Friday Female Comics Creator, IBARW Edition: Jackie Ormes

Reposted from my now-defunct comics blog.

The Ormes Society is a great resource for learning about black female comics creators. In fact, they have a recent two part series about black women in comics, with tons of info and links: part one, part two.

The organization is named after Jackie Ormes, the first African-American female cartoonist.

Years before Tarpé Mills created Miss Fury, Jackie Ormes was modeling her stylish and beautiful characters after herself, and defying stereotypes about black women while she did it.

In the United States at midcentury—a time of few opportunities for women in general and even fewer for African American women—Jackie Ormes (1911-85) blazed a trail as a popular cartoonist with the major black newspapers of the day…
Ormes’s cartoon characters (including Torchy Brown, Candy, Patty-Jo, and Ginger) delighted readers of newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender and spawned other products, including an elegant black doll with a stylish wardrobe and “Torchy Togs” paper dolls in the funny papers. Ormes was a member of Chicago’s black elite, with a social circle that included the leading political figures and entertainers of the day. Her politics, which fell decidedly to the left and were apparent to even a casual reader of her cartoons and comic strips, eventually led to her investigation by the FBI during the McCarthy era.
— from the description of Nancy Goldstein’s biography of Ormes

 

Torchy was successful as a comic and as a fashion plate, with a series of paper dolls printed in the newspapers. But she didn’t just stand around looking fashionable. She also tackled issues like racism, at a time when segregation was still law.

September 4, 1937:
Torchy Brown in “Dixie to Harlem” depicted the escapades of a teenage country girl, starry-eyed and slightly wacky, abounding in pluck, optimism, and determination. Dinah Dazzle, her friend’s cousin, visits from New York City, inspiring Torchy with fanciful daydreams. Here she heads North by train to try her luck at the Cotton Club in Harlem, in a setup ripe for week after week of humorous scenes. While presenting a funny, entertaining story, this strip reflected the real struggles of people moving from the South to the North. Ormes mocks the predicament of passing for white as youthful Torchy puzzles in the southern train station whether to go in the direction of the “Colored” arrow or to the more comfortable “White” section.
— from jackieormes.com

KMBC interviews Goldstein about Jackie Ormes and Torchy Brown.

NPR has a story on Ormes here, with some comics to view.

Nancy Goldstein’s biography reprints a large sampling of Ormes’ strips and illustrations. You can buy it here. Unfortunately, it appears to be the only place to find her work reprinted.

Friday Female Comics Creator: Tarpé Mills

Reposted from my now-defunct comics blog.

How awesome was Tarpé Mills? She was a graduate of Pratt Institute (I did a brief stint there, so I have a fondness), and she created several action comics characters in the late 30s and early 40s. She’s most well-known for creating the totally hot Miss Fury in 1941. Unlike other characters of the time, Miss Fury showed very little skin, preferring to fight crime in a skin-tight black panther suit. She also did with no actual powers to speak of. That’s one tough lady.

Mills dropped her first name, June, in order to obscure her gender — there were very few women working in comics at the time. However, Miss Fury garnered her tons of attention, including lots of interviews run with photographs (in which it was revealed that she quite resembled her sexy heroine). Being a woman didn’t slow down the popularity of her series though, which ran until 1952 and did well enough to allow Mills to retire directly after that.

Sadly, it’s kind of hard to find any of Mills work today (it’s depressing how often I seem to type that). Rachelle at Living Between Wednesdays has posted some of Miss Fury’s more interesting panels; as she puts it, “Not only does Mills hold her own writing and drawing adventure comics for men in a man’s world, she totally throws down some of the craziest shit I have ever seen in comics. Stone cold badass craziness.”

Golden Age Comic Book Stories has a whole issue of Jaxon of the Jungle, with art by Mills, here (scroll down). The story seems a little hinky (fighting savages in the jungle, hmmm) but Mike and Dorothy do look awfully stylish:

Pure Imagination has a volume of Miss Fury reprints available here. (Feel free to buy me this for my birthday.)

The Comics Journal reprinted a complete Miss Fury serial in issue #288, which is still available for purchase. You can see a sample page here.

Quick (but not really quick) mid-week links

Reposted from my now-defunct comics blog.

I was planning on saving these for the weekend, but I’m way too tickled by what’s happened.

There’s been some pretty big buzz around Peter David’s X-Factor #45, and the m/m kiss featured in the pages. Shatterstar and Rictor, both C-level superheroes, have been the subject of speculation for years. The kiss has ended speculation, and it’s pretty awesome — but the backlash that’s followed really isn’t.

