My wife was chatting with a co-worker the other day, and mentioned in passing the town I grew up in. The co-worker stopped her to verify she heard the name right. It turns out that her son had visited the town on a couple occasions as a member of the high school band. Kind of a "battle of the bands" thing, I gather.

Besides the serendipity of my growing up there and being a member of the band myself once upon a time, what stood out in the conversation was that the co-worker recalled the name vividly mostly because the locker room her son's band was given to use had been graffitied with a number of racial epithets in preparation for the mostly Black band. This was not decades ago, mind you; her boy just turned nineteen. Furthermore, when the issue was brought to the attention of school officials, the response was essentially, "Get over it."

This is the town I grew up in.

Obviously, I still know people who live there. And I know people who used to live there and still live nearby. I've tried talking to some of them about racial issues, largely to see how far away from the local norm I was in my attitudes. Most of them said racism and bigotry were bad things, but had little to no first-hand experience with it personally. (The area is still predominantly white, not surprisingly.) One woman did relay the story of another friend of hers who was in a mixed-race marriage, and his parents cut ties with him entirely. Slammed the door on his face, and years later still refuse to talk to him. Another person expressed what struck me as pretty bigoted comments, and when I confronted him about it, he literally said that he wasn't bigoted, he was just relying on negative stereotypes because he didn't really know the individual in question. (Which, to be 1000% clear, is literally what bigotry is.)

I was fortunate that I was able to leave behind this town of closed-minded people when I turned 18.

I didn't choose to leave the town because of racism or bigotry. At the time, it was largely a non-issue because the town's population was 99.9% white. But I did leave because of the overall mindset that tends to go along with bigotry. That anything different than the majority is to be reviled and ridiculed. That there's no place for anything beyond what's most common.

I credit comics for allowing me to appreciate diversity. I've written before about how New Mutants #45 contained a powerful message of inclusion for me, but it was more than that single issue. The Fantastic Four would regularly encounter alien races that they treated with respect, and racial minorities like Black Panther and Wyatt Wingfoot regularly wove their way through the stories as well. Even just the basic set-up of a non-traditional family unit showed me that "family" didn't have to be Mom, Dad and 2.5 kids.

There were undoubtedly other comics that influenced this line of thinking as well. I had the Green Lantern issues that introduced John Stewart, and I caught bits of the story where Tony Stark was replaced by Jim Rhodes as Iron Man. Certainly, all of that contributed. Especially with having read them as far back as I can remember, probably well before I could actually read the words on the page.

Was it just comics? No. I'm sure the likes of Seasame Street and The Cosby Show have their place. But I know those shows were also watched by some of the same people who continue to profess bigoted ideas. (Or, at least they did the last time I talked to them.)

I suspect comics had more to do with opening the door to the possibility of new ideas. It opened enough for me to see how truly small and petty the town was, and helped convince me to look towards broader intellectual and emotional horizons. The school I went to was considerably more cosmopolitan, boasting a student body roughly four times what the entire population of my hometown was. And that's where I found a need to be more receptive to new cultures and ideas, where I regularly encountered people of different races and sexual orientations.

I don't know that comics writ large taught me to be discard the bigotry that surrounded me growing up, but the specific comics I read taught me about understanding, and by leaving to go to a larger, more diverse community, I was able to find direct and immediate applications of that understanding. I'm sure that not everyone who read the comics I did took that same path, and I'm sure that not everyone who has a similar understanding followed the same path. But I think it does speak to the power of comics (or, for that matter, any media about which someone is deeply invested) to help create a more progressive and accepting society.

This one is a little curious to me. It's an article from a 1917 issue of Cartoons Magazine in which Summerfield Baldwin tries to relay Herriman's brilliance to readers. "My sole purpose," he writes, "has been to bring him to the attention of thinking people as a phase of American art well worth thinking about..." As such, the article does not seem to be very well-researched, nor does Baldwin seem to have had any direct contact with Herriman himself. Which is fine, but the curious part are the apparently original Krazy and Ignatz drawings that were "Drawn for Cartoons Magazine" by Herriman himself. So someone at the magazine seems to have had some contact with him, but no one seems to have asked him even the most basic questions. ("There is a man named Herriman. All that I know of him is that he signs his name in curious letters to the most charming column of comics pictures...")

In any event, it's a charming, little piece by itself and is perhaps the earliest indication I've seen of someone elevating comics to the level of high art. The scans are courtesy of Animation Resources.

Though I've mentioned Ben Passmore and some of his work on this blog more than a couple times, in looking back, I don't appear to have formally reviewed any of it. With his latest book, Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance, I'm going change that.

