Comic Book Resources

Oh…oh wow.

I doubt Kane actually drew the thing; but all accounts, he was a swindler who shopped his work out to a studio. But I dunno, maybe he did.

Comics had racist caricatures like this all over the place back then– I mean, Ebony from the Spirit is probably the most famous of all. It seems like it was just something that was done. Eisner felt bad about it decades later.

I know there is going to be ranting and soapboxing on both sides of 1940s racism…but it’s interesting to me just to consider whether this was how America’s publishers thought the mid- to lower-class mind worked in those days. Remember, comics were aimed at the more uneducated American’s…so is this how “poor” American’s felt, or is this how publishers THOUGHT “poor” American’s felt???

Greg, I feel similar to you when I see this stuff. Doesn’t make much sense being angry or offended (though I don’t dismiss anyone who is)…I just wonder why.

Well, it’s posible Kane was racist (although I’m not suggesting he was). I think it’s more likely that racist caricatures were a product of the times. While I haven’t read a ton of Golden Age material, I have yet to see an early comic book with a black character that is not depicted in a similar manner.

I should have said unsophisticated, not uneducated.

I don’t understand why this is so difficult to believe or understand. He probably didn’t like black people and wanted to portray them negatively. Creators do the same thing now, except now it’s not with racial groups, it’s with cultural, political, and religious groups.

Bob Kane’s father was an engraver for the New York Daily News; Kane attended the Commercial Art Studio, and learned to draw from copying existing comics (per Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow), so I imagine that whatever the convention was in drawing black people, Kane plugged it directly into his work.

Don’t forget that black creators were systemically denied a place in the comics industry at this point.

Also, ugh.

…or, not to defend the art in the least, he took a shortcut representation that was in most forms of entertainment and some political cartooning and put it in the scene…

The fact of the matter is you don’t see many black people in the period portrayed in a realistic sense–nearly any minority is portrayed in some sort of cartoonish stereotype.

He may have been racist, for all I know, but to put that label on him because he used a commonly used representation (Good Lord, look at the cookie jars from that period…) is ludicrous.

I don’t think the conversation should be about whether or not to exculpate Bob Kane. Yes, racist caricatures have a long, storied history in comics, and yes, Kane probably knew exactly what he was doing when he drew these sleeping-car workers as grotesque “sambo” figures, and yes, this was the norm in the U.S. and Europe (see Tintin, the jazz singer, etc) and yes, it marks ideologies of white supremacy and the very material conditions of exploitation and exclusion in which Black people found themselves even as they or their sons/brothers/husbands went off to die for their country in segregated regiments.

It’s not as if Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma banished all racist representations from comics though. The Mandarin was some straight up Fu Manchu yellow peril orientalism, racist depictions of blacks, latinos, and asians persist in the present. (“Sweet christmas” indeed.) So while I do think this is a particularly galling example of outmoded racial stereotypes, I think a broader conversation about race and graphic narrative needs to involve a more developed historical frame.

Hey, as I black person I find his portrayal of blacks utterly stupid. Who the hell looks like this? They look like aliens. How pathetic.

Wow. I hadn’t even realised they were supposed to be black till I read the text beneath. I was actually wondering why the waiters were wearing balaclavas.

Hmmm. So I wonder what we’re doing today that people will find inexplicable (and probably justly so) 70 years from now?

And it’s not just Batman comics. You can see similar things in other aspects of popular culture. For instance, it’s amazing how much wife-beating humor (and husband-beating, too, sometimes) was common in mid-20th century American culture.

It is horrible of course, but it’s also fascinating how cultures shift.

This is a completely standard cartoon representation of blacks from the period. Like 90% of Batman, it’s not original to Kane. If anything, it’s a testament to how far the culture has come that people born in the last few generations would find this kind of blackface stereotype surprising, considering how universal it was.

At least DC didn’t feel the need to censure this, or redraw it.