Chief among the angry, homophobic dissenters is Rob Liefeld, who tweeted some total bullshit. The tweets are now gone (good one, Rob), but here’s the first he wrote, as quoted by CBR: “As the guy that created, designed and wrote his first dozen appearances, Shatterstar is not gay. Sorry. Can’t wait to someday undo this. Seems totally contrived.” He went on to spout more homophobic fucktard douchebaggery (quoted here), including the salient fact that he has gay family members — so he obviously can’t be a ‘phobe. Riiiiiight.

So here’s what fills me with unending joy: CBR pulled out the quote in their Q&A with Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, and asked Joe to respond.

Joe Quesada: I’ve got to be honest with you, this is the first I’ve heard about Rob’s comments, so I can only react to what you’re telling me here, but there really isn’t much I can say about it except scratch my head. I like Rob, but Peter is the creator who’s writing the book, and ultimately while Rob is one of the guys who created Shatterstar, Shatterstar is a Marvel character and not a Rob Liefeld character. If this was done to a character in “Youngblood,” then Rob has every right to do what he wants to with it.

I hate to be that cold-blooded about it, but I’ve created characters for Marvel as well and at the end of the day, they’re Marvel’s and not mine. What Marvel wants to do with them is what Marvel wants to do with them. That’s my clear understanding of how things work when I do work-for-hire, to claim otherwise would be silly. It is work-for-hire. The characters are Marvel’s, and if that’s the way the characters are written, then that’s the way the character is. If Rob wants to publicly disagree with that, that’s his right, and I respect that. But if Rob is intending on flipping what Peter has written, he will have to wait to discuss that with the next Editor-in-Chief.

In other words, it ain’t happening while Joe’s in charge.  Fuck yeah.

I give Marvel a lot of crap for doing it wrong (my epic Marvel Divas vs. Gotham City Sirens post is in the works, hoo boy is it ever), but Quesada deserves props for standing by this decision.  It would’ve been much easier to decline to comment, or give us some vague crap about never knowing where things are going, but instead, he publicly put Liefeld back in his place, thereby aligning himself and, by extension, Marvel, against the homophobic dickwads of the comic book world.

Now we just have to hope nobody at Marvel changes their minds.

…

Here are some relevant (and awesome) links:

• Ten gay superheroes who broke new ground
• Perry Moore asks, “Who cares about the death of a gay superhero anyway?”
• Gay League has tons of posts detailing LGBT comic book characters
• Tangentially, there are lesbians in comic books too, but they get different reviews

To read pile, classics edition

Reposted from my now-defunct comics blog.

Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld

Sounds a little silly, I know, but DC’s 1980s maxiseries has a lot going for it: a brave young heroine with a classic origin story, a fun alternate dimension, some great supporting characters (including at least one non-stereotyped character of color), and just the right blend of 80s-ness to now feel nostalgic in a cool way. I mean, there were flying unicorns. Don’t tell me you didn’t dream about riding a flying unicorn when you were a kid.

Scanned by ashtoreth.

It is every child’s secret dream: my parents are not really my parents; there is more to my life than school and homework and band practice; I am someone special, someone unique. Someday, I will find my real parents and leave with them, to live a life of excitement and adventure and magic.

But this is a child’s dream, born of innocence and imagination. What of the reality? Suppose the dream were true? Would it remain so innocent, so adventurous and exciting as the child had imagined? Or would it become something more, something darker, more tragic, more noble?
— from Sequential Tart’s Character Portrait

Amethyst’s tale begins as a fun and exciting adventure story, but became darker and more complex as it continued, and it eventually felt the blows of Crisis on Infinite Earths.  Amethyst herself appears in three issues of Crisis, whose events rewove the real world until it no longer included her.  She returned to her alternate dimension, and eventually gave her life in a final battle to save it.

Unfortunately, no trade collecting Amethyst’s various series is available.  Two sets of scans have been posted by ashtoreth at scans_daily: here and here.  I’m working on obtaining more scans, but in the meantime, you can read about Amethyst at Sequential Tart.

Three things from the past couple of weeks in comics

Reposted from my now-defunct comics blog.

The past couple of weeks feel like they’ve been really good to me. Here’s a few examples of why:

Detective Comics #854

Greg Rucka kicks off a new run, and it stars the incredibly awesome Kate Kane, the new Batwoman (pssst, that’s her in our header). You don’t have to have any previous knowledge for this story, so don’t let that huge issue number scare you.

Why it’s important: The lead character of a comic book, the center of the whole story, is an out lesbian — and this is not played for shock value, nor is it the focus of the story. It just is. Additionally, each issue contains a B story starring Renee Montoya (The Question), Kate Kane’s ex-girlfriend. That’s two completely separate stories starring lesbian characters whose lesbianism is completely beside the point of the plot. This is what we mean when we ask for increased representation.

Poem: Because a girl is not a tree

Read it here.