The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1937: Papercutz Free Comic Book Day #11, 2017

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I'm not entirely certain how this comic found its way into my collection. Every now and again I find stacks of FCBD comics in our free lending libraries around Calgary. I usually take one or two, and I think that must be the origin of this piece.

Today's featured creator is cover and interior artist Alitha Martinez, one of the few Black women I could find represented in my collection. I read Jada Pinkett's Menace for my last look at Black creators, and I'm sure there must be more Black women in the industry, but the sad fact of the matter is that, as with most things in Western society, there is a systemic bias against POC, and Black women often feel the brunt of their dually-oppressed existence.

The Barbie stories in this comic are parts of larger graphic novels from Papercutz (who I just found out is an imprint of NBM, a really great publisher of European comics and of excellent erotica). What I do like about the comic is that it eschews the traditional Barbie look for something a little more relatable to the people who are going to be reading the comic. The first story, the one illustrated by Ms. Martinez, also features a prominent Black character as Barbie's more pragmatic foil. Of late, I wonder who it is that decides on the skin colours of characters in comics. I wondered about this a few days back with The Atom special, and the fact that literally every character, foreground, background, or otherwise, was white in a comic illustrated by a Black man. Is it the writer who decides? Or is the character description relatively vague and the artist decides? Or there's no guide, so the colorist decides? I have to believe that with newer comics like this Barbie one, there is a concerted effort to include diverse representation. The lack of it in older comics is simply a very blatant example of the racism that permeates not only comics, but culture.

Ms. Martinez's career in comics is relatively brief, compared with some of the other creators I've looked at, but she's made a mark in some really important comics, some of which I own and had no idea she was involved with. From art assists on the Christopher Priest-helmed Black Panther to work on the new(ish) line of Archie comics, she appears to be climbing through the ranks quite agilely, a feat we should be thoroughly impressed with given the oppressions with which she has likely had to deal. One of my favourite pieces of her work is this cover for Betty and Veronica #264. Just beautiful.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've only read one issue of the Priest Black Panther for the project, and here it is, with Ms. Martinez's art on the backgrounds.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 787: Black Panther #1, November 1998

I'll fully admit that leaving Black Panther to be the last comic I read in my couple of weeks highlighting Black creators is purely a case of leaving the best, in my opinion, for last. I love this run of comics, even though I don't actually have them all. When Marvel Knights premiered in the late 90s, I'd already been reading Quantum and Woody for a bit, so Christopher Priest's use of his ridiculously (but in a good way) post-modern storytelling style wasn't a shock, but I certainly wasn't sure how it was going to translate to mainstream superhero comics. I was pleasantly surprised, as I think many were. If you haven't guessed already, Mr. Priest is my featured creator today. And, as I've noted before, I think that his run on Black Panther is one of the most under-rated superhero comics of all time. It's funny, it's remarkably smart, it's beautiful to look at, and it tells a story in a way that, barring Q&W, I'd never seen before in comics.

Our narrator is Everett K. Ross, described in the editorial at the back as "king of all white-boys." He's a government agent assigned to liase with T'Challa while he's in the United States investigating the death of a child in connection with a charitable foundation he set up. The first issue is a cacophony of images and little sketches that Ross is telling his boss/girlfriend about losing his pants, hunting a rat with a handgun, and a visit to the Panther's rooms (in a poor neighbourhood in NY - T'Challa refuses to stay somewhere swanky while investigating the death of a poor Black child) by the Devil. Literally.

What one ought to draw from that brief and under-stated description of the first issue is that Mr. Priest is not interested in any kind of white-washing, be it with characters or situations. It's also, or it was in my experience, one of the first comics to actually treat the Panther as a king of a foreign country, and specifically as a king of an African country.

I'm sitting here trying to think of things to say about this comic. Here's the thing: just go and read it. I know there was a remarkable amount of noise over Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze taking the reins of the Panther, but Priest was there with an Black-centric version of the character years and year earlier. In an interview with the New York Daily News, Priest says of his focal character "I realized I could use Ross to bridge the gap between the African culture that the Black Panther mythos is steeped in and the predominantly white readership that Marvel sells to,"and the comic does an amazing and wonderful job of taking that African culture, and the Black culture that the comic comes to be steeped in, and showing the "predominantly white readership" how foolish and biased their views of those cultures are. It's an important comic, in my opinion, and, thankfully, also a really, really good one.

Last thoughts: I've, as is always the case with a themed reading, read some really good comics and some really bad ones over the last couple of weeks. What this little sub-project has definitely done for me is helped me to recognize a small portion of the diversity that has always been a part of the comics, even if it hasn't always been a visible part of the comics. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons I did this.

Onward.

(I should also add that the cover date of this comic is the same as the date my son was born, which makes the comic very special to me.)