kagablog

BY CASEY ALT

In July of 1966, only three months before the Black Panther political party was formed in Oakland, California, Marvel Comics introduced the Black Panther as the first Black superhero admitted into the immortal circle of American comic books. Originally conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as the “Coal Tiger,” the Black Panther officially entered the “Marvel Universe” via issue 52 of Marvel’s phenomenally popular title The Fantastic Four. As the hereditary king of the hidden African nation of Wakanda, the Black Panther possessed mystical powers that endowed him with panther-like strength, speed, senses, reflexes, and agility. Though the Black Panther was not the first Black character to appear in American comics, he was the first Black comics character to possess superpowers—an advancement that Marvel would later hail as “nothing short of a revolutionary event.”1 Considering that police from Greenwood, Mississippi, had arrested Stokely Carmichael for inciting a crowd of 3,000 civil rights marchers with a new cry for “Black Power!” only a few weeks prior to the Black Panther’s debut, Marvel could not have chosen a more controversial moment to unveil its new superhero.

At a time in which African American intellectuals had just begun to explore the new concept of Black Power, what did it mean for the almost exclusively White staff at Marvel to introduce the first representation of Black Superpower? How was Black Superpower imagined at the time and how did it differ from emergent definitions of Black Power? The goal of this paper is to investigate how Black Superpower was configured in the popular cultural icon of the Black Panther as well as how the comics community reacted to and interacted with this new possibility for power. Though often dismissed as a seductively puerile and escapist medium, superhero comics have repeatedly served as active public spaces for imagining and contesting the proper relationship between individual Americans and the often invisible forces of contemporary American technoscientific power. Through an analysis of these comics texts and the readers’ letters published in them, this paper explores how the concept of Black Superpower was negotiated by Marvel readers through the symbol of the Black Panther.

Power and Pulp

Carmine Infantino, longtime editorial director of DC Comics, once observed, “The theme of comic books is power.”2 Considering that most comic books traffic in the colorful exploits of superheroes and their superpowers, Infantino’s pronouncement might seem remarkably hollow. Yet Infantino was far from naïve, and his comment reflects a much deeper understanding of the relationship between representations of power in superhero comic book culture and perceptions of political and social power within the larger American cultural imaginary. Superpowers give human form to the often invisible exertions of power than undergird every American historical instant by illustrating exactly which powers their readers cannot possess. In doing so, superheroes provide a human interface to the otherwise unimaginable forces of the 20th century technoscientific sublime.

Tom Wolfe evocatively captured the conflation of comic book superpowers with the equally fantastic realm of modern American technoscience in his 1967 account of the American counterculture movement, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

But of course!—the feeling—out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night—it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world…with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics—Postwar American suburbs—glorious world!…the feeling—to be very Superkids! the world’s first generation of the little devils—feeling immune, beyond calamity. One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression—but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was common any longer—The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance—And the myths that actually touched you at the time—not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash—but of course! On Perry Lane, what did they think it was—quaint?—when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as honest American myths? It was a fantasy world already, this electro-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs.3

Particularly at a time in which the “technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, [and] ultrasonics” invisibly subtended the binary logic of US-Soviet superpower rhetoric, comic book superheroes provided an understandable human face to technoscientific power. In considering the relationship between superhero culture and Cold War doctrine, Saul Braun observed in his 1971 New York Times Magazine article on comics and counterculture, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant”:

It is not irrelevant to note that the Vietnamese war developed without hindrance— with some few exceptions—from a generation of men flying around the world on a fantasy-power trip, and was resisted in the main by their sons, the generation that began rejecting the comic books of the fifties with their sanitized, censored, surreal images of the world: a world in which “we” were good and “they” were bad, in which lawlessness masqueraded as heroism, in which blacks were invisible…. A world in which no superhero, whatever his excesses, ever doubted that he was using his powers wisely and morally.4

As Bradford S. Wright has demonstrated in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, superhero comics were one of the major mechanisms by which the young counterculture imagined new configurations of American superpower during the politically turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The comics company most responsible for the new upsurge in comics popularity during the 1960s was the brashly innovative team of Marvel Comics. Headed by the prolific powerhouse of Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby, Marvel reinvented comics during the early 1960s by rejecting the model of the classic superhero as a noble savior who stood outside of humanity in favor of a new kind of antihero who was as mired in the existential challenges as the rest of us and for whom superpower was more of an alienating burden than liberating blessing.

