Black Genius

Chapter 1

Your Best Bet Is All-Negro Comics!

Graphic Novels and Black Culture

Cause I'm standing here scratching in my pants pocket

And I can't find the key.

-Louis Jordan, "Open the Door, Richard"

Kendra and I stand in the cold snow stamping our feet like horses, drilling our soles into the earth. My bunched shoulders are two fists on my back. I am cold, but I am beyond excited. It is February 2018, in Paris's second arrondissement, and we're standing in a line that wraps around the theater block-a racial kaleidoscope of people, all of us in winter coats, puffing our breaths and blowing on our hands in the cold alongside Le Grand Rex's wall. Inside the old-school movie theater, brass railings and wide-mouthed staircases lead to balcony seating. I stare at the red pulpy velvet curtains that shroud the screen. It seems as if no one can simmer down; everyone is buzzing about, laughing and jittering, tossing around energy like real-world vibranium. Truthfully, I'm not sure we can sit down; I don't even really remember sitting down.

By the time the curtains pulled back, Black folks of every hue up in the balcony with us were already clapping, already happy, already chanting:

"Black Pan-ther! Black Pan-ther!"

That night, the theater brimmed with enough energy to power Paris. Every once in a while I'd glance around and see the occasional non-Black person looking around with a mixture of confusion and awe. Maybe they understood being excited, but they didn't get this.

The theater was ours. The entire room felt like Wakanda, our own fabricated escape from everything that waited outside. Even with all its corporate complications, Black Panther was still the type of moment that a lot of us had been waiting a lifetime to see.

I'd just turned forty years old, but staring at that screen as the movie started, the roomful of people shook so hard that the tears balancing at the edges of my eyes fell out. Bewildered with enthusiasm, I simultaneously sat in the present and the past. The young version of me who grew up on comic books would've never dreamt of that moment, even though for years he tried to make his own world, too.

My cousin Sean and I were two teenage comic book-loving Black boys in the '90s whose imaginations could only conjure white superheroes. At least they felt white. Sean's creation was a spandex-clad masked vigilante named Mister X who wore on his full-masked face a top hat that he could toss like Oddjob in Goldfinger. Me? I'd created a nameless hero who had Wolverine's upturned hair embedded with remote technology that allowed him to be controlled. He had pupilless eyes (couldn't draw eyes), armored shoulder pads (why not?), a belt braided with pouches and armed gauntlets around his wrists. In my best drawing of this hero, he stood with one knee propped up on a lab table, one arm jutting across his body at a diagonal. In the background, his creator, a white male scientist, looked up at his invention with a mixture of hope and fear as his hand rested on a lever that would bring the creature to life.

On Saturdays, we'd go to the local comic-book store, Steve's Comic Relief, and then we'd sit in Sean's basement with McDonald's takeout. After reading our latest haul of comic books, we'd get sketchbooks and No. 2 pencils, and doodle heroes and stories that sprang from our heads.

Our favorite superheroes at the time were Spider-Man, Batman, Captain America, Silver Surfer and the X-Men, so of course our brains were stuffed with the cotton-white idea that those heroes were far superior to anyone else. And while Black superheroes also existed at the time-Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Static Shock, Black Lightning and others-they were considered second-rate heroes, not always treated seriously or placed front and center like the ones who "mattered." They might've looked like us, but we weren't looking at them for inspiration the same way we did the white ones, who were the stuff of lunch boxes, video games, T-shirts, posters and Halloween costumes. When we jumped off beds and climbed trees, we weren't Black Panther or Goliath-we were Spider-Man, Wolverine and Batman.

We didn't know that while we were reading these comics, a secret war was happening against Black superheroes and creators. But eventually it became clear to me that when Black people get to write and create stories in the graphic novel and comic book format, everything from the storytelling to the politics and social commentary gets worked into superhero lore in ways that separate these stories and creators from the pack. And what Sean and I didn't know is that when we'd stepped into the comics world, there was already a long, sometimes broken history of Black heroes on and off the page. Still, every time they were given a chance to really shine, Black creators working on Black characters produced undeniably powerful stories with the ability to punch up.