The book starts with Ben scrolling through news of Philando Castile's murder and the ensuing protests. When his father gets home and asks if Ben's going to go out to join them, Ben declines and rattles off a string of excuses. After failing to convince Ben with arguments, Ben's father clocks him into the past to visit many significant events of Black resistance throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. But probably not the ones you expect. The ones that get repeated most often.... Rosa Parks and Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the formation of the Black Panther Party... They all get mentioned but that's not the focus. Ben meets the likes of Robert Charles, Imari Obadele, Herman Ferguson, Audly Moore, Assata Shakur... Probably the most widely-known event depicted is probably the MOVE bombing (which I daresay most of you are unfamiliar with -- go look it up). Emmett Till's funeral is also shown, but mostly only as an excuse to speak to several of the attendees in one place -- we don't even learn it's Till's funeral until the last panel of the scene. (Though if you're familiar at all, you probably guessed the location much earlier.)

Passmore is clearly coming at this with two objectives. First, he's going out of his way to highlight all the people and events that are generally not taught. As he notes towards the end, "The white history of Black liberation di more than lie about us, it confused our actual story. Who was actually essential in our struggle for liberation -- was it the ones white history picked?" Passmore brings those often-supressed names to the fore.

His second objective is to be objective. He doesn't present anyone as a saint. Everyone here is a real person, with both aspirations and limitations. He presents the good and the bad; one of the last figures he highlights is Micah Xavier Johnson. Passmore uses that to showcase some of the confused and often-conflicting messaging people are told about Black resistance.

And what is Black resistance? As Passmore says, "It's about life, and loving it so much you want to fight for it. Your life is worth more than getting blown up by a bomb the police said was just a phone."

I've noted before that I learned the history books were lying to me back in eighth grade, and I've spent much of my life since high school un-learning all the bullshit I was taught and catching up on all the things that were skipped over. It sounds like Passmore learned a similar lesson in school and has spent much of his adult life expressly studying Black history in America. That shows through very clearly here, as do his storytelling abilities. He lays out everything in a relatively easy-to-understand manner ("relatively" because he tackles some really complex characters and events) and the book is packed with information. Particularly if you think "Black resistance" starts and ends with Huey P. Newton.

I highly recommend this to everyone, and I'll be upset if this doesn't win him another Eisner Award this year. The book came out back in October so it's very eligible. It was published by Pantheon Books and should be available through your favorite bookshop. It retails for $22.00 US.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: The Soldier's Tale
https://ift.tt/2L98dgq

Kleefeld on Comics: Ron Wilson Appreciation Post
https://ift.tt/V2j3iXw

Kleefeld on Comics: Still No Lobo Reprints
https://ift.tt/jm4RSiF

Kleefeld on Comics: Speed Jaxon
https://ift.tt/93T0K26

Kleefeld on Comics: Joe and Asbestos
https://ift.tt/RtVJdnT

There are, of course, any number of instances in the anals of comic history where something was written or drawn that would be considered offensive today. Joe & Asbestos is one such strip, and it absolutely astounds me that it ran up until 1971! (You'll see why in a moment.)

Ken Kling created a strip called Joe Quince in the early 1920s. (I've seen start dates of 1923, '24 and '25.) The title character was on the hunt for a get-rich-quick scheme, and he frequently found out that there were no shortcuts. Despite that, however, he returned to gambling on horse races repeatedly, eventually befriending a stable hand known only as Asbestos. Kling evidently knew little about horse racing, though, and pulled horse names from actual races. And although Quince usually lost in the strip, the horses he bet on frequently won in the real world. Readers in the Baltimore area (the strip was never very widely distributed) started using it as a guide, believing Kling had some kind of inside information.

The Asbestos character initially became somewhat popular, and Kling changed the name of the strip to Joe & Asbestos. However, some papers continued calling it Joe Quince through 1926. Of course, the obvious problem in the strip is that Asbestos is drawn in blackface and is given stereotypically bad traits. Fortunately, Kling decided that the strip had run its course and he quit working on it in 1926, switching over to an unrelated strip called Windy Riley.(Although he does continue using blackface caricatures there as well.) Unfortunately, there was still plenty of reader interest and even demand for Joe & Asbestos so Kling returned to that title in 1932.

Kling seemed to broaden the strip's focus somewhat, although always kept horse racing as general theme. And sadly, he also kept the bad caricature that was Asbestos largely unchanged as well. Right up until his death in 1970. (That's based on the reading I've found. I haven't actually been able to find an instance of the strip after around 1945.) That this was largely left alone for so long seems to be primarily due to a very low syndication towards the end. In fact, it was only running in one paper for its last several years: The New York Daily News for most of those last years and then a brief run in The New York Mirror at the very end. Not to mention the niche focus of the strip meant a lot of people never bothered with it, even if it was in their paper.

