A Pittsburgh exhibit dedicated to Black American comics and creators
NPR-WESA has a report on an exhibition dedicated to comics featuring Black characters, and creators who worked in the medium:
It's great Thompson's doing these tributes, but one must wonder what he thinks of modern PC takes on these creations that've only done more harm than good? If Marvel had folded in the early 2000s, their past quality would've held up far better, IMO, and it's hugely regrettable many of these articles won't get into the more challenging subjects of modern times.
“Collections in Black: A Celebration of Black Comic Book Culture” was organized for the August Wilson African American Cultural Center by Phillip Thompson. You might know him as DJ Big Phill, one of the city’s most popular record-spinners. But he’s also a dedicated comics collector, specializing in original art, published comics and more by and about Black characters and Black history, whether Marvel superheroes or figures from real life.For the PC crowd that sided with Fredric Wertham, who, as discovered over a decade ago, plagiarized some of his "research" in addition to distorting everything for the sake of his sloppy goals. The sex-negative approach Wertham took - failing to make any proper distinctions between that and violent content - are just some of the reasons why comicdom was struck as low as it is now; who would've thought the same left-wing crowd Wertham was otherwise part of would end up siding with his viewpoints, selectively or otherwise? In the past dozen years or so, it looks like all misgivings they seemingly had with Wertham have almost entirely disappeared, and they brought back his censorsious beliefs in the past decade, which did cause creative damage.
[...] There are also, of course, tributes to Marvel’s Black Panther, mainstream comics’ first Black superhero. One vitrine in the AWAACC’s spacious galleries encases the 1976 issue of Jungle Action in which T’Challa battles the Ku Klux Klan. It was among the books Thompson recalls from his childhood in Penn Hills, when he and his brothers would sneak forbidden looks at his father’s comics collection.
“I was just mesmerized by those images,” he says.
Half of “Collections in Black” is drawn from Thompson’s personal trove. But it digs well beyond characters familiar from his childhood and latter-day Hollywood blockbusters (Marvel’s The Falcon and Luke Cage also among them).
[...] Thompson also honors Matt Baker, a Westinghouse High School grad who was among the nation’s top comics artists from the 1940s until his untimely death, in 1958. Baker contributed to titles like Fightin’ Marines, Teen-Age Romances and Jungle Comics, and drew the pre-Wonder Woman female superhero Phantom Lady. Baker’s work — his women tended toward the statuesque — helped inspire the ’50s backlash against comics as a corrupting influence, typified by books such as “Seduction of the Innocent.”
“He drew white women so well it was a problem,” quips Thompson.
It's great Thompson's doing these tributes, but one must wonder what he thinks of modern PC takes on these creations that've only done more harm than good? If Marvel had folded in the early 2000s, their past quality would've held up far better, IMO, and it's hugely regrettable many of these articles won't get into the more challenging subjects of modern times.
Labels: Africa, Black Panther, censorship issues, exhibitions, good artists, history, marvel comics