The first couple of panels on the page quickly set the scene. It’s early morning at Pop’s Bar-B-Que when two Black men in dark suits walk in. One walks over to the jukebox and starts to select a song. The other stands before Pop’s lunch counter. Neither addresses him immediately, but before they do, they agree that they’ll knock down the brother in the white apron behind the counter and then smash the place for as much money as possible. But, before getting down to business, the brother at the jukebox in the corner picks a song, and after a moment, Louis Jordan’s voice can be heard plaintively singing “Open the Door, Richard” over the tinny, yellow machine’s speakers. In just a few moments more, the two brothers-sweet-suited in colorful overcoats, their eyes shielded behind sunglasses, collars popped-menacingly move back towards the restaurant’s namesake, and in a flash they wrap his neck in a chain, choking him unconscious.

Black comic book history started with 1947's All-Negro Comics created by Orrin C. Evans, a Black man who was raised by Black middle-class parents in Pennsylvania. After dropping out in the eighth grade, Evans became a journalist covering racial segregation stories. He was sometimes referred to as "the dean of Black reporters" for his work at The Philadelphia Record, where he was one of the only Black journalists writing for a mainstream white publication at the time, as well as at the Black-owned Philadelphia Tribune. At the height of his career in the 1940s, he reported on the duality that Black soldiers faced: fighting for the country on the wartime front lines but returning to face violent racism. Orrin C. Evans believed race relations were gradually going to get better in America.

But his journalism career was making him doubtful. Not enough journalistic coverage stories centered or reflected Black American life, so in 1947 Evans created All-Negro Comics #1, a comic anthology of Black stories that Evans hoped would reach Black audiences more than the white stories, heroes and adventures that were the medium's sole focus. All-Negro Comics contains eight different Black genre stories-everything from detective tales to jungle adventures. He worked with an all-Black team, bringing together former Philadelphia Record colleagues like Bill Driscoll and Harry T. Saylor as writers, and also recruited Black pencilers and colorists. Evans's vision for All-Negro Comics was to create something that possessed "high moral and educational standards."

It's this vision that makes him a genius; he recognized early on that a medium like comic books could be a vessel for carrying messages to Black people at a time when very little pop culture spoke to us with any sort of dignity or imagination. On the opening editorial page of the comic, Evans states that All-Negro Comics is "another milestone in the splendid history of Negro journalism" that will "give Negro artists an opportunity gainfully to use their talents, but it will glorify Negro historical achievements." All-Negro Comics was published a mere six years before Amos 'n' Andy finally ended and almost a decade before Gone with the Wind appeared in theaters. Depictions of Black Americans still lagged behind those of white Americans. All-Negro Comics was Evans's attempt to start pushing back.

The first story in All-Negro Comics, "Ace Harlem," is billed as an ode to "the outstanding contributions of thousands of fearless, intelligent Negro police officers engaged in a constant fight against crime throughout the United States." It features a Black Dick Tracy analogue who fights crime in the hood. "Ace" opens with "Open the Door, Richard" playing from a local bar's jukebox as two Black hoodlums come in and shake down the Black owner, and then follows them before eventually introducing Ace, who's on the case to track down them down and put an end to their potential crime spree.

All-Negro wasn't just a series of hard-boiled detective tales, though. "Dew Dillies" is an adventure in nature that follows Bubbles and Bibber, two young pixie-like Black children. "Dillies" lets them frolic irreverently and innocently in this setting, as an antidote to the mainstream, mean-spirited impish "pickaninny" depictions of Black children. Bubbles and Bibber get into innocuous, inconsequential trouble like eating a clam and musing about cooking a nearby sitting duck they spot in a pond.

Instead of being portrayed as buzzing worker bees or lazy ingrates, the characters are fantastical: Bibber has wings and Bubbles the lower body of a mermaid. Bubbles and Bibber are wide-eyed, in contrast to the impish drawings that white people used. Bubbles and Bibber aren't stealing farmer's animals and crops or from kitchen tables. They aren't grinning, watermelon-devouring sprites or roving with a pack of wild-haired "savages." They're happy, and "Dillies" is about the happiness and imagination that all Black children should have.

Perhaps the most curious chapter of All-Negro, though, is "Lion Man," the story of an "American-born, college educated . . . young scientist" who is dispatched by the United Nations to the "Magic Mountain" on the African Gold Coast. Lion Man is an international watchman whose mission is to prevent any foreign poachers from stealing the large deposits of uranium located there. In this story the poachers are two white men: the mad scientist Dr. Sangro and his jungle navigator named Brosser, who are shown skulking in the African jungle, making their way to a potential uranium deposit.

