Can anyone really understand someone else? Can you see the world from where I sit? Do you know who I am?
It takes empathy, patience, curiosity to answer these questions, qualities which are in short supply now in a divided world and a divided States. Fifty years ago today Robert Kanigher, of all people, posed and tried to answer these questions in the strange yet sweet Lois Lane # 106 (cover dated November 1970, publication date 24 September, 1970), in the story “I Am Curious (Black)!”
Nine years after John Howard Griffin had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man for his book ‘Black Like Me’, Bob Kanigher, at a time of huge protest against racism by groups such as the Black Panthers and against sexism by the burgeoning second wave feminist movement, decided to use Superman’s ‘plastimold machine’ to turn Lois black.
Angela Davis, Time Magazine, 31 August
1970, page 12
Even at the time, perhaps particularly at the time, writing
a story like this risks trivialising the lives and experience of black people. Ideally,
a black writer and artist, people who have experienced racism, would
communicate directly to the audience, unmediated by a 55- year old white guy (Kanigher was born in 1915). You
wonder how someone like the Black Panthers’ Angela Davis, on the run at the
time of publication, accused of (abetting) murder, would have viewed this
comic.
So how could a superhero comic book aimed at 12 years olds
ever hope to even come close to a treatment of racism that’s going to help? Yet
in its own simple, relevant, way, ‘I Am Curious Black’ deals directly with
racism in
a way which modern mainstream comics don’t really attempt, even while we
live in sadly, similar, times.
The story is confrontational from the get-go splash page
where a black Lois asks Superman if he would marry her ‘just the way I am?’, now that she is black and he is white. Right away you understand that this
story is aimed at a white readership. Kanigher had introduced DC’s first black
character Jackie Johnson in Our Army at War # 113 (December 1961, publication
date 3 October 1961) and then (with Nick Cardy) Mal Duncan (Teen Titans # 26,
Mar/April 1970, publication date 15 January 1970). DC was only just starting to
introduce black characters and the vast majority of its readership would have
been white*.
At a time when DC Editorial Director Carmine Infantino
objected to the scene above in Teen Titans # 26 where a black Mal Duncan kissed
a white Lilith Clay goodbye, reputedly the first inter-racial kiss in comics (and editor Dick Giordano coloured it blue to draw less attention), Lois Lane # 106 surely sent shockwaves through the
readership and parents alike. Years of pent-up desire for equality delivered a
dialectical slap in the face to the big red S and to us as readers. An
unrestrained antithesis to the dominant thesis of the times about race. When
racist views were so entrenched and unexamined, Kanigher deliberately shocked
so a new voice could be heard.
He sends Lois on a journey of transformation from carefree,
comfortable, complacent white journalist to becoming someone who understands
just a little bit of what it is like for others, by becoming other. She feels
the rejection, the distrust, the confusion when her well-intentioned attempts
to talk to black people for a patronising little feature on ‘Metropolis’ Little
Africa’, are rebuffed. A blind black woman walks away because she ‘hears’ Lois
is white. Lois listens to a black man speak angrily about the roles white
people will ‘accept’ black people having while they resist true equality. Lois
begins to see the world though another’s eyes.
Now transformed to being black for a day by the Plastimold
machine, Lois feels the rejection, distrust, confusion, she felt as a white
woman all over again, as a black woman.
She meets a black woman and is invited into her apartment
and sees how others live. She is touched by someone who has very little but who
still wants to give.
Lois re-meets the black man she met earlier and experiences
his sexism. When he is shot by gangsters, Lois provides the blood transfusion
he needs to live.
The effect of the story is uplifting. It ends on a simple
moment of hope and unity, one personal connection by two imperfect people who
have been transformed just enough to begin to hear each other. You could never
pretend that Lois Lane # 106 is a sophisticated commentary on racism but
neither is it just a dated time capsule. The difficult, reportedly egotistical,
tyrannical Kanigher, who could be abusive to his National/DC colleagues managed
to display the very personal qualities he lacked, in his art, empathy,
patience, curiosity. The world of the young National/DC reader of 1970 was the
better for it. Fifty years later, so are we.
* Demographic studies of black readership of comics are hard
to find. I did find a 2017 Bleeding Cool report (see below) quoting NPD Bookscan’s
breakdown showing that in the US African-American readers made up 13 per cent
of the market (61 per cent were white) and worldwide, 14 per cent of readers
are black (71 per cent are white). Given the relative paucity of black creators
and characters in 1970 compared with relatively greater diversity now, I think
it’s a safe assumption to make that in 1970, the number of black readers was even
smaller as a percentage of overall readers of comics. If you have links to
studies of comic book reader demographics please post them in the comments field
below.
Research this article:
Michael Mead is a 54 year old New Zealand comic book collector, who likes to think he can do "contextual" commentary reviews of old comics, asking: "where does this story come from?", looking at the social, political, cultural times it came from, the state of the comics industry, the personal and creative journey of the writer or artist, the personal journey of the reader as a child and as an adult.