While we can look at it today and react with “modern” morals, it is interesting to see this in a historical persepective.

Anon (1:05 PM) suggests that people reading this in 1942 wouldn’t have found these cartoons offensive. That’s historically inaccurate – in cities like NY and Chicago what the popular media calls the “civil rights movement” was in full swing by the late 1930s, protesting not only job and housing discrimination and fighting for anti-lynching legislation, etc, but also against offensive stereotyping in the media. Black batman readers would probably not have nonchalantly chalked these panels up to convention.

Um……. yeah. What about the spirit.

>Hmmm. So I wonder what we’re doing today that people will find inexplicable (and probably justly so) 70 years from now?

“So, back in the day there was only a two or three gay characters. I remember this one, Extraño, who was actually depicted as completely flamboyant… Then, we found out this was because he was “diseased” and then he was “cured” from it. Seriously. If you´re gay comic character you´re most likely in a supporting role, bound to die of AIDS sooner or later for shock value. And no, of couse, they never showed two gay super-heroes kissing. I´m talking about a time when gay marriage was not even legal!”

I didn’t notice the waiters were black until it was pointed out. I thought they were wearing masks for some reason. I’m not really gonna bother with trying to reason it out. Either it was racist or he was just doing what was expected.

I should point out that I also recently got the second volume of (the golden age) Sheena stories, and the black people in those stories were not drawn stereotypically at all. They look like people. There is some stereotypical writing about the Africans, but not as much as you might expect. They’re definitely black people (not “colored” white people), but they look like human beings. So this isn’t necessarily “just the way it was done.” I understand that Kane farmed out a lot of his work, but I’m not necessarily wondering if Kane was a racist. I just wonder if the person drawing this was thinking, “Well, this is the way it’s done” and did it, or if more thought went into it. Ebony in The Spirit is another good example of this. Was Eisner thinking when he drew him, or was he just falling in line with what was “the way it was done”?

Oh, we’re certainly more progressive and enlightened today…

we’d never accept such offensive imagery.

Why you’d never see an image like this

http://www.meganandjack.com/mt/archives/indians2.gif

in popular culture…

Or this..

http://www.rocknjocks.com/images/products/atlantabravesbigfacefront.jpg

My 2 cents as an African American.

I think that it’s less a question of whether Bob Kane specifically was racist, rather than whether racism at the time was so pervasive that a comic book artist (who may or may not have been Bob Kane considering how much of his work he sub-contracted) would use these caricatures unthinkingly because no one had pointed out to him the racist nature of the stereotype.

It’s true that it was a fairly common caricature back then, but it’s also true that there were people around pointing it out and asking for better treatment. Was it as pervasive as today, where something like this would be noticed and reviled by the majority of people (god I hope so), or was it simply a matter of repeating a caricature that was familiar and well worn without much forethought. And whether that would make the individual a racist.

My brother showed me a Walter Lantz cartoon on YouTube yesterday from around that era that was so amazingly racist that we both stood with our mouths open. But I’m fairly sure this was shown in theatres all over the country. At the time, racism was simply part and parcel of most institutions and it would take decades of work and education to beat it back to where it is today (and it’s not gone yet, by the way).

I do agree with the idea of reprinting it without correcting it though. I don’t think anything is gained by glossing over the more negative parts of our history. I’m curious whether DC had some sort of commentary in the reprint to at least acknowledge that there is an awareness that some of the depictions are potentially inflammatory. I don’t want it changed, as much as I want it acknowledged, explained and recognized.

Alfred Day said:

I do agree with the idea of reprinting it without correcting it though. I don’t think anything is gained by glossing over the more negative parts of our history.

well said, sir.

i’m glad that DC let this run as well. i find racist portrayals facinating [and very offensive], as it gives insight into what was the culture of the day. It also produces discussions like this one of what used to be, and how far we have come in a short time.