Lion Man isn't alone, though. He's got a sidekick named Bubba, a stereotypical African native written to be mischievous and accident-prone, who speaks in broken English. Lion Man possesses keen senses and superior strength, and together, Bubba and Lion Man are ultimately able to thwart Dr. Sangro and Brosser's attempt to steal the uranium, despite Bubba's constant bumbling.

As an African protector of a precious resource who is vigilant against interlopers, All-Negro's Lion Man bears striking similarities to a more well-known Black African superhero, despite predating him by almost twenty years. Unfortunately, Lion Man and the rest of All-Negro Comics' characters would never appear again; not long after its debut, many of the comic's sponsors and distributors would disappear, and Evans would step back from trying to get another issue out.

Part of All-Negro's challenge was that during the same period, bigger, established publishers began creating Black-themed comic book content. Fawcett Comics and Parents magazine released their own Black titles, including Negro Romance and comic book bios on Black athletes like Jackie Robinson and Joe Lewis. As several comic book historians have pointed out, Evans and All-Negro were fighting an uphill battle-while they didn't dominate the market on Black content, they were the only player in the market that was all Black in distribution, creation and content. Evans's vision was the right call, but it's likely that All-Negro had too many supervillains to beat at once: Racial, cultural, financial and political industry power dynamics were too formidable. For all their page power, neither Lion Man nor Ace could topple the real-world forces stacked against them. It would be almost twenty years before America would get its first proper Black superhero when Black Panther was created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

It obviously didn't stop with Black Panther. The '70s and '80s saw a sort of Black superhero boom; we started appearing in Uncanny X-Men, Superman, Justice League of America, Captain America and Teen Titans in attempts to boost sales, appeal to more readers and better reflect the times. You probably know a lot of these characters by now thanks to their popularity and adoption into movies and cartoons, but it's also wild to think that many-Luke Cage, Storm and Bishop of the X-Men, Captain America's partner the Falcon and Black Lightning-were all created by white or non-Black creators.

Evans probably would've been happy with a lot of these Black characters; many of them came from the sort of dignified backgrounds and occupations that I suspect he wanted to showcase in the long term through All-Negro. Characters like Sam Wilson (Captain America's the Falcon), James Rhodes (Iron Man's War Machine) and John Stewart (Green Lantern) were former military men. Jefferson Pierce (Black Lightning) was an urban high school principal, while Vic Stone (Teen Titans' Cyborg) was a straight-A student and star football player. These guys were cape-on, cape-off heroes with admirable, clear, straight-line morals and attitudes that made them appear more palatable to the largely white male audience comic book publishers were catering to.

You felt that, too. Comics were already a geek habit in most people's eyes, and specifically a white boy one at that. When I started reading them in the '80s because my dad would have heaps of weekly comic book issues sitting on his coffee table with the mail, I'd scoop them up and read them in my bedroom or the back of his car but never quite felt comfortable telling or showing other kids around me that I was into them. I started wanting to draw superhero characters in part because my middle school classmate Max would sit in social studies class sketching them on notebook paper or in drawing pads. I mimicked both his style and his choices-heroic and stoic Captain America, Silver Surfer, Colossus and Spider-Man-which meant I was immersed in the world of white superheroes and didn't even consider drawing any of the Black ones. Add to this bedsheets, cartoons and Halloween costumes, and it became hard, especially as an already-geeky, bookish Black kid in mostly white classes, to show up and show out as a comic book fan.

Evans would've been overjoyed to know Dwayne McDuffie and Christopher Priest, two Black comic-writing geniuses who managed to turn the industry and some of its biggest characters inside out. I loved reading these guys when I was growing up even though I wasn't paying attention to who was writing comics at the time. But I remember some of their biggest moves in comics. McDuffie's Damage Control wasn't the kind of comic I'd normally read-it was a satirical comic book series about heroes like Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers and other Marvel heroes having to deal with a company responsible for cleaning up the messes they created fighting villains in NYC. You'd pick up an issue of Damage Control and find yourself reading scenes where Captain America has to talk billing prices with a construction foreman, or where She-Hulk found herself in the middle of breaking up union fights.