As Wright has noted, the appeal of Marvel’s new superheroes to the upper echelons of the American youth movement during the 1960s and 1970s was profound. Within five years of introducing the Fantastic Four in 1961, Marvel’s average sales figures doubled while those of its competitors remained unchanged or declined.5 The September 1965 issue of Esquire Magazine noted that “Spider-Man was as popular in the radical sector of American universities as Che Guevera.”6 In September 1966, Esquire again reported the immense popularity of Marvel Comics among college students across the country and the growth of Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee as one of the most prominent youth icons of the time:

The Princeton Debating Society invited Stan Lee, author of Marvel’s ten superhero comics, to speak in a lecture series that included Hubert Humphrey, William Scranton and Wayne Morse. Other talks were given at Bard (where he drew a bigger audience than President Eisenhower), N.Y.U. and Columbia…As one Ivy Leaguer told Stan Lee, “We think of Marvel Comics as the twentieth-century mythology and you as this generation’s Homer.”7

While superheroes may have offered a familiar friendly face for adjudicating the appropriate use of power among the growing counterculture of the 1960s, the symbol of the superhero carried a decidedly different connotation for youth within the emerging Black Power movement, in which the term “Superman” often was appropriated as a symbol of the selfaggrandizing hubris of the White-dominated power structures of the United States. In one of his infamous outbursts at the Chicago 7 trial in 1969, Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, exclaimed, “This racist administrative government with its Superman notions and comic book politics. We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people.”8 Seale also challenged Judge Julius Hoffman during the trial by declaring, “Black people ain’t supposed to have a mind? That’s what you think. We got a body and a mind. I wonder, did you lose yours in the Superman syndrome comic book stories?”9 In his 1970 book entitled Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, Seale also applied the term “Superman” to an FBI agent during an August 19, 1969, confrontation with Seale in Oakland: “He looked at me and just grinned. He really thought he was Superman. You can just look at a cat and see how he’s psychologically goofed up with Superman notions, so brainwashed that he thinks he’s defending the so-called ‘free world.’”10 Similarly, the Black Power poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, creator of the now-famous Black Power anthem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” in 1970, also later released a song entitled “Ain’t No Such Thing as Superman.”11 From Seale and Heron’s rejection of the concept of “Superman” and US comic book culture, it is apparent that within the different camps of the Black Power movement the category of “superhero” represented yet another mythic symbol of exclusively White superpower and was therefore worthy of critical deconstruction.

By the mid-1960s, it had become increasingly difficult for Marvel to neglect the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most powerful forces within the contemporary American landscape, and, continuing in its tradition of embodying current symbols of social power in human form, Marvel introduced the Black Panther in 1966. Prior to the Black Panther’s premiere, Timely Comics (Marvel’s name before May 1963) had already tested the waters of race relations by introducing its first and decidedly non-super African American character in the early 1940s in its World War II title Young Allies. Named Whitewash, the character appeared in blackface and zootsuit and spent a preponderance of his time tied up. Omar Bilal, curator of the online Museum of Black Superheroes, has described Whitewash as “[c]reated for comic effect only, Whitewash was portrayed as a helpless buffoon whose only purpose was to provide laughs as he fell into one dire situation after another.”12 Around the same time, early comics innovator Will Eisner also introduced Ebony as the Spirit’s sidekick in Eisner’s popular series. Like Whitewash, Ebony appeared in blackface, possessed no powers of his own, and served largely as typical Black minstrel-style relief for the Spirit’s more sober heroics.

