The Four Color Media Monitor

Yes Weekly reports the city council of Greensboro voted for a resolution to honor the life of the late artist Murphy Anderson, whose credits included co-creating Zatanna as the Silver Age daughter of the Golden Age magician Zatara (who made his debut the very same month and premiere issue as Superman in Action Comics), a decade after he'd passed away:

Recently, at a meeting of the Greensboro City Council, Mayor-elect Marikay Abuzuaiter announced a resolution honoring the life of comic book artist Murphy Anderson, who grew up in Greensboro in the 1930s and lived there from 1949 until 1959.

After Abuzuaiter spoke of Anderson’s “lasting impact on art, culture, and his hometown” as “one of the most influential, respected illustrators and inkers in the history of American comic books,” council unanimously voted “that a plaque will be installed at the Greensboro Cultural Arts Center to commemorate his legacy.”

Well that's great. He was a lot better than many modern artists whose styles pale horribly with character designs by contrast, and are a lot more PC to boot. This article also gives some interesting history about something Anderson originally wanted to do with Black Canary upon reintroducing her in the 1960s:

In 1959, with superheroes experiencing a comeback and Anderson getting more work, he moved his family to New Jersey. When DC brought back Black Canary, Anderson wanted her to be Black, but Schwartz said this would lose sales in the south (according to Amash, Schwartz confirmed this story). With Hawkman writer Gardner Fox, he co-created another female crimefighter in fishnets, the magician Zatanna. On superhero titles, he usually inked another artist’s pencils. His pen and brush skills won fan awards every year from 1961 through 1965.

That, sadly, was the situation regarding how storytellers did their work at the time when it came to racial issues. Of course, as many surely know today, Schwartz himself later did show the courage to oversee stories featuring positive approaches to race relations by the late 60s, with the Green Lantern/Green Arrow teaming a most notable example, and this was around the same time as Stan Lee did so at Marvel. It was under Schwartz's editorialship that the black GL John Stewart was introduced, and it's a terrible shame that at the end of the 80s, the editors who'd taken over by that time ruined everything with how Stewart was written, namely in the Cosmic Odyssey miniseries, just shortly after the GL run in Action Comics Weekly depicted Star Sapphire slaying Katma Tui, who by then had been written as marrying John. That was an utter fiasco that the GL franchise has never recovered from to date, based on how Katma Tui, last time I looked, was still being kept in the grave. And shoddy modern writers and editors like Geoff Johns and Dan DiDio are why it won't recover, so long as they continue to run the store.

Anderson's definitely a figure worthy of an honor for his hometown, so congratulations to the council for approving a memory plaque for him.

Labels: dc comics, good artists, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, history, women of dc