Also, does anyone else notice that the black waiter towards the middle of the panel is thinking something? Weird that they would have such a ‘charactature’ who is part of the story.

I also thought the waiters were wearing masks.

Oh my. Who was Kane swiping from that week?

Big deal. The important thing is that, as others have mentioned, DC didn’t do the politically correct thing and censor it. Good for them.

I haven’t seen this Chronicles volume, but DC does have a disclaimer in many of the Archives volumes: “The comics reprinted in this volume were produced at a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously. They are reprinted here without alteration for historical accuracy.”

Greg, I’m not saying this to be patronizing or condescending, it’s an honest question…but do you just not read a lot of cartoons, advertisements and comic strips and propaganda from before the ’60s? Because this type of stuff was so commonplace that it was ridiculous. I agree witht he people above who say Kane probably just did it unthinkingly because that was the norm of the day. The Sheena comic you describe was more the exception than the norm. I think it was so engrained in the popular culture that people who did it probably didn’t even give it much thought and considered it harmless. Such images were so ubiquitous that foreign artists who were influenced by American cartoonists like Osamu Tezuka, the father of modern manga, used similar imagery in their work.

T. is right- even in Latin America, that ridiculous character design used to pop up sometimes. I remember a comic book series -Mexican, I believe- titled “Memin” where the main character was a black boy who looked like Bosco (his mother looked like Aunt Jemima) while all the other characters looked real. Of course this was a comedy, so it was probably done intentionally, but it weirded me out even when I was a kid.

As for the Batman story? My guess is: it was a shortcut. The artist probably got tired of drawing the scene and still had the black waiters to go, so he decided to just draw them like caricatures, probably thinking “Bah, nobody will care, it’s just a panel in a comic book.” That doesn’t justify it, of course, but I see it as more lazy than intentionally racist.

I’ll just throw in some support for Adam here in that it ASTOUNDS me that people can’t see the indian sports logos as racist! And I bet it would take one freaking press conference with the current president for it to change. Just have Obama hold up a Cleveland Indians logo in one hand and a cartoon similar to the ones above in the other and the issue would be eminently clear.

It’s always amazed me that the Redskins can get away with having a name that’s a racial slur solely on tradition. Although Cowboys vs. Non Descrpit Native American/American Indian Tribes just doesn’t have the same ring to it, I have to say.

And yeah, I totally chalk this up to Bob Kane’s legendary “work ethic.” Not excusing it. To paraphrase Yahtzee, I don’t think he’s racist (at least this specific instance), just lazy.

T. (and everyone else who’s wondering how naive I am): I’m well aware that this was the norm back in the day. It always struck me as weird, because of the people who were doing it. Again, if you’ve never, ever seen a black person, you might take the stereotypical shortcut. If you’re a crazy racist, you might do that. I’m just wondering what goes through someone’s mind when they’re a cosmopolitan person (not that people who live in big cities can’t be racist, just that they obviously see many more kinds of people) who probably experienced stereotyping himself (again, that doesn’t mean he can’t be racist). It’s the same thing I think today when movies have stereotypical gay people. Do any of the people involved find it funny? Do they not know any gay people? It’s just weird.

What goes through the mind of the artists who draw this? I don’t know… Probably not too much. Even if the artist lived in New York City and saw black people everyday, I don’t think it would have had that much effect on his employment of these conventions because most comic artists didn’t really draw from life in those days (or these days, for that matter).

Think about the way the human body is rendered in comics… Before you had someone like Neal Adams coming with a more naturalistic depiction of anatomy, most comic artists just thoughtlessly copied what they saw in other comics–hence you get those lumpy muscles and outsize pecs and all kinds of stuff you know they probably don’t see around them in real life, but they just draw them that what because… well, that’s how you draw comics.

