Arguably, the first step on the path to the dominance now enjoyed by the
Black Panther was taken way back in 1947.
As mentioned last time, we'll be focusing on
John Terrell's comic book detective
Ace Harlem this time out. Ace didn't star in his own title, but something perhaps even more amazing for the time. He headlined an
All Negro Comics title created by and for the negro audience of the day:
It's fairly astounding that this existed in 1940s USA, and no surprise at all that it came from an independent publisher with a vision. We'll let Orrin C. Evans explain that vision in his own words:
A couple of sentences might perhaps seem a bit pompous or self-congratulatory, but the man was right in stating the historic significance of this comic. Rather than inflated self promotion, he seems aware of the long view and i find myself curious to learn more about the careers of Evans, Terrell, and the rest of the crew.
Lion Man is certainly closer to the Black Panther, though not the Cüneyt Arkın type character that he sounds like. But it's Ace Harlem who's the main hero of the book with the lead slot and a 50% greater page count. That's still just 15 pages, so his story is short enough to present here uncut:
Sadly, there was no second issue. Though the book seemed to have sold well where available, those locations were few and limited to primarily minority neighborhoods. Once again, our villain Distribution steps on early efforts and crushes them underfoot.
As noted in Mr. Evans' introduction, the contents of All Negro Comics were varied and fairly wide ranging for the limited pages available in a single issue. It's also worth noting that all artists were credited by their signatures on the work, not exactly a standard practice at that point -
It's definitely worth returning to this oddly unique comic to look closer at the other features. But, for today, we've reached the beginning of our path, and so we come to our end of this series. It's been a long journey, and the struggle continues, but looking back we can stop a moment to appreciate how far we've come - and the effort of those cut the trail, allowing others to follow in their path.
As we can see from looking back, progress moves forward and back again, and it'll be a long while yet before we reach a point that something like a black hero is no longer noteworthy. Even the front runners get dragged back down into bad stereotype and the work must begin again to lift them back up.
(Example - look at modern versions of Luke Cage in the comics. He's gone from a man who refused to cuss on the principle that it's low street thing that racists expect from him and he wanted to be better than that, to the victim of a writer who can only show characterization as a black man by filling his speech with curses. To be fair, he can't write any other character types beyond the basic wise-ass joker, so it's probably not conscious
racism. Still comes across terribly racist and makes me cringe when i see him in recent years.)
Sometimes i have visions of an angry Zombie Dwayne rampaging through the offices of the big two...
Ah, well. We carry on, eh?
all pages & art from All Negro Comics (1947)