It seems like a strange throwback. A strip so rooted in its time/place of origin that it never could outgrow that, but still managed to continue on despite that. If you look at other strips that started around the same time -- Gasoline Alley, Blondie, etc -- they made changes to reflect the society around them. Perhaps not as quickly as some readers would like (leading to complaints of retreading the same, tired jokes over and over again) but they changed nonetheless. That Joe & Asbestos didn't... honestly, I'm not sure what to make of that.

Speed Jaxon was a WWII-era comic strip by Jay Jackson (sometimes under the pseudonym Pol Curi) that ran in some African-American newspapers like the Chicago Defender. Conceptually, they were kind of similar to Buz Sawyer with a focus on wartime adventures, with the notable exception being that the titular hero was Black.

The other significant difference was that Jackson regularly wove in a message of inclusion and equality. In the examples below (all of which are slightly modified scans taken from the Billy Ireland Museum) you can see a number of examples where white American officers express very negative attitudes towards Speed which, in turn, he repsonds to with a mixture of resignation and quiet strength. He repeatedly tolerates the poor behavior, and then tries to prove how wrong people are about Blacks by just being a better hero than the white soldiers.

Of course, just being a better hero is a whole lifetime of issues to unpack. To those who've had to deal with it at all, the notion of having to do twice as much 200% better than their white counterparts in order to be given half as much is a refrain they've had to live their whole lives with. From what I've seen/read of the strip, though, Jackson himself didn't address that other than it was a simple matter of fact. I can only guess that in the 1940s, Jackson didn't feel he could hope for a loftier victory than just even having the chance to be treated as an equal. The dialogue is often a bit ham-fisted, but only in the same way many comic strips of the time were.

But there's another element at play here which seems to be handled with much greater subtlety. Speed's girlfriend in the initial installments was a Black schoolteacher named Carmen Brooks. I don't know what happened to her, but by the time we get to the sequences below, he's found a new love interest in Minta Washington. I can't find an instance where her actual heritage is expressly named (other than she's not Italian) but she's clearly identified as a European blonde. So she's not an American, but still decidedly pretty white. And she's seen here first holding hands (in the fifth piece I reproduce below) and then kissing Speed (in the eighth)! And in neither instance is any particular attention drawn to it; it's just two people interacting somewhat romantically.

Now, that Minta isn't American probably assuaged some possible concerns about showing an interracial couple (not to mention the fact that the strip only appeared in African-American newspapers) but Jackson still threw it out there as a completely normal and casual thing. In 1943, nearly a quarter century before Loving v. Virginia. Amazingly progressive, and extremely deftly handled, I think.

Maybe some of Jackson's overt messaging was a little over-the-top, but I wonder if that was done deliberately to slip these other elements in more surreptitiously. Distract readers with an obvious issue, and slide another one past them while they're complaining about the first. Maybe? I don't know. Frankly, I can't find hardly anything written about Jay Jackson, and even less on Speed Jaxon. I've only been able to find about 30 strips online, and can't even pin down when it first started or stopped. Which is a shame because Jackson seemed to know what he was doing, and creating an entertaining and progressive comic strips besides!

I've talked before about Dell's Lobo from 1966, and how it featured the first Black character who had the comic named after him. In that previous post, I included scans of the first issue and linked to where you could find scans of the second. So it's available to be read.

But I'm wondering... why hasn't it ever been reprinted? I mean, this is a significant comic -- why hasn't it been reprinted? Is it just a legal issue surrounding who owns the rights? Unlike many of Dell's comics, Lobo featured an original unlicensed character and there's no copyright notice to work with, so the question of who legally has the rights to the story seems unclear. When I posted about this several years back, Britt Reid suggested that it probably is in public domain.

My guess is that no one has deemed that the expense of even just confirming the rights would be made up for by the reprint sales that might be generated. Which means that either A) we'll have to wait another half century to see it published again, or B) someone will gamble that whoever the copyright holder actually is won't take any legal action if it's published without their permission. I daresay the latter is a distinct possibility; I've seen similar stories reprinted in this manner.

It seems like an important issue that should be celebrated more than it is. But I suspect people downplay its sale-ability precisely because of the main character's skin color. And they'll claim it's not racist because it's just that sales wouldn't be very good, not realizing that the the biases that led them to that conclusion stem precisely from a system that discourages readers from seeing Black protagonists as worthwhile.

Racism in comics isn't always about whether Black characters are drawn into a comic enough. It's an entire culture (well, sub-culture, really) that has subtly, but unilaterally, placed more importance on Caucasian heroes than heroes of color. It's not accusing any single person of themselves being racist, but of an industry that, on the whole, has discouraged, overtly and covertly, the use of Black characters in heroic roles. And now that you're aware of that, and are willing/able to work against it...

Where's my Lobo reprints?