When I was a kid, I had a lot of trouble drawing black people because I learned how to draw from comics and all the black characters really looked alike. I’m black myself, but it never occurred to me to look in the mirror or at members of my family, because I wasn’t trying to draw life; I wanted to draw the language of comics–and the lexicon of conventions for drawing black people was still fairly limited even as late as the 1980s; pretty much all the black characters in comics looked alike, so I just tried to copy what I saw on the page without thinking too deeply about it.

Yeah total bummer…it’s like Whitewash in I think he was a sambo like teenager who was in the Invaders kid group…..thing is that it is how blatant it was…things are not perfect now…but I will say this… we’ve come a long way now that we can let it run as is,warts an’ All!…CUZ WE CANNOT GO FORWARD WITHOUT MAKING SURE WE DON’T FORGET THIS!

This is bad, but it is the 1940′s! Minstrel shows were still fresh in the popular consciousness. I think on the whole this type of representation is rather harmless (at a time where we Germans had already made the leap from representing Jews as greedy sub-humans to full-scale genocide). By the way, popular European Comics have kept the blackface to this day – bring the representation of minorities in Asterix up in forums and fans will brand you as overly “politically correct”. How a recurring character like Baba (http://www.hautevelle70.com/gifs1/asterix/baba.gif), who is furthermore shown to be dumb and speech-impaired could NOT be considered racist is honestly beyond me.

> the 1940’s! Minstrel shows were still fresh in the popular consciousness

Here’s a distracting little nugget: there were blackface minstrel shows on British TV until 1978!

I got my niece and nephew (6 and 9 years old) those Fleisher Superman cartoons from the 40′s as a present. My brother told me later that he had to explain to them why the Japanese were negatively portrayed! I really didn’t even think about it when I gave the cartoons to them. All I remembered from them was how cool they were. Oops!

We all like to think that we’ve moved on as a society, but I still hear and see racist things all the time. I read stuff in the comments section of the Chicago Tribune all the time that makes me believe racism is thriving today. Jeez! The stuff people write on comment boards when they feel they are anonymous….I had no idea people still thought that way.

Um……. yeah. What about the spirit.

Regardless how easily you voted for Obama, if you are of the generation who finished high school 20 years ago, or older, I think it’s plausible only Barack Obama ever thought the US would have a black president within our lifetime. “Truly Tasteless Jokes” was a best-seller.

People didn’t flip from being racist to being non-racist in 20 years (if you insist on the election depending on that kind of change taking place). We simply spent our lives thinking the same 10 seconds of thought over and over until enough of us were forced to break that loop to make a change. And when we give ourselves only 10 seconds to think about something like ethnicity, we typically think what everyone else thinks. Racism persists because the challenge of protesting racism is in getting people to think further than the same 10 seconds over and over.

It’s the same with homosexuality. Into my 20s, I never spent more than 10 seconds thinking about gay rights, and I thought what everyone else thought: that marriage was what the churches said it was. Then I heard how the company that sued Rosie O’Donnell arbitrary submitted email exchanges between her and her partner as evidence, to shame her into capitulating. Because gay relationships aren’t protected by the 5th amendment right, gays are vulnerable to corporate blackmail. So having thought further than 10 seconds on the subject, I have to side with allowing gay marriage.

I think it’s perfectly plausible that Kane and Eisner hardly ever interacted with blacks. So they did what was common-sensical for people who never had to think about black/white relations for more than 10 seconds. I’m not white either, and I think if it wasn’t for mass-media, whites and non-blacks wouldn’t interact with black-issues more than the 10 seconds never broken by those building the white mass-media in the early 20th century. How many of us in the NYC area lunch with restaurant kitchen-staff?

I think the naivete lies in thinking nurturing racism takes all that much effort on any of our parts.

And at least with Eisner, he thought so far as to portray a white demonstrating some affection for a black. 5 more people broke the 4-minute mile within a year after Roger Bannister did it. Someone remind me who did that in the generation between Huck Finn and the Spirit.

How many of us in the NYC area lunch with restaurant kitchen-staff?

