Diversity in Comics - ANC#1: Sugarfoot - The Complete Story

With the uploading of a complete scan of All-Negro Comics #1 to the Digital Comics Museum recently, we've got the opportunity to take a critical look at each of the stories contained therein. The main stories are all by different artists, with this one, "Sugarfoot" by someone who just signs himself or herself 'Cravat'. It's a well-written short funny story of 8 pages. Sugarfoot and Snake Oil are a couple of homeless guys on the road, on the look-out for a free meal. There's distinct dialect used in this story, with the dialog written to include slang and pronunciation locating the duo and the family they encounter somewhere in the Southern USA.

The song that Sugarfoot is singing could be a corrupted version of Washboard Sam's "Soap and Water Blues" that was recorded in February 1947 (ANC#1 was published in mid-1947), but those lines aren't found in the lyrics. The closest is "I've got a gal shaped like a frog" so the connection is highly speculative.

The previous page introduces a gag that runs through the rest of the story - Sugarfoot saying that Ample is something or other, and she trying to get across to him that her name is actually Ample. Sugarfoot's line, "Baby, you're really stacked!" suggests that this comic wasn't really intended for children.

The lyrics of Snake Oil's song suggest that it is a customized version of St. Louis Blues. Snake Oil must be pretty good, because Sugarfoot and Ample are really swinging!

The story ends nicely with a reprise of the running gag and the two about to have to dive off the railroad track like they did in the beginning. I like this story for the skillful way it takes us through the various stages in the narrative. To me, the art is more complex than it appears at first glance, and it's very communicative. I have to say that I've really enjoyed reading this story, and the Ace Harlem story featured recently on Out Of This World. It's sad that there was only one issue of All-Negro Comics.

Diversity in Comics - ANC#1: Ace Harlem - The Complete Story

Nearly 3 years ago, Out Of This World featured the extremely rare and equally important All-Negro Comics #1. At that time just a handful of pages were available on the web - low resolution scans and no complete stories. Just recently, however, something almost unbelievable happened. Although collectors pay literally thousands of dollars for this highly sought after gem, a magnanimous soul allowed 300 dpi scans of the entire book to be produced for the Digital Comics Museum, making this important work of sequential art available to the world for enjoyment and study (thanks to Yocitrus): All-Negro Comics #1. The digital version of the full book can be downloaded from the DCM website, but what I've done for this post is to crop, and 'clean' by removing the discoloration due to aging of the paper, John Terrell's Ace Harlem story in its entirety, so we can take a look at it here and discuss. First, the story:

This 15 page detective story sends home the "As ye sow, so shall ye reap!" message of inescapable karma pretty strongly. There are lots of period cultural details - the clothes, the activities of the characters, the language, the streets and buildings, cars, interior and street furniture, hardware such as the cash register, some sub-cultural references. The picture we get of this part of  a 1940s inner city area (Harlem?) is that it is populated exclusively by African Americans - good guys, bad guys, innocent bystanders, victims - everybody, evidencing the way this piece of art reflects the highly segregated nature of society at the time, and lives up to the book's title.

Because so much of the content of this story is period specific, full understanding of what it communicates would necessitate a detailed understanding of the cultural items mentioned above. Take the jukebox and the song that it was playing, for example. "Open the Door, Richard" was a novelty rhythm and blues song first recorded by Jack McVea in 1946. The way jukeboxes were loaded with disks, as well as the mechanism for paying for and selecting a song to play would need to be appreciated. What about zoot suits? The lucky charm found by Ace Harlem would have been attached to the lengthy zoot chain that was a required accessory to the zoot suit - this was a watch chain attached to the belt, dangling at least to below the knee, and then back up into the pocket at the side of the pants. The cultural significance of the zoot suit is a PhD in its own right. The further this and other Golden Age comics recede in time in terms of their origin, the more background knowledge is required with which to interpret them. While the basic plot is relatively easy to discern, the implications of all the details, such as those mentioned above, on the mental picture conjured by reading the story, can be better appreciated when one has some familiarity with the culture of the intended audience.

