While intersectional feminism is gaining traction in scholarly circles and popular culture, during the 1960s and 1970s women of color were not only discouraged from participating in the Women’s Liberation
movement but are also noticeably missing from the comics pages and ranks of comics creators, male or female. Diversity in the mainstream comics pages was virtually nonexistent, with no Latina/Latinx, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Arab Muslim, or LGBTQ+ recurring charac-ters and very few Black ones. On the rare instances when people of color were represented, they were generally included as figures of villainy or comedy. According to Steven Loring Jones:
In the comics section, Blacks were the principal comic figures, having surpassed the Irish at the turn of the century as the butt of America’s jokes. Taking images from black-face minstrelsy, which was Ameri-ca’s first national popular entertainment form and a mainstay of the American stage until the 1940’s, many of the images of “Blacks” in the first half-century of the comics were not of Blacks at all.
Jones further explains that “newspapers published by the Afro- American press also entered into the fight against the negative depiction of Blacks. By the mid-1930’s they were leading the strug-gle against any continuance of minstrelized representations.” Jesse Ormes’s comic strip, Torchy Brown from Dixie to Harlem, was one of those comic strips, debuting in 1937, and appearing in numerous Black newspapers before ending in 1938. Edward Brunner notes,
“Not only was Torchy Brown almost certainly the first strip to be written and drawn by an African American woman, but its appear-ance in all editions of the Pittsburgh Courier (as many as fourteen) was as close to syndication as an African American strip could expect”
(24). Ormes created other strips such as Candy and Pattie Jo’-n-Ginger, but it was Torchy Brown that truly triumphed. Brunner explains:
In fifty-three weekly episodes that ran in the Pittsburgh Courier for exactly one year, from 1 May 1937, to 30 April 1938, Ormes sketched adventures of a young woman that were at once autobiographical and fantastic, presenting events from a distinctively female point of view (valuing interpersonal relations, affirming an aesthetic of taste and fashion, and using ingenuity and persistence to overcome tradi-tional barriers to recognition). (25)
Alas, Ormes and her creation remained anomalous, with people of color appearing rarely in comic strips, particularly as female characters.
It wasn’t until 1970 that a comic strip featuring a Black woman appeared in national syndication, when Friday Foster debuted. The strip featured the adventures of the eponymous Friday Foster, a bright and daring photographer’s assistant, and ran until 1974, although it inspired one stand-alone comic book as well as a fea-ture film starring Pam Grier. The strip was the creation of writer Jim Lawrence and artist Jorje Longeron, though in the final years it was also drawn by Howard Chaykin and Dick Giordano. Don Markstein maintains that while the strip “wasn’t critically acclaimed, particu-larly prominent, or very popular,” it was
the first mainstream syndicated comic strip to star a black woman.
In fact, other than a handful of broadly stereotyped caricatures from the industry’s very early days (such as Pore Lil Mose, by Yellow Kid creator Richard F. Outcault) and a few series aimed solely at black newspapers (such as Jackie Ormes’s pioneering Torchy Brown), no American comic strip had ever borne the name of a black lead char-acter. Ted Shearer’s Quincy arrived later the same year, and Brumsic Brandon Jr.’s Luther a year later, but Friday Foster was the first.
Steven Loring Jones notes:
The Black activism of the 1960’s also led to new individualized por-trayals of Black characters in the mainstream press. . . . The Black characters since introduced in humorous strips like Franklin in
“Peanuts” (1968), Lt. Flap in “Beetle Bailey” (1970), Clyde and Ginny in “Doonesbury” (1970–75), and Oliver Wendell Jones in “Bloom County” (1985) are Black caricatures drawn consistent with the manner in which the white figures are caricatured. Instead of huge lips and jet black faces to indicate Blackness, it is usually hair style, a goatee (for Black males), or dots or lines for shading. The focus of white cartoonists when portraying Black characters, has shifted from appearance to characterization.
Black female characters, and, for that matter, creators, continued to be even rarer, although Jones points to the editorial cartoons of Yaounde Olu, including “Slinky Ledbetter and Comp’ny” (1980) and “Jerri Kirl” (1983), as illustrating “a diversity of comic characters which were both stylized and non-traditional.” Thus, the syndication of Bar-bara Brandon-Croft’s Where I’m Coming From in 1989 holds particular
historical weight. Brandon-Croft, an avowed Black feminist, provided an important and rarely represented perspective in the comics pages and illustrated Black women in all of their diversity.
Unfortunately, Brandon-Croft and other female comics creators of color were undoubtedly not well represented on the comics pages during the 1970s through the 1990s and perhaps this is not surpris-ing, given that the newspaper comics pages have been extremely con-servative. In 2001 Maurice Horn argued:
The last 17 years have been marked by a series of social upheavals, and especially by what has come to be called “the sexual revolu-tion,” yet it would be difficult—indeed almost impossible—to find a reflection of these far-reaching events in the newspaper strips of the last decade and a half. In contrast to earlier times when the com-ics had held up a mirror to the society around them, the syndicated strips were now 15 to 20 years behind the times in social outlook.
This flight from reality has been responsible, above anything else, for the rapidly shrinking newspaper strip readership in the 1960’s and 1970’s, especially among younger people. Instead of trying to update their comics in order to appeal to a more sophisticated audi-ence, syndicate editors decided to hold on, at any cost, to the reader-ship that was left. (188)
Horn suggests that newspaper comic strips largely ignored social and cultural trends, clinging to outdated ideals and a simulacrum of wholesome domesticity. This clinging to an imagined past, a past that is almost entirely white and middle-class, and bereft of Black Americans, not to mention people of Latinx, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Arab Muslim descent, or LGBTQ+, is little wonder, given that the audience for print newspapers has remained relatively stagnant and relatively conservative. According to Paula Berinstein in 2005,
“newspapers are not serving everyone equally. Subscribership and readership are skewed toward older white people who own their homes,” and “most weekday subscribers are over the age of 34, with just 17 percent in the 18 to 34 age groups. Eighty-seven percent of weekday subscribers are homeowners. Sixty percent are employed;
27 percent are retired. Ninety percent—90 percent!—are white. If these figures can be believed, young people, non-whites, and rent-ers aren’t subscribing” (“Black and White” 46). Interestingly enough,
while age, education, race, and income all played key factors in newspaper readership, research found that men and women were represented fairly equally. And even though the study offers only a small window into the evolving demographics of print newspaper readership, it does present an impression of the intended audience.
Yet, the comics frequently present a different sort of space and a con-trasting perspective to the “hard news” even within the newspaper pages. Will a closer examination of newspaper strips from 1976 until the contemporary moment, particularly those created by women, offer challenges to dominant narratives of womanhood or will they simply reinforce received wisdom and common stereotypes? The fol-lowing section provides a closer examination of a typical series of comics pages from 1984, helping to provide a larger context for con-sidering individual strips over time and for studying the framework within which these particular strips operated.