I made this comment in reference to illegal aliens as a contemporary analogue to the golden age situations we are reviewing, if anyone needs to hear it.

Per Alfred Day’s comment:

That approach– running the work in it’s unaltered form with a prefacing statement acknowledging its racism – is exactly the approach that’s been used with some of US editions of Osamu Tezuka’s work.

Greg, you keep bringing up that it’s odd for Kane to have done it because in NYC he should have been more exposed to black people. But think about it, where did these caricatures thrive in the first place? Among the people in the US South, the Americans with THE most exposure to black people in the whole country. Take as a comparison the black comedians of today and their black people/white people comparison jokes. Their depiction of white people and how uptight they act is such an over the top exaggeration that doesn’t apply to most of the white people out there. Yet they’ve all been exposed to white people before and probably know their jokes aren’t really accurate. But they pursue it because it gets an easy laugh and entertains and our society says it’s totally okay to make such anti-white humor. They probably aren’t virulently and actively racist against whites, their just products of their environments and times and don’t really think much about it. I think the same mentality applies to white people back then: the caricatures entertained people, they were recognized as exaggerations, and people did it because it was an acceptable racism to portray, much like anti-white racism today is acceptable to portray.

What I’d love is for people to discuss more recent examples of benign racism, like the Japanese Superteam in Final Crisis. Now that was racist to me. LIke the Japanese people are so media-obsessed and materialistic that they can’t understand the noble and heroic aspects of heroism and instead can only grasp its superficial and “kewl” trendy aspects.

T, while there was a bit of technofetishist Gwen-Stefaniesque orientalism in regards to the super young team in Final Crisis, i didn’t quite get a sense of them as media-obsessed or materialistic from Morrison’s writing. Granted, I’d never encountered the characters before. From the solicitations, though, the Joe Casey FC Aftermath: Dance book looks pretty problematic along these lines.

Anyway, one could write an entire book on Kirby’s original 4th world books’ take on Sonny Sumo – not to mention Vykin The Black and Flippa-Dippa or whatever his name was. Kirby was a popular front liberal, his racial politics were “progressive,” and the 4th World was his attempt to produce comic fantasy that spoke to the cultural shifts of the antiwar movement, the black power era, and subterranean hippie motorbikers but still traffics in some deeply problematic images of people of color. This is the guy who created the first black superhero (for the big two, anyway) but still worked within a “structure of feeling” that looked at black characters in very proscribed ways.

Well, my problem with it was that American superheroes are shown as having their more “shallow” members who are in it for the wrong reasons and have to learn heroism later, like Booster Gold in 52. But it’s also balanced out by heroes who DO get nobility and heroism and sacrifice, and the latter type outweigh the former. But with Final Crisis, the most prominent type of Japanese hero seems to be the shallow one. Now sure if you focus on Tokyo street and club kid culture and game shows and ignore their rich cultural narrative of heroism, pride, sacrifice and nobility through fierce competition, you can show support for this “shallow” interpretation However, if you did the same to America and only focused only on the TMZ, Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight, Enquirer aspects of American culture and ignored the long history of heroic narrative in our culture, you could make the same case for American superheroes, that they should all be written as mall-obsessed, Celbrity worshipping, botox loving, Paris Hiltonite women and fratboy Apatowesque slacker slobs.

Actually, Warren Ellis’s Nextwave did exactly that to American culture, and although I enjoyed it at first it became one of my main problems with the book. He portrayed American superheroes much the same way Morrison portrayed Japanese superheroes, by focusing on their most vapid, shallow, trendy and urban characteristics. Even more annoying to me was how all the most flattering portrayals, the only character we were supposed to laugh WITH and not AT, Bloodstone, was a Brit. As if THEY, at least the urban ones, aren’t guilty of much of the same celebrity worship, tabloid culture and superficiality as Americans.