Period popular culture, particularly that of the 20th Century, an era of extremely rapid innovation and change, provides an incredibly valuable resource for analysis of this fascinating time. But African Americans are poorly represented in some areas of popular culture of that period, with items created by African Americans particularly scarce. In the case of comic books, ANC#1 is unique - the only comic out of the thousands of different books that were produced in the first decade of modern comic books' existence, that was written, drawn, and published by African Americans. Few seem to have survived, making the contribution of these scans to the Digital Comics Museum vastly important in terms of allowing access to this significant rarity.

Minorities in Comics in a Segregated America: All-Negro Comics 1

 

Prior to the integration of African American characters into comic book universes in the 1960s, African Americans rarely appeared in American comic books. When they did, it was usually in the form of a stereotyped caricature, examples being Whitewash in the Young Allies (Timely) and Will Eisner's The Spirit's sidekick Ebony White. Otherwise, if you were an archaeologist in the future trying to piece together what was going on in mid-20th century America and all you had as evidence was a pile of comic books, you could be forgiven for concluding that everybody in those days was light-skinned. All-Negro Comics 1 (1947) is itself a segregated comic, kind of a comic book version of FUBU clothes. Its stated intended audience is African American, and it is written, drawn, and published entirely by African Americans. Detailed information on the publisher, Orrin C. Evans, can be found here on Tom Christopher's website. It clearly wasn't a commercial success, and perhaps the 15c cover price had something to do with that. The book is extremely rare (the highest graded copy, a 7.5, sold at auction on March 13, 2009, for $10,600) and I don't own a copy (!), although I wish I did. The scan that's 'out there' is incomplete but at least offers a glimpse of this important comic. A more detailed description of the contents is located on Scott Shaw's Oddball Comics website: http://www.oddballcomics.com/article.php?story=2007-02-26 which is where the scans I have appear to have come from.

There are four strips within the book. Ace Harlem is a detective story, and I'll include a few pages here. Lion Man and Bubba is kind of an early version of the Black Panther and set in Africa. In fact there's a detectable similarity or two between this strip and Lee and Kirby's Black Panther concept, at least from the few pages I can see. Dew Dillies is kind of a Water Babies fairy story. But I'll start with the single page that is in the scan available, of Sugarfoot and Snakeoil, the page having the potential at least of being part of a romance story. There's also a gorgeous page of Hep Chicks On Parade, kind of like those one page features in romance comics that Jacque Nodell writes about on her Sequential Crush blog. I just wish the interior scans of this book were higher resolution. The male character anticipating a good meal is Sugarfoot.

 

You have to love those 1947 fashions. And here's a few pages from the Ace Harlem story. The first couple show the crime being committed and then Ace Harlem showing up at the crime scene:

The next couple of pages show the crooks who committed the crime sharing their spoils, and then Ace Harlem sleuthing them down:

 

More pages are missing but the end of the story is pretty gruesome:

 

And here's the back cover with a little more visual information about some of the characters in the book.

 

Besides All-Negro Comics 1, there are three issues of Fawcett's Negro Romance in 1950, then a single issue of Charlton's Negro Romances 4 (1955), which I believe reprints the second Fawcett issue. These are all segregated comics, however. It isn't until war comics of the early 1950s and then early 1960s that actual integration begins. Finally I'm adding three pages of the Lion Man story to the post to augment Aaron's feature on the history of black superheroes over on his blog Silver Age Gold. Note the idea of Lion Man being a scientist, the treasures of his people's mountain, and the white guy coming to steal it. Besides being an obvious reference to European imperialism, there's a strong parallel with Lee/Kirby's T'Challa (Black Panther), his land Wakanda, and the valuable mineral Vibranium that the explorer Ulysses Klaw comes in search of (he becomes the villain Klaw), as told in the pages of the now legendary Fantastic Four 52-53 and 56. I haven't read the Black Panther predecessor, Waku, Prince of the Jungle, in Atlas's Jungle Tales of the 1950s, so I don't know if there's a parallel there also. I did come across what appears to be the first solo African American hero in comics beyond ANC#1, and that was the western hero Lobo (Dell, December 1965), so I swiped the image from the Wikipedia page it was on and put it here for reference. Lobo is also covered by Aaron in his series on black heroes in comics.