
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Diversity in Comics: TV Adaptations - Room 222

Friday, February 24, 2012
Diversity in Comics: TV Adaptations - I Spy

(Above) on p.8 the two spies are lured into a trap, which results in Kelly being captured. On p.18 Scotty (Cosby) sets off in search of his buddy, Kelly (Culp), in the streets of Hong Kong, but finds himself out of his environment then in a spot of bother.
This wasn't Cosby's only contribution to comics (here as the character upon whom this series is based). Stay tuned for more Cosby and comics in future posts on Out of This World.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Diversity in Comics: TV Adaptations - Star Trek

(Above) on p.10 of "The Perfect Dream" Uhura and Kirk begin to wonder about the mechanisms underlying this apparently perfect world. On p.15 (below) Uhura speaks out against the abominable extermination policies that maintain the 'perfection' of the population on this planet.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Diversity in Comics: Little Audrey's African American friends

Sunday, February 19, 2012
Nurse Romance Stories: Teen-Age Romances 2 - "I Dared to Kiss and Tell"

Saturday, February 18, 2012
Fawcett's Negro Romance 2: "Love's Decoy"

Of interest in this particular story is the setting - the Cafe Ebonia, a segregated, African American night club, and its line of African American chorus girls. Otherwise this is standard romance comic material, with a crooked night club owner trying to use the female protagonist to destroy the undercover cop, who ends up being the leading lady's love interest. It's great stuff! The nightclub owner typically (for this kind of story, and in some real life situations) takes multiple advantages of the young girl trying to make it in showbiz, including attempting some unsolicited sexual advances that she has to fend off.
For the sake of (almost) completeness, there's a two page text story in the comic that Out of This World is pleased to post below. The entire comic (minus of course the cover) has been submitted to the Digital Comic Museum and can be accessed here if you want to download the cbr file.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Fawcett's Negro Romance 2: "Forever Yours"

There are no white people in the story (or in the whole comic) and so we get a glimpse of the other half of segregated America in the early 1950s. There is nothing in the way of negative stereotyping of African Americans here - the characters in the story are handsome, well-dressed, obviously have a decent income, etc. So the story simply acknowledges and accepts segregation as an existing condition, and does not interrogate or analyze it. Inasmuch as the characters are not depicted as in any way inferior to whites, it could be argued that it is demonstrative of the separate but equal ideal of some pro-segregationists. But the mere fact that Fawcett printed a comic specifically for a black audience (and partly drawn by a black artist) indicates that Negro Romance is really acknowledging the existence of the African American community, who are absent in the vast majority of other comic books. Had African American women of the early 50s been 'looking for a face like theirs', as did Prof William H. Foster III when he read comic books in the 1960s, they would have found what they were looking for in Negro Romance. But clearly the title was not a commercial success, as it folded after issue 3. Rare beyond belief, Negro Romance is nevertheless a true milestone in comic book history. It is actually the first title published by a mainstream comic book company featuring only black characters, in addition to being one of the few comics that featured African Americans in non-stereotyped, non-demeaning imagery from the middle decades of the twentieth century.
One thing I noticed as I continued to scan the book was the absence of ads. If there had been any, they would have to have been on the cover (back and inside), which alas I don't have. I'll have to check to see if that was the standard layout for Fawcett romance comics from that time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)