T: Your point about southerners is well taken, but I would argue that even with seeing blacks every day, many southerners were actively raised as racist, which is why they, even if they interacted with blacks on a regular basis, would still be prone to stereotypes. Even if northerners were racist (which I’m sure many were), I don’t know how much of it was because they were raised that way. I honestly don’t know. My grandparents were racist, but it was much more of a “benign” racism (if I can call it that) in that they simply didn’t challenge the prevailing stereotypes rather than actively “persecuting” minorities, in whatever way you might take that. It depressed me as I got older and realized what they thought, and it’s the same thing I wondered about this, that is, I assumed they just never bothered to really think about it, just accepted the stereotypes. From what the commenters are saying, it seems like that was what Kane (or whoever drew this) was doing. That’s a shame.

How much of the depiction is a result of Kane’s pencils and how much a result of the way it was colored? Wouldn’t this look significantly different if the color separations were done differently? (I can’t say for sure from the scans, but it looks possible to me) (and yes, I’m aware of the ironies in discussing coloring in this instance)

Honestly, I thought the waiters were all supposed to be wearing masks and possibly gloves at first too.

If this is the way it was intended to be drawn…well, there’s no excuse. You can explain how or why it might have occurred, but it’s still just wrong.

T.: Interesting take on the Japanese characters in Final Crisis. I didn’t see the Japanese superteam in the same light. I think Morrison could have chosen almost any modern society’s superbeings and depicted the younger characters as more celebrity-centered and media-obsesseed. In the age of reality t.v. and YouTube, it makes sense that there would be superhumans more into the lifestyle than the life-saving. I think Sonny Sumo was the balance you were talking about; he seemed focused on the mission. If you consider the hippie-centric Forever People as their antecedents, it makes sense. Kirby chose one prominent (but by no means representative) subculture on which to base his young characters. Morrison chose another.

Kirby’s depictions of black characters may not have been the most enlightened (all those technologically-advanced Wakandans dressed in stereotypical “native” clothing), but at least he tried at a time in which no one else put black characters in super-hero comics.. I don’t think his black characters are as disturbing as, say, Ebony White.

I didn’t see the Japanese superteam in the same light. I think Morrison could have chosen almost any modern society’s superbeings and depicted the younger characters as more celebrity-centered and media-obsesseed. In the age of reality t.v. and YouTube, it makes sense that there would be superhumans more into the lifestyle than the life-saving.

Oh, he totally could do the same with American teens, I agree. But the point is, he didn’t. Whenever I’ve seen him write younger DC characters like Tim Drake or Squire or the rest of the Teen Titans, for the most part he portrays them as mature and heroic, despite the fact that many American teens are a mall-loving, text messaging, Youtubing, celeb-obsessed vapid nightmare.

Given the number of hard-working, overachieving and education-obsessed Japanese people out there, I’d have loved for Morrison to have a superteam representing that mindset as well rather than just the Gwen Stefani interpretation of the Japanese. For example a Japanese teen superteam that is way smarter, well-behaved, self-sacrificing, regimented, heirarchal and more organized and achievement-oriented than your typical American teen superteam would have been a very interesting dynamic, as you could tie it into a lot of modern anxieties of Americans “falling behind” to other emerging cultures in Asia. This anxiety we saw often with people worrying about how bad American teens are doing in test scores and educational levels compared to the Japanese, how much better the Japanese are doing at marketing and innovating technology, and whether the Japanese have a superior productive, more efficient, cheaper workforce, like when Detroit’s car industry felt unable to compete with the Japanese system.

Again, T., I’m down with the critique of representations of Japanese/Americans in general, I just didn’t see it in the way Morrison characterized the SYT. Comics have and have long had some major orientalism issues. Two of them are Frank and Miller. And by “Frank” I am not talking about the Hulk artist.

