrested during anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, Alabama, and the second while King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to 250,000 Civil Rights marchers in Washington, D.C.
Obeying Code guidelines barring racial ridicule, Kirby gives Jones no caricatural features. If not for his skin tone—rendered in the African American-signifying gray typical of the period—he could be mistaken for white. Kirby instead renders two white characters with occasionally exaggerated expressions (188, 189). If Jones’s musical skills are a racial stereotype popularized by jazz celebrities Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis (“‘Gabe’ used to blow the sweetest trumpet this side of Carnegie Hall!”), they do not stand out in the relatively diverse but otherewise all-white company of an “ex-jockey from Kentucky,” a “one-time circus strongman,” “an Ivy-League college” grad, an Italian “swashbuckler” actor, and a Jewish mechanic (Lee et al 2011: 184-5). While Kirby and Lee treat Jones respectfully, they also employ him minimally. He is one of the least depicted characters in the premiere episode, and, unlike Binder and Wojtkoski’s 1940s Whitewash Jones, Gabe Jones is never central in terms of plot or panel composition, speaking only four times in twenty-three pages. Whitewash spoke more than twice as often, twenty-eight times in his first fifty-seven pages.
The following year saw the ratification of both the 24th Amendment, which overturned voting taxes in the South, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Lee Falk had been scripting General American English for Lothar since the mid-1950s, and after artist Fred Fredericks replaced the late Phil Davis on Mandrake the Magician in 1965, Lothar would no longer wear his 1930s costume but open shirts, trousers, and shoes. Fredericks also experimented with facial features, which, given the black and white newspaper medium, sometimes resulted in a white-looking African prince. After the murder of Malcolm X in February, the attack on protestors in Selma, Alabama in March, passage of the Voting Rights Act and riots in Watts, California in August, and President Johnson’s “affirmative action” executive order in September, 1965 also saw the first African American hero featured in his own comic book title. Dell Comics’ western Lobo, featuring the titular black cowboy, premiered in December 1965, but folded after its second issue, nine months later.
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s most significant contribution to the representation of racial and ethnic minorities in superhero comics was the introduction of Black Panther in Fantastic Four. The issue is cover-dated July 1966, three months prior to the founding of the national Black Panther Party for Self-Defense organization. Kirby had intended the character to be named “Coal Tiger,” and his costume design would have revealed his race by exposing his face. Lee, who routinely reprised Golden Age characters and characteristics, may have revised the character’s name after Paul Gustavson’s 1941 Black Panther, a white superhero in Centaur Comics. Fantastic Four #52 is also a variation on Richard Connell’s classic pulp fiction short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” with Black Panther, the chieftain T’Challa of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, inviting the Fantastic Four to his kingdom “for the greatest hunt of all!” (Lee & Kirby 2011: #52: 4). After being nearly overpowered by Black Panther’s superior Wakandan technology, the Fantastic Four escape his traps, and he surrenders. Despite this villainous introduction, the following issue begins with a “dance of friendship” performed by tribesman reminiscent of 40s-era Africa stereotypes, as Black Panther recounts a Batman-like origin story in which his father is murdered and he vows revenge against the killer—who coincidentally is attacking Wakanda at that moment. With the Fantastic Four’s help, Black Panther defeats his enemy and, with their urging, pledges himself “to the service of all mankind!” (#53, 20). As a result, the character does not serve what Kenneth Ghee identifies as “the sociological function of any redeeming hero mythos; that is working to save his own people first” and so is only “a generalized ‘humanitarian,’” not a “Black superhero” (2013: 232, 233).
Lowery Woodhall regards Black Panther’s first story arc as “a frustrating one to read from a racial standpoint,” beginning with “a ruthless, cunning and ferociously independent black man” and concluding with his “almost immediate emasculation” (2010: 162-3). While Lee and Kirby replace Black Panther’s personal duty of avenging his tribe’s previous leader with a superhero’s generically all-inclusive and so predominantly white-focused mission, they also portray him in a complex mix of racial tropes. While his costume and codename reinforce animalistic stereotypes, Black Panther reverses the racial structure of “The Most Dangerous Game” by assuming the role of the white hunter. He also defeats his enemy primarily through his intelligence: “You did not realize—I am a scientist too–!” (Lee & Kirby 2011: #53, 19), an opinion echoed by the Fantastic Four: “Apparently the talent of inventive genius is not limited to any one place, culture, or clime!” (#54, 8). His “jungle” palace includes “the latest fashions from Paris” and a grand piano played by “the world’s most renowned pianist” (#54, 7, 4). Lee also uses the Thing’s dialogue to mock his and Kirby’s use of African tropes common to comics since the 40s: “Yer talkin’ to a guy who seen every Tarzan movie at least a dozen times!” (#53, 6), and Black Panther admits, “Perhaps my tale does follow the usual pattern” (#53, 7). Kirby’s visual merging of Tarzan motifs with science fiction technology, however, reversed those Golden Age patterns. Still, Derek Lackaff and Michael Sales note how the character is undercut by the fact that “the sovereign Black monarch of a high-tech civilization is rarely allowed to exercise that power and authority” (2013: 68).
Lee followed Black Panther with the 1967 introduction of newspaper editor Robbie Robertson, second only to editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson at Spider-Man’s The Daily Bugle. Identified only as “Robbie” through dialogue, the character enters giving orders to a white reporter after Jameson has been abducted: “I’ll hold down his desk, while you see what you can uncover! Let’s go, boy! There’s no time to waste! (Lee & Romita 1967). Depending on production time, the August cover-dated inclusion of a graying black man in a position of authority directly follows president Johnson’s June nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. Marvel integrated the Avengers when Black Panther joined the team in an issue on sale while Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis and President Johnson signed the third and final Civil Rights Act in April 1968. Lee editorialized in his December 1968 “Stan’s Soapbox” in Fantastic Four #81: “Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today . . . if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, then we must fill our hearts with tolerance” (Lee 1968). DC, in contrast, prevented creators from introducing black characters. Future Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, who wrote for Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes from 1966-70, recalled:
I wanted Ferro Lad to be the first black Legionnaire, and Mort [Weisinger] said, “No, we’ll lose our distribution in the South.”… those were the rules back in those days. That’s another reason why Marvel appealed to me, because they were daring to do things that DC wouldn’t do. (Cadigan 2003: 53)
Weisinger, who had edited Superman since the 40s and was vice president of public relations, left in 1970.
[So much for the Golden Silver Age. But maybe Trump supporters have yet another era in mind? I’ll continue my search next week.]
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