With such dubious forerunners in the medium, it is perhaps fortunate that mainstream comics were largely devoid of Black characters after Ebony and Whitewash—that is, until 1963 when Marvel introduced its first “positive” Black character, Gabe Jones. Appearing in Lee and Kirby’s World War II war comic Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, which Marvel rebelliously billed as “The War Mag for People Who Hate War Mags,” Jones was a Black soldier in the otherwise all-White squad led by commando-extraordinaire Nick Fury. Though Jones initially did not play a major role in the series, his “Blackness” was an important point for Marvel. When the company in charge of color separation inadvertently assumed Jones was White and colored him pink in the first issue, Lee dispatched a very detailed memo making it clear that Gabe Jones was in fact a Black soldier.13

Perhaps even more significant, considering Gabe Jones’ limited visibility, was the gradual inclusion of Black citizens in the backgrounds of various Marvel street scenes. Wright has noted that “random black bystanders, college students, and policemen” can be seen for the first time in the 1965 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man.14 While such acknowledgements of ethnic diversity were long in coming to the comics industry, they were nonetheless among the first mass media presentations that included African Americans as regular members of society. Such representations took a radical leap when Marvel introduced its first Black superhero, the Black Panther.

Though Marvel has hyped the Black Panther’s arrival as a “revolutionary event,” the upheaval seems to have gone largely unnoticed by everyone except comics readers at the time. A survey of the most popular publications which explicitly targeted an African American audience and were in print during 1966 and 1967, including the Negro Digest, the Liberator, Freedomways, Negro Heritage, Ebony, and the Chicago Daily Defender, reveals that the debut of America’s first Black superhero was ignored all of the African American community’s major publications. The identically named The Black Panther, the official publication of the Black Panther Party first released on April 25, 1967, never once mentioned the new Marvel character. Even more surprisingly, four months after the Black Panther’s debut, Ebony ran an eightpage article by Ponchitta Pierce, “What’s Not Funny about the Funnies: Bias Bans Negros from Popular Comics,” in which the author investigated the conspicuous absence of Black characters in daily comic strips.15 Though also oblivious to the recent introduction of Marvel’s Black Panther, Pierce’s Ebony article underscores the degree to which Marvel’s creation of the character was an unquestionably bold move. As Pierce explained, comics printed during the Civil Rights movement ceased to include Black characters for fear of either inadvertently offending African Americans readers who might consider the characters derogatory or, conversely, offending White readers who might be opposed to overly positive representations of Blacks: “‘Comic characters are a white man’s land,’ admits Alfred Andriola, artist and co-creator of Kerry Drake, ‘Let’s face it. You can’t deal with race or color in comics. A colored maid or porter brings on a flood of letters. And if we show the Negro as a hero we get angry letters from the South.’”16

Charles Hardy has similarly noted in “A Brief History of Ethnicity in Comics” that In 1961 when “On Stage” featured a Black music coach, four papers immediately canceled the strip. The inclusion by creator Dale Messick in 1965 of a Black girl in “Brenda Starr” caused its temporary removal from circulation, in order not to offend readers in the Southern states. In 1970 when Lieutenant Flap joined the gang at Camp Swampee, “Beetle Bailey” was dropped not only by a number of Southern papers but also, for a short while, by Stars and Stripes! 17

According to Jim Shooter, longtime comic book artist and editor-in-chief of Marvel from 1978 to 1987, a reluctance to include Black heroes was not limited to newspaper comic strips but also extended to comic book producers as well. Shooter recalls that during his employment at DC Comics prior to his move to Marvel, “I had tried to introduce a black Legion of Super-Heroes character in 1966. Mort Weisinger, my editor, rejected the idea. He said that with a black character in it, the book ‘wouldn’t sell in the South,’ and that Southern distributors would boycott DC comics.”18