That said, I don’t think treating a japanese superteam as the model minority (hard working, education-obsessed, overachieving) is really any better than as spoiled fame-hungry brats, since it still distorts them, orders them in accordance with a U.S. gaze and a U.S. racial hierarchy (the model minority as the ‘middle’ minority, more ‘disciplined’ and ‘hard working’ than supposedly lazy African-Americans but too “alien” and “mechanical” to ever be allowed to claim whiteness. That kind of a representation would exist on a continuum with the depictions of african-americans we get in this batman issue, and for that reason, it’d be unnaceptable, to me, anyway. The only way I could get into a comic that represented asians like that is if it was invoking the stereotype as a form of self-aware critique, and there aren’t a lot of writers in superhero comics who do that sort of thing very well or at all.

Also, @Josh, this isn’t about the coloring, or not only about the coloring. The facial features and anatomy of the waiters clearly evoke a very, very long history of racist caricatures.

And for the record Morrison has routinely depicted British teenagers as violent and nihilistic.

It was a common artistic convention at the time. Whether or not the artist saw real black people every day, or never in his life, isn’t relevant; at the time, this was the common convention for portraying them.

Have a look, in the very same panel, at the windows. Real windows don’t have the visible diagonal lines as shown here, yet everyone instantly understands the convention that these represent glass windows (as opposed to, say, open and empty window frames). The artist would certainly have seen dozens of real windows every day, none of which had visible diagonal lines, but being paid by the page he wasn’t interested in finding a realistic and accurate way of portraying windows when there was a perfectly usable (in the technical sense), understandable and easy-to-draw convention for depicting windows. Same for the waiters.

Note that the white people aren’t exactly drawn photo-realistically either – check out the angles on some of those chins! (Not that that would now be considered reprehensible in the same way, of course)

As for what will people in the middle future look back on us in disbelief over – the most likely examples are things that most people don’t see anything wrong with, right now. “You mean, they flushed their lavatories with drinkable water?!?” or “They really charged students fees for a college education?!” or “Each family had their own vehicle?”

>Here’s a distracting little nugget: there were blackface minstrel shows on British TV until 1978!

Yeah, I lived in the UK for seven years in the ’00s and was surprised how less progressive the UK and Europe were on race issues. Not that the US is perfect, but the stereotype of ‘progressive’ Europe and ‘reactionary’ US doesn’t hold up in every case. This was true on women’s issues as well, at least in my experience.

What I found interesting about your article is the belief that the depiction of Jews would lead Kan (or whoever actually drew it) to be more sensitive to the depiction of other ethnic groups. History clearly shows that being a victim of prejudice in no way guarantees that on would be sensitive to another group’s plight. Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” comment comes to mind. However, on a personal not, my wife is black and I have to admit she isn’t the most sensitive about Hispanics or Asians (she refers to them all as Puerto Rican and Chinese, respectively).

Carl: I totally get that. I don’t understand it, but I get it. I was just musing about what Kane might have been thinking about.

Bill Reed said “Comics had racist caricatures like this all over the place back then– I mean, Ebony from the Spirit is probably the most famous of all. It seems like it was just something that was done. Eisner felt bad about it decades later.”

And let’s not forget the depictions of Chop Chop from the Blackhawks as a terrible stereotype. I may be the only person I know who has a warm spot in his heart for the 1960′s “Junk Heap Heroes” Blackhawks. It was not very good and lost all the charm of the original Blackhawks, but it did make Chopper into a chess master and called him Dr. Hands and he looked more like a human being. His powers were martial arts and a pair of power gloves that made his fighting skills more devastating.

Some other horrific WW II era ethnic stereotypes…

Whitewash Jones of the Young Allies (see lower left corner of cover):
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/229/546950-1_super.jpg

The cover of Captain Marvel Adventures #23 depicts a monkey faced pinhead..
http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/captain-marvel-adventures/23-1.jpg

>blockquote>I was just musing about what Kane might have been thinking about.

MONEY!

It’s all that playa cared about.